Ishiguro partial review

I've read two different reviews which described Ishiguro's prose as bland.  Here's my counterargument. The animating theme of Ishiguro's work is dehumanization. A category or person is defined as unworthy of full human status. A servant in remains of the day, a robot in Clara and the Sun, the clones in never let me go. Ishiguro's novels center this person and bestows them with a breathtaking humanity. They experience full and complex feelings, passions and ideas. But the language they have to express their inner life is limited, because language is the first limitation society places on them.  Klara has only the words that she has heard in her short life in a department store. She calls all the people of the outside world passers- by. She does not call them commuters or citizens because these things are outside of her experience. She only understands passers-by in the window or customers in the store.  Ishiguro's characters are full, but their language is limited, because their language is the language the society around them believes they will need to express what that society believes they are capable of feeling or worth. And that disconnect we feel between the simple things they can express and the depth and strength of what they are trying to reach for is the first injustice they experience in their deeply unjust lives. Which is a great deal of the reason why they are written this way. We begin to immediately and intuitively understand that these characters are circumscribed, that they are more than they are let to be. 

Hummingbird poem

I sat under a mimosa pink sky of contentment

Some white night blooming flower sank into its scent

Hummingbirds abandoned their feeders to flit through fluffy flowers

Militant mockingbirds patrolled the blackberry patch

The first fireflies flickered ahead

The twilight fades

The bright birds whiz

In silhouette 

To sweeter nectar

I too can drink

The sweeter sip

While evening pales

To home

In Virginia at Toneys I was cleaning the oven and my mom sent me outside for a break and I really did see hummingbirds zipping through the mimosa tree. There's like 60 pairs of them at the feeders in the summer and you can watch them on the porch but they like the wild nectar when the mimosas bloom. I had that real overriding feeling of peace well being and contentment and wrote this, then went back to scrubbing a wee oven. 

Takeaways from Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates

The rage that lives in all African Americans, a collective feeling of disgrace that borders on self-hatred.

This one reninds me of Toni Morrison and Marlon James, this rage that appears in their work that I don't understand but can recognize. 

Listening to . . . Things that I could have explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long lost friend, have not yet run out of time though I know that we all run out of time and some of us run out of it faster.

This I identify with, the longing to not have your sense of wonder exhaust, though I had just the kind of life he's talking about here where you get to travel and go to college and be young for longer. The idea of engaging with joy and wonder like a long lost friend. 

New poem

About the view out my window in the middle of the night

This farfetched starlight

Beyond the point where sleep comes soon 

Behind the setting of the moon 

A fatalistic sense of doom 

Can't quite inspire

Ill planned adventure

Between the sheets and void of mist

With racing heart and unchained breath

An unconscious shibboleth

Unlocks self censure

Mind's lonely mission

Moody clouds in black on grey

Too many hours til break of day

And yet they quickly slip away

In nervous frisson

Red rimmed sky eye

Disrupts the edge of patient dark

As silhouettes emerge more stark

A night that leaves its only mark

Passing by my eyes