Poem for the New Year

 

Good Riddance, But Now What?

By Ogden Nash 

Come, children, gather round my knee;

Something is about to be.

Tonight’s December thirty-first,

Something is about to burst.

The clock is crouching, dark and small,

Like a time bomb in the hall.

Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.

Duck! Here comes another year.

Greek Lyrics

Pure Pagan: 

Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments 

by Burton Raffel

To Zeus

Zeus, in whom all things begin,

Ruler of  everything,

Zeus, to begin my hymns

I bring You this

As a gift.

-   Terpander

These are Greek lyrics translated by one of my favorite poet-translators, Burton Raffel. The poets included in this anthology provide a glimpse into archaic Greek culture through their poetry. Among them are the very obscure to the somewhat less obscure, with a few familiar names like Plato.  There are poems and fragments of poems for everyone's taste. I enjoyed making connections with my own life and our twenty-first century culture. It was also interesting to see the influence that these ancient poets had on some of our greatest modern poets. Overall it is a beautiful selection of poetry.

Sportcoat the Deacon

Deacon King Kong 

by James McBride

“He felt like a radio tuning in to a new channel, one that was beginning to fuzz into range, slowly coming in clear, proper, the way his Hettie had always wanted him to be. The new feeling humbled him.”   ― James McBride, Deacon King Kong

James McBride’s novel Deacon King Kong is set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969, soon after the poor but close-knit community has been decimated by the arrival of heroin. The book begins with an act of vigilantism—or maybe it’s just the result of drunkenness: One morning an old widower known as Sportcoat, strengthened by a bootleg liquor called King Kong, steps into the courtyard and shoots a drug dealer in the head. The dealer survives but the aftershocks are enormous. Not only does the shooting invite the police to come sniffing around the project but it kicks off a turf war between drug gangs competing for supremacy.

The remainder of the book tells the story of a wide variety of characters held together by ties to Sportcoat. There’s a running joke in which people ask just what exactly Sportcoat does in his role as a church deacon. He enumerates a list of random odd jobs, calling himself a “holy handyman.” The author has almost as many narrative styles as characters as he shifts from broad, slapstick comedy to shoot and blow violence to nostalgic meditations on New York history. There is even a subplot involving a hidden work of art that was smuggled out of Europe after World War II.

The result was a mixed bag for this reader. I found some of the vignettes exceptionally interesting, but just as I thought the story was beginning to coalesce it fell apart with a character or highlight that just did not work for me. The book fell short of my previous experience with this author in his historical novel about John Brown, The Good Lord Bird, which I would recommend you read instead.

Annual Top Ten Favorites

 Top Ten Favorite Books of 2021

These are my favorite reads since January 1, 2021.  They include an extensive variety of reading: from the Classics to contemporary literary fiction; from the very long to quite compact works; and from fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, and poetry.  It was a very rich year for reading and there were others that could have made my list if I were to expand it.  While the others were very good books these are the ten that I felt will stay with me over the years; in fact a couple of them were rereads.  

The list is in no particular order, but if I had to pick my favorite of the year it would be Metamorphoses by Ovid, which blends beautiful poetry with a richness of imagination that has inspired readers, writers, and artists of all kinds ever since.  Several of the very good books that just missed my top ten include Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the other five novels of Walker Percy, The Republic of Cicero, The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, and Invisible Boys by Holden Sheppard. 

Don Quixote  by  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

The Gallic Wars by Gaius Julius Caesar

The River by Peter Heller

Metamorphoses by Ovid 

Dialogues and Essays by Seneca

Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Revolt of the Masses by Jose Ortega y Gassett

The Second Coming by Walker Percy

Dreams and Shadows

The Border Trilogy: 

All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain 

by Cormac McCarthy

"The fire burned down and it grew colder and they sat close to the flames and hand fed them with sticks and with old brittle limbs they broke from the windtwisted wrecks of trees along the rimrock. They told stories of the old west that once was. The older men talked and the younger men listened and light began to show in the gap of the mountain above them and then faintly along the desert floor below." (COTP, p 91)

The first volume of The Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses, combined intensely lyrical prose with the laconic wit of its cowboy protagonists. In it McCarthy mixed the quotidian details of ranch life with just the right balance of mythic phantasmagorical imaginings. Just when his prose seems to be over-the-top, he suddenly returns to the Beckett-like dialogue of two buddies alone on the prairie. One instance of this occurs when John Grady is out on the mesa with his buddy Lacey Rawlins--his Sancho to at least the extent that his adventures approached the Quixotic .

In the next volume, The Crossing, we read of two young brothers on a quest that plunges them into the bloody maelstrom of Mexican politics. Billy Parham who is later joined by his younger brother Boyd, sets out on a series of quests, all of which are doomed to failure. While the travels of Billy make up the action of the novel, it is less about achieving goals and more about larger themes of good and evil, fate and responsibility, and the nature of friendship and relationships in this gray and desolate world of shadows. Related to these themes that permeate the novel is the characters' ability or inability to clearly see the world around them.
"Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them." (The Crossing, p 46)

Cormac McCarthy concludes his border trilogy with a book that is spare and almost allegorical in its storytelling. In it he unites John Grady Cole with his older "buddy" Billy Parham, and focuses on a doomed relationship between John Grady and a Mexican prostitute. With Cities of the Plain the dreams have receded, the young men Billy and John Grady are older and their journeys have goals. This is a book that is bleaker in the telling even as the romanticism of John Grady Cole provides significant interest for the reader. The time is 1952, the place a cattle ranch in New Mexico. The West is changing as suggested by a brief interchange between John Grady and Billy early in the novel:
"What are you readin? Destry." (COTP, p 59)

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand is a classic example of the "myth of the old West". This is the life that is fading in the early 1950's and the question is will our heroes adapt or rebel against the inevitability of change. This change is not without difficulty and there are the ghosts of the past which they face as depicted in the following passage: "They sat against a rock bluff high in the Franklins with a fire before them that heeled in the wind and their figures cast up upon the rocks behind them enshadowed the petroglyphs carved there by other hunters a thousand years before." (p 87)

Shadowed by ghosts of the past and chastened but not defeated by their youthful misadventures, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham have become blood brothers of a sort, clinging stubbornly to a vanishing way of life. Billy reflects on their struggle, “When you’re a kid you have these notions about how things are goin to be. . . . You get a little older and you pull back some on that. I think you wind up just tryin to minimize the pain.”

While they fantasize about owning a little spread in the mountains, where they might run a few cattle and hunt their own meat, John Grady falls in love with a teenage prostitute. His desires collide with powers reminiscent of those he encountered in All the Pretty Horses.
''There's a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee you will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him,'' Billy warns him. ''Son, aint there no girls on this side of the damn river?''

Alas, for John Grady there are none that can compare with Magdalena. He does not worry about Eduardo, her pimp, with whom he must deal if he is to have her and his stubborn idealism sets in motion his inevitable doom. In fact, the question of one's destiny is present throughout this final part of the trilogy. Before the ultimate scenes of the novel there is a telling exchange between Billy and John Grady. I believe it alludes to John Grady's passions:
"John Grady nodded. What would you do if you couldnt be a cowboy?
I dont know. I reckon I'd think of somethin. You?
I dont know what it would be I'd think of.
Well we may all have to think of somethin." (COTP, p 217)

Combine McCarthy's two previous novels with the final somber tome and you have a masterpiece of contemporary fiction and a worthy contribution to the literature of the West. All three are works of a master story-teller, an author who speculates (some might say pontificates) on the nature of stories. So I will end with an observation about stories that I encountered during my journey through the novel.

"These dreams reveal the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence." (COTP, p 283)

The Bard of His Own Existence

Cities of the Plain 

by Cormac McCarthy

"The fire burned down and it grew colder and they sat close to the flames and hand fed them with sticks and with old brittle limbs they broke from the windtwisted wrecks of trees along the rimrock. They told stories of the old west that once was. The older men talked and the younger men listened and light began to show in the gap of the mountain above them and then faintly along the desert floor below." (p 91)

Cormac McCarthy concludes his border trilogy about the west with a book that is spare and almost allegorical in its storytelling. All the Pretty Horses combined intensely lyrical prose with the laconic wit of its cowboy protagonists while its sequel, The Crossing, sent two young brothers on a quest that plunged them into the bloody maelstrom of Mexican politics. Cities of the Plain unites John Grady Cole with his older "buddy" Billy Parham, and centers on a doomed relationship between John Grady and a Mexican prostitute. It is notable for its shockingly brutal feral dog-roping scene, its coruscating, vivid depiction the lost world of small horse-ranch life in the American southwest, and also for its fabular epilogue, an extended meditation on the nature of narrative and the forms of human destiny.

With Cities of the Plain the dreams have receded, the young men Billy and John Grady are older and their journeys have goals. This is a book that is bleaker in the telling even as the romanticism of John Grady Cole provided significant interest for this reader. The time is 1952, the place a cattle ranch in New Mexico. The West is changing as suggested by a brief interchange between John Grady and Billy early in the novel:

"What are you readin? Destry." (p 59)

Destry Rides Again by Max Brand is a classic example of the "myth of the old West". This is the life that is fading in the early 1950's and the question is will our heroes adapt or rebel against the inevitability of change. The change is not without difficulty and there are the ghosts of the past which they face as depicted in the following passage:
"They sat against a rock bluff high in the Franklins with a fire before them that heeled in the wind and their figures cast up upon the rocks behind them enshadowed the petroglyphs carved there by other hunters a thousand years before." (p 87)

Shadowed by ghosts of the past and chastened but not defeated by their youthful misadventures, John Grady Cole of All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham of The Crossing have become blood brothers of a sort, clinging stubbornly to a vanishing way of life. With the U.S. Army proposing to turn their employer's ranch into a military base, the two fantasize about owning a little spread in the mountains, where they might run a few cattle and hunt their own meat. But when John Grady falls in love with a teenage prostitute in a brothel called "White Lake" across the Rio Grande, his desires collide with powers reminiscent of his those he encountered in All the Pretty Horses.

''There's a son of a bitch owns her outright that I guarangoddamntee you will kill you graveyard dead if you mess with him,'' Billy warns him. ''Son, aint there no girls on this side of the damn river?''
Alas, for John Grady there are none that can compare with Magdalena. He does not worry about Eduardo, her pimp, with whom he must deal if he is to have her and his stubborn idealism sets in motion a chain of events that cannot be avoided. In fact, the question of one's destiny is present throughout this final part to the trilogy. Before the ultimate scenes of the novel there is a telling exchange between Billy and John Grady.

"John Grady nodded. What would you do if you coundnt be a cowboy?
I dont know. I reckon I'd think of somethin. You?
I dont know what it would be I'd think of.
Well we may all have to think of somethin." (p 217)

Combine McCarthy's two previous novels with this somber tome and you have a masterpiece of contemporary fiction and a worthy contribution to the literature of the West. All three are works of a master story-teller, an author who speculates (some might say pontificates) on the nature of stories. So I will end with one moment of speculation about stories among many that I encountered during my journey through the trilogy:

"These dreams reveal the world also, he said. We wake remembering the events of which they are composed while often the narrative is fugitive and difficult to recall. Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. Each man is the bard of his own existence." (p 283)