I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it...
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This morning, because the snow swirled deep
around my house, I made oatmeal for breakfast.
At first it was too runny so I added more oatmeal,
then it grew too thick so I added water.
Soon I had a lot of oatmeal. The radio
was playing Spanish music and I became
passionate: soon I had four pots of oatmeal.
I put them aside and started a new batch.
Soon I had eight pots. When the oatmeal cooled,
I began to roll it with my hands, making
small shapes: pigs and souvenir ashtrays. Then
I made a foot, then another, then a leg. Soon
I’d made a woamn out of oatmeal with freckles
and a cute nose and hair made from brown sugar
and naked except for a necklace of raisins.
She was five feet long and when she grew harder
I could move her arms and legs without them
falling off. But I didn’t touch her much -
she lay on the table – sometimes I’d touch her
with a spoon, sometimes I’d lick her in places
it wouldn’t show. She loooks like you, although
her hair is darker, but the smile is like yours,
and the eyes, although hers are closed. You say:
what has this to do with me? And I should say:
I want to make more women from Cream of Wheat.
But enough of such fantasy. You ask me
why I don’t love you, why you can’t
live with me. What can I tell you? If I
can make a woman out of oatmeal, my friend,
what trouble could I make for you, a woman?
STEPHEN DOBYNS
Someday I want to do an anthology, maybe just a chapbook, of poems about varieties of porridge. There’s that classic of early American literature, “Hasty Pudding,” and Galway Kinnell’s poem on oatmeal, and I am sure there are more… Maybe an anthology of breakfast foods, with a section on porridges.
I really like Heat Death, the volume from which this poem comes. I think a big part of what I enjoy about these poems is Dobyns’ style, which is very intelligent and very poetic and crafted (in things like line breaks and word choice – all that) but at the same times reads so naturally, like prose, vernacular. It makes me think these would be interesting poems to teach to kids, to help them think about poetry in new ways – not as something alien, in form and content, but as no different really from the forms of speech and writing with which they are already familiar.
Language that has been shaped – a little – but mostly that has been rendered powerful through some subtle process – subtle in the doing, though, rather than in the outcome. I might use Niedecker’s term to refer to it – “this condensery” – except that Dobyns’ language doesn’t seem that condensed. Like I said, it feels much more natural, much more vernacular. Though of course when you look closely the rhymes and rhythms and breaks all add up to real craft, hard work to make something simple.
Not perfect. Near the end, when the women says “what has this to do with me,” that diction is anything but natural. And I feel like the word “soon” recurs a bit too much, though the deadpan delivery of the first line in which it appears – “Soon I had a lot of oatmeal” – is one of the great moments in the poem. As is the line break here, which is like a moment of hesitation in a striptease:
sometimes I’d lick her in places
it wouldn’t show.
Overall, “Oatmeal Deluxe” has a kind of magical realist quality to it, starting off mundane – what could be more mundane than oatmeal? – but then descending, or ascending, into strangeness, before finally saying “enough of such fantasy” and coming clean on its intentions. It’s his way of saying “No” to a woman who loves him. How much better than “I like you – as a friend,” or “it’s not you, it’s me” is the ending:
If I / can make a woman out of oatmeal, my friend, / what trouble could I make for you, a woman?
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(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
In "The Execution Channel," Ken Macleod breaks from the far distance future worlds of his recent books, the "Engines of Light" series, "Newtons' Wake" and "Learning the World," to return to Earth, and Scotland, and the very near future, a time and place much closer to where Macleod started in "The Star Fraction," the first book in his "Fall Revolution" series.
"The Execution Channel" follows a father and his young adult daughter as their lives are caught up in an escalating crisis after an apparent nuclear explosion at a US air base in Scotland. The daughter had been at a peace camp outside the base and is pursued by the authorities to find out what she knows. The father has secrets of his own, that soon make him a wanted man as well.
The "Execution Channel" of the title is a cable/satellite TV broadcast that consists entirely of short snippets showing executions, deaths under torture and the like, gathered from news and security camera footage from around the world. Initially of uncertain origin, the anonymous murder porn of the "Execution Channel" plays a pivotal role in the trajectories of the main characters, and eventually its source is revealed.
The truth behind the apparent nuclear explosion is also revealed in the end, and it takes the book back into the more imaginative science fiction realms of Macleod's other books - but in a very satisfying fashion.
Along the way, Macleod uses the near-future setting to explore some of the tensions of our present - in particular, relations between the US and Europe, Western military adventurism in the Middle East, the covert world of renditions and waterboarding, ubiquitous surveillance, computers and blogging, and so on.
Ken Macleod is one of the most exciting writers in science fiction today. His always amazing and inventive and very, very human writing and his return to Earth and the pointed political observations of "The Fall Revolution" make this a book not to be missed.
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(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
Anyone who has spent much time in Northern California will recognize the physical landscape of "Always Coming Home."
Anyone who has read other books by Le Guin, in particular the truly superb "The Dispossessed," will recognize the intellectual and emotional landscape.
"Dispossessed" and "Always Coming Home" share a powerful engagement with the notion of utopia, and with the social issues informing the radical movements of the time in which they were published. "The Dispossessed" has space ships and anarchism. "Always Coming Home" has a Native American inspired matriarchal society on a (presumably) post-apocalyptic Earth.
"Always Coming Home" is also stylistic very different from "Dispossessed." Whereas the latter was a traditional narrative, coherent, complete and closed, "Always Coming Home" is a story, or a picture, constructed from a number of different threads. The main thread is basically a coming of age story about a young woman that follows a very traditional narrative structure, but it is broken up into sections, with other pieces interspersed. These other pages are highly varied - song lyrics/poems, fables or folk tales of the society depicted in the main story, and so on.
All the pieces come together in a very rich, satisfying way. The other material fleshes out the reader's understanding of the girl's world, while the interest of the girl's journey keeps the reader fully engaged.
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
Incredibly powerful, moving, persuasive, and very real. If you want to know what things were like in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombings, and especially if you want to have something to give to a young person to help them understand the horrors of nuclear war, then you need to check this out.
I think there is a sense that nuclear war is no longer an issue, and that terrorism is what we now need to be fearful of, but the nukes are still out there. And just as relevant, or more so, is the issue of confronting the horrors that have been perpetrated in the name of war...
Was this comment helpful? | Yes | No
(3 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
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Nick Chapman has commented on (11) products.
A Hobbit's Journal: Being a Blank Book with Some Curious Illustrations of Friends & Foes of the Nine Companions (Parchment Journals)
Nick Chapman, November 9, 2010
I'm excited about this. I loved The Hobbit - maybe more than my son, but he loves to write and draw, and I think he will really enjoy this.(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)
Heat Death
Nick Chapman, May 8, 2010
OATMEAL DELUXEThis morning, because the snow swirled deep
around my house, I made oatmeal for breakfast.
At first it was too runny so I added more oatmeal,
then it grew too thick so I added water.
Soon I had a lot of oatmeal. The radio
was playing Spanish music and I became
passionate: soon I had four pots of oatmeal.
I put them aside and started a new batch.
Soon I had eight pots. When the oatmeal cooled,
I began to roll it with my hands, making
small shapes: pigs and souvenir ashtrays. Then
I made a foot, then another, then a leg. Soon
I’d made a woamn out of oatmeal with freckles
and a cute nose and hair made from brown sugar
and naked except for a necklace of raisins.
She was five feet long and when she grew harder
I could move her arms and legs without them
falling off. But I didn’t touch her much -
she lay on the table – sometimes I’d touch her
with a spoon, sometimes I’d lick her in places
it wouldn’t show. She loooks like you, although
her hair is darker, but the smile is like yours,
and the eyes, although hers are closed. You say:
what has this to do with me? And I should say:
I want to make more women from Cream of Wheat.
But enough of such fantasy. You ask me
why I don’t love you, why you can’t
live with me. What can I tell you? If I
can make a woman out of oatmeal, my friend,
what trouble could I make for you, a woman?
STEPHEN DOBYNS
Someday I want to do an anthology, maybe just a chapbook, of poems about varieties of porridge. There’s that classic of early American literature, “Hasty Pudding,” and Galway Kinnell’s poem on oatmeal, and I am sure there are more… Maybe an anthology of breakfast foods, with a section on porridges.
I really like Heat Death, the volume from which this poem comes. I think a big part of what I enjoy about these poems is Dobyns’ style, which is very intelligent and very poetic and crafted (in things like line breaks and word choice – all that) but at the same times reads so naturally, like prose, vernacular. It makes me think these would be interesting poems to teach to kids, to help them think about poetry in new ways – not as something alien, in form and content, but as no different really from the forms of speech and writing with which they are already familiar.
Language that has been shaped – a little – but mostly that has been rendered powerful through some subtle process – subtle in the doing, though, rather than in the outcome. I might use Niedecker’s term to refer to it – “this condensery” – except that Dobyns’ language doesn’t seem that condensed. Like I said, it feels much more natural, much more vernacular. Though of course when you look closely the rhymes and rhythms and breaks all add up to real craft, hard work to make something simple.
Not perfect. Near the end, when the women says “what has this to do with me,” that diction is anything but natural. And I feel like the word “soon” recurs a bit too much, though the deadpan delivery of the first line in which it appears – “Soon I had a lot of oatmeal” – is one of the great moments in the poem. As is the line break here, which is like a moment of hesitation in a striptease:
sometimes I’d lick her in places
it wouldn’t show.
Overall, “Oatmeal Deluxe” has a kind of magical realist quality to it, starting off mundane – what could be more mundane than oatmeal? – but then descending, or ascending, into strangeness, before finally saying “enough of such fantasy” and coming clean on its intentions. It’s his way of saying “No” to a woman who loves him. How much better than “I like you – as a friend,” or “it’s not you, it’s me” is the ending:
If I / can make a woman out of oatmeal, my friend, / what trouble could I make for you, a woman?
(1 of 1 readers found this comment helpful)
The Execution Channel by Ken Macleod
Nick Chapman, May 26, 2009
In "The Execution Channel," Ken Macleod breaks from the far distance future worlds of his recent books, the "Engines of Light" series, "Newtons' Wake" and "Learning the World," to return to Earth, and Scotland, and the very near future, a time and place much closer to where Macleod started in "The Star Fraction," the first book in his "Fall Revolution" series."The Execution Channel" follows a father and his young adult daughter as their lives are caught up in an escalating crisis after an apparent nuclear explosion at a US air base in Scotland. The daughter had been at a peace camp outside the base and is pursued by the authorities to find out what she knows. The father has secrets of his own, that soon make him a wanted man as well.
The "Execution Channel" of the title is a cable/satellite TV broadcast that consists entirely of short snippets showing executions, deaths under torture and the like, gathered from news and security camera footage from around the world. Initially of uncertain origin, the anonymous murder porn of the "Execution Channel" plays a pivotal role in the trajectories of the main characters, and eventually its source is revealed.
The truth behind the apparent nuclear explosion is also revealed in the end, and it takes the book back into the more imaginative science fiction realms of Macleod's other books - but in a very satisfying fashion.
Along the way, Macleod uses the near-future setting to explore some of the tensions of our present - in particular, relations between the US and Europe, Western military adventurism in the Middle East, the covert world of renditions and waterboarding, ubiquitous surveillance, computers and blogging, and so on.
Ken Macleod is one of the most exciting writers in science fiction today. His always amazing and inventive and very, very human writing and his return to Earth and the pointed political observations of "The Fall Revolution" make this a book not to be missed.
(3 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
Always Coming Home (California Fiction) by Le Guin Ursula K.
Nick Chapman, May 20, 2009
Anyone who has spent much time in Northern California will recognize the physical landscape of "Always Coming Home."Anyone who has read other books by Le Guin, in particular the truly superb "The Dispossessed," will recognize the intellectual and emotional landscape.
"Dispossessed" and "Always Coming Home" share a powerful engagement with the notion of utopia, and with the social issues informing the radical movements of the time in which they were published. "The Dispossessed" has space ships and anarchism. "Always Coming Home" has a Native American inspired matriarchal society on a (presumably) post-apocalyptic Earth.
"Always Coming Home" is also stylistic very different from "Dispossessed." Whereas the latter was a traditional narrative, coherent, complete and closed, "Always Coming Home" is a story, or a picture, constructed from a number of different threads. The main thread is basically a coming of age story about a young woman that follows a very traditional narrative structure, but it is broken up into sections, with other pieces interspersed. These other pages are highly varied - song lyrics/poems, fables or folk tales of the society depicted in the main story, and so on.
All the pieces come together in a very rich, satisfying way. The other material fleshes out the reader's understanding of the girl's world, while the interest of the girl's journey keeps the reader fully engaged.
(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
Barefoot Gen 01 Cartoon Story of Hir 2ND Edition by Keiji Nakazawa
Nick Chapman, October 18, 2008
Incredibly powerful, moving, persuasive, and very real. If you want to know what things were like in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombings, and especially if you want to have something to give to a young person to help them understand the horrors of nuclear war, then you need to check this out.I think there is a sense that nuclear war is no longer an issue, and that terrorism is what we now need to be fearful of, but the nukes are still out there. And just as relevant, or more so, is the issue of confronting the horrors that have been perpetrated in the name of war...
(3 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
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