Genny Lin has a unique way of describing life in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. “Winter Place” has a kind of gritty-flashy feel to it, but I especially like the imagery at the end of her poem:
A strange and sometimes violent movie, OldBoy sprinkles dark humor in among the scenes of torture and fist-fights to lighten things up now and again. I couldn’t help but chuckle when a man found three chopsticks on his meal tray and opined (roughly translated):
The production is Korean, but it’s definitely a Japanese story. Perhaps most interesting, at least from a security perspective, is that the protagonist is suddenly free from solitary confinement after fifteen years but entirely unsure about who or why he was imprisoned in the first place. Like Kafka’s Joseph K, he sets out to figure out what his crime might have been and in the process continuously stumbles into the question of whether to trust anything or anyone.
The US Library of Congress has launched an interesting site called “Presidents as Poets“, which has information about the following men:
The collection includes an infamous poem attributed to Lincoln:
Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 190-191 (Translated from Swedish by Leif Sjoberg and W. H. Auden)
Congenial to other people?
It it with yourself
That you must live.
Denied any outlet,
The heat transmuted
The coal into diamonds.
Alone in his secret growth,
He found a kinship
With all growing things.
The manuscript for the book was left by Hammarskjold to be published after his death. He was Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) when he died in an air crash on September 18, 1961 en route to negotiate a cease-fire between the UN and Katanya forces in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). I was introduced to his writings while studying the origins of the conflict.