- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1637
I like him.
Poems like:
Love’s Not The Way To Treat a Friend
Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t
want to see your eyes forgotten
on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse
of those who can remember nothing.Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
bridges out of crippled birds.Love’s not the way to treat a friend.
There are so many better things for you
than to see your feelings sold
as magic lanterns to somebody whose body
casts no light.
And
RESTAURANT
Fragile, fading 37,
she wears her wedding ring like a trance
and stares straight down at an empty coffee cup
as if she were looking into the mouth of a dead bird.
Dinner is over. Her husband has gone to the toilet.
He will be back soon and then it will be her turn
to go to the toilet.
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1929
A pleasant, comfortable read, history of the Peace River Country, with excerpts from the pioneers, fur traders, Hudson's' Bay Men, the North West RCMP, Whisky Runners, Gold Prospectors, Trappers, Missionaries, and the countless other sundry characters who first populated the North. Well and often exuberantly written, it inspires one with the places to be searched and the countless exploration opportunities...
(It turns out he has a whole range of other books written about the local history of Alberta, Battle River, Edmonton, Etc. Have to keep my eyes peeled...)
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 2003
Only he who has also raised
his lyre among shadows
may find his way back
to infinite praise.
Only he who has eaten with the dead
from their stores of poppy
will never again lose
the softest chord.
And though the pool’s reflection
often blurs before us:
Know the image.
Only in the double realm
do the voices become
eternal and mild.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnet IX, from Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Edward Snow
Reading, finding it strangely affecting. It hardly needs my recommendation...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1869
I found it at a thrift shop, Dover reprint, and I picked it up because when I was a kid I was crazy for this sort of stuff.
By the time I was 12 I'd read almost the entire children's library, and some of the books that I hadn't included Tarzan, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I knew who Tarzan was, of course, who doesn't? But I wasn't that interested. Nonetheless, it was getting down to Tarzan or nothing, so I checked out a few of the books.
And I loved them...
I mean, I read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Tarzan books, the John Carter on Mars, the Moon Maidens, Tarzan at the Earth's Core, I'm pretty sure the library didn't have them all, but what they had, I read.
I loved 'em all.
So when I got to be twenty-ish I revisited them. Specifically Tarzan. And I found them painful, awkward to read, horrible, just appalling...
I blame my fancy highbrow European tastes, I'd been reading the English authors, Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maughm, George Orwell, any number of other authors, Vladimir Nabokov...clearly I was raising the bar...
When I had my son, perhaps when he was 10 or 12, I gave him a couple of dozen original dime-store Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books I'd found at a garage sale. He pretended to try and read and then discarded, they weren't to his taste, what can you do?
But finding this, the Dover reprint, slender, the adventures of David Innes and company at the Earth's core, I couldn't resist. I'd try him again.
And, a slender book, filled with original, novel ideas, poorly executed and even more poorly recorded...psychological gold, this, the primitive, stone age and reptilian races at the earth's core, the beast-man named "Gr-gr-gr", the thags and dinosaurs, the inwardly curving horizon and the stationary hovering moon, but, like Gaston Leroux's "Phantom of the Opera" it's also literary torture. The brilliant device of the author addressing a letter of criticism from a fan at the beginning (who turns to a believer when he sees the evidence the author provides) is undermined by it's execution, and perhaps it's wrong of me to judge as Burroughs himself never aspired to be more than a pulp-fiction writer, in any case, intriguing for the ideas, and he did have some great ideas, but for the most part these books will have to remain in memory and childhood...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 2050
At the moment I'm reading "Trout Fishing in America" by Richard Brautigan. I'm loving it.
A long time ago, almost 30 years, a roomate of mine recommended "In Watermelon Sugar" by Richard Brautigan which I never read, because at the time I only read books by dead authors and I knew better than to listen to my roomate. He was a nut-job.
You have to be careful in the recommendations people give you, they recommend a book, a movie, a play, a song, and you can see, for a moment, into their soul, and if you know already their soul is empty you don't want to go looking into the void. There was a girl once, a long, long time ago, I met her online, she used to be a model and sent me lots of pictures from when she was a model, but when I met her she wasn't a model any more. She was all washed out. When we were chatting online she told me her favorite book was "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and I knew it but hadn't read it so I found a copy and read it and thought to myself: "Uh-Oh". After we met and we talked and went back to my apartment and she told me about the business she was setting up and how she missed her children in Berlin, twin boys, but she had to leave, couldn't get or afford custody, and we slept together and after sleeping together she told me about the evangelical church she belonged to and how she liked to go to the front of the congregation to confess all her sins and how much she was looking forward to going to church on Sunday so she could tell them all about this in tones of infinite remorse and regret...
...and I stared at the ceiling and wondered how it was possible to fall in love...