Warren Moore

I enjoyed this essay on Haiku and Japanese religion, and especially the link at the bottom to dozens of translations of Basho’s frog haiku. http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/haiku.htm …

The essay is by Kenneth Rexroth, a Beat Generation poet whose essays I devoured in high school, especially the collection “World Outside the Window.” It’s worth a read just for the vast Nd eccentric erudition casually on display.

Re-reading his essays now, even this one, I now suspect that his desire to (oh so casually) show off with esoteric references sometimes leads him into unsound judgments. Also, I’m more struck by the deep-seated hostility to conventional society.

Of course these faults, which I did not see so clearly back then, were probably also what instinctively attracted me to his work.

In these respects Rexroth is a bit like another, more widely known high school hero, the physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman would play tricks to show-off, pretending to compute on the spot results he had prepared beforehand, and generally promoting his own cult of personality.

There’s also a subtle current of social alienation, if not hostility, under the surface of Feynman’s charming book of anecdotes. Feynman deconstructs various social scenarios with the perspective of someone who does not embrace them intuitively.

His underlying assumption is, often, that the rest of the world are a bunch of dummies, or at least that he needs it proved to him that they are not. His book is called after all, “What Do Gou. Are What Other People Think?”

“What Do You Care What Other People Think?” might be a more accurate spelling.