Not exactly a reading post

I have NOT finished my third book for the 2022 Classics Challenge, on account of not being able to get a hold of it. My third book is going to be The Narrow Road to the Interior, which describes a journey taken by the haiku poet Matsuo Basho in 1689. I am going to read this book. I am. Someday.

I probably should have just bought it, but I wasn't sure I wanted to acquire all these books of Japanese literature that I would probably never read again. So I studied the list of different translations on Prospector, chose one that sounded good and was available from the CU Boulder library (so it would arrive quickly!), and requested it. Pretty soon my library account page showed that the book was "in transit." And soon after that it showed that it was "ready for pick-up." So I hurried on down to the George Reynolds branch library to pick it up. 

Only it wasn't there.

I asked the librarian where it was and she looked it up. On her screen it showed only that it had been requested, not received. "Did you get an email saying it was ready?" she asked me. I said no. "Wait till you get the email," she advised. 

So I went home and waited, but an email never came. A few days later I emailed the "Ask-a-Librarian" service to inquire about this. The Ask-a-Librarian researched the problem and responded. It seemed that CU had sent the book to the Reynolds branch, but minus the note that is supposed to come with it, showing who it is for. Staff at Reynolds checked it in, which automatically sent a message to my account, but then because there was no note tucked into the book, they sent it back to CU without looking it up in the system to find out who it was supposed to be for. The Ask-a-Librarian told me he had cancelled my request, re-ordered the book, and scolded the librarians at Reynolds.

OK, fine. I sat back to wait. And then a couple of days later I thought to look more closely at the book that the Ask-a-Librarian had "re-ordered" for me. It was called The Narrow Road to the Interior, but the author's name wasn't Basho, so I assumed it was the translator. Except I'd never heard of that one (I'm getting familiar with the major Japanese translators). The name was Kimiko Hahn. Who is Kimiko Hahn? It turned out that the Ask-a-Librarian hadn't ordered a translation of a Japanese book published in 1700, but rather a book of modern poetry, published in 2006, by a professor at Queens College, CUNY -- Kimiko Hahn. I looked her up and discovered (among other things) that we have the same birthday, though she is five years older than I am.

I decided not to cancel this request, even though it wasn't what I wanted, because, hey, it might be an interesting book too. Also, I felt bad about cancelling it, since it was already "in transit." But I also re-ordered the book I actually wanted from the CU library. And immediately it popped up as being "ready for pickup" at Reynolds. 

This time, I wasn't deceived. Well, I admit I did check for it once or twice. But it wasn't there and I wasn't surprised. After a week or so, it stopped saying it was "ready for pickup" and just said it was "on hold." I suspect it is lost. It came all the way to the Reynolds branch and then went back to the gigantic CU library. It could be anywhere. I believe it is a fairly small book.

Why didn't I just order it from Amazon?

The book of modern poetry by Kimiko Hahn eventually arrived, so I checked it out, took it home, and read it. It came to me from the Colorado State University library, and I wondered whether anyone had ever checked it out before. Are there a lot of people at CSU who read modern poetry?

Several of Hahn's poems are responses to works of Japanese literature (including Basho and also The Tale of Genji). In fact, the epigraph that Hahn chose for her book is from Basho -- in the translation that I keep trying to get from the CU library! This explains the book's title, or at least it partly does. I realized, very belatedly, that The Narrow Road to the Interior would be an excellent title for practically any book of poetry.

Hahn's mother was Japanese-American (from Hawaii) and her father was German-American, so Hahn is Eurasian, and she writes, in part, about what it's like to be an Asian-American woman. One poem, entitled "Asian American Lit. Final," cited some of the books I plan to read this year (if I ever manage to read Basho first), others I considered but didn't choose, and some books and authors I hadn't heard of. I'm making a list of the latter:

• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
• Janice Mirikitani
• Lois Ann Yamanaka
• Hisaye Yamamoto
  
• Mitsuye Yamada
• Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Fiction

These aren't authors/books I can add to my list for the Classics Challenge; they would just be background, something to help me think about the books I did choose.

Although I like reading poetry, I at first found Hahn's poems impenetrable. Most if not all are apparently in a form called zuihitsu, which she tries to define in the first "poem" in the book, "Compass." The third definition she quotes, "Stray notes, expressing random thoughts in a casual manner," seems about right. Her poems are mostly lists of thoughts, although I think the thoughts are themselves little poems. In some cases, the little thoughts are numbered, and, most annoyingly, in some cases THEY ARE OUT OF ORDER. 

How are you supposed to read a list of little thoughts that are numbered as follows: 1, 5, 7, 20, 9, 11, 18, 16, 39, 22, 24, 26, 41, 15, 36 for A.B. ? (Yes, the last number is "36 for A.B.," whatever that means.) Are you supposed to read #20 after #7, or are you supposed to wait and read it later, after you've unscrambled 18 and 16? And what about 15, way almost at the end? And what about all the missing numbers? Are you supposed to assume that she wrote those too, but didn't share them?

I found this just a little too precious.

However, after working my way through about half the poems, I did start to like them. Most of the poems are about leaving her second husband for her lover who became her third husband, single-parenting her daughters during the transition, and 9/11 (most of the poems were written in the early 2000s, and of course she was a New Yorker). I think the parenting poems resonated most strongly with me.

So, an interesting diversion while I wait for the book I ordered. And just in the last hour or so, I noticed that the status of my request has changed from "On hold" to "Requested from Prospector." I don't know if that is really an improvement, but it is a change. Change can be good?