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13 verk 136 medlemmar 3 recensioner

Verk av Mark Yakich

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Vedertaget namn
Yakich, Mark
Nationalitet
USA
Bostadsorter
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Yrken
dichter
docent
Organisationer
Loyola University New Orleans

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Recensioner

This book was a delight to read.

Football, or soccer as most of us Americans know it, is a game with many different facets. Yakich is able to provide a great overview of the game, playing styles, growth of media exposure, and many other factors. The various subjects are addressed in a way that I felt I got a good overview of each of them without getting lost in minutiae.

Yakich describing how COVID affected him and soccer helped him was by far the highlight of the book. I loved reading about the various ways he made it possible to have weekly games with friends. I also loved how he described the way soccer helped him fend off loneliness and despair, like when he got on a Zoom call and made a homemade ball with his friend Rodolfo. Yakich was able to perfectly straddle the line between being relatable and navel gazing. That's what makes this book special.

I recommend this book to all.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
reenum | 1 annan recension | Sep 19, 2021 |
Football, from Mark Yakich, is another volume in the very interesting Object Lessons series. These books use everyday objects (broadly defined) as focal points for everything from memoirish accounts to sociological and cultural analyses. Most do all of the above to various degrees. This volume is a nice mix of personal experience related to football, some history and trivia about the game, and how the game can and does reflect both the good and bad aspects of society.

Because the book does stay pretty close to the game itself it will be more appealing to those who really just want to read about the sport. Not sure why some people keeps choosing books in a series that invites personal reflection then complains about the personal reflection, but stupid is as stupid does. If the series has been hit or miss for you and part of it is because you want something more like an encyclopedia entry than an intelligent contemplation of the object in its many uses, this book will be closer to what you want.

For those who enjoy looking at how things fit into and affect society as a whole, this volume will offer enough if that to keep you happy. Some of the ugliness in football is also part of the ugliness in society, so looking at it in a smaller more focused manner allows for some new insight. Unless, of course, you hate talk that challenges the status quo that leaves out large numbers of people. But for those with functioning brain cells, these elements of the book are what makes it worth reading, and the series as a whole very interesting.

I would recommend this to readers who like to connect the everyday to the larger picture of life. Football fan or not, this book offers a lot to think about.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
pomo58 | 1 annan recension | Sep 5, 2021 |
There’s a lot to like in this irreverent and provocative book about both reading and writing poems. For anyone shy of the art (whether reading or writing poetry), Yakich is most encouraging. He includes many tips and techniques, exercises to jog you out of the routine and ordinary ways of seeing and jumpstart your writing. And there are so many gems of good advice. Here are just a few of the bits I especially liked and copied out:

“A poem cannot be paraphrased. In fact, a poem’s greatest potential lies in the opposite of paraphrase: ambiguity. Ambiguity is at the center of what is it to be a human being. We really have no idea what’s going to happen from moment to moment, but we have to act as if we do.”

“A poem has no hidden meaning, only “meanings” you’ve not yet realized are right in front of you. Discerning subtleties takes practice. Reading poetry is a convention like anything else. And you learn the rules of it like anything else—e.g., driving a car, baking a cake, walking a tightrope.”

“As hard as it sounds, separate the poet from the speaker of the poem. A poet always wears a mask (persona) even if she isn’t trying to wear a mask, and so to equate poet and speaker denies the poem any imaginative force that lies outside of her lived life.” How many times I’ve harped on this to students and fellow writers!

“Poets depend on readers for confirmation of their worth. Readers depend on poets for confirmation of their doubts.”

“Not all poets are visionaries but all poets can be subversives, even if they are subverting only their own visions periodically.”

Readers will like some parts of the book better than others. I skimmed much of the latter half, since I was not much interested in reading about how to run a creative writing classroom/workshop, literary magazines, publication advice, putting together a manuscript, etc. And the Epilogue was far too long and terribly out of place in this context — a long-winded paean (on and on and on) to showers (the kind in which you stand in the tub or stall and wash and masturbate or whatever). Why here??

The book could have used some better proofreading. In quite a few sentences, I noticed words (articles, prepositions) left out, run-on sentences (comma splices), or other errors of punctuation. This just bugs me, perhaps a lot more than it should.

One mistake that I found rather significant is in the following sentence: "Even a single word can change its emphasis: present as a noun is an iamb, present as a verb is trochee.” In fact, the author has it backwards: the verb is the iamb. Pre-SENT. This seems pretty bad, considering that he’s using this example to illustrate.

And I take issue with a couple of other things. One is the famous (“under understood” says Yakich) quote of Gertrude Stein, which Yakich quotes as "A rose is a rose is a rose.” Unfortunately, he then proceeds to explain this statement for us. I don’t think Yakich has any inside knowledge here and wouldn’t give him the final word. Stein’s original version was “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” in which the first Rose is widely understood to be a surname. Stein is known to have had a painting by Sir Francis Rose hanging in her living room. So, really, who knows? It’s true that Stein later used variations on that sentence, including “A rose is a rose is a rose.” It may just mean that things are what they are. Yakich says: “A rose is clearly not a rose. “Rose” is a word standing in for that flowery thing that is out there in the garden. To say “a rose is a rose” is already once removed from what a rose really is. A rose is a rose is a rose. Does the rose turn a deeper red when it’s repeated three times? Perhaps. But couldn’t the rose also fade with such wear? The repetition of rose makes the rose less of a rose and more of a piece of language. Say it again aloud: a rose is a rose is a rose. Did you detect it? Arose: to ascend. Stein’s phrase isn’t about making the rose more rosy, but how language takes on a life of its own.” Well, maybe it’s that, too. He follows this up with a completely tangential and unnecessary paragraph about how many roses to send for various purposes, according to “the folks at Teleflora.”

I would also have to take issue with Yakich’s pronouncements (as if from on high) about prose poetry. For instance, “Prose poems are, for the most part, more prose than poetry—that is, they are structured more along the lines of story and scene than song.” It sounds like he hasn’t read many. Prose poems are not all structured along the lines of story. There’s a difference — actually an overlap — between prose poetry and flash fiction. Some prose poems read like fictions, but not all of them do. Some short pieces are thoroughly in one camp or the other. Yakich further maintains that “A prose poem is really a failed attempt at lineating a poem, or is a piece of prose that has failed to turn into a longer work. [I can't believe anyone would put such goofy thoughts in writing!] Like Montaigne’s Essays, which are literally “attempts” or “trials,” prose poems illustrate that there is nothing wrong with a failure of form. If the prose poem does nothing else, it illustrates that even straightforward prose is affected prose.” Huh? To each his own. He can have an opinion, but this is both ignorant and arrogant.

Here’s something to rankle those of us who happen to enjoy reading, and even writing (oh horrors!), short stories:: "Studying the short story mostly gets you sucked into writing a short story, and writing a short story takes too much time for what it’s worth, perhaps a publication in a journal which few will bother to read."

And poetry journals are so widely read, right?
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
toniclark | Mar 24, 2016 |

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Statistik

Verk
13
Medlemmar
136
Popularitet
#149,926
Betyg
½ 3.5
Recensioner
3
ISBN
23

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