Stats & Views from The Parrish Lantern - 2012 Top Posts as voted by who…….. You?

Around about this time of year I tend to come over all “Traditional” and start waxing lyrically about the “Good Ole Days”.  This has a nasty tendency of leading to copious amounts of reminiscing, bouts of nostalgia and to staring off vacantly into the distance. Luckily it is fairly easy to ward off with a stiff drink (thank you mine’s a whisky), and a large bucket of cold facts, statistics and pretty much anything I can tie a number to and mumble obliquely whilst slumped on a barstool.

In the light of that, I thought I would use this as an opportunity to find out what the 2012 top posts were. With the aim of seeing if they corresponded with my own opinion of how The Parrish Lantern is perceived and how it should evolve from this point. Although I have my own favourite posts, I thought I would use the same technique I used last year and base it on the number of visits a post got, with this slight proviso, in that I would take the number of comments made on each post into the equation, as I realised whilst doing this that sometimes a post with the most comments wasn’t necessarily the most visited.  So, starting with January here are The Parrish Lanterns top posts as voted by who………..You?

January’s top post fits in perfectly with one of the aims I had for The Parrish Lantern, which was to continue promoting Poetry & to increase its presence on this site. The top post was The Best British Poetry 2011, this wonderful anthology was edited by Roddy Lumsden and published by Salt, a fantastic independent publisher who punches well above their size, even having a book Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012. In second place is one of my favourite books of the last few years  Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s - In Praise of Shadows , although this eloquent strange book is primarily an essay on the Japanese sense of beauty, it is also an act of meditation and an elegy to a culture he perceived to be receiving it’s last rites, making it part clarion call, part last post.

February saw even more poetry reaching the top spot with a poem I wrote for my wife Valentines Day (Twelve Roses) - back in our courting days, hitting the number one position and the second position jointly shared by a book of poetry by the Austrian born poet Erich Fried and a book set around the bombing of Hiroshima by Masuji Ibuse, although to be fair Ibuse is just ahead on comments making Black Rain, second  and Fried’s Love Poems a respectable third.

March’s top two represent exactly the type of literature I love featuring on The Parrish Lantern, the number one post was a historical post, this one based on early Japanese Science Fiction & was inspired by The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories anthology. In the number two position was probably my favourite of 2012, I say probably because it has to vie for that position with at least one other, in second place From The Mouth Of The Whale, apart from being a wonderful book, this placed The Parrish Lantern on the international stage through my involvement with a wonderful group of bloggers who, under the leadership of Stu (Winstonsdad), made up The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shadow Jury – thanks Stu.

April was another exciting month for my blog, with all three posts again promoting literature on an international stage. In first place was my interview with Andrés Neuman, the author of the wonderful novel Traveller of the Century, in second place was my report on my World Book Night Experience and in third, based purely on the number of comments, is another IFFP shadow jury post Seven Houses in France - Bernardo Atxaga.

May. In the top position for May, was the wonderful novel whose author I interviewed in April. Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, is a book about which I said “Attempting to pin down & define all that goes on in this book isn’t easy, as I said in my interview it seems to encompass everything – Do you like Philosophy✓, History✓, Politics✓, Romance✓, Translation✓, Poetry✓,” Just behind this is  Everyday by Lee Rourke, a fantastic collection of tales, which I managed to describe as a combination of  Camus, Sisyphus and a spilt kebab. Again this month we have a third position because of the number of comments it got, this was the post on official winner of the IFFP.

June saw two posts that again define my own perception of The Parrish Lantern, the first was one I described as a very brief image of the history of Japanese poetry in the post-war period. In the second position was a celebration of one of my favourite writer’s (Lawrence Durrell) centenary year. This totally surprised me because if it was based purely on comments this post would not have featured in any list, so the fact that it’s here has pleased me immensely.

JULY featured a writer known more for his prose writing, than his poetry, Across the Land and the Water–W.G. Sebald, was a collection of poetry, stretching over 37 years and contains many of the themes (borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend etc.), that would be recognised in his later acclaimed work. Just behind this was The Car Thief by Theodore Weesner, a blunt & harsh tale of one individual trapped in a world not of their own making, with seemingly no way out.

August’s post combined two of my favourite obsessions, poetry & Japanese writing, as the first position was taken by The Art of Haiku  - Its History through Poems and Paintings by Japanese Masters written  by Stephen Addiss. This was a fascinating read on a subject I knew little about. Although I have a small amount of knowledge on Italian poetry I wasn’t aware of this writer’s oeuvre until I started researching for the second place book this month,  Requiems & Nightmares: Selected Short Fiction of Guido Gozzano.

September’s top post was a book given to me by the wonderful Istros Books, one of the new small Independent publishing houses that have sprung up in the last few years, with the aim of filling in the gaps often left by the larger publishing houses. The director took a chance and sent me this book after I cheekily asked for it, the book being Definitions by Octavian Paler, one of my favourite poetry books of the year. The book in second place showed me a side of Japan, that I had no knowledge of & by a new to me writer, The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto by Kenji Nakagami.

October. The Summer My Father Died by Yudit Kiss, is a memoir about love, family love, which makes this a warm beautiful tale full of poetic insight, written by someone with a love of the written word. It also contains a set of author’s notes, containing anthologies where you can find English translations of the Hungarian poetry contained within the pages of the book, a resource I shall be mining for years. In second place is a book that is part manga, part poetry collection, based partly around Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings, Soul of a Warrior by Clash of Weapons, was a first for me & an idea I will hopefully see more of.

November saw two books whose subject was art, in first place Still started out as a photographic exhibition, before becoming a collection of short stories by some of the best short story writers around. The book (Sea Of Ink ~ Richard Weihe) in second place is about how how Zhu Da, the prince of Yiyang, distant descendant of the Prince of Ning, the seventeenth son of the founder of the Ming dynasty, became Bada Shanren, widely regarded as the leading painter of the early Qing dynasty and who would still be influencing artists centuries later.

December’s top post was on a book, that I’ve been reading on and off for a while now, and which caused me some confusion. Easter Rabbit, is a collection of microfiction, that could easily be described as prose poetry and which by it’s very brevity leaves you with more questions than answers, that leaves you to ponder each tale. In second place was another new to me writer, Niven Govinden, with his brilliant book Black Bread White Beer.

This leaves me with the question of what were the top five posts of this year. In keeping with tradition in reverse order are:

5th - Definitions by Octavian Paler

4th – Love Poems by Erich Fried / Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse

3rd - Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s - In Praise of Shadows

2nd - Early Sci-Fi, Nihon (にほん) Style

Which leaves me with the only thing left to do is to announce the winner…………………………..

  The winner of The Parrish Lantern’s 2012 top post of  is The Best British Poetry 2011.

 

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot.

Best Wishes for 2013 to all who follow & comment on The Parrish Lantern.

A Season’s Greeting to one & all from The Parrish Lantern

 

This is The Parrish Lantern’s third Christmas and, like the previous two, I still look around, check over my shoulder and think well I’m still here. Nobody’s called me out and declared what a fraud I must be, so……………. a big thanks to those that have followed since those Jurassic times and another to those who have come on board since – Thanks for contributing via comments, suggestions etc., thanks for visiting and a big thanks for being  polite enough not  to mention my failings.  All that’s left for me to do is to offer you the best of this season’s greetings and may the coming year meet all of with your wishes.

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Little Tree - E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

Little tree

little silent Christmas tree

you are so little

you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest

and were you very sorry to come away?

see i will comfort you

because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark

and hug you safe and tight

just as your mother would,

only don't be afraid

look the spangles

that sleep all the year in a dark box

dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,

the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms

and I'll give them all to you to hold

every finger shall have its ring

and there won't be a single place dark or unhappy

then when you're quite dressed

you'll stand in the window for everyone to see

and how they'll stare!

oh but you'll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands

and looking up at our beautiful tree 

we'll dance and sing

"Noel Noel"

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry.

This seasons joy to one and all from The Parrish Lantern.

An eleventh-hour largesse for the lexis votarient in your midguard.

The Horologicon - A Day’s Jaunt Through

the Lost Words of the English Language : Mark Forsyth.

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Are you looking for that wonderful gift to present to the individual in your life who appears to have swallowed a lexicon with their mornings repast, and have you been a bit tardy in getting said article? Well fret not here is an awesome nay, Brobdingnagian offering that could easily engender feelings of exuberance and even adoration from said recipient!

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In his preambulation Mark Forsyth states that this book is for those words that are..

“To beautiful to live long, too amusing to be taken seriously, too precise to become common, too vulgar to survive in polite company, or too poetic to thrive in this age of prose.”

He goes on to say that these words languish away in old and arenaceous dictionaries, that these are the lost words and the great secrets of civilisations that can still be of use today.

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What sets this marvellous read apart from your standard lexicon is the method of recording used does not follow the A – Z format. In fact the writer states that by having words arranged alphabetically within a dictionary you render them useless as they bear no relation to their neighbouring words and are estranged from those words they share a relationship with (for example in the Oxford English Dictionary, wine and corkscrew are separated by seventeen volumes). This led the author after hours of rumination and a degree of puttering to fix upon the idea of using the medieval book of hours as his solution to this dilemma, in the process reinventing the reference book for the modern world and it’s constant haste. With this method all one needs to do is to check the time of day via whatever clepsydra you prefer and then by referring to the correct page within this publication - suitable words should avail themselves for your use and the delectation of all within earshot.

The Horologicon (or book of hours) is the partner to last years The Etymologicon, and like that wonderful book, uses Mark’s Inky Fool blog, as it’s reference point. Where as the previous work, threaded us through the strange connection that exist between words, The Horologicon, is literally a book of hours, charting the period from just before the moment day-raw streaks red across the sky and guiding us through the day and eventide up until Bulls-noon, where we, having wished bene darkmans to our loved ones, will hopefully be ensconced in our dreamery, asleep in those arms of Morpheus.

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This was a BBC radio 4 book of the week (read by Hugh Dennis) and was described as:

  “The Horologicon (or book of hours) gives you the most extraordinary words in the English language, arranged according to the hour of the day when you really need them. Do you wake up feeling rough? Then you're philogrobolized. Pretending to work? That's fudgelling, which may lead to rizzling if you feel sleepy after lunch, though by dinner time you will have become a sparkling deipnosophist. From Mark Forsyth, author of the bestselling The Etymologicon, this is a book of weird words for familiar situations. From ante-jentacular to snudge by way of quafftide and wamblecropt, at last you can say, with utter accuracy, exactly what you mean.”

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I got my copy of The Horologicon, from Netgalley, as an E-book, and bought my own copy of The Etymologicon, in the same format for my Kindle, but whilst researching for this post I came across this box set containing both books and thought that for the person in your life that adores words, this would make an ideal present - even if that one person is you.

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The Inky Fool - On words, Phrases, Grammar, Rhetoric & prose

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Icon Books is an independent publisher of engaging, quality non-fiction, which was founded in 1992 and celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2012. Icon is a member of the Independent Alliance.

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Disclaimer.

“This is a reference work. You should on no account attempt to read it cover to cover. If you do, Hell itself will have no horrors for you, and neither the author nor his parent company will accept liability for any suicides, rampages, or crazed nudity that may result.”  Mark Forsyth.

Black Bread White Beer ~ Niven Govinden

 

Amal’s recovering from the night before, where he allowed himself to get “stinking drunk” after leaving the hospital, his wife, and the now never to be born child of theirs. The ward sister had chased him out with well meaning remarks of support for his welfare and an understanding that he was in the way. It’s now the morning after this fracture in their lives and Amal needs to get to the hospital to collect Claud, his wife, and to make things right.

Black Bread White Beer explores the everyday minutiae of a loving relationship that, like microorganisms, can sustain or destroy a marriage.Those wonderful quirks of a loved one that can become needles attacking your very essence.

Covering the twenty four hours after the loss of their unborn child, we follow Amal, and through him we learn of his love & the relationship he has with his wife & it’s through him we watch it teeter, wobble & slowly fall. Amal is a modern Indian (Bengali) man married to a middle class English Woman, and it’s in the heartland of his wife’s family that this story plays out; with Claud retreating to her family home after her loss. Claud insists that they don’t tell her parents about the miscarriage (the visit is to help her father plumb the washing machine), meaning that they both have to bear their grief alone, isolating them from family, friends & ultimately each other.

This is the first book I’ve read by Niven Govinden but it won’t be the last, in this book he confronts all those issues facing people who dare to commit to another individual and does so with the utmost empathy, passion and yet with a precision that in other hands could have become cold and abstract. Although seen from Amal’s perspective, we get an insight into the complexity of a marriage, with all the subtle and not so subtle pressures that different cultural influences can place upon it and how shared memories can become a means of communication, when all around you is turmoil and hurt.

More Opinions.

“Niven Govinden brilliantly evokes the bleak comedy and deranged exhilaration of modern life. This is the sound of the suburbs.” Jake Arnott

“I’m full of admiration for this novel and the way it captures a couple as a crisis detonates in their marriage and exposes all sorts of emotional and cultural fault lines in the process. It was deft without being superficial, serious without being ponderous and pulled off the clever trick of constantly unsettling the reader’s sympathies and assumptions. And the novel’s setting - affluent, settled Sussex - is a wonderfully evoked foil for the novel’s themes of disruption and alienation. It’s a very fine book.” Alex Clark

“In this tale of everyday tragedy and everyday life, Niven Govinden confirms his status as one of the most important chroniclers of modern-day Britain. Written with grace, beauty and refreshing honesty, Black Bread White Beer explores human relationships in all their messy flux, creating a novel of genuine power and resonance. It is the kind of book readers long for, but so rarely find.” Stuart Evers

“A stylish, gripping, quietly heart-breaking book that takes the reader’s emotions and clamps them, vice-like, until we are left spent and breathless. It reminded me in both style and subject of the great American master James Salter, in the way it turns a cool, anthropologist's eye on a couple as their love for each other - already full of dangerous fissures - begins to crumble. One of the most moving, powerful novels I’ve read in a long while.” Alex Preston

“Niven Govinden’ s taut, poetically harrowing novel displays all the poise, balance and confidence of the most daring of tightrope walkers. Few contemporary novelists are able to maintain such courage. Black Bread White Beer confirms Niven Govinden as one of those few.” Lee Rourke

“Niven Govinden is one of my favourite writers in the world and his words are like punches to the chest. The book deals with themes of technology versus nature, mixed-race couples and how the small can seem so big, with wit, tension, emotion and humility. One of the most human books about grief ever written.” Nikesh Shukla

 

Niven Govinden(Wiki)

Niven Govinden(Booktrust Interview)

HarperCollins

HarperCollins Friday Project

 

 

Easter Rabbit.

 

Back in July, I wrote a post entitled The Tortoise & the Easter Bunny ?, this book by Lee Rourke traced a history of fables from Aesop to Flash Fiction. Whilst writing this post, I came across a few names, some known (Shane Jones) & some new to me. One of those new to me & who featured in that post was Joseph Young & his collection of microfictions - Easter Rabbit.

Constant Math

Things he decided: ice was always bitter, time will

append like cooking oil, he’d only been wrong once.

That was as a boy. There was a girl, her small ear,

purple in the mulberry tree.

 

In this collection the tales have been reduced to their core, although “reduced” as a term doesn’t do them justice. in this collection of microfictions the stories are carved as though from a large block of marble, not to create something, but to reveal the essence that was always there. The majority clock in at about fifty words & yet they convey the impression of being complete, without being finite, it’s as though they have their own interior logic, and are not reliant on any external source.

Lapse

Her hand was small enough to thread the fence,

touch the bug that held the wall.

---,she whispered, as it fell. What? he asked. What?

she answered. She turned her head, her neck a bracket

for the dropping day

       *    *    *

To be honest this collection has me slightly confused, I’m also sure it’s my fault & whatever label used is fine with the writer. My confusion lies in the where does the division (if one exists) between micro fiction and prose poetry lie?  Like prose poetry, microfiction appears to be loose, possibly random paragraphs and to use everyday language, although it is heightened, making every word placed - placed with a specific purpose - as if it were a puzzle & could have only been placed there, would only fit there. As stated this division is probably only the confusion faced by one confronted by something new to them and something that by it’s very brevity leaves you with more questions than answers, that leaves you to ponder each tale.

Making this collection, however you define it, a wonderful read and one that, like poetry, benefits from being read then reread to oneself, and then out loud just to feel the way the words roll around your mouth.

Easter Rabbit opens windows to both the small and large worlds of everyday life and in the process opens rooms in your mind that you had either forgotten or had no knowledge of. The tales in this book provoke sometimes, coerce others but whichever route chosen the result is you are left with your thoughts and/or a desire to read that one just finished, one more time.

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End

They turned right, off the road, left the smell of the

river, the miasma of history. They looked at their hands

and forearms for dust and scars. Well?  She said, down

the long blue lens of his sight.

 

Easter Rabbit.

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