BOOK REVIEW; Howell's poems freeing body, spirit
Frederick Smock Special to The Courier-Journal
344 words
21 June 2008
The Courier-Journal Louisville, KY
METRO
11
English
(c) Copyright 2008, The Courier-Journal. All Rights Reserved.
'Hatchet Buddha' is enlightening
By Frederick Smock
Special to The Courier-Journal
The Buddha, you will recall, sought a release from human suffering. The Hatchet Buddha — represented as a female, holding a cleaver in one hand, her sex in the other — sought a release from the suffering occasioned by love. Her quest was not exclusively an ancient one.
Poet Rebecca Howell passes this figure of the Hatchet Buddha through several historical incarnations: the sometime-wife of the Hindu god Ganesha; the wife of Jonah; Joan of Arc; and, among others, the poet herself?
The women in these poems are visited by "wrathful deities" who appear as lovers (dangerous men always appear as lovers, don't they?) and who promise to combine metaphysical teachings with their ardor. But beware:
Angels are made to deliver
So when they go, a girl is left
baited and waiting
These lovers all seek one or another means of subjugating the women they visit. An over-arching theme here, within these poems, is that of the female intellect working to assert some independence of body and spirit.
In the dark, we grope
When we grope, we grab
If this love must be a wrestling
one of us will be pinned to the ground
While informed by Buddhism, mythology and history, these poems nonetheless float above the philosophical scrum, upon a felicity of phrasing, and an irresistible lightness of being. It is a high "ground" that the poet chooses for her characters.
Rebecca Howell is an intelligent and insightful poet, whose work entertains even as it enlightens. Her poems are graced by exquisitely inventive drawings by Arwen Donahue.
All the principals here — poet, artist, publisher — are Kentuckians, adding to the state's already considerable literary mystique.
Frederick Smock is chairman of the English department at Bellarmine University. His forthcoming book is "Craft-talk: On Writing Poetry."
Book Review
The Hatchet Buddha
By Rebecca Gayle Howell
Illustrations by Arwen Donahue
Larkspur Press; 47 pp. ; $24
Monday, June 30, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Joseph Needham - the man who loved China
Behind the Wall
By ALIDA BECKER
965 words
8 June 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
15
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA
The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
By Simon Winchester.
Illustrated. 316 pp. Harper/HarperCollins. $27.95.
On a winter evening in 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University's most brilliant scientists -- and one of its most avid skirt-chasers -- lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham's extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for ''fragrant smoke.'' Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language. It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom's decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity -- including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work ''addressed,'' as Needham put it, ''to all educated people.'' The first volume of ''Science and Civilisation in China,'' published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham's lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.
Despite its hyperbolic new subtitle (apparently the original, ''Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,'' was considered too tame), Simon Winchester's biography, ''The Man Who Loved China,'' presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities -- or, for a time, his own countrymen. A committed socialist and Communist sympathizer, Needham lent his authority to a dubiously documented investigation whose report, issued in 1952, concluded that the United States had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea. Blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and denounced for his political naivete by the British establishment, Needham retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.
Cambridge had saved him once before, offering escape from the ''spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage'' of Needham's parents: a red-headed Irish spendthrift, fond of spiritualism and plate-throwing tantrums, and a solemn London doctor, who used the boy as an operating-room assistant. Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, called Noel by his father and Terence by his mother, took care to sign letters to each of his warring parents by the name they preferred. But at Cambridge this shy, introspective only child became someone else entirely -- the outgoing and seductive polymath Joseph. As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, ''The Professor and the Madman,'' he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). ''Handsome, in a studious way,'' Needham spoke with ''a silkiness, almost a lisp'' and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.
Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it's not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham's first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar. Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the British Foreign Office, charged with organizing aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colorful characters who come his way.
But if Winchester's account of these excursions seems faithful to Needham's character, some careless aspects of the narrative are less so. Do we need to be told twice within the space of three pages that Needham demanded a British boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Or reminded three times of his father's dictum ''No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised?'' Isn't it odd that a map of China accompanying the World War II section should include as-yet-unborn nations like Pakistan, Bangladesh and North and South Korea? It's hard to imagine Needham, renowned for his photographic memory, countenancing such slips. Especially if you credit the story his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: ''She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the book's page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.''
By ALIDA BECKER
965 words
8 June 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
15
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
THE MAN WHO LOVED CHINA
The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
By Simon Winchester.
Illustrated. 316 pp. Harper/HarperCollins. $27.95.
On a winter evening in 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University's most brilliant scientists -- and one of its most avid skirt-chasers -- lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham's extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for ''fragrant smoke.'' Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language. It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom's decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity -- including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work ''addressed,'' as Needham put it, ''to all educated people.'' The first volume of ''Science and Civilisation in China,'' published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham's lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.
Despite its hyperbolic new subtitle (apparently the original, ''Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,'' was considered too tame), Simon Winchester's biography, ''The Man Who Loved China,'' presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities -- or, for a time, his own countrymen. A committed socialist and Communist sympathizer, Needham lent his authority to a dubiously documented investigation whose report, issued in 1952, concluded that the United States had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea. Blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and denounced for his political naivete by the British establishment, Needham retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.
Cambridge had saved him once before, offering escape from the ''spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage'' of Needham's parents: a red-headed Irish spendthrift, fond of spiritualism and plate-throwing tantrums, and a solemn London doctor, who used the boy as an operating-room assistant. Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, called Noel by his father and Terence by his mother, took care to sign letters to each of his warring parents by the name they preferred. But at Cambridge this shy, introspective only child became someone else entirely -- the outgoing and seductive polymath Joseph. As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, ''The Professor and the Madman,'' he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). ''Handsome, in a studious way,'' Needham spoke with ''a silkiness, almost a lisp'' and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.
Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it's not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham's first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar. Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the British Foreign Office, charged with organizing aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colorful characters who come his way.
But if Winchester's account of these excursions seems faithful to Needham's character, some careless aspects of the narrative are less so. Do we need to be told twice within the space of three pages that Needham demanded a British boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Or reminded three times of his father's dictum ''No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised?'' Isn't it odd that a map of China accompanying the World War II section should include as-yet-unborn nations like Pakistan, Bangladesh and North and South Korea? It's hard to imagine Needham, renowned for his photographic memory, countenancing such slips. Especially if you credit the story his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: ''She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the book's page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.''
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