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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | 909.09823 Houston, J. 1997 | Searching... Unknown |
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Sample Poems DictionaryAs a small south american squirrel inhabiting mostly mountainous regions would feed on lizards half-way between poles of the tropics, I too would fall heartbreaked in the settlement of feuds of the fields of kentucky.When the moss grows high between the perennials and disordered mimmocks weep, these dainty fastidious gestating mammals break for leavened bread and sup between the rows of trees, lifting like friars some heavy books in the sunlight's morning windows where the mollusks row in scion's quadragesimal phyla.Found TextThe deer mistook their reflections for deer and the deer mistook their reflections for other deer and the deer apparently mistook their reflections for sheep and what the deer mistook their reflections for isn't certain and the deer were removed from the scene, being deer, before being removed and mistaking reflections of the other deer for the sheep the deer were removed and the deer deciding to join them joined the deer having mistaken reflections of sheep for the deer having mistaken reflections of sheep for the deer in the plate glass windows. The New LifeI eat steak and live on the big neon avenue and fear strangers, admire my neighbors, the drug store, and the bus,I was an addict live addicted to the avenue, in the dark folds late at night, addicted to sleep and lavender,I went into the liquor store to buy a bottle of wine, loving you and the liquor store, the lavender bottles, the many directionsa_|.PART TWOToday I am rivets of sails in a log cabin where Jack London lived in Alaska until they moved his cabin here where we collect the change to buy our drinks and eat the free hors d'oeuvres, where the neighbors are somewhat pleased beside the railroad trains, where the vague sense of the Union Pacific is with opssums of freeways and you, where the airplanes fill the plastic sky, where the fish are brightly colored on the lawn, where an underwater bird is pummeled on the sidestreet, where we take hallucinogens and wander through museums, where the people construct the atificial ponds, where
Author Notes
James D. Houston is the author of "Continental Drift" & six other novels, & of several nonfiction works, including "Farewell to Manzanar", coauthored with his wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston.
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Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Houston has all the luck, piggy-backing a trip to Japan on his wife's research project; visiting his daughter when she gets a job on Saipan, one of the Mariana islands; traipsing from Hawaii, around Indonesia through Bali. The image of him that emerges from this travelogues is that of a man who has spent much of his life on the West Coast musing about what lies beyond the ocean. Musing, but not studying. Houston (Continental Drift) takes a very impressionistic, once-over-lightly approach to the exotic locales he visits. There is a little description (especially of baths, which he seems to like most of all) and reporting on the occasional quaintly weird custom like talking to rocks in Hawaii, and blessing metal objects in Bali. In theory, the book is defined by the metaphor of tectonic instability, but in fact it seems strained, adding little by way of cohesion or illumination. Houston favors lists of meaningfully juxtaposed nouns or runs of unanswerable questions ("What do such places speak to? In their silence what do we hear? Why is primal landscape so compelling?... The rocks are us."), but a little goes a very long way and soon it seems more portentous than profound. There are also some vexing stereotypes, whether the resigned savant ("his eyes gaze into mine, merry, ancient, boyish, dark and innocent, the vulnerable sage.") or the cliché of the Japanese R-L switch ("Mona Risa, Mona Risa, men have name you. You so rike a raydee wis a mystic smire..." ). One can't help feeling that while Houston had a grand opportunity and probably enjoyed it too, he didn't bring enough of it back for us. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A delightful account of an idiosyncratic odyssey through island outposts in the world's largest ocean with the observant, low-key novelist Houston (Love Life, 1985, etc.) as an unfailingly congenial tour guide. In company with his Nisei wife, Jeanne Wakatsuki, Houston headed first to her parents' homeland. Sojourning in Ibusuki (a part of Kyushu, which a local returning from the US refers to as ``the Alabama of Japan'') and later in Fukuoka (one of but four cities to host championship sumo wrestling tournaments), he finds himself wondering whether the island nation's backcountry is ``too strange and perhaps more trouble than it's worth.'' Before Houston presses on alone, however, he and his wife make contact with friends of friends who renew their faith in the cultural and other ties that bind all peoples who live on the Pacific Basin, including those who, like the Houstons, are residents of America's West Coast. In Hawaii, he seeks out a woman who talks with rocks (volcanic or otherwise), an honored vocation in a venue where the legacies of Polynesia survive and thrive. Westering on, the author lights in Indonesia (where a native son lately back from L.A. shares rules of the road for traffic-jammed Jakarta) and Bali (whose Edenic setting belies its troubled history). Covered as well on Houston's overwater trek are the Marianas (Tinian as well as Saipan, where his daughter works at a resort catering to Asians on holiday) and the Ryukyus (Iwo Jima, Okinawa, et al.), where the ghosts of WW II can still disturb the sleep of visitors. Good old-fashioned travel writing of the sort that combines personal observations on faraway places with astute commentary on what connects their past, present, and future.
Library Journal Review
Houston (coauthor of Farewell to Manzanar, 1973) sets out on a journey around the Pacific Rim to explore the historical and cultural connections among the various countries and islands that surround the world's largest ocean. Along the way, he stops at Japan and the islands of Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Ie-Jima; Jakarta and Bali in Indonesia; Saipan and Tinian in the Mariana Islands of Micronesia; Honolulu and Big Island in Hawaii; and his native California. Houston was drawn on this quest to look "for ways to see my family and homeland with clearer eyes," and in this richly anecdotal text he succeeds admirably. Recommended for all libraries.William L. Wuerch, Micronesian Area Research Ctr., Univ. of Guam (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.