Madwomen poets and me

Posted on Sunday, October 31, 2010 by Mark

This term I am taking a class called “Madwomen Poets” in which we are reading and discussing Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. It is technically a freshman-level class although I do not think there are any freshmen in it. There are 9 students so it is about the perfect size. The professor is Dr. Jeanne Emmons.

These are the books we’re using:
Plath, Sylvia. 2004. Ariel : the restored edition. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Sexton, Anne. 2000. Selected poems of Anne Sexton. Ed. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George. 1st ed. A Mariner Book. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin.

We started with Plath and read her poems over four weeks and have now been on Sexton for four weeks with one class left.

Each week we pick two poems from those for the week and answer the following questions about them:

What experience or event is the poem talking about? Be specific and detailed.
What feelings does the poem express about that experience? Show how you know this.
(A and B) Identify two metaphors from the poem that you found powerful or effective. Why was each metaphor effective?
How is each poem similar to other poems we have read by the same author? Identify the other poems by title, focus on similarities in imagery, metaphor, idea, feeling. Be specific.
Discuss experiences / feelings/ observations of your own that relate to the experiences / feelings / observations in these poems? Explain.

We also have to keep an ongoing file of themes from each poet. What I have ended up doing is more of a cross between and index and a concordance. It turned into a ridiculous amount of work; particularly since the class is a one credit hour course. ::shrug::

My ‘index’ allows me to find an answer to question 4 quite easily and to make connections I would miss otherwise.

I have really enjoyed this class and the assignments have helped me immensely in accepting, understanding, and relating to the poetry of these two poets; highly functional as poets but both immensely dysfunctional as individuals.

I am hoping that this small taste of the benefits of actually working at the reading of poetry will stick with me. Since taking up poetry just a couple of years back I have read a fair bit but I rarely spend any real quality time with it. I knew I should work harder, spend more time, think about it, reread each poem several times, and so on. But I mostly don’t.

Thanks to this class I now not only know that that would be a good idea but have actually experienced it to be so. My concern is that I will treat this much like physical exercise. Having been a certified fitness trainer (by the American College of Sports Medicine) I have a depth of knowledge about how exercise benefits the individual. Having actually been in quite good shape a couple of different times I also know firsthand how being in shape benefits me; less aches and pains, far fewer headaches, more energy, better sleep, less colds and other illness, and so on. I even have a decent understanding of sports motivation and psychology. Except I can not make that work on myself. I am out of shape far more often than I have been in shape.

Thus my concern is that I will ignore what I have learned about the rewards of working at poetry. But I have some ideas. I was going to spring one on you right here but after a discussion this morning with my new writing partner (as in writing group) I might try something local first.

As an example of what I did in this class, here is my second poem for last week:

For My Lover, Returning to His Wife

1. This is a description of how the narrator feels about how she as the other woman must let her lover return to his wife.

2. False value, as in paste jewelry; cheap and tawdry goods. Although the narrator is “A luxury” she is also a “momentary” and fleeting, rapidly dissipating one “like smoke from the car window. One of the guiding images of the poem is of art. The wife is described with images of “the potter’s wheel,” “Michelangelo” and his monuments and painted chapel ceilings. “She is solid” and enduring like pottery and marble statues. In contrast the narrator is “momentary” and like “a watercolor” simply washes off. Around the time this poem was written do-it-yourself paint-by-numbers watercolors (and otherwise) were all the rage. Anyone and everyone was encouraged to pick up a brush and fill in the outlines; anyone could be a painter! As for as art, lasting art, goes, little of value was produced by this fad.

3. A. “for the drunken sailor who waits in her left pulse” I take this to be a metaphor for the desire and lust, the quickened pulse, of the wife that will issue “the curious call” that draws the husband to her for their own lovemaking.

B. “As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.” Especially situated within the larger image of art this metaphor states that the other woman is ephemeral and is unstable, impermanent, as a watercolor left out in the rain. Perhaps also that, in effect, she can be simply rinsed away in the shower before the husband goes home to his “solid” and “monument[al]” wife.

4. Sexton became infatuated with breasts in Love Poem; five of the thirteen poems we have from it have breast references: The Breast, The Papa and Mama Dance, Mr. Mine, Song for a Lady, and Eighteen Days Without You (December 18^TH). We also find a breast reference in Rapunzel.

In this poem it is a more tender, although jealous, image as it is referring to her lover returning to his wife; “when you will burrow in arms and breasts … and answer the call, the curious call.” Rapunzel’s use is also tender, although deviant as it refers to an older aunt loving a young girl, “Old breast against young breast….” There are several images in The Breast but the most important in relation to this poem is “Later I measured my size against movie stars. I didn’t measure up. Something between my shoulders was there. But never enough.” Neither does she measure up against her lover’s wife in this poem. For another tender reference in a, I hope, more equal lesbian relationship, we find “On the day of breasts and small hips … we coupled, so sane and insane” in Song for a Lady [I really hope this is about one of her adult affairs and not about Nana.]

5. As I stated above, one of the primary feelings engendered by this poem is one of false value. The narrator knows that she is, at least to her lover, of far less value than the wife. This feeling, and its reciprocal of being valued far more highly than one should, are ones I felt in a deeply existential way upon reading Pablo Neruda’s Las manos de día / The Hands of Day. This book, originally published in 1968, is some of his late work. In it he questions, seriously and deeply, just what value he has been, just what it is that he has given the world. Unflinching, honest, sometimes scathing, he asks of what value his life and his poems have been? He has never made a broom, a chair, in fact, none of the objects he touched throughout his life; someone else made them all. His disappointment and shame for not engaging with the world more is clearly evident. As the translator, William O’Daly, says in his introduction:

“… don Pablo’s hands integrate experience, intellect, intuition, and feeling into a poetry that unites peoples of different languages and cultures by giving voice to his longing and to theirs, to what we struggle against or become, what we must embrace or eventually betray” (xi).

I read this book in October of 2008. It was a very difficult time for me, as I had not gotten back to my thesis and, despite wonderful things—mainly Sara—entering my life, many others had gone wrong. Sara was of two disparate minds about our relationship still, I had learned a fundamental lesson about my communication skills in a particularly harsh way, and I was again suicidal. Reading these poems of Neruda’s was both uplifting and almost soul destroying, often at the same time. Just what had I given the world? Of what use had I been? Of what use could I still be?

Sexton seems to see to be aware of the same sense of false value in being the other woman. She knows that she has betrayed her lover, his wife, and even herself. There are no questions in this poem, only statements. She is stating that she knows she has truly given neither the world, nor her lover, anything of value through this relationship.

Lost, I navigate
in the solitude they left me.
And because I made nothing,
I stare in the darkness toward so many absences
that have slowly turned me into shadow.

Ending of XI The Absent Ones – Pablo Neruda The Hands of Day 2008 Copper Canyon Press

Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red

Posted on Monday, October 4, 2010 by Mark

Carson, Anne. 1999. Autobiography of Red : a Novel in Verse. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Contemporaries.

This is my 3rd book review for the 12 Books, 12 Months Challenge.

I had read Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet in August 2009 and quite enjoyed it. Thus, when I came across this one last November in a bookstore for a reasonable price I grabbed it.

This is a retelling of the story of Geryon based on the existing fragments of Stesichoros‘ Geryoneis. All I will say about the story is that Geryon and Herakles are lovers.

Honestly, I am unsure what I thought of it. It seems both ancient and postmodern at the same time. I did enjoy the story, though, and it is a quick read. To give some idea of the book here is the TOC:

Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?
Read Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros
Appendix A: Testimonia on the Question of Stesichoros’ Blinding by Helen
Appendix B: The Palinode of Stesichoros by Stesichoros (Fragment 192 Poetae Melici Graeci)
Appendix C: Clearing Up the Question of Stesichoros’ Blinding by Helen
Autobiography of Red: A Romance
Interview (Stesichoros)

The 1st section provides some background on Stesichoros, Stesichoros’ influence as a writer, and on his Geryoneis.

This section begins with an epigraph by Gertrude Stein on the feeling of words doing as they want and have to do. Thus, Carson writes,

“Here we come to the core question ‘What difference did Stesichoros make?’ A comparison may be useful. When Gertrude Stein had to sum up Picasso she said, ‘This one was working.” So say of Stesichoros, “This one was making adjectives.’

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate names. … These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being” (4).

I love that! The “latches of being;” of particularity.

The 2nd section includes XVI purported fragments of Geryoneis but what portion of the “eighty-four papyrus fragments and a half-dozen citations” (5) are they?

See Wikipedia article on Stesichoros for the relevance of his purported blinding (and restoration of his sight) by Helen.

As I said, I enjoyed this. But I am doubtful how much I would have if it had been, say, twice as long. I absolutely loved Eros the Bittersweet; so much so that I bought a copy as soon as I had finished reading the library copy and am looking forward to rereading it.

Between Sara and I we also have the following two books by Carson:

Carson, Anne. 2002. The Beauty of the Husband : a Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Contemporaries.

Sappho. 2003. If Not, Winter : Fragments of Sappho. Trans. Anne Carson. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books.

I am looking forward to reading both of these, also, although the Sappho truly is fragments; generally very short fragments.

Carson, Anne, and Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.). 1986. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

A few more thoughts on reading last year and this

Posted on Tuesday, January 5, 2010 by Mark

In my recent Books Read in 2009 post I talked a bit about what I read last yea and a few other aspects of reading. In this post I want to touch on a few other issues, some of which are orthogonal ways of looking at what I read last year; so partially an update, partially new.

Public domain

January 1st was Public Domain Day [and when I started on writing some of what became this post].

In honor of the public domain, and Public Domain Day, I intend to read some William Butler Yeats whose stuff enters public domain this year. Look around the Public Domain Day site:“To celebrate the role of the public domain in our societies” and check out the list of authors (probably) entering public domain this year (Sigmund Freud, for instance, and Yeats). All of the listed authors have links to their Wikipedia pages (or the several I checked anyway. All seem to be links. Ergo.)

I have never intentionally read any Yeats so I am looking forward to it. For me, one of the big boons of reading ebooks on my Touch [I use Stanza and ePub files] is the number of public domain titles I am reading. Much of it I have been aware of, for assorted reasons, for much of my life but I never got to it. Although I have purchased a very few ebooks I have not made the transition to buying ebooks. Despite the advantages of ebooks—I do believe there are some (and that I’ve said so on this blog)—the limited capabilities of today’s hardware and software, combined with the fact that I am mostly reading stuff from free sources, means that I still buy print books. But the technology and the social/legal situation means that (currently) I get to focus on the stuff now free. I like that.

Based on my Books Read in 2009 post (and feedbooks) I read 28 public domain books last year. That is 35% of my entire reading. Only one (ah, 1.5) of those was in print: Siddhartha and half of Lord Jim. That means that 96% of my public domain reading (a solid 33% of all reading) was done on my Touch. [Only 2 of the total ebooks read were not in the public domain for the US, at least according to feedbooks.]

Fiction vs. Nonfiction

I didn’t even think of this until I saw Jessamyn West’s list a couple days after mine. When I got home I decided to sketch it out, both overall and for ebooks, and finshed vs. not finished. Jessamyn also looks at ratio of male-to-female authors (amongst a few other looks) and that does not serve any interestof mine. Data’s there, count for yourself if you are.

Overall (print/ebooks)

Finished: 44 Fiction, 39 Nonfiction.
Unfinished: 2 Fiction, 5 Nonfiction.

So 53% of total finished was fiction; 47% nonfiction. Pretty even split and appropriate, for now. If you throw in the unfinished books on both sides it comes closer to even (51/49%)

Ebooks

Finished: 24 Fiction, 4 Nonfiction
Unfinished: 1 each

86% of the finished ebooks were fiction; 14% nonfiction. Goes to 83/17% if add in one each unfinished, except the fiction gains it back since it is still being read; Emerson’s essays were given up completely.

Goodreads

As of 4 January I have joined Goodreads. Both Jenny and Angel asked me in the comments of the book post why I’m not on Goodreads. I’d never discovered a need, primarily. Thus never had an account and did not know what it is exactly.

Books—most in one of a couple different ways—get tracked in a lot of places by me. Amazon for some things I want; Google doc of acquisitions (chronological); LibraryThing as, primarily, a catalog for me of mostly stuff I own (~99%), I do little of the social there; Zotero for things I have read, regardless of source; wiki for what read and dates. What else is left?

Well. I haven’t been happy with the amount of engagement I’ve given many of these books (or articles) after I have finished reading them, in a long time. I should write more reviews, even mini-reviews, and other commentary on what I have read. Will this help?

One thing I do not like already is that I cannot find where to find someone I know who uses it so I can add them as a friend. The add friends function seems to really want me to give them my Gmail contacts, my facebook friends, etc. I am not cool with that.

Griped about it on twitter and a friend reached out and friended me. Many of her Goodreads friends are my friends too. But I still do not know how to find and friend Angel. Jenny was found in the previous manner.

I sure wish I could figure out how to simply get a csv file out of a Zotero collection. Might play with putting the last 3 years books read in if I could. I do not want to import my whole LibraryThing database. Wonder can I just export an LT collection? Need to look into that. And. Ebook metadata/editions remains a problem and even adds a new twist. Anyway ….

No promises but I am going to give it a try.

A new year in reading

No idea what 2010 will bring for me in reading. But I am looking forward to whatever it is. Am already reading some Wendell Berry poetry and Kundera on the novel.

Here’s to a great year of reading for everyone!

Books Read in 2009

Posted on Thursday, December 31, 2009 by Mark

Not sure what any of this means, or why, it is, or if, of importance. Much can be seen of my book reading habits over the last 3 years at this blog [see links at end of post]. According to previous posts, it looks like another banner year in the Lindner household for book reading. No doubt, article reading was even further reduced; perhaps I need a different ratio; slip a few more articles back in.

Numbers

Numbers, in the real world, are often hard. Overlapping and/or conflicting categories, different reasons for not finishing something, one read 1st half on a Touch and back half in a Penguin paperback (Conrad, Lord Jim), …. Nonetheless, one must try:

90 books total

9 unfinished (all reasons)

81 books read (all formats)

3-4 unfinished are still being read (2 actively: Chan and Mitchell; Gaskell)

Of these totals, the ebooks follow:

31 total

1 given up on (Emerson)

1 ebook/print (Conrad)

1 still reading (Gaskell)

29 ebooks read

So, ebooks made up 29/81 (~36%) of my book reading this year. Some of them being short stories, or short collections, probably helped. Hmmm. I am OK with this.

There is some color-coding and other data exposed, and, in some cases, some commentary. The commentary is down a notch let’s say and, sadly, leave it at that. Dates of reading where known are included.

The titles of books not finished are in red. An “edition statement” is present for all ebooks and says ebook (type) in a sort of pink.

“Professional development” in a comment generally implies that I read it at work on breaks (notice lengthy reading times).

Some previous commentary on a few of the ebook titles read [15, 17-19 & 45], and commentary on my experience reading ebooks on an Apple Touch, can be found in these earlier posts re ebook reading from 2009:

My personal journey into ebooks [See entries below: 15 and 17-19]
Update: My personal journey into ebooks [See entry below: 45]

Hopefully there is COinS metadata for all 91 entries; Zotero for the win!

So, without further ado:

Books Read in 2009

Steven Black, Serials in Libraries: Issues and Practices (Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited, 2006). Read: 5 Dec 2008-2 Feb 2009. Professional development.
Walt Crawford, The Liblog Landscape, 2007-2008 : a Lateral Look (Mountain View, Calif.: Cites & Insights Book, 2009). Read: mid-Dec 2008-6 Jan 2009
Wendell Berry, The Long-legged House, 1st ed. (Washington DC ;[Berkeley Calif.]: Shoemaker & Hoard ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2004). Read: 29 Dec 2008-8 Jan 2009
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha : an Indian tale (New York N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1999). Read: 1 Jan / 10 April-6 May 2009
Robert Butler, Intercourse : Stories (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008). Read: 3-4 Jan 2009. See also: Some things seen around the internet lately
Jacques. Ellul, A Critique of the New Commonplaces (New York: Knopf, 1968). Read: 3 Jan-15 March 2009. Read about half, all in all. Counting it read. Cited by David Bade in a talk he gave to the UIUC ASIS&T Student Chapter about 2 years ago.
Christopher Hutton, Abstraction and Instance: The Type-Token Relation in Linguistic Theory, 1st ed., Language & communication library v. 11 (Oxford [England]: Pergamon Press, 1990). Read: 4 Jan-?? 2009. For my CAS interests. Difficult.
Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems. Volume Two (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2005). Read: 9-10 Jan 2009. Wow! Very earthy, natural, attentive. Nice to have read it on the heels of Berry.
Mary Oliver, Red Bird : Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008). Read: 10 Jan 2009
Paul Woodruff, Reverence : Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Read: 11-23 Jan 2009. I had begun a post on the amazing synchronicity and overlap between, and their effect on me of, Berry, Oliver and Woodruff. Sadly, somewhere along the way, that fell through; like so many other attempted blog posts this past year. Even if it didn’t get posted, I sure wish I had written it for myself.
Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth = Residencia en la tierra, trans. Donald D. Walsh, New Directions paperbook 992 (New York NY: New Directions, 2004). Read: 16 Jan- 2009. Have not yet finished this. Spent several months at it slowly but the last fair bit is about war and destruction. I could only take so much, beautiful as it may be, with my son deployed to Iraq.
George Steiner, Grammars of Creation: Originating in the Gifford Lectures for 1990 (New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2001). Read: 26 Jan-1 March 2009. This was an extremely interesting book, although hard to follow sometimes. I had intended to read more Steiner after this but haven’t gotten to it yet.
Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Poems ([New York]: Counterpoint Press, 2008). Read: 28 Jan 2009. This was a gift from Sara that she brought me from her ALA Midwinter trip.
J. H Bowman, Essential Dewey (London: Facet Pub, 2005). Read: 2-16 Feb 2009. Professional development.
Rachel Kramer Bussel, ed., The Lust Chronicles Anthology, ebook (pdf). (Beverly, MA: Ravenous Romance), http://www.ravenousromance.com/the-lust-chronicles/the-lust-chronicles-anthology.php. Read: 5-13 Feb 2009
Pablo Neruda, Ode to Typography = Oda a la tipografía, trans. Enrique Sacerio-Garí (Torrance, Calif.: Labyrinth Editions, 1977). Read: 9 Feb 2009 in Illinois State University Milner Library Special Collections. [Issued in a portfolio. "One hundred copies printed." No. 26. "This book was printed on Japanese Masa and Ragston papers at Yale University School of Art using a Vandercook proof press. This book was designed & produced by Richard Bigus, Labyrinth Editions ..."--Colophon. "We have translated the ode not only into English but also into the typographical space it celebrates. The "Ode to Typography" is Neruda's song to a world of words as it is created under the ancient fingers of a masterful hand. Typography is also poetry. In this book printer Richard Bigus was the poet."--Translator's note. Letterpress printed. Bound in Japanese side-sewn style using linen thread. Covers created from artist-made marbled paper.]
Edgar Allan Poe, Bon-Bon, ebook (epub)., 1832, http://feedbooks.com/book/760. Read: 15 Feb 2009
D. H. Lawrence, Amores : Poems, ebook (epub)., http://www.munseys.com/book/24967/Amores. Read: 16-17 Feb 2009. Enjoyed quite a few of these.
Christina Rosetti, Poems [New Poems by Christina Rosetti: Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected], ebook (epub)., http://www.munseys.com/book/22140/Poems. Read: 18 Feb-7 March 2009. A bit much sometimes, especially when she’s on about religion, but I enjoyed quite a few.
Virginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style (Cheshire, Conn: Graphics Press LLC, 2006). Read: 1 March-. Gave up fairly quickly as did not feel prepared for it in some way. Hope to get back to it someday.
P. K. Page, Cry Ararat! Poems New and Selected (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967). Read: 2-5 March 2009. Quite enjoyed these.
Leonard Smith, Chaos : a Very Short Introduction, Very short introductions 159 (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6 March-27 April 2009. I really appreciated how it kept hammering away on the differences between models and reality; numbers in our mathematical models, the numbers we observe when taking measurements in the world, & the numbers inside a digital computer; and models, computer implementations of our models, and the real world.
H. G. Wells, Tales of Space and Time, ebook (epub)., 1900, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3469. Read: 11-20 March 2009. I quite enjoyed these stories. Makes an excellent read on a mobile device.
P. K. Page, Evening Dance of the Grey Flies (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981). Read: 14-15 March 2009. Enjoyed these also. Have a couple more books of Page’s poetry to read.
Alex Rose, The Musical Illusionist : and Other Tales (Brooklyn N.Y.: Hotel St. George Press, 2007). Read: 18 March-3 April 2009. Read this at Sara’s. Was pretty good, all in all, but I seriously longed for some sort of pointers (citations/references) to that which was based on fact. I guess there is just too much admixture of reality and make believe in this for me.
Lisa Lane, The Darkness and the Night : Blood and Coffee, ebook (epub)., A Ravenous Romance™ Fantastica™ Original Publication (Beverly, MA: Ravenous Romance, 2009), http://www.ravenousromance.com. Read: 20-25 March 2009
Barrett Watten, Conduit (San Francisco: GAZ, 1988). Read: 22-24 March 2009. Cited by Ron Day, “The “Conduit Metaphor” and the Nature and Politics of Information Studies” JASIST 51(9) p. 808. Although I was really looking forward to this, I didn’t quite get it. Mostly a series of disconnected thoughts, statements, etc. Maybe I’m just not bright or hip enough to get it.
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, ebook (epub)., 1895, http://feedbooks.com/book/32. Read: 25-28 March 2009. Enjoyed it but also noticed a few issues that with a bit of probing around academically I discovered have been commented on by Wells scholars. Tad bit pleased with myself for that.
Umberto Eco, Serendipities : Language & Lunacy, trans. William Weaver, Italian Academy lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). Read: 27-29 March 2009. Enjoyed this much better than the longer book for which it is the leftover bits (see Eco below).
Roy Harris, Mindboggling : Preliminaries to a Science of the Mind (Luton: The Pantaneto Press, 2008). Read: 29 March-1 April 2009
Charles Wagner, The Simple Life, trans. Mary Louise Hendee, ebook (epub). (New York: Groseet & Dunlap, 1901), http://www.munseys.com/book/25493/Simple_Life,_The. Read: 30 March-9 April 2009. Quite excellent; highly recommended.
Per Linell, The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins and Transformations, Routledge advances in communication and linguistic theory 5 (London: Routledge, 2005). Read: 2-15 April 2009. A most excellent book that I hope to revisit someday; preferably with my own copy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-reliance and Other Essays, ed. Edna H. L. Turpin, ebook (epub)., Merrill’s English texts (New York: Charles E. Merrill, 1907), http://www.munseys.com/book/17951/Essays. Read: 9-21 April 2009. Only read Intro and four essays (through Friendship) before giving up. I found Emerson practically incoherent and self-contradictory. I wanted to like and respect these essays more but simply could not. May give them another chance in another decade or so.
Ronald Gross, Peak Learning : How to Create Your Own Lifelong Education Program for Personal Enlightenment and Professional Success, Rev. ed. (New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999). Read: 12 April-. Am supposedly still reading this but haven’t been back to it in a while unfortunately.
Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress, The making of Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997). Read: 15 April-19 May 2009. Of some value but highly disappointing. The outtakes, which comprise Serendipities, make for a better read.
John Clarke, Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The Rede lecture delivered June 13, 1894., ebook (epub). (Cambridge [Eng.]: Macmillan and Bowes), http://www.bookglutton.com/detail/Clark/Libraries+in+the+Medieval+and+Renaissance+Periods/352.html. Read: 22-24 April 2009. This was an excellent lecture. The only drawback of the ebook version was that all but one image was missing.
Catherine Belsey, Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, Very short introductions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Read: 28-30 April 2009
John Miedema, Slow Reading (Duluth Minn.: Litwin Books, 2009). Read: 29 April-3 May 2009. Worth reading. Short with an easy style. [The LibraryThing reviewers who called this overly academic in their reviews are nuts.] I started on a review of this but didn’t get far due to assorted interruptions. Another one that I wish I had at least gotten down for myself.
Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning, and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Read: 2 May-30 June 2009. Ordered my own copy from amazon on the 2nd day of reading. This is an excellent book, especially appropriate for all LIS folks. Should be required reading for all LIS & book history folks.
Irving Singer, Sex: A Philosophical Primer ; with New Material on Same-Sex Marriage, Expanded ed. (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Read: 4-7 May 2009
Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information, and Wonder: What is Knowledge For? / (London: Routledge, 1991). Read: 9 May / 30 June-4 Aug 2009. Restarted 30 Jun with my own copy. A most excellent book which I hope to revisit on occasion. Recommended by David Bade.
Sheila S Intner and Peggy Johnson, Fundamentals of Technical Services Management, ALA fundamentals series (Chicago: American Library Association, 2008). Read: ?? May-11 Sep 2009. Professional development.
Toni Weller, Information History : an Introduction : Exploring an Emergent Field (Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2008). Read: 11-16 May 2009. OK but I was hoping for something more.
Nick Baylis, The Rough Guide to Happiness: Practical Steps for All-round Well-being, Rough guides (New York: Rough Guides, 2009). Read: 18 May-. Finished most of this. Free from LibraryThing via their monthly publisher review copy program.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, ebook (epub). (Project Gutenberg, 1997), http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/844. Read: 29-30 June 2009. My 1st Wilde and I enjoyed it immensely.
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (ebook (epub), 1894), http://www.feedbooks.com/book/162. Read: 1-6 July 2009. Quite enjoyed this and makes a fine ebook read.
Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood, ebook (epub)., 1922, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2158. Read: 6-11 July 2009. Awesome swashbuckling goodness!
Aristophanes, Clouds, trans. William James Hickie, ebook (epub)., 2001, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2562. Read: ?12-16 July 2009. Seriously underwhelmed. Need a good print edition with lots of foot/endnotes fleshing out the huge amount of missing context.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, ebook (epub)., http://www.bookglutton.com/detail/John+Dewey/Democracy+and+Education+an+Introduction+to+the+Philosophy+of+Education/400.html. Read: 18 July-22 Sep. My 1st long nonfiction work read on the Touch. It went OK but this, for me, would have been better in print.
Wendell Berry, Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World (Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint Press, 2009). Read: 1-2 Aug 2009. Excellent for all ages! Gift from Sara that she brought me from ALA.
Anne Carson and Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, D.C.), Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1986). Read: 5-11 Aug. Most excellent! Acquired my own print copy shortly after finishing it. Will definitely be revisiting this.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas, Beacon paperbacks 330 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Read: 12-16 Aug. Quit at pg. 16 because I just could not get into it. Maybe someday. The main text looked like it was better than the introduction but that was where the author was setting out what he had tried to do and placing the work in the context of his subsequent work [English translation came years after the original].
Susie Bright, Susie Bright’s Sexwise: America’s Favorite X-Rated Intellectual Does Dan Quayle, Catharine MacKinnon, Stephen King, Camille Paglia, Nicholson Baker, Madonna, the Black Panthers, and the GOP–, 1st ed. (Pittsburg, Pa: Cleis Press, 1995). Read: 16-19 Aug 2009. Saw this on the quick sort shelf waiting to be reshelved. What can I say? A large font Sexwise down the spine caught my eye.
Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, eds., Language Myths (New York N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1998). Read: 20-28 Aug 2009. Short overviews of lots of issues in linguistics and language studies. Generally good quality throughout that makes for a good introduction.
Birger Hjørland, Information Seeking and Subject Representation: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Information Science, New directions in information management 34 (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1997). Read: 28 Aug-11 Oct 2009. This time got through the whole thing.
Robert Fiengo and Robert May, De Lingua Belief (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006). Read: 29 May-. Supposedly still reading this but I think I’ve given up on it. While they are challenging the received norm in philosophy of language they are doing so on a very fine point. I agree that theirs is a valid critique but I also feel that it is spurious and does not begin to go far enough; that is, to question the whole of the received norm of philosophy of language.
Marina Orlova, Hot for Words: Answers to All Your Burning Questions About Words and Their Meanings, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Read: 31 Aug-1 Sep 2009. What can I say? This little tramp caught my eye on the new book shelf at Urbana Free (my public). Really not worth the effort; which isn’t much, mind you. Etymology of the worst kind. And by a[n intentionally] tarted up blond.
Alan Moore, Lost Girls (Atlanta: Top Shelf Productions, 2006). Read: Vol. 1 sometime in Aug. perhaps; vol. 2 7-8 Sep; vol. 3 8 Sep 2009
Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Read: 9- 24 Sep 2009. Another poet tried. Another that didn’t particularly speak to me.
Owen Barfield, Speaker’s Meaning, 1st ed. (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1967). Read: 13-15 Sep 2009. Enjoyed.
Owen Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays, 1st ed. (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1977). 15 Sep-15 Nov 2009. Enjoyed most of these essays. Would like to revisit this with my own copy someday.
Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, 1st ed. (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009). Read 20-24 Sep 2009. A popularization of some of the types of invented languages discussed by Eco, amongst others, but far more readable and interesting.
Karel Čapek, R.U.R., ebook (epub)., 1921, http://feedbooks.com/book/4199. Read 23-25 Sep 2009. I have been filling in the name of this story in crosswords for decades so I figured it was time to read it. I was not disappointed. Another great ebook read.
David M. Levy, Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, 1st ed. (New York: Arcade, 2001). Read 25 Sep-24 Nov 2009. Pretty good but read at work during breaks so the author’s point was kind of too spread out for me. Instead, I recommend Avatars of the Word [See below].
Arthur Conan Doyle, Through the Magic Door, ebook (epub)., 1907, http://feedbooks.com/book/356. Read 28 Sep-5 Oct 2009. Doyle on other books; excellent. Would be easier to (re)consult if printed.
Melissa Kwasny, Reading Novalis in Montana, 1st ed. (Minneapolis, Minn: Milkweed Editions, 2009). Read 2-31 Oct 2009. Mentioned positively on a good friend’s blog so I wanted to check it out but these poems just didn’t speak to me. But in a bit of sychronicity, the epigram at the start of Lord Jim is by Novalis.
Rafael Sabatini, Casanova’s Alibi, ebook (epub)., 1914, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3952. Read 5?-10 Oct 2009. Interesting read.
Paulo Coelho, The Way of the Bow, ebook (epub)., 2008, http://feedbooks.com/book/3873. Read 10 Oct 2009
Kurt Vonnegut, 2 B R 0 2 B, ebook (epub)., 1962, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/912. Read 12 Oct 2009. Quick, fun read.
Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, ebook (epub)., 1887, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/7. Read 12-13? Oct 2009. Hilarious!
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, ebook (epub)., 1868, http://feedbooks.com/book/3311. Read 12?-19 Oct 2009. Quite good; I highly recommend it. “Widely regarded as the precursor of the modern mystery and suspense novels, ….”
Kimberly Zant, Surrender (Lake Park, GA: New Concepts, 2007). Read 20-22 Oct 2009
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil, ebook (epub)., 1859, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4316. Read: 23-24 Oct 2009. Decent enough short story but not classic Eliot.
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, ebook (epub). (1921), http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4146. 25-26 Oct 2009
Jane Austen, Lady Susan, ebook (epub)., 1794, http://feedbooks.com/book/3922. 22?-30 Oct 2009. Yes, I did read Huxley in the midst of this. It got off to a slow start for me but I went back to it after Huxley. All in all, I’d say it is decent enough. Epistolary novel.
Stephen Dunn, Local Visitations: Poems, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). Read 1-3 Nov 2009. Another poet that really didn’t speak to me.
Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche, ebook (epub)., 1921, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2168. Read: 2-13 Nov 2009. Good Sabatini; the one he is most known for but I prefer the previous 2 I read more.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, ebook (epub)., 1912, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/67. Read 13-14 Nov 2009. Excellent!
Max Black, The Importance of Language, Cornell paperbacks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). Read: 6/14 Nov 2009. Read on the way to/from ASIST 2009 Annual Meeting; 1st half on planes there, back half on a train home.
David Yanor, ed., Lust: Quills Annual Erotic Magazine, vol. 1 (Vancouver: Quill’s Canadian Poetry Magazine, 2004). Read: 14 Nov 2009. I read this on the City of New Orleans train from Chicago to Champaign on the way home from ASIST 2009. I got this from Little Sister’s in Vancouver.
George Eliot, Brother Jacob, ebook (epub)., 1860, http://www.feedbooks.com/book/4370. Read: 17-18 Nov 2009. Again, not the best Eliot, but fun and short.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ebook (epub)., 1900, http://feedbooks.com/book/719. Read: 18 Nov-11 Dec 2009. See also entry below. Read just about half on my Touch and then while at the Illini Union bookstore during a 30% off sale I noticed a new Penguin Classics paperback for $7. On sale it was $4.90 so I grabbed it and finished the novel in print and then went back and read the introductory essay by Alan H. Simmons. Print also provided me the glossaries and all the editorial notes. This was an excellent novel. The Novalis epigram, mentioned in the Kwasny entry above, that opens the novel is: “It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.”
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim : a tale, [New ed.] /. (London: Penguin, 1900).
James Joseph O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998). Read: 18 Nov-14 Dec 2009. Noticed Dorothea Salo thanking Steve Lawson for recommending this in friendfeed so picked it up. Quite good; recommended.
R. L. Trask and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Linguistics, Introducing … (Cambridge [Eng.]: Icon Books / Totem Books, 2000). Read: 29 Nov 2009
Duncan Emrich, The Folklore of Weddings and Marriage; the Traditional Beliefs, Customs, Superstitions, Charms, and Omens of Marriage and Marriage Ceremonies (New York: American Heritage Press, 1970). Read: 10 Dec 2009. This was grabbed on a lark when looking for books on alternative wedding vows because it was illustrated by Tomi de Paola.
Mary Oliver, American Primitive : Poems, 1st ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1983). Read: 13 Dec 2009. One of my favorite poets so far.
Saki, The Chronicles of Clovis, ebook (epub)., 1911, http://feedbooks.com/book/3401. Read 14-?? Dec 2009. Decidedly wicked and wickedly funny.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. 1st ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Read 17-30 Dec. Quite enjoyed this.
Chan, Lois Mai, and Joan S Mitchell. Dewey Decimal Classification: Principles and Application. 3rd ed. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC, 2003. Read 21 Dec-. Professional development for the new year.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. Curious, If True: Strange Tales, ebook (epub)., 1859. http://www.feedbooks.com/book/3335. Read 21 Dec-. Enjoying this so far; 2 out of 5 stories read.

Well, that’s it for 2009. #90 and 91 are still being actively read. A few others will hopefully be continued soon. As to what’s next? I got lots of Mary Oliver, Erotic Poems, Crowley, and a Harris book for Christmas. I also have plenty on the ‘to be read’ shelf among many more. And seeing as I have yet another ‘to be read’ shelf at work, too, … *le sigh*

Metadata issues and the issues of (non)reference for ebooks still sucks. I have begun doing my best to get my ebooks via the Web on the MacBook and then syncing them. When I grab the file from feedbooks, gutenberg, …, I bookmark the page in my delicious account and tag it with ebook. Then I can at least see what the source is claiming for what I believe I got. Has been somewhat helpful but a real pain. Most of the metadata in the CoinS in this post for ebooks comes from my entering a good deal of data from those pages. Very little good structured data in free things often; it is a difficulty.

Oh well. Here’s to reading in 2010!

2007/2008 Books read and earlier 2009 posts re Reading

Sometimes – Song series 1

Posted on Monday, March 16, 2009 by Mark

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can see your soul

out of sight,
your deep dark secrets
ebb and flow like the tide
but all that i see
are infinite spectrums of possibility

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can reach your soul

i love the infinite distances
that exist between us.
with persistence, our reach
will be enough.

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can touch your soul

guardians of each other’s solitude,
sheltering, yet giving wing,
we are free to take flight in
that beautiful touch of the other
“whole and before an immense sky.”

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can feel your soul

from the inexpressible unity of
life death, heaven earth, you me
rises this delicious nourishing love
giving the flowers strength,
setting us both ablaze, eternally.

when i look deep in your eyes, i swear i can see your soul
sometimes …

Thanks to James and Rilke for the inspiration, motif, and some of the words.

James – “Sometimes” from Laid [WorldCat entry].

Rilke, Rainer Maria. 2005. The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke. Trans. Ulrich Baer. New York: Modern Library. [WorldCat entry]

Sometime prior to October of last year, I was inspired to begin a series of poems that were inspired by one or more lines from songs. This is the 1st one to be completed.

The 1st stanza is pretty much all me, while the rest are based on the letters of Rilke. Much of the Rilke material comes from a section of a letter that (in one translation) begins:

In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude … (36).

Most places on the Internet cite this (if they cite it at all) as coming from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. That is simply not true. Perhaps as (one of) his best known prose work it just gets the nod, but it is from the above collection and is from a letter dated August 17, 1901 to Emanuel von Bodman.

There is another translation also on the Internet which is what sent me after this in the first place. It was quite a bit of work to finally track this down, and I had the assistance of another librarian to do so. Some day I may write a lengthy post on these kinds of issues [I certainly had meant to long before now].

The Internet served me well in turning me on to the wonderful sentiments expressed by Rilke. And then it proceeded to routinely deceive me as to the source of said sentiments. The Internet can be a wonderful thing. It can also be horrible in that people (knowingly or not) lie.

Through it all I just keep trying to string a few words together.

My personal journey into ebooks

Posted on Monday, March 9, 2009 by Mark

Recently I began reading ebooks. Before I address which books specifically and related issues let me put a few things on the table.

Preliminaries:

This post is about my experiences in the recent present and not about the future of what will or might be (even if I comment on that).

I have read quite a fair number of lengthy things from desktop computer CRTs, a flat panel display, and on both my 12″ Mac PowerBook and my 13″ MacBook. I read quite a few PDFs and lengthy web pages that I did not want to print out for whatever reason, many of them from the PowerBook, back in the day when I was reading heavily in our field and writing about it here.

Several years ago I bought a PDF ebook on some computer topic from the Woody’s Watch email newsletter folks. Maybe I read it, maybe I used it as a reference book. Can’t say as I remember.

Last summer via rebate I got a 16GB iPod Touch for free when I bought the MacBook. Until recently, though, I hadn’t used it much at all. I loaned it to a friend to take to ALA Midwinter and she tested out a few apps and also discovered that our campus IT folks had finally made an “app” available that connects one to the campus network whenever you are in range.

The insta-connection made a huge difference in my willingness to use it. The other thing that made me start using it more is the app Stanza.

Stanza is a very useful app, although not perfect (more about this in a moment). I still have a paper-based book in my backpack for reading on the bus and/or at lunch, but I find that it has been remaining in the backpack more and more as I grab the Touch and go (lunch). Part of this is that I have a new winter coat and I do not have a nice big pocket to put a book in anymore. Part of it is something(s) else.

In some ways the Touch is more convenient. It certainly lies flat better than most books. It is lighter than most every book. But it also has drawbacks. No. 1 is that a large number of things I want to read are not available for the Touch, either due to format issues or period. No. 2 is that I have a ton of print things I do want to read and am not about to pay again for an ebook version, assuming one is available. And, yes, I do imagine that over time availability will change. [Note: Amazon's recent Kindle app for the Touch/iPhone will do little to make the books I want to read available any time soon, if ever.]

I am aware that if I used Google Books then I might find even more available than I think are, but until the scanning/OCR process is greatly improved No Thank You! I used to do electronic reserves work and while this work is valuable in assorted ways I hated reading even the quality work we produced. [UIUC still has a massive way to go in this arena and could learn from what we were doing.] Thus, I’m not about to routinely try reading Google Books books on my Touch. Also, I believe that requires a network connection. Sustained reading on my Touch should not require a network connection except for the occasional acquisition.

I still greatly value production value in my content, be it editorial work, text layout, or the many other qualities that go into a quality reading experience (in any medium). [See for example, Mandy Brown's In Defense of Readers at A List Apart.]

On that note, on to issues of

Formatting:

So far, I have read one purchased book and a couple free ones from assorted sources. The purchased one had the worst formatting in Stanza.

The purchased book was The Lust Chronicles from Ravenous Romance. Ravenous Romance publishes only ebooks and audiobooks and they are quite affordable [$1.99 for short stories, $4.99 for ebooks, $12.99 for audiobooks]. Their ebooks come in multiple formats and for one price you can download any and every format you need. Your purchase price allows you to download the book up to 50 times over a 50-day period. Not sure why these are the terms but they are certainly liberal.

I initially got the .epub format which they say is for Stanza. Could not make it work on either my laptop or the Touch, nor could we get it to work on S’s laptop or Touch [1st & 2nd gen Touchs, respectively]. After futzing around in the FAQs at both Ravenous Romance and Lexcycle I gave up and grabbed the PDF.

The PDF looks exquisite on the laptop either in Adobe Acrobat or in Stanza. But. It is completely wonky on the Touch. It is readable, but it is distracting. The table of contents is run together as one long paragraph instead of as a list. The formatting of the individual story titles and authors, and all white space between chapters, is thrown out and thus the stories are all kind of run together. I guess for $4.99 I cannot complain too much but it was a distraction during reading.

Turns out this is what Stanza does with PDFs, thus I have started using PDF Annotater on the Touch for PDFs. It provides annotation capabilities and allows one to read PDFs with graphics. This purchased pdf looks exquisite in PDF Annotater on the Touch.

The other books I have read are:

E. A. Poe, “Bon-Bon” (1832) (short story) from www.feedbooks.com. The formatting on this one isn’t too bad. Default format is fully justified which I do not like when the justifier is not good, or, as in the case of the Touch screen, the “page” size is small. I just turned off the full justification and, although the right margin is even more ragged than normal in ragged right justification, I do like it better.

Paragraph breaks exist but new paragraphs are indented a whole 1 space. Not much, but now that I left justified the text it is generally enough. With the text fully justified over to the right margin one space was not enough. All-in-all, the formatting of this short story is not bad, especially with the changes I just made.

D. H. Lawrence, Amores: Peoms (1916) New York : B. W. Huebsch (E-text prepared by Lewis Jones) www.blackmask.com [2007 Blackmask Online / Munsey's Magazine]

[Seems blackmask is now Munseys and will redirect you to http://www.munseys.com/.]

This text seems to be formatted fine but I have some concerns. Being a neophyte reader of poetry I am still trying to get a grasp of “the art of the poetic line” and the narrow screen width plays havoc with such.

Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing. Great prose might be filled with metaphors. The rhythmic vitality of prose might be so intense that it rises to moments of regularity we can scan. Its diction may be more sensuous, more evocative, than that of many poems. We wouldn’t be attracted to the notion of prose poetry if it didn’t feel exciting to abandon the decorum of lines (Preface, xi).

Longenbach, James. 2008. The Art of the Poetic Line. Art of series. Saint Paul, Minn: Graywolf.

Sure, I can rotate the Touch and get a wider line length but then am required to move forward (or backward) through more “pages.” And this forces more stanzas to be broken across pages so that the next step in poetic semantics from the line to the stanza is also seriously affected.

I’m not saying that this is a non-starter or that it is an issue for more practiced readers of poetry but it is a concern to me.

Christina Rosetti, Poems (1906) Boston : Little, Brown and Co. / Author’s edition, revised and enlarged 1876, University Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. Produced by Steven desJardins, Jeffrey Online Distributed Proofreading Team. www.blackmask.com [2007 Blackmask Online / Munsey's Magazine]

Pretty much the same issues (for me) as Lawrence. Also, there are an awful lot of poems in this text so navigation by bookmarks (where every poem is a bookmark) involves a lot of scrolling.

For another perspective, “why is text on screens so ugly?,” see the post at if:book re hyphenation (or lack thereof) in e-texts.

Page navigation:

For this issue, I am not sure whether it is the Touch or Stanza. Page navigation is accomplished by touching the right side of the screen to move forward, and the left side to move backward. Sometimes the pages go the opposite way from which you are touching it to do so. Generally it isn’t too big of a deal but it is a pain when reading poetry. It is a massive deal when one is trying to read poetry aloud in an attempt to cheer up someone special. My Touch got tossed across the room the other evening when it did this several times in a row to me. Not that my getting upset helped the situation at all. Thankfully it didn’t hurt it, either (the situation or the Touch).

Metadata and citation issues:

I am a cataloger. But even before that I have lived a lifetime with “bibliographic” data and issues of citation, be they in person (oral), in writing, or on the web. [OK, the last one hasn't been a lifetime, but you get the point.]

I have been listing my albums (LPs) in assorted documents since I was about 14. Shortly after that came the books, the cassette tapes, the CDs, DVDs, journal articles, …. Once upon a time, I practically made a living of testing assorted free- and shareware database software for cataloging one’s collections. Metadata is almost always important to me. Often I even exert the effort to control and harness it.

The web and its promises—the Semantic Web, linked data, whatever you want to call what we might one day have, and what we could even have today—give these efforts even more importance. I am not claiming we need a full-fledged librarian version of authority control for the web, but things must be what they purport to be and when that purporting comes from another linked resource then it is even more critical that the purporting be correct and not subject to change in some fundamental way that invalidates the claim.

Also, this data must be fully and easily shareable, despite the recent objections of one of LibraryLand’s overlords.

Bussel, ed. The Lust Chronicles at Ravenous Romance – This page does a decent job of giving me some useful metadata. I get a title, an ISBN, and a publication date (to the exact day). I’m less pleased by the attribution statement; “by Rachel Kramer Bussel” is true in a loose interpretation of “by” but not in the more bibliographic sense. RKB is the editor (and compiler) of this collection of edited, slightly reworked, blog posts. But at least the “by” name is linked so that we can easily see what else this “author” is responsible for from this publisher.

My biggest gripe with this page (and the publisher) is that they provide no machine-readable data for Zotero (or similar programs) to pick up. Sure, I can bring that page in as a web page in Zotero but then I get minimal data about the page itself and not about the book. So much then has to be manually changed (including type of resource) that it’s almost easier to just do it by hand in the first place.

At least the human-readable data on the page is describing the book itself.

Poe. “Bon-Bon” at feedbooks.com. Pretty much the same issues as above. No machine-readable metadata supplied. Pulling into Zotero as a web page serves little purpose due to the low amount of data, most of which needs some massaging. No ISBN.

Lawrence. Amores at munseys.com. OK, here is where I start to lose it. There is all kinds of neat data here for “this” book. Except it isn’t. The data is purportedly brought in from LibraryThing and it is for … wait. Wait for it. The title and author are correct. But all that other neat data (Blurbers, awards and honors, epigraph, last words, people/characters, canonical title, …) is for Like Water for Chocolate. You know, that might be a good book. It might even be great. But it is not Lawrence’s Amores. I guess we’re actually lucky we can’t pull in all that bullshit data automatically.

Rossetti. Poems at munseys.com. My first gripe is that this book on a cover internal to the file claims to be New Poems by Christina Rosetti: Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected. So what is the title? Other than that, it has the same issues as Lawrence’s Amores, except this one claims, via data also pulled from LibraryThing, to be The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

So much for linked data and/or what things purport themselves to be.

The following comments (this section) only apply to the freely available, public domain books that I’ve been reading and/or looking at.

When you browse these books at sites like munseys.com and feedbooks.com you are generally not seeing the covers that belong to the version of the text that you are acquiring/browsing. feedbooks.com looks to (possibly) be better about having the cover art that goes with their books, but munseys.com most certainly does not. The text of these books is not from the Norton Critical or Penguin editions, for instance.

Many would argue that this is a benefit of freely available cover art. I disagree. Maybe I’m just too old—a dinosaur from another age—but I feel that these visual clues are important to knowing just which text I am dealing with. This misdirection is not the slightest bit useful to me. In fact, I consider it a serious problem and would rather just see a generic cover like those available in LibraryThing [example from my library]. [Hmmm. Interesting. At munseys.com (web version) they don't show cover art. I only see them when browsing from the Touch.]

I mean c’mon. I’m browsing books on my Touch. How useful can a “cover image” thumbnail even be? Ah well; I know people will disagree. If these covers work for them then great. I consider it a disservice. At best.

Which leads to the next question regarding these books?

Which edition am I reading? [I'll ignore FRBR to avoid the wholly unresolved issues surrounding Expressions, Manifestations, and Items in the electronic world.] But in the old school world of print books, using languge that is at least nearing a couple centuries now, which edition am I looking at? Despite the lie of the cover art, I am pretty well convinced that I do not have the text of, say, the Penguin Classic edition.

Maybe I just need to get with the new world order of no authority and information that is totally free. I.e, information that is totally disconnected from its cultural and historical contexts. I may only be reading a novel but this dinosaur wants to be able to put it into its proper context, thank you very much. And I want to be able to cite it in all the assorted ways in which I may need/want to do so.

Zotero

On the topic of Zotero, does it need a new format for ebooks? Sure, ebooks are just books. But—and this is highly preliminary as this is my 1st attempt at citing them—they need a field for URL to the book (if directly addressable as a download) and one for the provider. Those two requirements could possibly be served by the URL and Repository fields. But what about recording the format (.epub, .pdf. .mobi, …)? Anything else I’m missing?

Comments on the Works

The Lust Chronicles – This was hit and miss as one might expect of a book composed of disparate blog entries. But all in all, and for $4.99, I enjoyed it. There’s something to be said for discreetly reading erotica on one’s ebook device while riding public transit.

“Bon-Bon” – I thought Poe’s short stories were supposed to be good. Maybe I just got the wrong one. Meh. Thankfully it was short.

Amores – I quite enjoyed this and immediately looked for a print copy. It does not seem to be in print anymore and the only used copy I found was an old library castoff for a stupid amount of money. But one can get Complete Poems (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [1088 pages], which includes lots of extra material from Amazon for $16.47, or one can get The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence (Wordsworth Pub., 352 pages) for $7.99. I kind of want the 1st one but I do not enjoy reading from books that large. I have requested a copy via ILL of the 1st and larger one to see if it is the one I want.

Poems – This one I am back and forth on. I enjoyed some of the early poems and some from the middle and then there was a long stretch before finding some more I liked. There are a lot of poems here, some fairly long. I liked it enough to try and find a decent collection of her poems in print.

This exercise led to failures with library metadata; specifically, uniform titles in WorldCat. Telling me that there are 134 editions available but making it hard to narrow down which edition my librar(ies) hold is not a service. It is a disservice. I don’t want just any edition. But then, perhaps, I am a dinosaur. That, and library metadata issues, are topics for different posts.

Conclusion

I will keep reading some ebooks and PDFs on my Touch. In fact, I downloaded several more titles the other night. I already had the Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So I grabbed Emerson’s Essays, Wells’ Tales of Time and Space and The Time Machine, Wagner’s The Simple Life, and one or two others.

Hopefully some of the issues I complain about above will work themselves out. My concern is whether they will be solved or whether I (and others) will simply adjust to this brave new world. Either way works, I guess. But I fear the second leads to the loss of something meaningful.

Books read in the 2nd half of 2008

Posted on Sunday, January 4, 2009 by Mark

For assorted reasons my book reading greatly increased this past year. Based on that I split this list into two, posting the 1st half (or so) on 11 August in a post titled Books read in 1st half of 2008 (and some).

In the earlier post, I reported reading 26 books and re-reading 3 books. This list includes 45 books read, one re-read (also in the 45), and 4 unfinished. I think there are 2 in the read count that weren’t technically finished but close enough. The four unfinished are: Williams, et al.; Black; Crawford; and Berry. All but the Williams, et al. are currently being read.

Thus, totals for the year are:

71 books read
4 books re-read
4 books unfinished

Books Read in 2007 [33 books read, 3 of which were re-reads, and 9 books in progress]

Wow! This is a big increase. Not as big in magnitude as 2006 to 2007, but bigger in raw numbers by far.

As to why I censored myself please see this post or this one which contains the real explanation.

The rest of 2008s book reading follows: [those not in 1st post]

early-June – mid-August (perhaps)

Joannides, Paul., and Daerick Gross. 2007. The Guide to Getting It On! : for Adults of All Ages. 5th ed. [Waldport], Or: Goofy Foot Press.

Read most of this—so counting it as finished—except for a couple of chapters that are directly non-relevant to me.

Highly recommended; highly affordable; and there’s a brand-new 2009 edition out.

11 – 30 August

Harris, Roy. 1996. Signs, Language, and Communication: Integrational and Segregational Approaches. London: Routledge.

I actually read the Preface thru ch. 2 on 10 Mar, and re-read those parts again in May. Then I started over from the beginning in Aug.

This is a good book. It presents a pretty good introduction to Integrationism, but there are many newer works by Harris, and it is one of his longer works. All in all, though, it probably presents the most comprehensive intro to Integrationism. Bought my own copy, to say the least.

…, the question often asked is: ‘But what other theoretical basis is there for the study of communication?’ To that question this book tries to suggest an answer. It is written from the viewpoint of a hypothetical theorist (‘the integrationist’) who, although very sceptical of what passes for the study of communication in modern academic circles, does not (yet) consider it a lost cause.

What the integrationist seeks is an explanatory account of communication which will accord with our lay understanding of human existence but does not prejudge fundamental questions about how and why human beings communicate.

…

The integrationist’s hypothetical opponent is ‘the segregationist’. Why the term segregationist? Because for this theorist semiological knowledge and knowledge of the world are two segregated domains. … For the integrationist, on the other hand, these are not two domains at all but a single integrated domain, and its separation into two is already a questionable theoretical move which risks distorting our analyses of communication (x).

The present book is concerned only with general principles of communication theory (xi).

12 – 14 August

Kerner. Censored

12 – ?? August

Corn. Censored

15 August. Re-read 21 / 23 September

Neruda, Pablo. 1993. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Penguin twentieth-century classics. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books.

Classic Neruda and my first. I enjoyed it immensely.

XII Your Breast Is Enough

Your breast is enough for my heart,
and my wings for your freedom.
What was sleeping above your soul will rise
out of my mouth to heaven.

In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.

I have said that you sang in the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn,
and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

You gather things to you like an old road.
You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.
I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated
that had been sleeping in your soul.

16 – 22 August

Carroll, Lewis. 1998. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland : and, Through the looking-glass and what Alice found there. Penguin classics. London; New York: Penguin Books.

Glad that I finally got around to reading a non-Disneyfied version.

23 August – ??

Williams, J. Mark G, et. al. 2007. The mindful way through depression : freeing yourself from chronic unhappiness. New York: Guilford Press.

Started on this but did not get too far as it is a self-help book. The kind which—by definition, perhaps—requires doing something more than simply reading. Plus, I was going to do some active work in breathing, yoga, and/or related areas and despite a small beginning on said activities did not get very far. Something to definitely improve on in the upcoming year.

24 August – 3 September

Cohen, Martin. 2008. Philosophical Tales: Being an Alternative History Revealing the Characters, the Plots, and the Hidden Scenes That Make up the True Story of Philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

British smarminess. Not at its best, either. All in all, not very satisfying.

30 August – 1 September

Harris, Roy. 1995. Signs of Writing. London: Routledge.

This is simply excellent. Short, too. Bought myself a copy and am really looking forward to re-reading it with pencil in hand.

Communication itself, whatever form it takes, is an integration of activities, rather than a separate form of activity carried out in addition to others; and the product of that integration, as well as its enabling mechanism, is the sign.

In the case of writing, the activities that have to be integrated for communication to take place are designated globally, but vaguely, by the traditional terms writing and reading. Biomechanically, the two are independent (as is shown by the possibility of being able to read without being able to write); but as constituents of the process of communication they are interdependent. In other words, whatever can in principle be written must in principle be readable. The two types of activity are linked semiologically by a relationship of reciprocal presupposition.

An integrational approach to writing rests upon this single premiss and on the development of its theoretical implications.

Self-evidently true as the basic premiss may seem, the fact remains that no semiological study has hitherto examined the consequences that may be drawn from it as a foundation for the study of writing (5-6).

15 – 29 September

Steinman, Lisa Malinowski. 2008. Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

23 – 25 September

Borges, Jorge Luis. 2000. This Craft of Verse. Ed. Calin Andrei Mihailescu. The Charles Eliot Norton lectures ; 1967-1968. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Found this utterly lovely little book of lectures practically hidden away in the deepest bowels of the compressed stacks when I went looking for something else on poetry. Bought myself and my lady a copy almost immediately after I began reading it.

Whenever I have dipped into books of aesthetics, I have had an uncomfortable feeling that I was reading the works of astronomers who never looked at the stars. I mean that they were writing about poetry as if poetry were a task, and not what it really is: a passion and a joy (2).

…, I would like to say that we make a very common mistake when we think we’re ignorant of something because we are unable to define it. If we are in a Chestertonian mood (one of the very best moods to be in, I think), we might say that we can define something only we know nothing about it (17).

There are, of course, verses that are beautiful and meaningless. Yet they still have a meaning—not to the reason but to the imagination (85).

Anyone who knows me or has read this blog for the last year or so ought to be able to see how (or, at least, that) these quotes speak to me.

The lecture titles are:

The Riddle of Poetry
The Metaphor
The Telling of the Tale
Word-Music and Translation
Thought and Poetry
A Poet’s Creed

26 – 29 September

Oliver, Mary. 1994. A Poetry Handbook. 1st ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co.

29 September – 4 October

Barbach. Censored

29 September – 17 October

Neruda, Pablo. 2004. The Captain’s Verses (Los versos del Capitán). Trans. Donald D. Walsh. New York: New Directions.

7 – 11 October

Palmer, Donald D. 1998. Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners. For Beginners.

8 – 10 October

Bussel. Censored

11 October

Boland, Eavan. 2001. Against Love Poetry. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton.

12 – 13 October

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1995. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. 1st ed. Schocken.

Dated and with well-known theoretical issues but still a classic.

14 – 15 October

Neruda, Pablo. 2008. The Hands of Day. Trans. William O’Daly. Bilingual. Copper Canyon Press.

This was simply an amazing book of poems. This is the only book where I willing and without hesitation read each and every poem twice immediately. I also marked a much higher percentage as favorites/speaking to me. Having read several Neruda books so far (and after) this is by far my favorite!

I wish I could explain why but best that I can say is that the poems, individually and collectively, really spoke to me. In this book, Neruda really questions his life, its purpose, its meaning, and whether he actually did anything of value with his hands. It is intense. But it is what I need.

I declare myself guilty of never having
fashioned, with these hands I was given,
a broom.

Why did I not make a broom?

Why was I given hands at all?

What purpose did they serve
if I …

I “The Guilty One”

In this shop
I want to buy a pair of hands,
I want to discard
my own:
they do not serve me.

I want to know
whether being so old
I am capable
of starting over,
of working anew,
of carrying on.
With fresh feeling, I want to touch
the world,
the bodies,
the bells,
the roots,
to be born
in other fingers,

…

XXXV “Seal of the Plow”

There are many poems here asking the questions of these two. What have I done? Has it been of value? Why did I not do something with my hands? Was I valuable? Did I provide a service to the world?

The simplicity of the questioning is stunningly powerful, without coming anywhere near being maudlin.

I am going to crumple up this word,
I am going to twist it,
yes,
it is too flat,
it is as though a big dog or a great river
had run it over with a tongue or water
for many years.

In the world I want
roughness to be witnessed,
the salt of iron rust,
the toothless power
of the earth,
the blood
of those who spoke and those who did not speak.

I want to witness the thirst
inside the syllables:
I want to touch the fire
within the sound:
I want to feel the darkness
of the shout. I want
words rough
as virgin stones.

LX “Verb”

“I want to witness the thirst inside the syllables. … I want words as rough as virgin stones.”

Yes. I do want this.

17 – 20 October

Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1993. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. M.D. Herter Norton. Rev. ed. W. W. Norton & Company.

Excellent; especially from one so young (when written).

…, dear sir, be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot now be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer [p. 35].

20 October – 8 November

Grayling, A. C. 2002. Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age. Oxf0rd: Oxford University Press.

Spotty; not as good as I had hoped. Although he bravely calls things as he sees them.

31 October – 15 November

Alfaro. 2006. Real.m. 1st ed. [Columbus Ohio]: Silenced Press.

Loaned to me by my daughter on the final night of ASIS&T. Written by a local Columbus, OH poet. Some was not to my taste but much of it I found excellent. Would like my own copy.

3 – 6 November

Longenbach, James. 2008. The Art of the Poetic Line. Art of series. Saint Paul, Minn: Graywolf.

5 – 8 November

Tyler. Censored

9 November – 14 December

Harris, Roy. 2004. The Linguistics of History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Another excellent book by Harris on the language(s) of supercategories. He has written on science, art, and history.

10 November

Hoagland, Tony. 1998. Donkey Gospel: Poems. Graywolf Press.

Was given to me by another poetry-inclined student but didn’t really speak to me.

10 November – 7 December

Bright. Censored

10 November – 29 December

Barnstone, Tony, and Chou Ping, trans. 2007. Chinese Erotic Poems. Everyman’s Library.

There are some really excellent poems in here.

WHITE MOONRISE

The white rising moon
is your bright beauty
binding me in spells
till my heart’s devoured.

The light moon soars
resplendent like my lady,
binding me in light chains
till my heart’s devoured.

Moon in white glory,
you are the beautiful one
who delicately wounds me
till my heart’s devoured.

Anonymous (c. 600 BCE)

NIGHT IS FOREVER (From 42 Songs

The night is forever. I can’t sleep.
The clear moon is so bright, so bright.
I almost think I hear a voice call me,
and to the empty sky say, Yes?

Zi Ye (3rd-4th centuries CE)

There are many, many more. Some are even quite explicit, especially if you grasp the Chinese motifs. The short introduction provides a bit of a grounding in them.

?? – 27 November [couple of weeks]

Hollander, John. 2001. Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale Nota Bene/Yale University Press.

Forgot to record when I started this but it was my bus/lunch book for a couple of weeks.

15 – 20 November

Hornby, Nick. 2001. How to Be Good. New York: Riverhead Books.

23 – 25 November

Boccaccio, Giovanni. 2007. The Eaten Heart: Unlikely Tales of Love. Trans. G. H. McWilliam. Penguin (Non-Classics).

This is really just some tales excerpted from the Decameron, which I think I read a couple years back. I certainly started the Decameron and I remembered some of these tales but I’ll count it anyway.

25 – 26 November

Neruda, Pablo. 1991. The Book of Questions. Trans. William O’Daly. Port Townsend, Wash: Copper Canyon Press.

XLIV

Where is the child I was,
still inside me or gone?

Does he know that I never loved him
and that he never loved me?

Why did we spend so much time
growing up only to separate?

Why did we both not die
when my childhood died?

And why does my skeleton pursue me
if my soul has fallen away?

LXVI

Do the o‘s of the locomotive
cast smoke, fire and steam?

In which language does rain fall
over tormented cities?

At dawn, which smooth syllables
does the ocean air repeat?

Is there a star more wide open
than the word poppy?

Are there two fangs sharper
than the syllables of Jackal?

LXVII

Can you love me, syllabary,
and give a meaningful kiss?

Is the dictionary a sepulchre
or a sealed honeycomb?

…

Assorted questions from varied poems:

Where can you find a bell
that will ring in your dreams?

Does the earth sing like a cricket
in the music of the heavens?

Is 4 the same 4 for everybody?
Are all sevens equal?

How many weeks are in a day?
and how many years in a month?

There are some absolutely amazing questions in these poems!

28 / 30 November

Neruda, Pablo. 2002. The Sea and the Bells. Trans. William O’Daly. 2nd ed. Copper Canyon Press.

30 November – 9 December

Nabokov, Vladimir. 1992. Lolita. Everyman’ Library 133. New York: Knopf.

5 December – ?? [not yet finished]

Black, Steven. 2006. Serials in Libraries: Issues and Practices. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited.

Reading at and for work/professional reasons. I’m a bit over halfway through it so I’ll leave it here.

6 December

Pinsky, Robert. 2006. First Things to Hand. 1st ed. Quarternote chapbook series #5. Louisville, Ky: Sarabande Books.

I know Pinsky was a recent poet laureate but I did not find this to my taste at all. There was only one stanza in one poem that spoke to me. In other words, this is the 2nd worst—to my taste—book of poems I have read. There was another book that I gave up on about 1/3rd of the way in during this time frame but I did not record it.

7 December

Page, P. K. 2008. The Essential P.K. Page. Essential poets, Vol. 2. Erin, Ont: Porcupine’s Quill.

Saw this lovely little book of poems on the cart waiting to be cataloged. Waited somewhat patiently for it to be done so I could check it out. Talk about some profound idiocy; some policy-based and some system (ILS)-based. Once it was in the English Library and on the new books shelves I still needed help to find it. Keep in mind that I knew the call no., the poet, the title and exactly what it looked like!

The English Library actually has 4 call no. sequences for their new books. Four freaking sequences! A major WTF?! God forbid the theater books get crossed with the poetry or the literature or …. You know, because call numbers can’t help us with that. Wondering if this is some faculty/department driven idiocy, or what?

But let me go on record. Idiocy.

This Heavy Craft

The wax has melted
but the dream of flight
persists.
I, Icarus, though grounded
in my flesh
have one bright section in me
where a bird
night after starry night
while I’m asleep
unfolds its phantom wings
and practises.

7 – 20 December

Blue. Censored

?? – 14 December

Hyde, Stella. 2006. Literary lust : the sexiest moments in classic fiction. New York: Atria Books.

11 – 16 December

Phillips, John. 2005. The Marquis De Sade: A Very Short Introduction. Very short introductions 124. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

mid-December – ?? [not finished yet]

Crawford, Walt. 2009. The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look. A Cites & Insights Book: Mountain View, CA ; distributed by lulu.com. http://www.librarything.com/work/7141660. lulu.com http://www.lulu.com/content/4898086

Mostly finished; just working my way through the blog profiles now.

17 – 18 December

Machiavelli, Niccolo. 1962. Clizia. Trans. Oliver Evans. Barron’s library of literary masterpieces. Great Neck, N. Y: Barron’s Educational Series.

Ultimately based on a no longer extant Greek comedy entitled Cleroumenoe by Diphilus of Sinope, but actually based on an adaptation of it by Plautus. Plautus’ play is known to us as Casina, although the title he gave it is Sortientes. Written by Machiavelli around 1520.

18 – 20 December

Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1957. Mandragola. Trans. Anne Paolucci and Henry Paolucci. 1st ed. Library of liberal arts 58. New York: Macmillan.

Written between 1512 and 1520.

20-30 December

Harris, Roy. 2003. The Necessity of Artspeak: The Language of the Arts in the Western Tradition. London: Continuum.

Truly excellent! Of the supercategory books I probably prefer the one on science (naturally), then this one, and then the one on history. All are important commentaries. though.

29 December – ?? [just begun]

Berry, Wendell. 2004. The long-legged house. 1st ed. Washington DC ; [Berkeley Calif.] : Shoemaker & Hoard ; Distributed by Publishers Group West.

I’ve previously only read perhaps 2 essays by Berry. This is his first collection of essays, “[f]irst published in 1969 and out of print for more than twenty-five years, …” (back cover).

It is time to take another road, on which she does not smile

Posted on Sunday, September 21, 2008 by Mark

I have remarked here before about how little poetry I have read in my life. Most of it has been in the last few years, and most of that in the last year.

I wrote a couple of poems when I was an adolescent and/or teenager—when I use the word “poem” to refer to my own efforts I am using that word loosely—and I have written a few this year. Most of those written lately have been posted here but at least one has not but was given to its dedicatee. [Oops, reminded of the haiku, so two not here.]

I am currently reading Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics by Steinman (see below) and am about halfway through it. I get much of it but then some of it is escaping me. Not sure how much work I will put into “formal” poetics but I think that it is important to me as a powerful use of language, particularly one most aspects of which escapes linguistic science.

My most recent muse has gone her fleeting way, although leaving a permanent mark. Nonetheless, there are always things to try and put into words, powerful things like depression, for one, that generally escape more prosaic language. Thus, I may be posting a few more poems here, assuming I keep at it.

Feel free to skip them. I certainly am not claiming that they are any good. But perhaps they will be valuable to me as another way to use language, and to learn how language works.

I have no doubt that over the years I have read a few other poems and even perhaps books of poetry. I may well have read one or two other small ones this summer that I forgot to record. I certainly know I sampled a few score poems from a dozen or so books this summer that are not on this list. Anyway, here is the list of poetry books that I know I have read [in the order read]:

Jewel. 1998. A Night Without Armor: Poems. 1st ed. New York: HarperCollins.

Paglia, Camille. 2006. Break, Blow, Burn. 1st ed. New York: Vintage Books.

Stone, Ruth. 2002. In the Next Galaxy. Port Townsend, Wash: Copper Canyon Press.

Neruda, Pablo. 1993. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Penguin twentieth-century classics. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books.

Steinman, Lisa Malinowski. 2008. Invitation to Poetry: The Pleasures of Studying Poetry and Poetics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

My commentary on Paglia is in my Books Read in 2007 post. Haven’t commented on any of the others, although Stone is listed in my post about books read (mostly) in the 1st half of this year and I remember quite enjoying much of it. There was one poem in it I particularly liked entitled “Love.”

I enjoyed much in the Neruda and was recently able to buy myself a brand-new copy of this out of print paperback for $2.50 + $3.50 in shipping. One could complain about the higher cost of shipping than the book but I won’t as $6 for an out of print book in perfect shape is a steal. This is the same edition as I borrowed from a friend this summer and I wanted this one as it has the poems in Spanish and English on facing pages. I did not read all of the poems in Spanish but I did try translating the titles on my own before looking at the English versions, and when I found a particularly lovely turn of phrase in English I made sure to see how it was in Spanish.

For instance:

White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul
You live again in time, slender and silent.

Ah you who are silent!

Abeja blanca, ausente, aún zumbas en mi alma.
Revives en el tiempo, delgado y silenciosa.

Ah silenciosa!

VIII “Abeja Blanca” / “White Bee”

Or:

Longing that sliced my breast into pieces,
it is time to take another road, on which she does not
smile.

Ansiedad que partiste mi pecho a cuchillazos,
es hora de seguir otro camino, donde ella no sonría.

XI “Casi Fuera Del Cielo” / “Almost Out Of The Sky”

This summers (public) poems:

No matter how far I proceed down this road with poetry, I have no doubt that my primary love of, and exposure to, poetry will be through song lyrcis. And in that regard I have “read” many thousands.

And on that note …

“es hora de seguir otro camino, donde ella no sonría.”

Some things read this week, 13 – 19 April 2008

Posted on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 by Mark

Sunday – Friday, 13 – 18 Apr 2008

2007. Running & Philosophy: A Marathon for the Mind. Malden: Blackwell Pub.

Ch. 6 : Running Religiously by Jeffrey P. Fry (Sun)
Ch. 7 : Hash Runners and Hellenistic Philosophers by Richard DeWitt (Mon)
Ch. 8 : A Runner’s Pain (Mon)
Ch. 9 : What Motivates an Early Morning Runner? by Kevin Kinghorn (Mon)
Ch 10 : Performance-Enhancement and the Pursuit of Excellence by William P. Kabasenche (Tue)
Ch. 11 : The Freedom of the Long-Distance Runner by Heather L. Reid (Tue)
Ch. 12 : Existential Running by Ross C. Reed (Wed)
Ch. 13 : Can We Experience Significance on a Treadmill? by Douglas R. Hochstetler (Wed)
Ch. 14 : Running in Place or Running in Its Proper Place by J. P. Moreland (Thu)
Ch. 15 : The Running Life: Getting in Touch with Your Inner Hunter-Gatherer by Sharon Kaye (Fri)
Ch. 16 : John Dewey and the Beautiful Stride: Running as Aesthetic Experience by Christopher Martin (Fri)

This has been an excellent read so far. Very motivating. The authors all take a different starting point and make use of (generally individually) a great breadth of philosophies/ers. I can personally make a point of contact with all of them even if I don’t agree with how each of them flesh out their arguments. Some good arguments. Some presented well. And the rare few are both.

Recommended if you are a runner that has never “gotten” philosophy, or if you are a fan of Dr. George Sheehan’s writings, or you are a philosophical runner. I don’t actually understand how one could be a (distance) runner and not be somewhat philosophical. Seems downright absurd to me but one must leave open the space of logical possibility. [Or so I am repeatedly led indoctrinated to believe.] Oooh. One more category of recommended readers: philosophers who value a disembodied philosophy; one that has removed the experiencing subject in anything but the most clinical and sterile [and non-productive] way.

Monday, 14 Apr 2008

Banush, David, and Jim LeBlanc. 2007. Utility, library priorities, and cataloging policies. Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services 31, no. 2:96-109. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VSH-4R718K6-1/1/b1967e800400df0464b6b26bfa785a1c.

A clearly ex post facto attempt at ethical justification for cataloging policy at an ARL library. The fundamental good was “no backlogs.” I read this because David had sent me a response, which I hope is being published somewhere.

Bade’s response to the above.

Going to be vague on this as I think David has it out for publication but yesterday when we were hanging out I failed to clarify what I can say about any of the recent things he sent me. So, vagueness ensues.

Excellent! Even more eviscerating than I was and far more eloquently put than I would do.

Friday, 18 Apr 2008

Lodge, David. 1992. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses. New York: Penguin Books.

Began book at diner. Perhaps read some Saturday. Finished 2 out of 6 chapters.

This is a book that was recommended to me by the man who sold it to me. Now I only paid about $3 for it and he has a limited knowledge of what fiction I may have read, except he has as good of knowledge as is possible for any other human being to have of my literary reading. Brian of Babbitt’s Books (of Normal, and, also formerly, Champaign) and I have been in several book discussion groups during my 6 years in Normal at ISU [Oh, and the 1st year I was here I would drive over pretty much once a month].

Somehow I managed to fall into this small group almost immediately. Most importantly, we were in the Auerbach Mimesis group for over 3 years. That is where the vast majority of my literary reading comes from. He also knows of my love for White noise.

I think he recommended it because is set in two campus environments, one in some fictional state between Northern and Southern California and somewhere in England.

I was beginning to question how much time I was going to give it but I’m 150 pages in now after reading it some Sunday and tonight [Mon.] at dinner in the Alley. It’s had its moments of humor

Some things read this week, 23 – 29 March 2008

Posted on Sunday, March 30, 2008 by Mark

Saturday – Sunday, 22 – 23 Mar 2008

Mann, T. (2008). “On the Record” but Off the Track” a review of the Report of The Library of Congress Working Group on The Future of Bibliographic Control, with a further examination of Library of Congress cataloging tendencies. , 38. Washington, DC: AFSCME 2910. Retrieved from http://www.guild2910.org/WorkingGrpResponse2008.pdf.

Sunday, 23 Mar 2008

Weinheimer, J. (2008, January 1). An Open Reply to Thomas Mann’s report “On the Record” but Off the Track. . Retrieved March 23, 2008, from http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00013059/.

DeLillo, D. (1986). White Noise. , Contemporary American fiction., 326. New York: Penguin Books.

Finished.

You could put your faith in technology. It got you here, it can get you out. This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature (285).

Technology is lust removed from nature. Oh man! Does “fiction” get any better that?

Monday, 24 Mar 2008

Levy, N. (2007). Neuroethics. , 346. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Read the Preface and Introduction to this (73 pp.) Man! This sure made me miss all my work in consciousness. Looks like it’d be a very good book, but I’m just not sure I can devote the time to the rest of it right now.

The introduction does a great job of dispelling many myths of self-hood and consciousness among other topics. One is the equation of the self with consciousness:

Many of our actions, too, including some of our most important, are products of unconscious mechanisms. The striker’s shot at goal happens too fast to be initiated by consciousness, similarly, the improvising musician plays without consciously deciding how a piece will unfold. Think, finally, of the magic of ordinary speech: we speak, and we make sense, but we learn precisely what we are going to say only when we say it (as E. M. Forster put it, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”). Our cleverest arguments and wittiest remarks are not vetted by consciousness; they come to consciousness at precisely the same time as they are heard by others (24).

Another is the myth of internal representation:

Our visual experience is as of a world that is internally represented. But the world is not internally represented, at least not in any great detail. There is nevertheless a sense in which we do possess a rich representation of the world. We represent the world to ourselves not by way of an internal image, but by having an external model: the world itself. Rather than take a snapshot of the scene and store it internally, we rely upon the actual stability of the world. We store our representation outside us (34).

Yes, I have only reproduced some claims here. Do not worry; there is plenty of science and good philosophy to back it all up.

Monday – Friday, 24 – 28 Mar 2008

Swift, J. (1996). Gulliver’s travels. (Unabridged [ed.].). Mineola N.Y.: Dover Publications.

For these Reasons, the Trade of a Soldier is held the most honourable of all others: Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can (185).

Is it really satire? And please feel free to be offended if you like. I was a soldier for over 20 years, and technically will be until I die. My son is also a soldier with over 8 years of service and is a combat veteran. Satire may well be truth.

Tuesday, 25 Mar 2008

Mazzochi, F., Tiberi, M., De Santis, B., & Plini, P. (2007). Relational semantics in thesauri: some remarks at theoretical and practical levels. Knowledge Organization, 34(4), 197-214.

Friday, 28 Mar 2008

Some articles by David Bade that have been submitted for publication. Not sure if I am allowed to discuss them yet so will hold off.

Mugridge, R. L. (2008). Experiences of newly-graduated cataloging librarians. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 45(3), 61-79. doi: 10.1300/J104v45n03_06.

I only skimmed this one so I will hold off from any real commenting. It is interesting to me as it is highly related to my original CAS topic, although I had hoped to go a bit deeper.

Friday – Saturday, 28 – 29 Mar 2008

Kari, J. (2007). A review of the spiritual in information studies. Journal of Documentation, 63(6), 935-962. doi: 10.1108/00220410710836439 .

I was hoping that this piece might serve as a piece of the domain analysis-integrationism connection for my CAS paper but I was wrong.

While it is possibly interesting to some, I think Kari is confused about several things. In particular, what is science and what are the limits of what it can study. This confusion is readily apparent in the article itself and not only in the confused critiques made of the literature being reviewed.

One example is this non-starter of a statement: “Documenting a spiritual occasion in an objective fashion is so much easier: all one needs is a video camera” (949). WTF? First off, most of the what could possibly pass for a spiritual occasion can not in any sense be documented in an objective fashion.

This is related to what seems to pass for the author’s view of what science is and what doing science consists of. While no formal definitions are provided, the best sense that I could get is that simply counting things and turning numbers into a statistic or two is science. Well, It is not. I also have no doubt that the author’s views are a bit less simplistic than this but nonetheless that is the sense I get from the article.

Another example that shows that the author is confused about the separation of science and other modes of inquiry is demonstrated in his critique of an article by Babb, and especially in this statement: “The above extract shows that Babb is well up on the matter, but also sometimes she apparently forgets to maintain the critical or objective attitude of a scientist” (955).

That comment is not only wrong but ignores what Babb was doing in her article [Babb, N. M. (2005) "Cataloging spirits and the spirit of cataloging." CCQ 40(2):89-122] Babb can easily be (and was) critiqued for using such a small sample but she was not attempting to do science. She was looking at title pages of books purportedly written by spirits and how our cataloging rules have evolved to handle such attributions of authorship. There is no serious sense in which that could ever be considered to be doing science.

I will leave you with the conclusion, which while it makes some valuable points also commits the same fallacy.

It is time for information researchers to start asking themselves not only how to exploit context in reaching a holistic picture of informational phenomena, but also what the empirical contexts are that are bona fide foreign to them and potentially significant to humanity. By doing so, we may open up new grounds for further research and thus widen the scope of information studies as a branch of science (959).

Read that through once or twice and tell me you can’t see the confusion. If we want a holistic picture then we must admit ways of knowing besides science. If we are only talking the empirical then we are excluding whole realms of phenomena, of human experience, and of human knowing. Information studies is not a science (and that is OK), but if we only admit the empirical then we have excluded far more than we can honestly cover.

Saturday, 29 Mar 2008

Budd, J. (2008). Self-Examination: The Present and Future of Librarianship. , 281. Westport, Conn: Libraries Unlimited.

Started this yesterday and it looks quite good. So far I have read the Introduction and the 1st chapter: Genealogy of the Profession.

There are a few minor issues and claims that I have trouble with but they do not have much to do with (or influence on) the larger purpose so I am trying to be forgiving. I am going to comment on one, though, as it is directly related to many of my current interests.

Early in the 1st chapter Budd writes, “In order for there to be communication there has to be language; do we know what the first language was, how it came to be, who spoke it” (3)?

Unless one is equating communication and language—actually under any account—that is a complete non-starter. They are and never have been coextensive. And, as Harris so ably demonstrates, it is communication that must proceed language. The very idea of a language (in use) requires that there be communication. The simplest refutation is that most people will agree that almost every animate being on this planet communicates between others of their own kind, and often as not with beings of other sorts. The vast majority of these people will also adamantly deny any use of language, much less the capability for language, to these creatures.

As I said, not really relevant to the larger purpose of the text, but it will cause me to keep a sharper eye on his larger arguments. I find it hard to believe that a scholar with the philosophical bent of Budd could make that mistake.

habitually probing generalist

Palmer, CL. “Structures and strategies of interdisciplinary science.” JASIS 50(3): 242-253, 1999

Category Archives: Literature

Madwomen poets and me

Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red

A few more thoughts on reading last year and this

Public domain

Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Goodreads

A new year in reading

Books Read in 2009

Numbers

Books Read in 2009

Sometimes – Song series 1

My personal journey into ebooks

Preliminaries:

Formatting:

Page navigation:

Metadata and citation issues:

Zotero

Comments on the Works

Conclusion

Books read in the 2nd half of 2008

It is time to take another road, on which she does not smile

Some things read this week, 13 – 19 April 2008

Some things read this week, 23 – 29 March 2008