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Vol. 38, No. 18 |
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3-5-2008 Booktalk, 3/06/08Don Langford is a senior lecturer in the English department at Ohio State Newark. He has published a number of poems, one of which — “Vivid Dreams, Antarctica” — was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005. He is currently completing a book of poems. I first read D. T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism for an English project in my senior year of high school, after listening for a couple of years to Alan Watts’ lectures on Buddhism and Taoism on KPFK radio in Los Angeles. Suzuki’s book on the history and practice of Zen introduced me to a way of being and an inquiry into life that immediately appealed to me, and it presented a world of intuitive experience that has influenced me ever since.
Walden, or Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau. In my undergraduate years at Oregon State University, Professor David Robinson encouraged me to read Thoreau’s Walden for more than its importance as literature. Thoreau’s deliberateness in examining his life and his emphasis on consciously attending to the details of his experience made a lasting impression on me. Walden demonstrated for me that principles for living could grow directly out of one’s own experiences. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. When I was in my early twenties, distributing literature in front of markets about the use of growth hormones and carcinogenic chemicals in meats, I hadn’t yet discovered the work of Rachel Carson and her writings about the harmful chemicals in our environment. She faced tremendous pressure from the chemical industry, which tried to silence her and discredit her research. I have since used her book in my English classes for a new generation of students who are concerned about ways to reduce the further poisoning of the planet. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979 by Gary Snyder. In addition to my interest in Gary Snyder’s poetry, this book of essays and interviews brought together the interconnected interests I had in Buddhism, conscious living, a concern for the health of the environment, and poetry as an expression of one’s interaction with the world. Snyder’s practice of Hua-Yen Buddhism became the subject of my doctoral dissertation at OSU, directed by David Citino, connecting the primacy of place in Snyder’s poetry with his training in Buddhism and advocacy of bioregionalism. Snyder shows that meditation is not an activity separate from the details of one’s daily life or work, but is in itself a way of being, whether one is writing a poem or raking the leaves. The Tao Te Ching, translated as The Way and Its Power (or Virtue) or The Way of Life, is a Chinese Taoist text sometimes attributed to Lao Tzu as early as the 6th Century BCE, and consists of 81 poems, often cryptic and challenging, but always offering wisdom on many aspects of personal and social life. It appeals to me because, without ever becoming dogmatic, the poems provide insights that work indirectly, like the best of Gary Snyder’s elliptical poems, tapping into glimpses of ageless human wisdom. Who is your favorite character in literature? Zorba, in Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel, Zorba the Greek, because he truly celebrates the life he is living.
What is the last book you’ve bought? Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America by Kerby A. Miller. My ancestors emigrated from Ireland to Canada, the country of my birth, and I’ve been tracing my family genealogy in recent years. Miller’s book is a fascinating history of the Irish people and the difficult lives they endured.
What’s your “guilty pleasure” – a book you love but don’t often talk about because it’s not “serious” literature? For many people, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell are out of fashion these days, but I still enjoy Henry Miller’s exuberance for life and the “gift for gab” that comes through in his work, including Tropic of Cancer and his thoughtful meditation on life in his wonderful travel book on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi. Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter Lemons is an example of great descriptive landscape writing and an underappreciated art form today.
What “important book” have you not read and why haven't you read it? One of the several “books yet to be read” in my bookcases includes the witty and ribald tale of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. Years ago I began reading it, and I look forward to a time in the future when I can expand the pleasure of immersing myself in great world literature.
What book would you most want your kids to read? what would you want them NOT to read? The Crows of Pearblossom by Aldous Huxley is a delightful and imaginative story for young people. The animals work it out in the end. This is Huxley’s only children’s book, written for a young niece who lived near Pearblossom, California.
Rather than restricting children from reading any book, I’d let them select written works that interest them and promote thought. This is preferable to the trance state often induced by television.
What classic novel was a disappointment to you? I never developed an appreciation for Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, perhaps because I thought that the potential for an account of dark human psychology lapsed from realism into an unbelievable type of ghost story that wasn’t compelling for me the way that Hawthorne, Poe, Kafka, Robert Walser, Anna Kavan, and E.T.A. Hoffmann are.
If you were to ban one book, what would it be and why? I doubt that I would ban a book or prohibit anyone from reading any book, no matter what the content or how disagreeable someone else may find it. There is a long and unhealthy history of banned literature and censored ideas. Preventing access to ideas through the banning of books may be worse than any harm that could come from exposure to ideas contained in a book.
What genre of literature do you prefer to read (history, fiction, biography, etc.) and why? In addition to the fiction I read for the classes I teach, I like to read science and biographies of thinking people who, like Thoreau, live their lives deliberately and consciously with a deep curiosity about the world in which they live. These are often literary figures, artists, and scientists who question and examine their connection to varieties of life and experiences with a curiosity that is infectious. Authors that keep my attention include E. O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Laurie Garrett, Howard Zinn, and Timothy Ferris.
What magazines do you subscribe to and why? I subscribe to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review because it keeps me connected to some of the changing perspectives and moral questions of our time, and the library doesn’t carry this publication. I have generally discontinued subscribing to magazines that I can check out from the library or view online.
Booktalk is a literary column that appears regularly in onCampus, featuring an Ohio State staff or faculty member with significant literary accomplishments. To nominate someone for a future column, e-mail harris.587@osu.edu.
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