Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems From the Chinese

One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (New Directions Book)
One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (New Directions Book)
Rexroth, Kenneth. One Hundred Poems From the Chinese. New York: New Directions, 1965.

The terrible thing about these reading notes is how quickly they turn into a trophy case, embalming everything they collect. I'll think about how many books I can still read before I die, how many languages I still have time to learn. Every night out without a book, that's one less book I'll carry to the grave, where it won't do me a bit of good. And only a particular sort of book can shake me out from under this sad compulsion.
Tags:

Next Posts

Previous Posts

Comments

mooxyjoo
you hardly need to make such reading notes to get that feeling.

i finished 'the magic mountain' last week and then said, wait, now what am i going to do with that? what am i going to do with all this goethe? i thought the more of these i read the better it was supposed to be, but it seems that the more i read the less able or ready i am to relate what i have read to anyone else who might have read any such book, or ever care to. and i thought i cared especially about those who weren't reading the books i've read, but could.
aaron
[this is good]
I've found that when I started working with texts on my computer, I started getting more serious about typing and annotating the text than I was about finishing reading it. With a physical book, where the constant imperative to move forward and finish keeps driving you (and the separation between text and note-taking apparatus is so clear), maybe we tend to see the book as a product to be consumed, whereas reading on the computer "feels" more like writing. It's an interesting experience; I'm also having problems actually finishing anything. I read enough to get an argument started and then, before I know it, I'm writing and writing and hardly reading at all. I've been reading Souls of Black Folk for about three months now. and the notes I've taken are starting to be a substantial fraction of the textfile's length.

Post a comment

Already a Vox member? Sign in

You will be asked to join Vox to post this comment.