one monkey minds its own business; the other has mischief in mind
Sneaky Monkey [Haiku]
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Tag Archives: monkey
Bhubaneswar Limerick
A crafty langur of Bhubaneswar lived in the trees above the old bazaar. He'd watch shoppers straggle and shopkeepers haggle, then slip in under everyone's radar.
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BOOK REVIEW: Monkey: New Writing from Japan: Vol. 2: Travel ed. Ted Goosen & Motoyuki Shibata
MONKEY New Writing from Japan: Volume 2: TRAVEL by Ted GoossenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Amazon.in Page
Out: December 28, 2021
This anthology of travel-themed short writings by prominent Japanese authors includes: short stories, essays, poems, excerpts from longer works, and even an illustrated story [i.e. “The Overcoat” by Satoshi Kitamura.] The nature and degree of travel varies considerably with some pieces being travelogues or setting-centric fiction, but other pieces explore travel in a more symbolic sense (e.g. “Hell” by Kikuko Tsumura or “Decline of the Aliens” by Hideo Furukawa.] And one piece, “Cardboard Boxes and Their Uses” by Taki Monma deals more with the topic of being shut in, so it might be considered a study in travel through its absence.
The anthology includes works by literary stars such as Mieko Kawakami, Haruki Murakami, and Yasunari Kawabata, and showcases translation by some of the most well-know translators of Japanese literature. [The edition ends with a dozen brief statements by translators about what they have found particularly daunting to translate — not necessarily because the literal translation is difficult but because the elegance of the origin language can be lost to clunkiness in the translated language.]
Among my favorite pieces were “The Dugong” (a historical fiction story with a “Journey to the West” feel to it,) Haruki Murakami’s essay entitled “Jogging in Southern Europe” (which anyone who’s ever exercised amid people who don’t exercise will find amusing,) “Five Modern Poets on Travel” [particularly the tanka of Kanoko Okamoto and the haiku of both Hisago Sugita and Dakotsu Iida,] and “Every Reading, Every Sound, Every Sight” by Jun’ichi Konuma. That said, I don’t think there was a clunker in the bunch, each piece was well-composed and translated, and I’d highly recommend reading this book.
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Bucktoothed Monkey Mastermind [Common Meter]
I saw a bucktoothed monkey sit on the ground all alone. It looked the doofus - its dental- mental shortfall shone, but is the size of incisors a measure of one's smarts? Has anyone done the study, gathered data, made the charts? What if that dentally-outsized primate is a dreamer- a mastermind, a supervillain, or just a first-rate schemer? What if it just wants us to think that it's a huge dimwit? So, it doesn't show its erudition, or its razor-keen wit. Instead, it waits for us to be lulled to a false repose, so that it can show us we're all a bunch of biased schmoes.
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Persistence of Youth [Senryu]
DAILY PHOTO: Monkey See…
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Brass Monkey
the brass monkey seemed real -- not like a real monkey, but like a real supplicant, making a real offering i guess its realness was the realness of human wishfulness it looked real because it looked like what a human desires in a monkey -- rather than how an actual monkey would behave, hightailing it with the fruit up to too lofty a height to have its jackfruit repossessed i read that the original "brass monkey" was a cannonball rack on an old-timey sailing ship, then the term came to refer to cold weather, because the differential contraction of cold metal would cause the cannonballs to pop off the rack -- hence the saying: "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey!" and, somewhere along the way, it also became a low-brow malt liquor cocktail seems strange that so many brass monkeys would exist that weren't monkey-shaped, or even made of brass -- but such is the way of words
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POEM: Don’t Tease the Monkeys
Hey, naked baby macaque, who stole the hair off of your back, but left you that blocky hairdo? Perhaps, you didn't think your look through?
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DAILY PHOTO: A Macaque Offers Its Opinion of the Weather
Taken in July of 2014 in Kerala
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DAILY PHOTO: Lounging Cotton-Top Tamarin
Taken at Lincoln Park Zoo in the summer of 2018.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 