NewPages Blog

Guest Post by J. Gauner.

As a literary pilgrim and a John Steinbeck scholar, John J. Han has traveled to Japan since 2007 to attend the annual Steinbeck conference and roam to some famous literary sites and Zen temples to pay his respects to iconic writers such as Matsuo Basho, Masaoka Shiki, and Yasunari Kawabata and delight himself in learning about Japanese culture. His literary travels have borne fruit, a collection of ten photo essays titled On the Road Again, which follows the footprints of Matsuo Basho’s well-known work, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a poetic narrative in the form of haibun.

Han’s collection visually presents the literary sites he has visited. The unique lenses bring the reader the mindscape of the author’s literary pilgrimage and sensibility to Japanese literature and culture.

Like a tour guide who has a backpack of stories, Han leads the reader to see the sites and “listen” to his narratives. Sometimes he offers his own haiku to accompany his photos. For example, his response to the replica of Basho’s hut sounds pleasant, though slightly ironic:

a long pilgrimage
to Basho’s hut
a fake front

Another interesting part of Han’s book is that some captions provide useful information for better understanding of the sites presented by his photos. Below is the one accompanying the photo about Masaoka Shiki writing his death haiku (used also as the book cover):

Shiki died of tuberculosis at the young age of thirty-four. In this scene, displayed in the Shiki Museum, he writes three death poems (jisei) in haiku form on September 18, 1902, one day before his passing.

Han includes Shiki’s three death haiku in the caption to satisfy the reader’s curiosity. For some photos, especially the ones on the Basho and Shiki haiku rocks, it would make the tours more curious if he includes haiku in the captions.

Han’s literary pilgrimage helps him understand that “one of the best ways to maintain international peace is to learn about each other’s cultural heritage.” He believes this learning can start with a visit to famous literary sites because “literature is one of the best ways to understand and connect with people of another country.” Han gets his mission into literary travels in On the Road Again.

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On the Road Again by John J. Han. Cyberwit, 2020.

Guest Post by Claude Clayton Smith.

I was 13 in 1957 when my junior high English teacher asked us to read a book about someone in the career to which we aspired. I enjoyed school, so I figured I’d become a teacher. Happily, I found what I thought was the perfect book at our town library—My Life As A Teacher by John Erskine. But no doubt its opening sentence spun my 13-year-old head:

Nothing in education needs explaining more than this, that a teacher may be neither a professor nor an educator, that a professor may mature to the age of retirement without teaching or educating, and that an educator, without loss of reputation, may profess nothing, and never face a class.

Sixty-four years later, after ten years of teaching English at the secondary level and thirty as a professor at the university level, I appreciate what Erskine was saying. But all I could remember from junior high was that he had taught at Amherst College.

Re-reading Erskine confirmed my best instincts. “I wanted to be a teacher,” Erskine wrote, “and I wanted to write.” In the classroom he developed writers by “encouraging each individual to discover for himself the manner and the style which was natural and characteristic.” The teacher’s part was “to connect the reading with the pupil’s experience.” What could be more simple or obvious?

Erskine began teaching at Amherst in 1903, and later, at Columbia, became the father of the Great Books course. There were negatives, certainly. At Amherst, Erskine found his students ill-prepared and had to institute a course in spelling. (“The elements should have been acquired in high school English.”) Erskine also soon discovered that: “No professor is thought so necessary as the coach.”

It’s now 2021. What else is new?

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My Life As A Teacher by John Erskine. J.P. Lippencott Company, 1948.

Reviewer bio: Claude Clayton Smith, professor emeritus of English at Ohio Northern University, is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four others. His website is: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.

Guest Post by Michael Coolen.

“I remember coming to one village whose streets were black with priests, and its taverns full of seething atheists.”

Almost every page of Laurie Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: A Memoir is filled with redolent writing. Like many writers supplanted by magical realists, deconstructing whiners, and much less gifted authors, Laurie Lee is receding into the past for many readers who don’t even know his name, much less his exquisite writing.

As a composer and pianist for many decades, I draw inspiration and comfort not only from contemporary music, but from music from the distant to ancient past. Similarly, from time to time I seek out writers from the distant past, Virgil, Herodotus, et al., whose writing confirms to me that Time is just a word we use to measure grief and laughter and insight and children and love.

A friend with similar tastes introduced me to the writings of Laurie Lee just recently. I did not even know who he was. And now I can’t wait to read everything he ever wrote, where every page can contain sentences like the following: “Segovia was a city in a valley of stones—a compact, half-forgotten heap of architectural splendours built for the glory of some other time.”

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As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: A Memoir by Laurie Lee. Nonpareil Books, 2011.

Reviewer bio: Michael Coolen is an Oregon writer/pianist. He is also a composer, with works performed Carnegie Hall, MoMA, the Christie Gallery, Europe, Japan, and Russia.

Buy this book from our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Guest Post by Glen Donaldson.

Last year I went along to see an arthouse movie a lot of people were raving about starring William Dafoe and Robert Pattison called The Lighthouse. I wasn’t that fussed on it but it led me to seek out an autobiography of sorts published the same year called The Last Lighthouse Keeper.

Exhilarating, profound and exquisitely written, probably the highest compliment you can pay a memoir once you’re done reading it is think to yourself—even if it’s only for a few brief moments—”I wish I’d lived that life.” That’s how I feel about The Last Lighthouse Keeper.

John Cook spent twenty-six years as one of Australia’s longest serving lighthouse keepers. In the 1960’s, he was running a service station and picking up the pieces after a marriage breakup. Seeing an ad one day in the local newspaper, he applied for a position with the Australian Commonwealth Lighthouse Service. So began his decades-long love affair with ‘a life in the lights.’

The book centers chiefly on his time spent on two Tasmanian lighthouse islands, Tasman and Maatsuyker (the last spot between Australia and Antarctica). It ends with his transfer to a third, Bruny, where he stayed on for another 15 years.

The presiding tone of the book is summarized on page 55 when the author, referring to his first posting on Tasman Island, notes, “Either people come here crazy or this place turns them that way.”

From fisticuffs with fellow lighthouse keepers to removing his own rotten teeth with a wood punch to the microscopic gaps in brickwork that, via howling winds, could turn a lighthouse into an oversized whistle and drive a person insane with the sound, this book is crammed full of riveting anecdotes.

Simply one of the best reads I’ve ever enjoyed.

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The Last Lighthouse Keeper by John Cook with Jon Bauer. Allen & Unwin, July 2020.

Reviewer bio: Glen Donaldson pens weekly and uniquely at both SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK and LOST IN SPACE FIRESIDE.