Euphoria

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Lily King emphasizes what was required to be listened to as a female anthropologist in early times. Despite the difficulties, Maed kept on advancing in her professional practice. Among others, she was a leading figure in "The Salzburg Seminar in American Civilization" after the WWII, a post conflict initiative that focused on bringing young leaders together (not mentioned in the book).

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall More than half way through now and I'm still waiting for the euphoria moment when everything falls into place. At times I wonder if my disappointment isn't perhaps due to a lazy reading of the book on my part because I'm not really getting it while others are clearly getting a much richer reading experience. The research rarely feels rooted into the soil of the novel. For me the Tam still don't have a vivid identity. I'm not seeing how they spend a typical day. King is more interested in the sensational than the everyday and this, for me, is caricaturing the culture a bit. And i often feel she doesn't quite have command of her material. This might be due to the obvious problems posed by fictionalising real people. I still have the feeling she wanted to write the English Patient but was beaten to it. There is a strong sense of place, but there aren’t any overly long descriptions, yay! I hate it when the writer feels the need to describe every gorgeous, striated leaf in the place. The writer does a great job of letting us use our own imaginations to visualize the details. Some authors don’t know how to do this; King is a pro. I have to laugh that I enjoyed the setting so much—I’m an indoor bunny who recoils from bugs, crocodiles, and heat, and yet I was totally digging this river-side living in the tropics. The setting reminded me a lot of State of Wonder, one of my favorite books, so I’m sure I was predisposed to liking it. Basically what you need to know about me and this book is that while I should have expected not to like it, I instead was uniquely devastated by the transformation from a coincidence into a pattern. The book was inspired by the few months in 1933 in which Mead, an American, her second husband Reo Fortune, an Australian, and Gregory Bateson (an Englishman, who would become her third husband) spent together on the Sepik River in New Guinea.This threesome has a difficult dynamic. It is obvious from the outset that Bankson is smitten with Nell despite her having malaria, a broken ankle and sores all over her body. Fen does not show the least bit of jealousy and it is interesting to find out what occurs between Nel and Bankson. There are so many joys in this book: watching three vastly different approaches to the then nascent field of anthropology (the fact that they're from different cultures is obviously significant); seeing a love triangle emerge; and, of course, meeting the various people they’re studying, which include a tribe leader who was recently exploited by colonials by working in a mine. On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin

It is undisputed that Maed´s work was colossal and regularly challenged by her environment, but ultimately contributed to extending human perception. There’s also a lovely repeated image, drawn I think from the poet Amy Lowell, about two kinds of love: the intoxicating flush that comes with wine and the comforting sustenance provided by bread. Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. It was not ontological. It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public. This novel was inspired by the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson The threesome did research of tribes in New Guinea in 1933.

The Best Classic Poetry Books

Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet, best known for love poems such as Funeral Blues, poems on political and social themes such as September 1, 1939and The Shield of Achilles, poems on cultural and psychological themes such as The Age of Anxiety, and poems on religious themes such as For the Time Beingand Horae Canonicae.” New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 by Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) She told me that the Tam believed that love grows in the stomach, and that they went around clutching their bellies when their hearts were broken. 'You are in my stomach,' was their most intimate expression of love.'" Because he has limited access to the tribe Nell and Fen are studying, what he witnesses is limited, and we have to do the work of connecting episodes and judge whether we can trust his observations. Like an album of photographic negatives, this book is transformed by light, inhabited by family, illness, mortality, and faith. There is a brooding intelligence here, radiant with fireworks and emergency flares. Euphoria was inspired by anthropologist Margaret Mead and her experiences along the Sepik River with her husband Reo Fortune and the British anthropologist who would become her second husband, Gregory Bateson. But the story is entirely of King’s invention, including the tribes and their cultures. The novel is a feat of research, imagination, passion, and restraint.

Being familiar with King’s electric writing style, I was truly excited to finally get to read her most recognized work which I had saved like a squirrel hoards acorns for the upcoming winter. Imagine my huge disappointment when I couldn’t, for the life of me, be fully drawn into the story. Indeed, there’s such fiery confidence here, such cleanness – something of the cleanness of Plath’s own poems – that it doesn’t necessarily matter that it’s about Plath. Cullhed has the poet resolve that “I would never again ask for permission to write”. I wonder if Cullhed found her own permission to write in Plath, as well as a poetic register that she could take on and expand. This is a book about the precipitous, high-stakes relationship between creative genius and domestic life, centred on the lure and dangers of freedom. At one point in the novel Hughes tells Plath that life has a mission for everyone and that his mission is freedom. His revelation is all-too-plausibly risible. The freedom that Hughes is seeking is the freedom to evade his responsibilities as a father and have an affair with Assia Wevill. But Cullhed’s Plath has committed to a life with this man partly because she was seduced by his vision of freedom. “His stride is wildernesses of freedom”, Hughes wrote in his 1957 poem The Jaguar. “The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.” Now that her husband’s freedom has shown itself also to be crushingly banal, Plath has to work out her own sense of what freedom is. Despite the inevitable strife among the threesome, there is a wonderful point in the story when they work together on a euphoric epipany of ideas as they try to map various cultures according to dominant sets of characterics; i.e. possessive, aggressive; caring yielding; pragmatic, managerial; creative, nonconformist. Should they map genders separately? Could the scheme work for individual personality types? I loved that section. I find I am more interested in this question of subjectivity, and the limited lens of the anthropologist...Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation."Anna Akhmatova is among the most moving and revered voices in Russian literature. A poet of passion and conscience, she was persecuted after the Revolution and under Stalin, but chose to remain in Russia and bear witness. Her works capture a rich emotional world – poems such as ‘A Ride’ and ‘By the Seashore’ reflect a complex attitude to love or explore the duality of her own nature, while others, such as ‘Courage’ and ‘In 1940’, evoke the horrors of war.” The Selected Poetryby Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)