Kathryn Scanlan: Kick The Latch

Studs Terkel was the person I thought of first when I began to read Kick The Latch, and then I thought of Lucia Berlin. Imagine a combination of the two: the great oral historian and the perfect-pitch observer of women’s lives and you have some idea of the punch this little book packs. Scanlan based the book on interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer, but Sonia speaks directly to us. Scanlan says, I wanted to preserve – amplify, exaggerate – Sonia’s idiosyncratic speech, her bluntness, her flair as a story teller.  I arrived at what you could call a composite picture of a self. 

Colum McCann : Thirteen Ways of Looking

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is a thirteen-stanza poem written in the 1920’s by Wallace Stevens and published in his first book of poetry Harmonium. In thirteen haiku-like stanzas he offers glimpses of the blackbird as observer and observed. Does it represent death? Or the fleeting nature of life? Or perhaps the beauty of the natural world? Or a thousand other things?

For old hippies…

I went looking for Joni Mitchell’s own version of this song after I heard someone else singing it, and look what I found. Mitchell is 79 years old.

And for another Mitchell classic recorded 30 years ago listen to this:

Catherine Chidgey : The Axeman’s Carnival

The story begins with a little  magpie chick falling from its nest.

…not even a chick but a pink and naked thing, a scar, a scrap a scrape fallen in roots and wriggling, when I was catching my death and all I knew of the sky was the feel of feathers above me, the belly of black as warm as a cloud above me….

Worrying is good for you

At that moment

At that moment, he splashed into the pond. The thin man, who had been holding his right hand, had suddenly let go.
“Oh!”
“He fell!”
“He fell!”
The onlookers were all clamouring for a better view when they were suddenly pushed from behind and plunged into the pond, too. The thin man’s clear, high laughter could be heard above the uproar.
The thin man scampered across the bridge like a black dog and ran off into the dark town.
“He ran away!”
“Damn it!”
“Was he a pickpocket?”
“A madman?”
“A detective?”
“He’s the tengu of Ueno Mountain!”
He’s the kappa of Shinobazu Pond!”

“The Hat Incident” (1926) by Yasunari Kawabata (trans. J. Martin Holman)

tengu   is a land spirit

kappa is a water spirit

Go to The Hedgehog Review to read Richard Hughes Gibson’s analysis of this brief piece (and others)

Marcos Giralt Torrente: Father And Son – A Lifetime

Simply Messing about in Books

Grey clouds and night rolling in at five thirty. Winter is well on the way, in fact it officially begins tomorrow, and with it a tendency to want relaxing reading. The brain is in idling mode for a while. Diversion and detectives with odd personalities are required. But this year I find myself reading books about physical activity and yearning to take up some extravagant form of dance.