Books Newly Received:
W. S Merwin, Summer Doorways, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 216pp. $24

Merwin is one of my very favorite poets and I have read many of  his forty-or-so books. I enjoy his prose as well and thought The Lost Upland masterfully done.

Summer Doorways traces his early years from New Jersey to Princeton to France, where he went as a tutor and traveled and lived first-class. The chapters are short, for the most part, and smoothly and enjoyably read. One moves rapidly forward, waiting for something meaningful and exciting to happen.

It never does. The book quickly becomes a bore. One wonders whether one has misjudged him, all these years. No, he is still an important and perhaps a major poet.

To write about one's early year among favored and aristocratic personages comes across, time after time, as snobbish and self-serving name dropping. So he travels with counts and throne pretenders (Portugal) and wealthy landed Americans and Frenchmen as a tutor to a couple of rich kinds--so what? It could be made a lot more interesting by a good writer. But perhaps even the gifted Merwin couldn't make it so.

A pity.

Red Pine (translation), the heart sutra, The Womb of Buddhas , Shoemaker & Hoard, paper, 301 pp. $14

The Heart Sutra (I capitalize it, where Red Pine, aka Bill Porter, does not) consists of but 35 lines of disputable text. I quote it here:

"The noble Avlaokiteshvara Bodhisattva,
while practicing the deep practice of Prajnaparamita,
looked upon the Five Skandhas
and seeing they were empty of self-existence,
said, Here, Sharpitra,
form is emptiness, emptiness is form;
emptiness is not separate from form,
 whatever is form is emptiness;
whatever is form is emptiness,
whatever is emptiness is form,
The same holds for sensation and perception,
memory and consciousness,
Here, Shariputra, all dharmas are defined by emptiness
not birth or destruction, purity or defilement,
completeness or deficiency.
Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness there is no form,
no sensation, no perception, no memory and no consciousness;
no eye, no sound, no smell, no taste, no feeling, and no thought;
no element of perception, from eye to conceptual consciousness;
no causal link, from ignorance to old age and death,
and no end of causal link, from ignorance to old age and death;
no suffering, no source, no relief, no path;
no knowledge, no attainment and no non-attainment.
Therefore, Shariputra, without attainment,
bodhisttavas take refuge in Prajnaparamita
and live without walls of the mind.
Without walls of the mind and thus without fears,
they wee through delusions and finally nirvana.
All buddhas past, present and future
also take refuge in Prajnaparmita
and realize unexcelled, perfect enlightenment.
You should therefore know the great mantra of Prajnaparamita,
the mantra of great magic,
the unexcelled mantra,
the mantra equal to the unequalled,
which heals all suffering and is true not false,
the mantra in Prajnaparmita spoken thus:
'Gate gate, paragate, parasangate, godhi svaha.'"

As a sometimes Buddhist (Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays) I've read my Alan Watts and Suzuki dutifully more than 50 years ago, and have tried to pay attention to the best of the many texts that have appeared since then. And while a soldier at Fort Ord, California, attended Buddhist services in Monterey--the only I could get off-post during my wartime training. I've read koans and tried to puzzle out their meaning and, sometimes, with lots of luck, nudged the doors of enlightenment  to the extent that I thought I had experienced something important.

So, what does it mean, this sutra of 35 lines? I am not the right one to ask. I think one can deliberate on practically anything in the universe and gain from the act, be it a bug or mastodon or another human being, preferably a woman.

But this book is important and Bill Porter is a knowledgeable man, a long-studied Buddhist,  and a good writer. He has thought long and hard about what is contained in the Heart Sutra and goes through it, line by line, all 35 of them, reflecting the best scholarship from 200 BC to the present time, and his own long and careful study. I found what he found most interesting, but I doubt if many others will. But if your are interested in Buddhism, this book will whet your appetite. It sure did mine.

And if you want a mantra, "Gata-gata, paragata, (excuse me) para-san-gate, godi-sa-ha-va," seems like a good one. Good enough for me my three days out of the week, anyway.

And if you think I am being facetious, that is your problem, not mine. The old monks were not without humor, and some were downright silly. Wise, too, but  not dumb.
 

Million Dollar Baby a Gem

Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank, but Morgan Freeman almost steals the show. She is terrific, and Eastwood is no slouch.

Below, the stars receive their academy awards. Yes, Clint holds two. He both starred in the movie and directed it. Not to mention writing the jazz score.

This movie is not what it seems. It might be likened to a left jab, followed by an uppercut.

The jab is the conventional story of a girl who wants to be the world's welterweight champion and, with the help of an ex-cut man trainer, does exactly that.

The uppercut is when Maggie Fitzgerald goes up against the champion of Britain, a dirty street fighter, who injures her severely, and she must spend the short rest of her life in a hospital with life-support. Frankie, her trainer, is by her side, and when the difficulties of staying alive become too painfully impossible, administers the euthanasia cure.

She is the surrogate daughter for the real one who never responded to his weekly letters, hopelessly and dutifully sent. And this is the true movie, the upper cut, for which the tried-and-true fight story (read: Rocky Again) is the setup, the jab.

Minor touches are excellent and expand the movie and its appeal. Maggie grew up "trailer trash" but sees boxing as her way out of a lifetime as a waitress and a family that can only be described as conventionally dysfunctional. Each of them is cruelly and accurately characterized, as are other minor roles in the movie. There are no surplus characters or scenes; each expands the vision and meaning of this great movie, and the lighting and camerawork are tribute to what Clint Eastwood has learned in making this twenty-fifth film of his career.

It may well be his best. I'm looking forward to a second viewing on something other than my downloaded file on my computer screen. It wide-screen and HD, it ought to be even better. If that is possible.

What are the
greatest movies of all time?
How many are there, after nearly 100 years of movie making? Many, but only a few have achieved that wonderful status.

And Gangs of New York is one of them., just added to our list.

I
Leonardo DiCaprio (right) and Daniel Day-Lewis (left) argue out their many differences, prior to the bloodshed on which the movie depends for resolution

Now Scorsese and DiCaprio are back in another powerful flick, Aviator. Unfortunately, this is not one of the world's greatest flicks, in spite of all the lavish attention given it.

Nice, if you like airplanes. There are numerous familiar characters, such as Ava Gardner, Katherine Hepburn, Jean Harlow. But the actors who portray them look nothing like them, so this aspect is a big disappointment. And Hughes's semi-psychotic obsessions seem like playful tics and character traits, rather than signs of severe derangement.

We don't give grades in Kingfisher University, but if we did, this would merit a B-.

DiCaprio does a decent job in this forced movie presentation of the life and troubles of Howard Hughes. But all the exciting shots of old aircraft in motion will not make up for a biography that depends mostly on weirdness for its drama.

Tell us your favorite movies and maybe we will publish them. Or add some to our list. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any specific order:

1. Citizen Kane

2. Apocalypse Now Redux

3. The Godfather, part 1

4. Once Upon a Time in America

5. The Third Man

6. All That Jazz

7. Casablanca (thanks, Scott)

8. Gandhi

9. Reds

10. Chinatown

11. House of Sand and Fog

12. Ordinary People

13. Gangs of New York

14. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (thanks, Anna)

Kingfisher Salutes:
John Matthew Coetzee

In 2003, the Swedish Nobel Prize committee  awarded the South African writer J. M. Coetzee its coveted literary prize. His work to date certainly merited it, although the  committee's awards to date are curiously neglectful, and they might have not noticed him among the world's good and great writers.

After all, they had overlooked such luminaries as Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Henry Miller--to name only three.

Coetzee (pronounced Kut-zee-uh') came from a world that was the legacy of the Boer War, the Dutch settlement, British occupation,  Afrikaners, Hottentots and Natives. It is largely unknown to us in the West, that is, until Coetzee came along and wrote exhaustively and compellingly about it.

Coetzee's life seems ordinary enough, at first glance; he details it in two autobiographical accounts, Boyhood and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, One would hardly expect him to have developed into the outstanding writer he is. But something wonderful and mysterious must have happened late in his early development and as he matured.

For a full bibliography and biography go here

See also

Born and raised in and near Capetown, South Africa, his life seems replete with ordinary parental conflict, a father who was a drunk and  ne'er-do-well, a mother who was overly protective and neurotic, and Catholic schooling in  the absence of anything better around or available to him. Yet his youthful concerns and interests seem normal enough, as he retells them, and very much like my own, complete with a love of things British and Russian. How he became a master of narrative fiction remains undisclosed. He graduated college, then went off to work in London at early computer programming and freelance writing. A study of obscure foreign languages offers no leads. But then artistic development has always been a mystery.

Perhaps later autobiographical accounts will trace his life in London and the United States, where he matriculated to the University of Texas, where he earned a Ph.D., writing  his thesis interestingly on the Irish writer,  Samuel Beckett. More important, he began his first novel while at Texas. (See the right-hand column for Coetzee's experiences there.)

Let us examine a few of his works: (Comments only on works read by your editor.)

Dusklands, 1974

Part one, The Vietnam Project

Sheesh. A revisitation of Viet Nam and our atrocities there, done by a  hired military expert who reports to an officer named, of all things, Coetzee. He is half-mad and hates  his wife, Marilyn, a former beauty queen gone to fat and neglect. Their sex is described in pathetic, gross anatomical terms. The report is for the government and is  hinged on America's use of defoliants and the massacre of captured troops that may or may not be the enemy's.

Our narrator, Eugene Dawn, goes mad under the strain and stabs his son, which gets him arrested, confined, and committed. And from his internment he writes this short, unpleasant novel.

It is the first episode in a pair of novellas, the first short, the second long, started while a graduate student at the University of Texas, probably written in the carrels of the library, or so it might seem, from the frequent reference to the omnipresent gray environment which surrounds him. The stacks.

Part two. The second and longer novella also involves a namesake, The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee, Edited, with an Afterword by S. J. Coetzee, Translated by J. M. Coetzee.

We suspect that it is all made up, in the manner of DeFoe, whom Coetzee admires greatly, but can't be sure, and there is the joy of such writing. The story, though, is not ambiguous. One clue that it is fiction based in a close reading of history is Coetzee's preface that states it was first published in 1951 "by my father, Dr. S. J. Coetzee" and drawn from a series of lectures his father purportedly gave at the University of Stellenbosch between 1934 and 1948. Well, the university is real.

We learn from his autobiography that his father was an unsuccessful lawyer, gambler, and drunk—hardly the type to deliver scholarly lectures, or else the writer is being even more clever than usual, bitterly leading us down the garden path.

It is the story of two expeditions by the Dutch and a man named Coetzee into the heartland of Africa in search of elephant tusks and adventure. He finds more of the latter than the former. The Hottentots are exploited and exert their revenge; one such venture is not enough; and it is soon repeated, with even more disastrous results.

Coetzee would have us think that the narrative is a translation from an 18th century manuscript, and almost convinces us this is the case, early in the novel, but the narrative soon gives up its stilted, pedantic style and becomes pure modern-day Coetzee—carefully and entertainingly written, rich with metaphor and allusion.

High-grade entertainment, and we learn a bit of recreated history as well.

In the Heart of the Country, 1977 (US title: From the Heart of the Country)

A black, depressing novel, about which Anatole Broyard writes,

"Mr. Coetzee is a master of deft hysteria. My favorite scene is of Hendrik and Magda, after the death of her father, sawing off his bedroom from the house, cutting through floor, walls and ceiling until the room falls away. In the last section of "From the Heart of the Country," after Hendrik and Anna have left, Magda signals to an airplane--perhaps only an imaginary airplane--that passes overhead every day. She builds fires and dances, then reflects that, in Africa, everyone dances around fires, this is no signal of distress. With white washed stones, she outlines on the dry ground the body of a woman, her arms thrown open, and her legs."

Yes. But nonetheless a good story and an enjoyable read.

Waiting for the Barbarians, 1980

Life and Times of Michael K, 1983

Coetzee won the Booker Prize for this, but did not attend the ceremonies. The protagonist of the story, set in a future Cape Town and Karoo, is a descendant of various Franz Kafka's characters, who never find out the meaning of their suffering. There is even a Castle in it.

Michael K sets out with his aged mother in a homemade wheelchair, heading away from the city to where he was born, but she sickens and dies. Michael K eventually ends up in an internment camp. He runs away and, physically and mentally wasted, suffers an ignoble death, alone in the woods.

Foe, 1986

The play in the title is on Defoe, the writer of Robinson Crusoe, about which Denis Donoghue writes in The New York Times:

His review sums it up nicely:

[He] "tells a woman's story, and lets her prescribe the terms on which it is to be construed. Susan Barton, of an English mother and a French father, has a daughter of the same name. The daughter is abducted by an Englishman and conveyed to the New World.

"Susan follows her to Brazil, but in Bahia the trail goes cold. She stays there for two years, then takes ship for Lisbon and becomes the captain's lover. On the voyage, the sailors mutiny, kill the captain and set Susan adrift in a small boat. She lands on an island, where she is found by Friday and brought to his master, here called Cruso. Cruso is an irascible, lazy, imperious fellow: he has lost interest in escaping from the island or even in recalling the events of his early life there.

"Friday's tongue has been cut out, either by slave owners or by Cruso. After a year on the island, the three are rescued by an English ship under Captain Smith, but on the voyage back to England, Cruso dies, pining for the island. The rest of the book deals with Susan and Friday in England, and her efforts to persuade Daniel Foe to turn her account of life on the island into a popular book of adventure. Foe is not much interested in Cruso and Friday; he regards their island as a boring place on which the same nothing happened every day. He is far more interested in Susan's two years in Bahia, a time of indifference to her.

"But Foe is too busy, and too pestered, to get the book going: he is sunk in debt, the bailiffs have taken his house. Susan tries to write the story as ''The Female Castaway,'' but she thinks she needs Foe's flair and fancy to turn it into fame and money. Then the daughter turns up; or perhaps she is not the daughter but a changeling. Now read on."

Guess not. Maybe later.

A Land Apart: A Contemporary South African Reader, 1987 (with André Brink)

White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa, 1988

Age of Iron, 1990

Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, 1992

The Master of Petersburg, 1994
It is as though Dostoevsky were reborn long enough to write one more novel, this one with himself as protagonist. (Talk about a modern twist on an old, old theme.) Coetzee's book is simply magnificent, and no wan imitation of the master. It  deserves to be read on its own merits, which are considerable.

A good mystery and very enjoyable.
To see a detailed account of The Master of Petersburg go  here

Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, 1996

Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, 1997

As a boy, Coetzee was not very different from many of us, growing up in a lower-middle class home, with an overly attentive and neurotic mother and a father who is an undependable drunk. He joins the Boy Scouts and collects stamps. So what makes him different? Read Youth below.

What is Realism? 1997

Disgrace, 1999
A professor sleeps with one of his students. So what else is new? Well, she takes him to court, the faculty try and dismiss him, and the girl's boyfriend beats him up. He goes off to start a new life, alone and disgraced, but ends up with his daughter on a farm, and messes up her life, too. The daughter is raped by Natives and he is beaten badly again. He can't win for continuing to lose. If anything positive can come out of this maelstrom, Coetzee won't let it happen. Yet it is a fascinating story, told masterfully and hard to put down, physically or intellectually. But not his absolute best work.

The Lives of Animals, 1999 (with Amy Gutmann)

The Humanities in Africa, 2001

Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986–1999, 2001

Essays on his contemporaries and others.  The one on Dostoyevsky is a wonderful accompaniment to his novel, The Master of Petersburg, and takes us to Joseph Frank's definitive five-volume biography of Dostoyevsky, especially to volume four, The Miraculous Years, 1866-72, or so, when Dostoyevsky wrote his major novels.

Others include Borges, Brodsky, Defoe, Richardson, Kafka, and Rilke. One may tend to forget that Coetzee is a Ph.D. from the University of Texas and a professor of writing and literature, so this collection of essays is right up his alley, professionally speaking. How he can combine a career of fiction writing and literary teaching and scholarship is difficult, but proves it can be done, and done well.

Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, 2002

Carries the novelist into his teens and early twenties, from South Africa to England and London. If you liked Boyhood, you'll like Youth even more, and hope that Coetzee continues his autobiography into his years at the University of Texas and his Ph.D. (though he has written about it elsewhere and as candidly as usual).

Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, 2003
Coetzee dons the garb of a literary woman, traveling and speaking before academic groups, as he has done so many times in his life. She is middle-aged, alone, often ill, and sad. She has a son who travels with her, out of concern and boredom. Often she feels she would be better off alone.

Slow Man, 2005
Portions of this novel appeared in The New Yorker in the past year and were so well-written and intriguing that I began reading Coetzee in earnest. A big job, but worth it.

The story of a man who lost his leg in a terrible bicycle/automobile accident, it traces his remaining life as an invalid fighting to resume a somewhat normal life, including his relationship with old, new, and hired friends. How it ends I will have to guess at until I buy and read it.
 

POETRY SECTION

Poem du jour

From Seamus Heaney, who won the  Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995:

CHAIRING MARY

Heavy, helpless, carefully manhandled
Upstairs every night in a wooden chair
She sat in all day as the sun sundialled
Window-splays across the quiet floor.

Her body heat had entered the braced timber
Two would take hold of, by weighted leg and back,
Tilting and hoisting, the one on the lower step
Bearing the brunt, the one reversing up

Not averting eyes from her hurting bulk,
And not embarrassed, but never used to it,
I think of her warm brow we might have once
Bowed to and kissed before we kissed it cold.

Published in The New Yorker, June 27, 2005, and used without permission

SAILING TO AMERICA

Regarde vous, John?

Three excerpts from J. M. Coetzee on his life at the University of Texas--why he went there and why he left

 . . .I sailed into New York harbor aboard an Italian ship, once a troopship, now crammed with young folk from foreign parts come to study in America. I came, immediately, from England; at the age of 25, I was heading for Austin, where the University of Texas was to support me to the tune of $2,100 a year for teaching freshman English while I studied in the graduate program.

*  *  *
 

The students I taught in my composition classes might as well have been Trobriand Islanders, so inaccessible to me were their culture, their recreations, their animating ideas. I moved in a single stratum of the university community, a stratum of graduate students living thrifty lives in rented apartments with baby toys scattered over the floors, laboring like tortoises to complete courses or prepare for orals or write dissertations. Their talk, when it was not of their teachers (their personalities, their deficiencies), was of getting out, getting a job in Huntsville or Texarkana, getting their hands on real money. With less tangible goals than these or perhaps with none at all, I toiled away at my Old English texts, my German grammar.

On Sundays I played cricket on one of the baseball fields with a group of Indians. We formed a team, traveled to College Station, played against a team from Texas A&M also made up of nostalgic castoff children from the colonies, lost. I remembered an Indian friend from the old days in England. He and I went for walks in the Surrey countryside, a countryside that, we agreed, meant nothing to either of us. ''In America,'' he said (he had spent time in Columbus, Ohio), ''you can stay up till 4 in the morning, and when you go out there will still be a hamburger stand open.'' I did not care about the hamburgers, but the picture he drew seemed a distinct improvement on the England I knew. Now I was in America, or at least in Texas ; but the green hills, I was finding, were as alien as the Surrey downs. What I missed seemed to be a certain emptiness, empty earth and empty sky, to which South Africa had accustomed me. What I also missed was the sound of a language whose nuances I understood. Speech in Texas seemed to have no nuances; or, if there were nuances, I was not hearing them.

*  *  *

"I left Texas in 1968. It was never clear to me, from beginning to end, why the university - and the American taxpayer - had lavished so much money on me to follow idle whims. Sometimes I thought it an oversight, an insignificant oversight, allowed for in the system: that among the thousands of petroleum engineers and political scientists turned out every year, it did not matter if there were one or two of whatever I was. At other times the Fulbright exchange program seemed to me an extraordinarily farsighted and generous scheme whose humane benefits would be felt by all parties far into the future. Where did the truth lie? Somewhere in the middle, perhaps.

"Coming or going, I had no regrets. I departed, I thought, unmarked, unscathed, except by the times. No one had tried to teach me, for which I was grateful. What I had learned in the course of three years was not negligible, though picked up, for the most part, by accident. I had had the run of a great library, where I had stumbled on books whose existence I might otherwise never have guessed. Observing the linguist and scholar James Sledd at work at his desk at 5 o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, I had been reassured that the province of English studies was not, as the life style of my colonial teachers had always implied, reserved for dilettantes. I could have come away with less.

[B May 6, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Because of an error in editing, two sentences in ''How I Learned About America - and Africa - in Texas'' by J. M. Coetzee (April 15) read incorrectly. They should have read, ''Years later, in Buffalo, still pursuing this track, I was to venture my own contribution to the history of the Hottentots: a memoir, composed out of the air, of Jacobus Coetzee. The memoir went on growing till it had been absorbed into a first novel, 'Dusklands.' '']
 

Coetzee's Nobel Prize address is simply a reading from his novel, Foe, and kind of a plug to buy it and read more. A unique approach, especially when compared with the usual condescending effort to describe one's work in terms of elaborating on and improving  the universal plight of mankind.

Click here to read Coetzee's Nobel Prize Address

BACK ISSUES of Kingfisher Journal
(Available only online)

<sub>Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 1, Poet Robert Sund Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 2, Iridescent Light Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 3, Sylvia Plath Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 4, James Wright Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.2, No.1, Richard Hugo Issue

Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 1, Theodore Roethke Commemorative Issue</sub>

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 2, No 3, W.S. Merwin/Richard Ford issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, William Stafford Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 2, David Wagoner Edition}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Edna O'Brien Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 4 Anthony Powell and Donald Justice issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 1, Robert Sund and Graham Greene Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 Saul Bellow  and Robert Creeley Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 3 Philip Whalen and Vincent Van Gogh Issue.}