Word: haiku
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hilarious account of a writer's development, which ranks as a small comic masterpiece: "First try to be something, anything else... Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age--say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire." But in the middle of all the wisecracking remain passages that ring out with such truth that they communicate directly to the reader the pleasure of literary creation, "those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius." On the basis...
Other chapters, such as the story of Tekka Maki and her haiku, miss the mark...
...definitive rogue-genius Gulley Jimson, hero of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. For a man who claims that most of his life has been "a flight from boredom," Scum has an amazing tolerance for bull-session profundities. Scarcely a page goes by without an interpolated haiku-like verse (WE WEAR OURSELVES INSIDE OUT/ TRYING TO BRING THE OUTSIDE IN) or an observation like "The truly most valuable product of this planet is people, loved people...
...campaign on their behalf. Occasionally, the voters seemed to think that Nakasone was running too. In Maebashi, 60 miles northwest of Tokyo in the heart of his own Gumma prefecture, Nakasone was greeted by posters bearing his picture and hundreds of cheering supporters. At one point he recited a haiku praising the local shrubs, and by inference his local constituency. Looking at ajisai [hydrangeas], I feel homesick for Gumma...
...into a kind of generic mental process, in which the subjects gradually progress from nature and animals to more shocking views of drug abuse, and finally toward an inner view of the children's mental development and emotions. On the concrete level, the poems on nature vary from abstract haiku about the moon and the stars to short descriptive passages about the fearful side of nature...