Let me start by saying that I am currently going down a weird music rabbit hole and am currently listening to Napalm Death while typing the newsletter this month. This is my normal chill wave vibes of Post Rock but it is helping type this newsletter after reading a section of the mind melting Finnegan’s Wake that I am attempting to power through.
Thank you for reading this.
I wanted to say up front that if you are interested in what is happening here, there is a Youtube Channel where I record live reactions to the texts and I draw the next book that I will be reading.
There is also a Pango Books shop where I am selling the copies of the books that I read from with bookmarks and stickers.
There is also a Twitter and Instagram: @randomnumberlit on both platforms.
This month I didn’t finish as much as I would have liked because - after I decided to split up Kristin Lavransdatter into the three volumes it was originally published in - I pulled Finnegan’s Wake because, you know, poetic justice I guess.
I finished:
Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist
Kong Shangren’s The Peach Blossom Fan
Visnu Sharma’s The Pancatantra
Now that I look at this list, I have had a strange September. I was briefly very ill at one point. I started a new job recently in August and I am getting used to how much time that takes out of my daily schedule. I think my reading life will flatten out again and I will have more time to read these strange texts.
First Up:
Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist
Its sort of wild to me that it took to Seamus Heaney to get to a poet that I will continually think about after having read him.
So far in the history of the Small Works List I have read poetry from: Paul Valery (I remember almost nothing but should revisit), Alfred Corn (one poem stands out to me still), Amy Lowell (a delightful and influential read), Henri Michaux (I didn’t get it at the time and still don’t), Ki No Tsurayuki (I etched one his poem’s into a wood plaque as a gift), William Collins (almost nothing), Robert Service (I put this one away), Eliza Cook (almost nothing), Michael Longley (Two poems I continue to think about), Yogesvara (one poem I will continue to revisit), Robinson Jeffers (This one is more of a vibe - a grim/dark vibe), Louis MacNeice (one poem), and now Seamus Heaney.
It is a kinship of the mind that I find the most intriguing for me with Seamus Heaney. Death of the Naturalist was on the Big Book List for some reason. I am not sure why. It must have appeared on some list at some point that I came across. It is no different from a single volume published by Jeffers or Longley or MacNeice. There was no larger ambition for the work than simply an early volume from an aspiring and significant poet, but it is the best one I have read so far. I am going to leave this entirely to taste. I keep bumping into Longley ever after reading him. I also ran into MacNeice with a translation of the Oresteia which I found intriguing. I also found out that MacNeice did a modern dramatic retelling of Columbus’ voyage for the BBC which blew my socks off but it is Heaney that I found the most sympathetic character for the purposes of thinking about his work.
I don’t even know if there is a single poem that stands out to me as a moment that in reflecting on the work I was moved to tears. I was shocked and scandalized more so by The Peach Blossom Fan than Heaney. I etched a poem by Tsurayuki into wood for a gift to a family member. I bought my wife a Christmas gift based on a poem by Amy Lowell. Poetry makes deep ripples in my life, but as I reflect on the works I read this month Heaney returns to me with a warm glow of affection for the vantage point of his immense poetic vision.
I want to struggle with this work because upon first reading it I can see exactly what he is looking at. I think of a poem like “Digging” where his intention is clear and well executed but it is the second step in to think about how he is doing what he is doing, what his intention is for poem like this, putting it first in the collection, the motif of digging throughout the text, how digging interacts with the idea of naturalism, and so much else that I think I can see the lines and scaffolding more clearly than any other writer. It isn’t that it is simplistic so much so that I grasp it easily but it is familiarity of mind that I was moved by with Heaney. Or “An Advancement in Learning” which is a poem about a rat. The locus of this poem is something detestable and the emotion comes through clearly but it is the process of cognition and learning that is fascinating to me as the reader. Heaney describes the moment of awareness to understanding to learning that I think is as ineffable as the shock and fright of a childhood memory, but it also works entirely as a poem about a rat. I really enjoyed this poetry and will continue to read Heaney’s work because I thought it was delightful if his subject matter is simple, everyday but also repulsive things like the smell of rotting potatoes or peat moss.
Kong Shangren – The Peach Blossom Fan
I don’t really know what to say about The Peach Blossom Fan. It would take a lifetime to become acclimated to understanding Chinese Drama. I read every word of this text and followed the story just fine. It is a simple enough presentation of characters and setting. I watched most of a traditional Chinese Opera version of this story on a website. That was even harder to follow because the singing and speaking in Chinese Opera is very specific and distant from Western Opera. The costumes were incredible. The acting was broad and emotive. The musical accompaniment was very different from Western classic music which was something to get used to. All of that to say that it will take reading more than one classical Chinese drama to say that I have a grasp of what is happening here. That is why I am uncertain about what to comment on here.
In this text, the villain is clear from the beginning but it is the villian’s velocity to act in this setting that I think is unique. Juan or Ruan depending on your translation is a flat villain. His task is simple and his motive and intentions are clear but when he develops the upper hand he is not easy to stop and that is something that I found really enchanting and frustrating about this story. In addition to this, there is a connection between this work and a short story from Pak Wan-suh where an old woman, through a disguise, takes the place of a young woman in order that than young one is not subjected to the horror of sexual assault. I am not sure it is a direct literary allusion from Wan-suh but rather that this is an element common to storytelling that I am not familiar with. Again, I don’t know enough about this milieu to speak intelligently here.
The story follows the characters of Master Hau and Fragrant Princess. Even their arrangement, betrothel and marriage does not make immediate sense to me and so suspends the intricacies of their arrangement in vagueness to me. Given this though, Hau and Fragrant Princess are promised to one another and Juan gets involved somehow to help pay for their wedding costs. At first, the couple accept the gift because they don’t know who it is from but once they find out they send the gifts back which enrages Juan. This exchanges sets the tone for the rest of the text in small and large ways. Juan later arranges for Fragrant Princess to become the betrothed to his commanding officer based on this grudge. Hau and Fragrant Princess are separated and they are unsure of each other’s fate for a long while. The Ming Dynasty collapses and Hau and his friends are on the losing side of that arrangement. Through luck or the mandate of heaven, the two find themselves in the same region on the run from loyalists in neighboring monasteries on the same mountain. At a religious ceremony at adjoining holy sites, Hau and Fragrant Princess finally meet each other. They reunite and make a scene. They are immediately chastised by their effusive display of affection and the abbot reprimands them in a moment that snaps the audience back to reality and shames the audience as well as the characters.
I was shocked and scandalized by this piece of writing in a way that did not sit well with me at first. The whole play is about “The Peach Blossom Fan” which is a token that Hau gives to Fragrant Princess when he has to leave for military work in the north. Fragrant Princess attempts suicide and fails but inadvertently bleeds on the fan and is distraught by this. A friend of them both takes the fan and paints with the blood speckles on it into peach blossom and many people comment on how beautiful it now is. Then, at the end of this whole play where everything has fallen apart they finally reunited it and it is glorious for a moment and then it is snatched away from the reader with a sharp and derisive review of the situation. You can’t help but be made a fool because the problems of two people do not amount to a hill of beans when their entire way of life has been uprooted. It was a remarkable reading experience.
Post Rock Jukebox
Its hard to know where to go with this pick because I have been deep in the wilds of Post Rock randomness. I actually found a band that takes its name from artificial intelligence parlance, Random Forest. I borrowed from this concept when I named the “Anonymous Forest” the portion of the big book list that features anonymous or various authors books. I found Random Forest through an alphabetized list of post rock bands I stole from Wikipedia and using my trusty ol’ random number generator to force myself to find new bands. I pulled Random Forest from this random process and loved their low key, chill wave vibes. Their albums are super short and just some solid, peaceful, vocal -less music front to back.
Visnu Sharma - The Pancatantra
Visnu Sharma’s name came to me from the Small Works List in typical ancient world literature fashion. I had a different name listed in the World Lit 300 to 1000 C.E. list. I googled this name and the first and most persistent thing that came up with the Pancatantra. It seemed right to me to read and so I jumped in. I am sure the Pancatantra is on my list somewhere else and so I thought I would go for it. I found out later that Visnu Sharma is generally thought to have written the Pancatantra around 200 B.C.E. so it is plausible that I was meant to read something else from the 300 to 1000 C.E. list. I will go back and find out who I was supposed to read soon.
It is hard to establish what is the official canon of the Pancatantra because multiple versions over the thousands of years this book has been read feature different amounts of stories with no real identifiable core of documents other than the super structure of the text of the 5 sections that general fit into “Conflict Among Friends,” “Winning Friends,” “Crows and Owls” (naturally), “Forfeit of Profits,” and “Actions without Due Consequences.” Traditionally, the longest section is the first section with the most stories no matter the collection and the section get shorter and shorter through to the end.
Simply put, the Pancatantra is Aesop’s Fables of India but more than that this document helped inform my understanding of both Bana’s work Kadambari and Yogesvara’s work. The main influence for me seems to be the desire to tell ever evolving stories within stories with competing superstructures that the inside tale makes comment on the story teller and the listener and the context in which the tale is being told in not only in the story itself but also for the reader. This complex web of morals and story telling was fascinating but at times difficult to follow. It wasn’t difficult to follow this time who was talking and who they were talking to like Kadambari but it was difficult to ascertain what was meant to be learned from each story because the morals would reinforce something within the tale itself without feeling like they reached outside of that context to the reader’s context at times. There are a few stories that really struck me as interesting. This text asserts the caste system in a powerful way and at times it made a lot of sense to me as I was listening. There might not be a more unsympathetic reader to the idea of a class system than your present writer, but there is an internal logic to the way the caste system is propagated here that I had to catch myself reading.
Beyond that, there are two stories that I think illustrate the whimsical and charmingly strange nature of these stories. The monkey and the wedge is one of the first stories in the collection and set the tone for the rest of the book. I will summarize it here:
There was a monkey that was watching a lumberjack saw a log. The lumberjack put a wedge in his log to save his spot where he was sawing. A monkey came down and removed the wedge but got his leg caught in the log and died. The moral of the story: mind your own business.
That’s it. Stated as briefly and plainly as this.
The next story was told with a bit more writerly flourish, the bug and the flea.
There was a bug (probably a mosquito) and a flea lying in the bed of the king. The flea says to the bug who is new to this area to not bite the king as soon as he lays down because he will jump up and search the bed to kill them. If they wait until he is asleep, he will probably not react so quickly. The king comes in and lays down. The bug can’t help themselves and bites as soon as they get their chance. The king jumps up, has the bed searched and the servants find the flea and kill it: never trust a bug. Bug’s gonna bug. I love this story very much.
I don’t know if I would recommend this book to the same audience of Aesop’s Fables. I haven’t read the Fables yet and I am sure like Grimm’s Fairy Tales that there is some of the work that does not laid quite the same for modern audiences. The same is true here of the Pancatantra. Some of it is very context laden to ancient India which can be difficult to bridge at times. It was an enjoyable read and I am glad I am forced to do so because I wouldn’t have finished this text had I not felt compelled to hear it all the way out.
Currently Reading
Currently Reading:
The Night Book (Finnegan’s Wake) from James Joyce. I am about 25 pages in of 500. This book may break this project. I plan, like Newton, to look at every word of this document. I am not sure what I will get out of it. That may be the point.
Richard Wright’s Black Boy - I have wanted to read this book for a long time. I have started and stopped it many times. I have been quote a line from this book for 20 years about eating a “congery” which is something that little boy’s eat when they are hungry. It is a deeply tragic line about poverty but it has stuck with me for a long time.
I am also continuing to read Kristin Lavransdatter - Book 2: The Wife. It is wonderful and I love it with my whole heart.
If you have read this long, thank you so much. I appreciate your time immensely. If you are interested in leaving a comment and letting me know what you think so far, I would welcome the feedback and participation. I look forward to hearing from you soon.