Spring on SXNU Campus

Poems Retrieved - from a lost corner of the Computer ...

I'm not sure of their age, but here are some poems I found whilst fossicking around the back reaches of my 'puter.

Tip Haiku


driving to the tip
prickly pear and pine breakdance
in the rear vision mirror

*

car slews sideways
on black muddy tracks
grey sky streaked with gulls

*

backing the trailer
I jack-knife, straighten, back again
slam the door, unload

*

proud prickly pear and pine buried beside car bodies

*

leaving, all gulls gone,
black crows circle in the grey –
a yin-yang day


Man of the Match

It didn’t make the TV news
or the backpage of The West
but the news spread fast enough –
his mother told everyone:
You should’ve seen him!
I was so proud …
The TV news showed
a boy with his eye damaged,
a fatal road crash down south,
and a Royal shaking a commoner’s hand.
What a pity you missed it!
Of course, he bowled well,
did something good, not sure what,
but then he went out to bat,
number eleven or twelve …
I’m so proud of him!
Now she’s phoning distant cousins,
showing his backlift to butchers,
stopping shopkeepers with her tale.
He would’ve won the match only
they ran out of time or balls
or something. You should’ve seen him –
Whack! And away it’d go!
Yes? Oh. Just this lettuce thanks.
Cricket? Last week she said
it was a boring, dangerous game.
This week: You should’ve seen him!
I was so excited I spilt my coffee.
Now they break till mid-January –
I can’t wait! He was man-of-the-match –
Did I tell you?


Hot Days

in this town
summer days are songless
brute sun in a silent sky

banksias stand like stringless cellos
warbler whistles his choked phrase
from a melaleuca’s dry neck

in the cracked silence
a string player buries his fingers
in the soil

feeling for song

Easter Sunday

Thank you, Jayne, I have found my eggs.

Nostalgia: Remember typewriters?

Way back in the dim dark past, I wrote on a 1913 portable. It had a wooden case held together with black vinyl covering. It was a museum piece and I took great delight in formulating typewriter poems on it - a sub-genre of concrete poems (Dom Sylvester Houedard was the star at the time). I hit the keys so hard that you could see through the eyelet of the 'o's . I was hitting the booze hard at the time also, so the typewriter was midwife to a lot of self-centred crap. My first wife put it on a council pick-up one day when I had advanced to an IBM golfball. It's a sad memory I will never forget ...

Read about Houedard here: http://www.ubu.com/historical/houedard/index.html

Ya dig?

The Lesser Wall of China

Through my kitchen window at Shanxi Normal University - they put a hole in the Lesser Wall yesterday. Will Japanese tourists have a yen to view it?

WrongWrite blog

The Living Tongue cleansed

My eldest son, Miles, has inherited a few things from me, and he has put them to good use :-) Just take a look at http://wrongwrite.com/ He would have a field day here in the People's Republic! Even the textbooks in English about how to Write English have screamers. Sometimes it is funny ... like a student - a Freshman to use Americano lingo which they favo(u)r here - said the other day in a writing class:

'Cohesion is very important in English testes.'

Life Explained

Who needs William Burroughs/Brion Gysin? Who needs a pair of scissors? Off the Net and off an email, I took the words for this poem: from Keith Richards, sexagenarian rocker and an interview with a today star called Infinito 02017. This is the dance mix. I call it Life Explained, ya dig?


My voice is kind of this wild style
so it kind of brings it back together
in there. All right.
"He was cremated and I
couldn't resist grinding him up
with a little bit of blow." Keith said.
You got Infinito 2017 equals
nine two times, because
it's 99, then you got 99 inside of,
you know, tomorrow.
Message body repressed.
It all cohesive.
"My dad wouldn't have cared,"
Keith said. So it's like 720 degrees,
there you go. Glad you
explained that.

Taxi!

Today was Monday so I rose early and went out to second campus by the uni bus at 7.20am. I taught freshmen oral English until 10am and then caught a taxi back home. It is not expensive to catch a taxi here, but it is often exciting, if sometimes dangerous. Today the driver was an anachronism in physical appearance. He looked exactly like a cartoon version of a 1950s/early 1960s American hipster: about 30 years old, in a wide-lapelled, double breasted jacket with a dark shirt underneath, ‘cool’ sunglasses, a prickly black goatee beard with matching moustache, and a crazy haircut not unlike an old flat-top Kramer cut from those decades. When I sat down, he said ‘Hell oh’, gunned the tincan taxi out into the traffic, then grinned and said, all as one phrase, ‘Hell oh sit down pleeze’. I immediately liked his way of driving - fearless, fast and lyrical. He drove like I imagine Dean Moriarty of On the Road fame would have driven – or maybe the real man behind the wheel of Keroauc’s novel, Neal Cassidy. My driver knew where every inch of outside skin on his tincan was, and he ducked and dived through the slenderest alleyways of traffic like some kind of animal … In fact. that was it!, the tincan was an extension of himself and he was ducking and jiving like an Aboriginal Aussie rules football player. And when the opposition defence got too obstructive – four lanes of raggedy parked traffic at the red light, with bicycles and pedestrians all taking up any inch of space - he took off the road and went around that corner on a broad footpath! Hah! He did it all so effortlessly and with such clear-eyed athleticism that I just sat there and marvelled. I don’t know how he didn’t hit anybody or cause an accident, but he did it languorously, driving me home quicker and smoother than any other taxi-driving maniac in this crazy city.

He REAL cool
He no need no driving school
He a crazy Zen-driving fool
Playing the road like he’s shooting pool …




(... with suitable apologies to Gwendolyn Brooks)

Chalk one up for China! Goal! Goal!

Passions run hot here over a few sports: ping-pong, basketball and soccer. Well, they call the last one football - but to a true-blue Australian like me that means Aussie Rules.

Anyway, in my meanderings around the Net, I came across the origins of soccer - and China cracks a mention, so I thought I'd share it here, just in case my curious students read my blog ...

> Many believe the English invented the sport, but from what we can gather, the Chinese deserve the bulk of the credit. Canada's CTV quotes FIFA president Sepp Blatter as saying there is evidence the Chinese played the game "a thousand years ago." It may go even further back. According to that same article, historians have discovered proof the game originated about 2,000 years ago.

FIFA.com goes into considerably more depth. An early soccer-like game called "cuju" bore many similarities to modern soccer with teams, rules, competitions, and stadiums. The game "gained favour among the rulers and the people," and over time, evolved into a worldwide phenomenon.

One question remains, though -- who came up with the word "soccer"? The always reliable Mavens' Word of the Day explains that Britain is the unlikely culprit. "The formal designation for the game we know as soccer is Association football." Mavens' explains that the word "soccer" is a kind of slangy contraction of "(As)soc(iation football)" and an "er" suffix. <

April Fool's Day

Today I was wished Happy Fools Day by a Chinese friend. It was a strange text message to get and at first I had no idea what it referred to - until I realised the date. But when did this crazy April Fool's Day idea begin? I went looking, and thanks to About.com, today I am an educated fool:



The First April Fool's Day

Then in 1562, Pope Gregory introduced a new calendar for the Christian world, and the new year fell on January first. There were some people, however, who hadn't heard or didn't believe the change in the date, so they continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April first. Others played tricks on them and called them "April fools." They sent them on a "fool's errand" or tried to make them believe that something false was true.

Poisson d'Avril

In France today, April first is called "Poisson d'Avril." French children fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their friends' backs. When the "young fool" discovers this trick, the prankster yells "Poisson d’Avril!" (April Fish!)

Last Evening together in Linfen

The reason we came to Linfen was to let Jeanette's grand-daughter Sophie know her grandparents. Now we have spent eight months together: from left, Tania Jain, Sophie at 18 months, myself and Jeanette, posing among the new growth of Spring at Shanxi Normal University. Tomorrow they leave for Hangzhou, and I remain here to work until the end of semester in June.

The Lion in Winter

Prime Prynne

'To write and eat at the same table' is harder than it sounds.
- J H Prynne

(Thank you, Christopher Walker)

I have never found Prynne clearer.

Every now and then, a good poem comes along ...

... a poem by
the Irish comedian Denis Leary, which he claims was
written by his dog:

You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
I'll eat that.


(Thanks for drawing my attention to that one, Candice Ward.)

Poem in memoriam Peter W.

it's a lyrical day
i saw a sparrow in the sky
a toddler blowing soap-bubbles

on the fruitstand
all the banana bruises
have healed

at the courts
basketball players let little ones
shoot hoops

my friend is dead now
but a rainbow
is not out of the question

spring in china -
washing dries on
every balcony and window

Philip Whalen's Selected Poems Out Now

Hymnus Ad Patrem Sinensis

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick
splashed picture--bug, leaf,
caricature of Teacher
on paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it
Their world & several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it--
Cheered as it whizzed by--
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all


One of my alltime favourite poets - a true individual

Overtime: Selected Poems
Penguin Poets
Philip Whalen - Author

Book: Paperback | 6.06 x 8.97in | 304 pages | ISBN 9780140589184 | Penguin

Dragon Dreaming

Thank you to Suzie and Hazem for this wonderful gift. The calligraphy reads Dragon in various ways, and I fell in love with it when I saw it in Beijing. Now it will hang in Western Australia, part of my Dragon Dreaming.

Quote of the Day

Howard Nemerov - "I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier."

Henry Thoreau journal

One of my favourite books of all time is Walden by Henry Thoreau. Now I have discovered a blog which quotes from the journals on a daily basis. Check it out at http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/ or http://www.inblogs.net/blogthoreau

Here are the opening words of Walden:
"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again."

Illustrations: Henry Thoreau; his cabin in the woods; front page of the original edition

The old impulse to write ...

Lyn Hejinian at http://www.poets.org wrote about writing some time back. I enjoyed her quotes from other creative people and I'd like to share them with you:

(Quote) Thus Roland Barthes writes: "The word transports me because of the notion that I am going to do something with it: it is the thrill of a future praxis, something like an appetite. This desire makes the entire motionless chart of language vibrate." Eugène Delacroix: "The very sight of my palette, freshly set out with the colours in their contrasts is enough to fire my enthusiasm." Paul Valéry: "I go into an office on some business or other. As this includes writing I am handed a pen, ink, paper all perfectly assorted, and I scribble some quite trivial phrase. I enjoy the act of writing to the point of wishing to go on writing. I go out, walk down the street, taking with me an urge to write, to hit on something to write about." (Unquote)

The Haiku poets of the Japanese tradition always counted their calligraphy as part of their art, and in China to this day, calligraphy is a highly praised art in itself. In fact, calligraphy is one among the many disciplines young Chinese art students learn. And handwriting here is of a standard that would shame 99% of Australian students.

My tools for writing are a Benq laptop and Windows XP. I can't sit down to sharpen twelve of them before I start, or dip my nib in the inkwell to refresh my mind ... Sometimes I walk out and scribble a note in a notebook (my sister has never followed behind me and taken notes ) but it is a rare thing, and most times the jotted words are edited out early in the piece. I do often sleep with pad and pen beside me, but it has only worked once to give birth to a new poem, a nightmare at that. Occasional class notes have appeared, however, through this method - and teaching does pay the bills. I enjoy the act of writing, as Lyn H says ... but must sleep now or tomorrow the words will all be sleeping in little divans at the base of my cerebral cortex.

The 4th Kokako Haiku and Senryu Competition is now International!

Closing date: 31st October, 2007
First Prize
NZ$200

2 Runners-up prizes NZ$50 each

Judge:
Catherine Mair

Send entries to:

The Kokako Haiku Competition
Patricia Prime, co-editor
42 Flanshaw Road
Te Atatu South
Auckland 8
New Zealand

Please make cheques out to Kokako
Overseas entrants may send cash at their own risk

Conditions of entry:

1.Haiku must be previously unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere.
2.Entry fee is NZ$5 for every 3 haiku; for overseas entries, US$1 per haiku.
3.Send two copies of each haiku, or group of haiku, with your name and address on one copy only.
4.Winning haiku and commended entries will be published in Kokako 8 (April, 2008).
5.Winners will be notified by mail.
6.Any theme is acceptable.

Any queries, email: pprime@ihug.co.nz

Daydream (snap poem)

the washing machine whirls to a close
Linfen buildings buffed and dried
bicycles beautifully spoken
sparkling ladies glide by
on the back of
proudly polished pedalodiums
ridden by bright-faced gentlemen
with Colgate-white teeth
gleaming in shining sunlight
down promenades lined
by leafy elms past
milkpond lakes skirted
by weeping willows ...

from a Hills Hoist hangs
those stubborn Chinese stains
- corruption and pride

Wise man says ...

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man's life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Henry David Thoreau

Poetry and The New Yorker

David Orr writes an interesting essay in The New York Times about the 'Annals of Poetry'. In it he discusses a recent long article in The New Yorker by Dana Goodyear, a 30 year-old staffer at the magazine. See the entire article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/books/review/Orr.t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin

Here's just one interesting paragraph:

'And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.'

The meme machine

My friend, poet and fellow blogger, Jill Jones, over at http://www.inblogs.net/rubystreet , tagged me to respond to a meme which read as follows:

Tom Beckett tagged me (Jill Jones) with this meme:

"I now propose a new tag: Things which one has read and has been influenced by which are not confined to those paper-bound vessels of the printed word we refer to as books. Let's call these Non-Books. Or maybe Impossible Books. Or Limen Books? It's up to you."



My list (tonight - any other time it may be different):

1. sitting by the radio with my parents and brothers and sisters, listening to the rhythms of speech and the zany sound effects of The Goon Show in the Fifties
2. coloured patterns of stained glass light falling on pious faces as the parishioners knelt
3. the sound of scuttling claws as rock crabs ran away exposed to sunlight
4. river water dripping off oars
5. stoned to the bones in an emergency ward with an attack of renal colic
6. the intimate feeling of a dental nurse leaning against my elbow on the arm of the chair when I was twelve, and I in my summer school shorts and nowhere to hide
7. the taste of stolen mulberries off a neighbourhood tree


My blog list has disappeared into the ether, so I can only issue the broadest of tags - to all you bloggers, particularly the poets, who would care to participate.

Burke's Frontyard

As they renovate, nobody works harder than the donkeys carting the materials.

Small Press Month

What would poets do without small presses? The major presses may occasionally publish poetry collections but only from the safest of poets and from the mainstream. Poets who kick over the traces and map out new territories need the small presses. So, please take a moment to follow this up at http://www.smallpressmonth.org/


Another great site to support is Small Press Distribution. It is easy to publish a book but it is extremely difficult when it comes to distribution, so take a journey of discovery to http://www.spdbooks.org/default.asp

Burke's Backyard at 9.30am Today

TAG HUNGERFORD AWARD WINNER 2006

TAG (Tom) Hungerford with Alice Nelson



The Board of writingWA is pleased to extend congratulations to Alice Nelson, winner of the 2006 TAG Hungerford Award for her work of fiction entitled In Arcadia.



The Award was announced by Alastair Bryant, Director General of the Department of Culture and the Arts, on Sunday 25 February, at a presentation dinner held at Lamont’s East Perth restaurant.



The TAG Hungerford Award carries a cash prize of $6000 provided by New Edition Bookshop, and a publishing contract with Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

An extract from In Arcadia will be published in The West Australian on Saturday 10 March.



Also shortlisted for the 2006 TAG Hungerford Award were Deb Fitzpatrick and Varnya Bromilow who each received additional cash prizes of $500 contributed by Tom Hungerford in a gesture of appreciation for the quality of their writing.



The 2006 TAG Hungerford Award is sponsored by New Edition Bookshop, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, The West Australian Newspaper, and writingWA.

Tom Collins Poetry Prize 2007 goes to ...

The judge was Fay Zwicky, Highly Commended went to Glen Phillips, and the First Prize went to Murray Jennings. They are pictured on the front verandah of Tom Collins House Writers Centre, by the sea in Swanbourne, Western Australia, just yesterday, 4 March 2007.
It was a very special day for Murray all around because it was his wife Ros's birthday, and their 40th Wedding Anniversary - and he won the prestigious Tom Collins Poetry Prize. Congratulations, Murray and Glen - and Fay, if it comes to that.
The prize is offered by the Fellowship of Australian Writers, WA branch, annually, and is sponsored by the Furphy family in Shepparton, Victoria. The original 'Tom Collins' was the narrator of 'Such Is Life' by Joseph Furthy who built the house in its former location of Servetus Street, before the government put a (necessary) highway through. The house was moved up the hill and around the corner to a picturesque spot among the trees near Alan Park.

Lantern Festival

(photo Reuters)









People walk under lanterns hung to celebrate the Lantern Festival in Tianjin municipality. The Lantern Festival falls on March 4 this year, the 15th day of the first month of the Chinese lunar calendar.

Shanghai Literary Festival

FYI - http://mrestaurant.sylogicsgroup.com/mrestaurant/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=75&lang=en

Pierre Joris MEDITATIONS ON THE STATIONS OF MANSOUR AL-HALLAJ

CHAPBOOK RELEASE

Anchorite Press is pleased to announce the release of a new collection of poems, MEDITATIONS ON THE STATIONS OF MANSOUR AL-HALLAJ, by Pierre Joris.

Each handmade chapbook is 5.25 x 8.625 and features a Rives deckled cover and cotton wove endpaper. 21 special editions, signed and numbered by the author, are also available. Each stitched special edition features handmade endpaper.

To peruse our archive of previous publications, or for ordering info, please visit our site: www.anchoritepress.blogspot.com. You can also contact us via email directly: anchorite.press@gmail.com.

Sincerely,
Christopher Rizzo, ed.
Anchorite Press

Why we (Australians) are a nation of Poets

Peter Craven in The Australian newspaper had a lot to say about Oz poetry. It is good to see it getting some attention - and positive attention at that.

Read it at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21296782-5001986,00.html

Hamilton Stone Review No 11 online

Featuring nonfiction by Jim Murphy; fiction by Julie Compton, Marilyn
Coffey,Suzanne McConnell, Harold Klapper, and Sybil Kollar; and poetry by
Maxianne Berger, Roger Day, Andrew Burke, Sally Van Doren, James Davies, Simon Perchik,Mary Rising Higgins, Rodney Nelson, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Jason Wilkinson,Michael Young, R. L. Swihart, Maurice Oliver, and Chanming Yuan.

http://www.hamiltonstone.org/hsr11.html

Spring Rain - draft two

dawn rain washes the dust off the town
so Chinese builders play cards inside
the building they are building

blue metal mountain is rinsed
and a great wall of handmade bricks
leans against the wind

the town's heat has been turned off
admin officers huddle over heaters
as they plan the next semester

a lone student walks in the rain
her new umbrella as yellow as the sun
before the dark grey clouds

Spring Rain

dawn rain washes the dust off the town
so Chinese builders play cards inside
the building they are building

blue metal mountain is rinsed
and a great wall of handmade bricks
leans against the wind

the town's heat has been turned off
so uni officers huddle over heaters
as they plan the semester schedule

a lone student walks in the rain
her new umbrella as yellow as the sun
before the dark grey clouds

Crows Calling at Midnight by Li Bai

Yellow clouds behind the tower where
a crow returns and calls caw caw on a branch.
Inside, a Qin river girl weaves a brocade
of green yarn like mist, hears a whisper at the window
She stops the shuttle, but it is nobody. She recalls her friend
far away, and herself in tears like rain alone in her room


Hmm, I did this then looked at another translation (by someone who perhaps knows what they're doing!) - and I like mine better (See below for confession of how I translated them.)

Homesickness by Li Gou

Some say the sun sets on the horizon
I see all corners of the sky but I do not see my home
I already hate the blue mountains for keeping us separated
Blue mountains covered in cloud by evening


I'm not an expert in Chinese (that's an understatement!) so I took a short cut. I read the word-by-word transcription of the characters and then wrote them out as I saw it in English syntax and grammar. Too much of a cheat? Perhaps - but fun.

Draft Two ...

a whitehaired busker playing erhu
on my laptop screen obliquely
illustrates Bach’s Cello Suites
on my iPod speakers. Kulchur
Ezra Pound spelt it. No matter
how you spell it, it’s the frisson
between strings that has me
writing here, missing her asleep
with twin hot-waterbottles at her feet
and me pondering imponderables



I've been trying out ten-liners in a form originating from Fannie Howe, and tonight the old Chinese busker whose photo sits on my screen was both in line with and at odds with the Cello Suites coming out of my iPod. It has kept me up with loose thoughts of the similarities and gulfs between cultures and the 'release and tension' of that circumstance echoing the creation of all great art. Draft one was twelve lines so I have had to sacrifice some little thoughts. With Pound also in my thoughts, I hope it coheres.

Jiaozi! Enjoy ...

One of my favourite foods in China is jiaozi - dumplings. Chinese dumplings are very popular during the Chinese New Year season ... (The photo doesn't do them justice They may not look great, but the test is in the tasting!)

INGREDIENTS:

Jiaozi dough:
3 cups all-purpose flour
up to 1 1/4 cups cold water
1/4 teaspoon salt

Filling:
1 cup ground pork or beef
1 TB soy sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1 TB Chinese rice wine or dry sherry
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground white pepper, or to taste
3 TB sesame oil
1/2 green onion, finely minced
1 1/2 cups finely shredded Napa cabbage
4 tablespoons shredded bamboo shoots
2 slices fresh ginger, finely minced
1 clove garlic, peeled and finely minced

PREPARATION:
Stir the salt into the flour. Slowly stir in the cold water, adding as much as is necessary to form a smooth dough. Don't add more water than is necessary. Knead the dough into a smooth ball. Cover the dough and let it rest for at least 30 minutes.

While the dough is resting, prepare the filling ingredients.
Add the soy sauce, salt, rice wine and white pepper to the meat, stirring in only one direction. Add the remaining ingredients, stirring in the same direction, and mix well.

To make the dumpling dough: knead the dough until it forms a smooth ball. Divide the dough into 60 pieces. Roll each piece out into a circle about 3-inches in diameter.

Place a small portion (about 1 level tablespoon) of the filling into the middle of each wrapper. Wet the edges of the dumpling with water. Fold the dough over the filling into a half moon shape and pinch the edges to seal. Continue with the remainder of the dumplings.

To cook, bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add half the dumplings, giving them a gentle stir so they don't stick together. Bring the water to a boil, and add 1/2 cup of cold water. Cover and repeat. When the dumplings come to a boil for a third time, they are ready. Drain and remove. If desired, they can be pan-fried at this point.

Death of a Red Heroine - great book!

I've praised this book elsewhere, and I was rather worrying that it was just an accumulation of my interests coinciding with the themes of the novel that had me so pleased, but now I have found an objective review which said all I'd like to say, only better than I would have (in my constant haste), so I quote from it here:





DEATH OF A RED HEROINE
By QIU XIAOLONG
New York: Soho Press, 2000. 464 pages, $25

Andrea Kempf


China has enjoyed a long tradition of crime fiction, dating back to at least the Tang dynasty, when tales of jurists who often solved their mysteries with the aid of ghosts rather than detection or common sense were popular. However, almost none of the genre has been available in the West, with the exception of The Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee, an eighteenth-century novel based on the exploits of a seventh-century judge, which was translated into English by the Dutch scholar and diplomat Robert van Gulik. Better known than his translation is the series of popular novels that van Gulik went on to write in English based on the character of Judge Dee. The twentieth-century detective novels set in China available to Western readers have been written either by visitors to the country or by Western authors inventing an imaginary China. Finally, with Death of a Red Heroine, English-language readers have a genuine Chinese novel of detection, written by Shanghai-born Qui Xiaolong, who came to the United States on a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1988 and stayed on after the pro-democracy debacle in Tiananmen Square.

(Well expressed paragraphs deleted here, mainly for copyright reasons - I don't want to quote the whole thing in case I'm stepping on toes.)

What raises the novel well above a typical police procedural is the quirky, erudite inspector. Chen is able to quote a Tang-dynasty poem appropriate to every situation; and when Chinese poetry fails, he quotes T. S. Eliot or Matthew Arnold. He delights in eating a good meal, and the many that he consumes are described along the way to the murder's solution. He is an earnestly good man, picking his way through the political minefield represented by the case, trying to see that justice is served, and that the demands of the state are met. The supporting characters are equally engaging: ... All of these very real people, moving through a very real Shanghai, trying to decide what is appropriate behavior for China in the 1990s, are part of a mosaic that creates an authentic picture of the country as it charges into the twenty-first century with a new economy but an old political structure. Death of a Red Heroine is much more than a detective story. It is an elegant, true-to-life portrait of China today.

Andrea Kempf is a professor and librarian at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. In 1993, she participated in a teaching exchange at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xian, China. She is a regular reviewer of fiction for Library Journal and was recently named Library Journal Fiction Reviewer of the Year 2000.

The review can be found at http://www.persimmon-mag.com/winter2001/bre_win2001_5.htm

'40 Under 40' award winner, Miles Burke

My eldest son, Miles Burke, is Managing Director and Founder of Bam Creative, a design shop specialising in the development of corporate identities on the Internet and elsewhere. Years ago I said to him, Don't do it son, it'll never work! Now he has won a '40 Under 40' years award as a business leader in our community, an award run by WA Business News. Fathers can underestimate their offspring, can't they. So, congratulations to Miles. You can find his company website at http://www.bam.com.au

Happy New Year, China-style

And a third draft of Tootle Lingo, which I may rename later:


thirteen floors below us
contrapuntal traffic flows
in eight directions at once
(at least!) and bells on bikes tinkle
pitched above the beeping of scooters
beside the horns of impatient taxis
and bullying bellicose trucks
challenging long-winded baritone buses
as the bullfrog-bassoon police wagon
pulls the Kunming Sinfonia into line
with a hooonk-hooonk
and a mega-megaphonic order ...

traffic flows across
and up and down
unnaturally
like two rivers
crossing each other
and the sounds of their
tootle lingo
lulls the townspeople
- and me -
into a stupor

tootle lingo (draft two)

thirteen floors below us
contrapuntal traffic flows
in eight directions at once
(at least!) and bells on bikes ring
pitched above the honking of scooters
beside the horns of impatient taxis
and bullying bellicose trucks
challenging long baritone buses
as the bullfrog-bassoon police wagon
pulls the orchestra into line
with a hooonk-hooonk
and a mega-megaphonic order
(in Chinese which is
all Greek to me …)

traffic flows across
up and down
unnaturally
like two rivers
crossing each other
and the sounds of their
tootle lingo
lulls the town
- and me -
into a stupor

If computers be the spice of life ...

... play on!

Today we visited a friend, Charles, who is a composer here in Kunming. He is American and has run-up 82 years on the clock so far. After a healthy and delicious lunch with his wife Hillary - English - we retired to the study to listen to some compositions by Charles. First, the composer played a 'Saraband' on the piano. A little googling tells us that a saraband was an erotic dance for two that was very popular at royal courts in the 17th and 18th centuries. The eroticism was kept at bay by our surroundings

Then Charles introduced the next piece as too 'difficult' for him to play, so - the computer did. The sheet music was up on the screen, and the computer indicated where it was at with a moving horizontal line.

It's the first time I have seen such a system and I was hypnotised. The music was not hideously difficult, and the machine did its job faithfully. We liked the piece, but Hillary complained the computer never obeyed the score in the middle when the tempo was meant to increase for a while, then return to its original tempo. The music was all played at the same tempo.

Next, Charles introduced a cello piece, with a repetitive 'ground bass'. In this piece the computer sound could only approximate the sound of strings, but not fully reproduce their roundness or vary the tone as a performer with an instrument can. I had trouble getting past this to listen to the composition. Charles then played an orchestral arrangement of the piece, and I was amazed at the difference. It certainly gained life from this extension, but the volume variations and light'n'shade of a 'real' orchestra just wasn't there.

I have heard my poems read by a computer with a range of voices, and they suffered from the same dehumanising element. But just yesterday I saw an old Victor record player with the trumpet horn as its speaker and the old needle arm loaded and ready to play. On top were six 78 rpm records with Chinese covers. Dust covered everything. The Victor had been made in America, and I daydreamed through celluloid images how it came to China and how it has survived so much topsy-turvy history to end-up parked in an 'antique' shop in the Bird and Flower Market on Old Kunming Road in 2007. And now, today, we listened to a computer play fresh compositions of Western music in timbres and epths of a full orchestra.

Thanks, Charles, for sharing your music and your system with us today. We should train your little dog JoJo to sit like Nipper, the dog of His Master's Voice fame

Valentine's Day calls for a Poem!

looking down on Kunming
from the eighteenth floor
in the eleventh month
of our marriage
we dine Thai in China
full of contradictions ourselves
besides the cross-dictions
of our lingo and the world
around us
our favourite music
an old traditional string player
between the two best bookshops
our favourite book
a Shanghai who-done-it
with the chief detective a poet
our favourite shops
the Flower & Bird Market
with fierce dragons
and ancient crazed vases
a new restaurant around
every corner hold the chillies!
even here a rose means
I Love You and so today
young men carried red bouquets
to their wives and lovers.

We say this is a day we will always remember
then laugh when we can't remember
our first Valentine's Day last year.
'Live In The Present' we chorus,
looking out at the rose-red neon signs
of Kunming at night.

Today's diary entry

Famous Australian saying: Life wasn’t meant to be easy (John Fraser, PM, 197?) That’s the theme for today’s missive

Jeanette is still ill, even with the lack of food and the Chinese little medicine pills from yesterday’s adventure to the pharmacist. So this morning, after my wonderful breakfast of muesli, yoghurt, toast, tomato and fried eggs, I went hunting for bananas, bottled water, and more medicine.
The bananas I found, up a side street at a stall. He wanted 9 yuan, so I expostulated that that was too much. I offered him 3. I even enlisted the help of a Chinese woman shopping nearby – but she sided with him and said that was the usual price. Okay, I gave him the money with a smile. He laughed when I left and I doubted I had done the right thing. (Checked it out later, in my obsessive way, and it was a fair price for current market conditions. Damn.)
I continued up the street on a hunch and found the pharmacist I was at yesterday – but different staff. Luckily I had brought the sheet of paper identifying the anti-diarrhoea medicine and bought 20 small phials of the pills for 20 yuan. A bargain, if it works.
Water – that’s easy. We have a little corner store across the octopus walkway where we buy two bottle of water for 6 yuan.
Now came the real test of the day, and of my patience and ‘serenity’ : toast. A simple thing, you say. After all, I’d already eaten it for breakfast by toasting my own selection of bread downstairs at the Marco Polo Restaurant. But ‘life wasn’t meant to be easy’.
The hunt: tally-ho and off I went, down in the lift to the Marco Polo Restaurant on the second floor (their first floor would be our ground floor). I explained to my favourite, button-nosed cute waitress, that my wife was ill upstairs and that she could only have dry toast for lunch. ‘Toast?’ she enquired, and shook her head. I explained, with suitable gestures, the slicing of bread, the slipping it in a toaster (which she saw every morning at breakfast time as hotel guests burnt their own with an antiquated multiple-slice electronic toaster), the popping up and the spreading of butter and jam which, I hastened to add, I wasn’t looking for. ‘Ah,’ she nodded thoughtfully, ‘just a-wait a moment, plees’ and took off . I waited optimistically. She returned, shaking her head. ‘Not toast. Toast ble’kfast.’ ‘But,’ I said, oozing Western charm, ‘your kitchen has bread and a toaster. It is easy to do …’ But, no, sorry and all that, warm smile, but toast is ble’kfast: there is no changing the order of the day. (Confucius probably said something about it somewhere.)
Sigh.
Downstairs further to the first floor (our ground floor) where the duty manager usually sits, only she’s not there but the assistant-to-the-assistant-chief is there, so I tell her my tale of toast woe. She makes a phone-call and returns to suggest, ‘You go to second floor Western restaurant, they have toast-a.’ No, I shake my forlorn head, I’ve tried that, they say only ‘Ble’kfast’.
‘Wait a moment plees.’ She disappears into the manager’s office.
Silence.
Then she returns to say, ‘Sorry, no toast-a. You try delicate shop-a’ and points vigorously to the street.
‘What?’ I am confused.
She stammers over the English word, ‘Day-lay-kay, deli-key, delect-a’ and I suddenly have an illumination, ‘Delicatessen! You mean ‘delicatessen.’
She struggles, ‘Yes, delicate shop-a, out-street …’
Ah, bugger it, I think, I’m off to hunt further a-field. I walk out and over the octopus walkway to Mamma Fu’s ‘as seen in the Lonely Planet’.
They offer me a menu, no thanks, and indicate a seat, no thanks – I want a special order, take-away. The smallest of the small waitresses appears and listens carefully, then says, ‘We have. Toast. Yes.’ And ducks off to start the process.
The sweet cashier, a larger girl than normal here, sweetly says, ‘Sit down’, and indicates a table. I try to pay. ‘No-no,’ she says and points at the chair. ‘We make toast – French toast …’
Panic. ‘No, no, mayo, mayo,’ I almost yell, ‘I want straight toast – just slices brown on two sides.’
A waitress scurries off to tell Miss Tiny in the kitchen.
I relax and sit and read China Daily. The Chinese government is attacking pollution. The ex-Malaysian prime minister applauds Iraqi militants and encourages them to make the Americans pay. England has bird flu.
Miss Tiny returns with toast – four pieces struggling to fit in a single thick cardboard container. She sees my pleasure and tells the cashier how much. The tiny waitress disappears again and I pay with a 100 yuan bill. The cashier laughs ironically as another waitress also appears with a bill and a 100 yuan to pay for it. Change – it’s the cashier’s constant headache. The tiny waitress returns with two sealed containers and wraps them in a plastic bag. So much trouble for so little – my 92 yuan change comes in the biggest bills she has. Smiles all around.
‘Thanks, thank you very much .. shie-shie, shie-shie,’ and I rush over the octopus to deliver my prize: dry toast for lunch, with a banana. True love’s banquet.

10/02/2007

*

















Beggars everywhere some days – the broken, the homeless, some with chalk-written screeds in front of them on the pavement, some use chalk calligraphy as their
‘talent’. They break my heart. We can’t pay them all, so we sometimes put money in the hat for people who perform – even the children who do acrobatics in the street. The parents are so poor they can’t afford their children to go to school. The Chinese government is now cracking down on such situations of child labour. But here is a man, well-dressed, who plays a most melancholic melody between Mandarin Books and the new one, Wheatfield Books. His music reminded me of Li Bai’s lines:

Plucking the strings, he played for me.
I heard murmuring pines in many valleys.
Like flowing water, the music cleansed my heart,
leaving its echo in the frosty bell.

(from Listening to the Lyre of a Monk Named Jun by Li Bai, Tang dynasty,
trans. 2005 Gladys Yang, Panda Books: Beijing)

When we put money in his hat and thanked him, he smiled broadly and said, clear as a bell, in cultured English, Thank you …

*

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Every civilisation has a past, and a present and a future, so it is no different here in China. It is just that as a stranger I notice the old character of the architecture thrown into relief by the present-day skyline which is rapidly being taken over by the skyline-in-progress. It shows in the architecture, in their dancing, in their everyday fashion, and in their cuisine. As a stranger, I admire the ancient aspects which the urban avant-garde artists, composers and writers probably scoff at - just as I feel the Jindyworobaks held Oz lit back, and Banjo and Henry Lawson take space on bookstore shelves which should be showcasing contemporary poets and writers. (BTW, in a rare English bookstore in Kunming, called Mandarin Books ironically, I found an old A&R paperback of Christopher Brennan's poetry. I already own it, so I bought Du Fu and and a collection of Tang & Song literature instead.)

In business, in the dim distant past, I tried to live by the principal that what you did today influenced your business tomorrow, so I had better stop rambling here and write a poem in the hope of influencing my published output tomorrow ...

Kunming in pictures and words

Sakura Hotel in February
looking out our 13th floor window
see Kunming shining to the misty hills
rooftops speckled with solar panels
dusty cactus in pots on window sills
glittery glass buildings
wet black bitumen ribbons
Dong Feng Dong Lu
advertising signs six storeys high
white chalk characters on pavement slabs
before broken beggars
thin bent woman balancing a pole of
two bamboo baskets of bright red strawberries
as the book-keeper balances his books

Cathay yesterday
People’s Republic of China today
tomorrow …

The asshole song

Please, be my guest and visit http://filmstripinternational.com Maybe someone will write an Aussie version with you-know-who as the hero ...

Silent Firecrackers

See below for a discussion of this shot ...

Kunming photos

Here I am in Kunming, where the people are proud of their city and its environment, and it shows in their tidy streets and flower-bordered walkways. As usual there is a great contrast between ancient and modern, and between the haves and have-nots. In one side street, a mosque stood out among the modern buildings, and around the corner from a tall modern fashion building stood an ancient building with its colourful facade. Up that end of town is the Weis restaurant, where we ate thin crusty pizza in sunshine. As we walked home, we veered off the main drag to walk around a park. In an old long stone pergola, with vines asleep for the season, music came from a traditional string instrument and a middle-aged man singing with his microphone ... Before them, in amidst a crowd of working people and unemployed (it seemed to me) a lady in traditional costume danced slowly, holding out her hands to a young fan out for a walk with her dad. Up and down the old edifice, people - mainly mature males - sat and listened, or smoked and stared off into the municipal garden. But free lunchtime entertainment, with the occasional game of cards, is a good respite from a hard life, scrunging to make a buck or living on the low state pension. When we returned to the hotel, I noticed again the long strings of 'fake' firecrackers used to decorate the entrance when there are weddings afoot - and there are plenty at this popular hotel. I took a photo just to remind me of the difference between sophisticated Kunming where the symbol will ward the 'bad spirits' off, and Linfen where the air is alive with the noise and smell and loud bangs of fireworks all day everyday! (Couldn't post that photo - I've overloaded the system. I'll post it separately.)

Reading and Relaxing

Today, I started reading Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong, a mystery novel set in Shanghai in 1990. I could relate to this paragraph:

A glimpse of a veiled face at the entrance of Beijing subway, a waft of the jasmine blossom fragrance from a blue teacup, or a particular rhythm in an attic with a train rumbling into the distant night, and he would have the feeling that he was on the verge of producing a wonderful poem. All this could turn out, however, to be a false lead, and he would end up crossing out fragments of unsatisfactory lines. (p.47, Soho Press Inc., 2000)

Hanging your washing out to dry

Right next door to a classy fashion store, Dunhill's in Kunming, the residents of this block of apartments take advantage of a sunny day to dry their washing. It's the same throughout the China that I have seen. No salesman from Hills Hoist has been through this market yet ...

Lingo Bingo

Recently I read some ten line verses by Fanny Howe, and was taken with them, so I tried my hand at similar, but used it to my own purposes:

Lingo Bingo


the air here is thick with shibboleth
he comes down for da shui not just
to drink but to feel the temperature
expatriot ghettos breed insecurity
it is shortly after the reason to be jolly
now in the season of promise I pause
with a China Post pen in the air
she points at the page to indicate
press harder to be read push down

to give it all birth to give it all berth

*


Those born on the last day will have no name
and come swimming out of one language
into the rocky mouth of the next out of
some lingua franca of muttered remnants of
father’s post-coital snore and mother’s desire
amphibious tongues licking wet wombs
'Feel that! did you feel that? he moved!'
shouting out at the first fresh breeze
the art of Mandarin is in pronouncing it tonally
‘Israeli PM to visit China on heels of Iran official’


quote from Fanny Howe

*


It’s lingo bingo. Let’s nuke it, Dad.
‘Mullah Omar says hasn’t seen bin Laden
for years.’ In the Sakura Hotel restaurant,
a Zimbabwean’s young son wants to
try them all—Chinese, English, Japanese …
breakfasts without borders. Let’s nuke it, Dad.
‘Twin car bombs kill 75 in Baghdad market.’
It’s gene-pool polo with Bush and Hussein: clans,
castes and religions. Lingo bingo, chatting over
the borderline fence(s). Let’s nuke it, Dad.


*

I was a salmon once and look at me now
with a gouty foot and drenched in thought

pulling petals off roses as I think of Blake
fears and the guilty side of testicles
down among bushes of memory
which ring the alarm at half past midnight
and I stay awake pondering
my wilful heart unnerves me till dawn
then rows me out to the middle of a lake
and (slowly) fades to black



quote from Robert Kelly

*


In the Sakura Hotel, Kunming,
I transfer my wet Beckett T-shirt from
bathroom to lounge. He’s inside out, so
I remember Christ’s image reversed on
a kindly parishioner’s towel. Imagination
is the one weapon against reality. I
wonder which woman and what city,
but time will end one day and
the bo-tree will have leaves or not
and it will not matter.


quote from Jules de Gaultier


The headline quotes are from Reuters.

I may continue this 'series', using quotes from poets and Reuters as they come to my notice.