Chicks in soccer jerseys are hot, especially when they are reading Yokochi's Color Atlas of Anatomy. I just wanted to write this.

Recently acquired:
-Complete Poems, by Basil Bunting (New Directions)
-A Nomadic Poetics, by Pierre Joris (UCalifornia Press)
-[one love affair], by Jenny Boully (Tarpaulin Sky)
-The New Frontier, by Darwin Cooke (DC Comics)
-Pearl Jam, by Pearl Jam (J Records)

I am one of those people who actually think that later Pearl Jam is more interesting than their earlier stuff. Even I do love Ten, Vs. and Vitalogy, subsequent albums were a lot more layered and riskier. Not to mention that they got Matt Cameron (ex-Soundgarden) to drum for them after Yield. And I am not ashamed to say that Binaural is my favorite Pearl Jam album.

Jessica has a discussion about Kaavya Viswanathan on looktouch. I don't really have an opinion on the case (unlike Steven D. Schroeder, whoever he is). I have not read her book or McCaffrey's. I think anyone could have written the passages that were highlighted in the various reports I have seen. I think that once again, it's being overblown.

If you want to bitch about plagiarism, discuss this:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

And this:

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise aupres du feu, devidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous esmerveillant :
Ronsard me celebroit du temps que j'estois belle.

Lors, vous n'aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Desja sous le labeur à demy sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s'aille resveillant,
Benissant vostre nom de louange immortelle.

Je seray sous la terre et fantaume sans os :
Par les ombres myrteux je prendray mon repos :
Vous serez au fouyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et vostre fier desdain.
Vivez, si m'en croyez, n'attendez à demain :
Cueillez dés aujourd'huy les roses de la vie.

The first poem being by W.B. Yeats and the second one by Pierre de Ronsard. When discussing the Yeats poem, I don't think ever heard Ronsard mentioned as the source. Worse, when I worked on a quick translation of the poem for my British Renaissance class, someone said it reminded him of a Yeats poem. (Ronsard was a Renaissance poet)

Persian poet Esmail Kho'i will be reading next week (Sunday, May 14th) at the University of St. Thomas. The reading will start at 4:00pm. It's organized by my friend Mehregan Oskooi.

Mehregan wants me to help him translate into English the poems of Kho'i. The problem being my inability to speak Farsi and the fact that I've only heard one poem by Kho'i. The poem, an address to current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reminded me of Allen Ginsberg's "America" in its use of anaphora and its list of grievances. Both are also angry political poems.

I am not sure if Ginsberg has any influence on Persian contemporary poetry. His parents being Russian Jews, they might be stemming from similar traditions. Kho'i's poem, however, is quite different from Ginsberg. Ginsberg addresses an abstraction, an ideal, while Kho'i speaks to something quite more concrete. There is also a different diction, Ginsberg's poem being more colloquial while Kho'i first speaks in a humble, polite manner, the way one speaks to a dignitary, and then shifts to a more informal register. This would be difficult to convey in English, since there is only one register of politeness (unlike French and German, both of which have 2, or Japanese with 5). And there is also the play-on-words that Kho'i plays with the meaning of Ahmadinejad, first as servant of God, then as manservant of the court (as in "lapdog").

I have read very little of Persian poetry, beyond Bly's really awful translation of Rumi and Hafiz. And more recently, Mehregan made me discover the work of Ahmad Shamlou and Forugh Farrokhzad. Their poetry reminds me of what Alejo Carpentier (or was it Franz Roh) when he talks of an "élan vital" in his essay on magical realism, trying to link Surrealism to Romanticism (mostly Blake) and gothic art, but also to Persian, mestizo and Japanese literatures.

Shamlou writes for example in "Elegy":

To embrace the flow of wind,

and love

who is sister to death—



eternity

has shared with you

      this secret.



And so you have taken the shape of a treasure:

earned and enviable

another kind of treasure

which, claiming the earth, these lands

    in this way

has made the heart embrace them.

And Farrokhzad writes in "I Pity the Garden":

She now lives on the other side of town
in her artificial home
and in the arms of her artificial husband
she makes natural children.
Each time she visits us, if her skirt is sullied
with the poverty of our garden
she bathes herself in perfume.
Every time she visits she is with child.

Our garden is forlorn
Our garden is forlorn

This ties a bit on the conversation I am having with Johannes and Craig on whether the subaltern can experiment or not.