Books Acquired Recently: Poetry Edition

ellipsis 49 (2013).

Strasko, Barbara Buckman. Graffiti in Braille. Cincinnati: Word, 2012.

Friday night was the debut reading for this year’s issue of ellipsis, Westminster College’s literary journal. ellipsis is unique in that it is run by students, but accepts submissions for review from anyone, so it ends up publishing a good mix of established poets, emerging poets from around the country (lots of newly-minted MFAs in the contributor list, ha ha), and a few students. Aside from some student poems, every year a featured poet who has previously published in the journal reads their work. This year’s poet was Barbara Buckman Strasko.

After this tragic week, and with the announcement about fifteen minutes before the reading began that the second Boston bombing suspect had been captured, I was really feeling the need for some poetry. The poems read from the journal were all quite good, with many of them being thought-provoking as well as finely crafted. Strasko’s work was also enjoyable. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is where my mother’s family has lived since the early 1700s, so I was happy to be able to talk with her after the reading. She was very approachable, and happy to talk with students, which not all visiting writers are. I look forward to reading her book!

Books Acquired Recently

Ai. No Surrender. New York: Norton, 2010.

Last Thursday I was grading some student essays about Martín Espada’s poetry reading on campus last month, and, as is often the case when reading student work, I was seized with an incredible desire to read literature (in this case poetry specifically) rather than reading writing about it. So after I was done at the office I walked up the hill to The King’s English Bookshop to look for some poetry because they have an excellent poetry section. I decided to buy Ai’s last collection even though I am not that familiar with her work–I’ve only read a few of her poems in anthologies. I read the book immediately and loved it! The collection consists primarily of long narrative poems, all very smooth, probably the best long poems I’ve read aside from Kenneth Koch’s. I highly recommend it.

Bergen, David. The Retreat. 2008. Toronto: Emblem, 2009.

As I’ve written here before, Bergen is one of my favorite novelists. However, I did not realize this book existed until I recently read his latest novel, The Age of Hope, which included The Retreat in the list of his previous books. Apparently it hasn’t been published in the U.S., which is why I didn’t receive the usual notification from amazon.com about “a new book from an author whose books you’ve purchased before.” However, I was able to find a copy of the Canadian edition from one of their used booksellers.

Saying Goodbye To Old Friends

The books that I am removing from my library.
The books that I am removing from my library.

I have decided to de-accession some of my books in preparation for my upcoming move. This is a difficult decision because I love my books, not just for their content, but also for the history that they embody. My obsessive book collecting is one way to document my life. There are many books that I have which I know I will almost certainly not read again and which probably will never come in handy as reference for my research, but I keep them because of the memories that I associate with them. Thus giving some of them away is like giving away part of myself, which sounds cliche, but is true in my case. I am not just a person with lots of books, I am a cyborg in the Harawayan sense who consists of my physical person and my books (and perhaps a few other objects as well).

But this group of books that I’ll take to my local bookstore (the Central Book Exchange) for some cash no longer have enough nostalgia attached to them to justify moving across the country. Most of the nonfiction is well-written, I’ll just never read it again. Most of the fiction (clearly not all–War and Peace is pretty decent, ha ha) is not. A few of the books are excellent, but I have two copies and only need one. It is an interesting cross-section of texts: some old religion textbooks from my undergraduate days, some superfluous chess books (I’ve had Pawn Power in Chess since high school, but I still haven’t read it, and haven’t played in about three years, so I wouldn’t get to it any time soon), some fiction.

Books Acquired Recently

Burton, Betsy. The King’s English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller. Salt Lake City: Gibbs, 2005.

The King’s English is a bookstore in my neighborhood that I have patronized frequently during my time living in Salt Lake City. It is probably the best bookstore which sells exclusively new books that I’ve ever been to–I always find something fascinating that I wasn’t looking for. Burton’s book is a history of the store’s first quarter century. I’ll be moving this summer to take a new job, and have been acquiring various mementos of my favorite places in the city. This purchase is a part of that saying goodbye.

Penner, Jessica. Shaken in the Water. Tipp City: Foxhead, 2013.

I received a review copy of my good friend Jessica Penner’s new novel, and I am hoping to get a review of it published in an academic journal. I’ve read a few excerpts of it previously which were quite good, so I am looking forward to reading the whole thing. You can buy it here.

Books Acquired Recently

Bergen, David. The Age of Hope. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2012.

Bergen is one of my favorite novelists, and I just found out that he has a new book out. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been published in the U.S. yet–aside from Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, Canadian writers get zero respect here–so I had to find a copy from Canada online. I was able to find one from a bookseller in Ontario via abebooks.com.

Braddock, Jeremy. Collecting as Modernist Practice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012.

I have always loved collecting things, so this book sounded appealing. As it turns out, the book considers anthologies as collections as well as discussing collecting objects, which is something that I am also quite interested in. I am looking forward to reading it. This, Lukas’s, and Wiebe’s books were bought from amazon.com.

Lukas, Paul. Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, from the Everyday to the Obscure. New York: Crown, 1997.

I really enjoy Lukas’s Uni Watch blog, in part because we share the same obsession with aesthetic detail. I just found out that he published this book on the subject fifteen years ago, and bought it right away. It looks like a nonfiction version of Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine, which is a good thing.

Wiebe, Dallas. Skyblue the Badass. Garden City: Doubleday, 1969.

I have been reading a fair amount of Mennonite literature over the past year after a long hiatus from the field. I’ve been struck by how few U.S. Mennonite novels there are in comparison to the Canadian tradition (including David Bergen), and have been making a concerted effort to read the few U.S. novels that do exist. Wiebe was one of the first U.S. Mennonite writers, but I’ve only read a few of his poems and one or two of his essays. All of his fiction is out of print, but I was able to find a copy of Skyblue the Badass (I couldn’t find any of Our Asian Journey) for $46.00. I bought it with some birthday cash. It’s in very good condition, and I love that the back cover has a note from my main man George Plimpton.

George Plimpton's note about Paris Review Editions.
George Plimpton’s note about Paris Review Editions.

Thinking About Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry

I am hoping to visit New York City sometime this summer, and go to a Mets game. Last night I dreamt that I bought tickets to this game, and that Dwight Gooden would be pitching. I thought to myself, “How impressive that Gooden pitched the first game I ever attended, and he’ll be pitching this one, too. That’s a pretty good career.”

Gooden is long retired, but two of the three parts of that dream statement are true. Gooden pitched the first Mets game I ever attended, a win against Atlanta in 1985 (an account of this game can be found in Davey Johnson and Peter Golenbock’s book Bats [New York: Putnam, 1986] on page 210). Although I was unaware at the time of the amazing season Gooden was having (I was only five, so didn’t really understand the concept of statistics; Gooden went 24-4 that year with a 1.53 ERA and won the Cy Young Award), I already knew his name, and I love being able to say that I saw him in person during one of the best seasons any pitcher has ever had. The first Atlanta batter singled, but that was about it. The Mets won 16-4, and Darryl Strawberry (whose name I also knew) hit a grand slam. Also, the lady sitting next to me in the stands gave me some cookies (the weird thin wafer sandwich kind with vanilla creme layers, which were my favorite at the time), and my father bought me a pennant and a set of Mets wristbands, one of which I had to give to my sister when we got home.

People, myself included, tend to forget that Gooden had a good career because after the successes of his first few seasons he was supposed to have a great career. This potential was destroyed by drug abuse and its consequent legal problems. But he went 194-112 with a 3.51 ERA over sixteen seasons–with a winning record in all but four of them–and was an All-Star four times. That is nothing to sneeze at. The same (all of it, alas) can be said for Strawberry’s career, in which he hit 335 homeruns over seventeen seasons with eight straight All-Star selections from 1984-1991.

I admit that when I think of both of these men I think about their disappointments first. Together, they were the Mets version of Anakin Skywalker: the chosen ones who failed to fulfill that role, falling victim to the Dark Side instead. But this attitude isn’t quite fair to them. Aside from their individual accomplishments, they played central roles on the 1986 championship team and 1988 division winners, when Strawberry should have been voted Most Valuable Player (though again, my first 1988-related thought of Gooden is about his failure to close game four of the NLCS, even though that was just as much Johnson’s fault for not taking him out as Gooden’s). They both seem to have found some peace in their turbulent personal lives, and it is time for us as fans to come to peace with their impressive careers as well.

USA 1 Costa Rica 0 in the Snow

The USA defeated Costa Rica 1-0 outside of Denver in a World Cup qualifier tonight, and what a spectacle! It snowed steadily–and at times heavily–the entire match. In fact, I’ve never seen such snow at a sporting event before. It was a crucial match for the USA, and they earned an essential three points, but I found myself not even thinking about the significance of the match as I watched because it was so much fun to watch the snow. Kudos to the referee for letting the match go its full length. The USA should qualify for the 2014 World Cup, and thus this result will just look like an early step on the road to qualification in the record book, but it will be a match that is remembered for years and years. It will be an event that one sees clips from on ESPN anytime the possibility of snow looms over a sporting event. I am happy I got to see it.

A Hilarious Photograph of the Harvard Band

Photograph © copyright by George Frey for the Associated Press.
Photograph © copyright by George Frey for the Associated Press.

Jay Caspian Kang has a hilarious column on grantland.com about this photograph of the Harvard band here. My favorite one is “Judith Butler.” I would love to know the bandmembers’ reactions to this.

Books Acquired Recently

Delany, Samuel R. The Mad Man. New York: Kasak, 1994.

I found this copy of the first edition of The Mad Man, one of my favorite Delany novels, online in good condition and for a good price from one of amazon.com’s independent sellers, so I decided to buy it. The second edition, published in 2002, is substantially revised, and is the one I reference in my work on Delany, thus I bought the first edition more as a piece of Delany memorabilia than as reading material.

Reimer, Al. Mennonite Literary Voices: Past and Present. North Newton: Bethel College, 1993.

I have been looking for a copy of this book on and off for over a decade, and finally found a copy surface on abebooks.com from a bookstore in Winnipeg. It is one of the early pieces of criticism on Mennonite literature, and I’ve been wanting to read it since taking a course in Mennonite literature in 2001.

Starlin, Jim, et al. Infinity Gauntlet. 1991. New York: Marvel, 2011.

This was a pure nostalgia purchase from amazon.com. I read the Infinity Gauntlet miniseries as a junior high schooler when it first came out, and recently had a conversation about it with a friend that inspired me to seek it out again.