Everything is Oll Korrect!

Fun with Board Books

Posted on by Richard Carroll

When it comes to Serious Books for Grown-Ups, I’ve never read so little as I have in the past year and a half or so. That number hasn’t dropped to zero and I do still read more than the average American (though yes, that’s a low bar to clear), but it’s certainly not what I’d like. However, the total amount of time I’ve spent reading is as high as it’s ever been thanks to my children and their library of board books – which, for those who don’t know, are short books for babies and toddlers printed on stiff cardboard pages, so they’re much sturdier than regular books. This isn’t a genre I’ve ever given much thought to before, naturally, but since they’ve been my primary reading material lately I figured I’d share a few thoughts and observations on them.

The first thing to keep in mind about board books if you want to enjoy them is that they’re not about the story. That sounds obvious, given that the target audience can’t read and possibly can’t even speak either, but adults are so used to judging books by their writing that it’s hard not to apply the same criteria to board books. They’re not really about the artwork, either, which is often simple. Not that the story and art shouldn’t be good, but what makes them good is that they contribute to the primary purpose of board books, which is that they’re a social activity. An excellent example is the classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd. In this book, a child bunny rabbit catalogues and says good night to nearly everything in his room: the clocks, socks, kittens, mittens, comb, brush, bowl full of mush, and so on for several pages. By the standard of any other genre this is extremely boring, yet it’s among the most popular board books in the United States. Why?

Because young children love routine. The predictable and repetitive “good nights” are calming, especially if you read this book every night as part of the child’s bedtime routine. Even I found Goodnight Moon relaxing once I understood why it’s so repetitive. Also, reading time is quality time with a child’s parents (or other relative) whose presence helps the child feel even more relaxed and secure.

Mostly, anyway – my daughter has figured out that when we read any book that frequently mentions bedtime or sleeping it means that her bedtime is near, so any time I pull out, say, Goodnight Moon or The Going to Bed Book she protests because playtime is almost over.

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2022: Watch Out, You Might Get What You’re After

Posted on by Richard Carroll

Dead blog, lol.

Almost, anyway, but that’s fine. For the last couple years, and probably for a while to come, Everything is Oll Korrect! will primarily be a repository of old writing, updated very sporadically. I have a few ideas for future posts, but they’ll have to wait since I have more important projects.

I don’t even know what kind of traffic Everything received over the past year. Looking it up as I write, I’m at about 5,200 views, a bit up from last year’s 4,900 but under half of my peak in 2018, which was 12,800. The most viewed post of the year was, by a huge margin, “Which Translation of The Analects Should I Read?” The most popular from this year was my review of Henry Sumner Maines’ Popular Government, I suspect because publisher Imperium Press linked to it in a couple places. Coincidentally, all four posts this year looked like something from my more explicitly political days from about 2015-18. Popular Government, in fact, had been discussed by the old Neoreactionary bloggers Foseti and Radish Mag.

Hey, Everything may be dead, but it’s pretty OK compared to those two. They may well still get more views than me, though…

What else? I wrote about Yuri Pines’ book Foundations of Confucian Thought, mostly sharing some particularly interesting excerpts. There’s also John “Borzoi” Chapman’s essay collection Cultured Grugs, hit-and-miss like all compilations are but mostly good. Rounding out this year’s posts is a review of The Penguin Book of Haiku, which stinks. Sorry, weebs.

So did I not read anything? Well, of books written for adults, I read thirteen this year, by far the smallest number in a very long time. Certainly the smallest since I started tracking this back in 2015. Of the books I read to my toddler, I’ve read a ton of them. At least a couple every day, though of course the same books are reread many, many times. I’m sure someday my hobbies will recover from what marriage and parenthood have done to them. Well, to some extent, anyway; music and video games never recovered from what college and then working full time did to them.

One highlight of 2022, though, is that I do have one less thing to worry about: School. I’m done. I’ve got my Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, finally. With this in hand, moving on to a new career should be much easier.

School sucks, by the way.

Just terrible.

Absolutely rotten.

Anyway, besides that, my daughter is now a toddler, and a big sister. My son was born a bit earlier this year. In some ways, having a second child is easier than the first; my wife and I have a better idea of what we’re doing, which helps a lot. On the other hand, we now have twice as many small children to take care of, and we’re stretched thin even with substantial help from our parents. With God’s grace, though, we’ll make it.

For a long time, basically all of my twenties, my life largely revolved around my hobbies. I’d go to work, get home, and then read, watch anime, and write about the same. I was content in a relatively low-paying job because, hey, it was sufficient to buy the books I wanted. Eventually, though, I decided that these things were ultimately unsatisfying, and I became serious about finding a wife and starting a family. Well, now my free time is largely gone, money is tight, and I never have time for myself anymore. However, this is a project whose fruits last into eternity and which fulfills me in a way that reading even great books does not.

I certainly have some nostalgia for how things were, of course. There’s an appeal to the bachelor life of doing mostly what you want, when you want, and to the relatively carefree days of childhood. Childhood must end, though, and the bachelor life has no larger meaning in itself. The family life is the path I chose; its difficulties are the cross Christ gives me to bear, but it’s a cross that bears fruit. I can’t explain, but when I hold one of my children, I understand that I’m doing what God put me here to do.

Have a happy New Year, everyone, and thank you for reading.…

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Foundations of Confucian Thought

Posted on by Richard Carroll

A few years ago, I read and reviewed Yuri Pines’ book The Everlasting Empire, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in Chinese intellectual history, or Chinese history generally for that matter. Since I enjoyed that book, when I was looking for more work on Confucianism a while back I picked up one of his earlier books, Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722-453 B.C.E. Confucius and his followers did not, of course, emerge from nowhere, so a full understanding of Confucianism requires some knowledge not just of their source materials (primarily the Five Classics), but the intellectual milieu they originated in.

In fact, Pines’ book is broader than that. Though Confucianism does receive more attention than the rest of the Hundred Schools of the Warring States period, Pines refers as often to Warring States (typically by its Chinese name, Zhanguo) thought as to Confucian thought in particular. So, what he’s doing is tracing the origin of the terminology and ideas that formed the context and foundation for Zhanguo intellectual life.…

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The Penguin Book of Haiku

Posted on by Richard Carroll

As a person who likes Japan, likes literature, and likes what he’s read of the combination of those two, I want to like haiku. However, it’s never really appealed to me. In my experience, five-line tanka are about as short as a poem can be and still feel like it has some substance to it, and even that takes a patient sort of reading to appreciate. I also hadn’t read all that many of them though and didn’t know much about the context in which they were written, so I hoped that reading The Penguin Book of Haiku, with its large sample size accompanied by an extensive introduction and some commentary, would help me to at least appreciate if not enjoy the form.

Conclusion: I still dislike haiku, but now I have more reasons to dislike them.

First, a little context. Editor and translator Adam Kern includes a rather long introduction, most of which is worth reading but the main point is that before the early Twentieth Century haiku weren’t written as short, standalone poems. Rather, it was more of  a game played with a group of people. You begin with a challenge verse, and participants compose, on the spot, verses in answer to the challenge and to each other. Haiku contests, in which a challenge verse is published and the best responses win a prize, were also extremely popular. This form of haiku, as essentially a word game, does sound fun and, though you certainly did have the meditative, serious haiku we typically associate with the form today, many of them were comedic and in their original context probably were quite funny. To give Penguin’s collection credit, this context is important to understanding haiku and reading these poems alongside the challenge they responded to makes them far more intelligible than the more common format of printing them as standalone poems. Unfortunately, I still can’t get past two problems.

One is the same reservation I’ve always had, which is that they’re insubstantial. The first few entries in the “Washbasin” series, which introduces the book, should suffice as an example:

The washbasin’s
drip-dripping gives way
to crickets chirping.
[by Bonchou]

with oil burning low
an early-to-bed autumn
[by Bashou]

fresh new straw mats
having just been installed,
in the moonlight!
[by Yasui]

here’s wishing
a millennium of sundries gathered –
New Year’s feast
[by Bashou]

Kern adds some commentary, but even so, there frankly isn’t much here. In the Hyakunin Isshu, the poems are short and rely heavily on the reader savouring a given poem’s predominant image, but here all you have is a phrase and the reader ends up doing most of the work trying to get something out of them. Now, given haiku’s popularity, many readers seem to enjoy that, and I suppose if you’re using the more serious poems as a sort of meditation, I can appreciate that. I open to the possibility that I’m just missing something. Personally, I prefer poetry that stands more on its own.

In any case, the other problem is the many, many puerile haiku. An example Kern uses in the introduction to illustrate low-brow haiku is the response to “However grim, / It was also funny,” by Soukan Yamazaki, “Even while / my father lay dying / farts kept ripping!”

Is it funny? Well, sure. Is it worth writing down and preserving? Frankly, no. Gross, irreverent jokes may be funny in their immediate context, but they aren’t something I particularly want to read. Kern also includes obscene haiku, sometimes with accompanying Edo-era illustrations. He says in the introduction that he includes them to give an accurate idea of what haiku was like, and to emphasise that the Japanese of this era were human, for better and worse. That’s perfectly defensible, of course, but it still doesn’t make me interested in reading someone’s old porn stash.

So, would I recommend The Penguin Book of Haiku? Well, if you want an opportunity to learn about the form, there are a lot of them here with a solid and substantial introduction. If you don’t like haiku, though, it won’t change your mind. For that matter, if you do like haiku the way it’s most often presented, it might even change your mind for the worse. I went into the book expecting short scenes of cherry blossoms and frogs jumping into ponds, instead I got short scenes of farting at wakes and masturbating voyeurs. I suppose that’s the risk you take when you walk into a new literary scene.…

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