Posts Tagged ‘books’
“Short was good in a book”*…
With the kids in the house all day I am finding it terribly hard to concentrate when reading. Hopefully you’re the opposite, and having a fine time, tackling Moby-Dick or War and Peace or Ducks, Newburyport or whatever. But, if not, here, copy and pasted from an old newsletter, are some of my favorite short books:
Novellas:
- Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
- Denis Johnson, Train Dreams
- Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts
- Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation
Short stories:
- Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God
- David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives
Lectures:
- Ursula Franklin, The Real World of Technology
- Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
Memoir:
- Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company
- Joe Brainard, I Remember
- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Poetry:
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Ursula K Le Guin translation)
- A.R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year
Comics:
- Eleanor Davis, You & a Bike & a Road
- James Sturm, Market Day
Art:
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing
- Walter Murch, In The Blink of an Eye
Staying sane:
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death
- Alan Jacobs, How To Think
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Biography:
- Stefan Zweig, Montaigne
- Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick?
Essays:
- Sarah Manguso, 300 Arguments
- Donald Hall, Essays Over Eighty
- Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers
- Montaigne, On Solitude
- Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty
You could read many of these in a single afternoon. Happy reading!
(Buy from your local bookstore or Bookshop if you can.)
Characteristically-good advice from the estimable Austin Kleon (@austinkleon): “Short was good in a book.”
* Charles Portis, Gringo
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As we concentrate on the compact, we might send charming birthday greetings to Ludwig Bemelmans; he was born on this date in 1898. An author, illustrator, and artist, he is best known for his six Madeline picture books.
In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines… the smallest one was Madeline…
“Archives are a kind of site in the sense of like an archaeological site”*…
If time at home has you missing life in the stacks or sifting through old papers in search of pieces of the past, fear not: You can do the same thing online. Slews of institutions are in the market for armchair archivists—volunteers who can generate knowledge by clicking through digitized resources, deciphering handwriting, tagging photos, and more.
Several institutions have already seen an uptick in digital detective work since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A transcription project at the Newberry, a research library in Chicago, has seen a surge in contributions: “In two weeks, we’ve received 62 percent of the traffic we typically see over the course of an entire year,” writes Alex Teller, the library’s director of communications, in an email. This past weekend, the By the People transcription project at the Library of Congress saw 5,000 more users than the previous weekend, says Lauren Algee, the team lead for the crowdsourced initiative. Here’s how you can join them. (Unfortunately, that delicious old-book smell is not included.)…
If you’re cooped-up and curious, use your free time to decipher handwriting, tag images, and more: “How to Help Librarians and Archivists From Your Living Room.” And/or dive in at that National Archive.
* John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists
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As we dig digging, we might send carefully-curated birthday greetings to Frederick Baldwin Adams Jr.; he was born on this date in 1910. A bibliophile, he was the the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City from 1948–1969. His predecessor, Belle da Costa Greene, was responsible for organizing the results of Morgan’s rapacious collecting; Adams was responsible for broadening– and modernizing– that collection, adding works by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, E. A. Robinson, among many others, along with manuscripts and visual arts, and for enhancing the institution’s role as a research facility.
Adams was also an important collector in his own right. He amassed two of the largest holdings of works by Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as one of the leading collections of writing by Karl Marx and left-wing Americana.
“There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher”*…
In November, Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered hit number one on the New York Times bestsellers list—with an asterisk. Or more accurately, a dagger (†). This is the first time many people noticed this dagger and learned that it means the NYT believes the book has made it onto the list with the help of bulk purchases. It is, however, far from the first book to do this.
In fact, his father helped pioneer the practice among business people.
According to former Trump executive Jack O’Donnell in his 1991 book Trumped, the Trump organization purchased tens of thousands of copies of the Art of the Deal upon its release in 1987. They put copies of the book on pillows during turn-down service. He also pressured his executives to buy 4,000 or more copies of the book each.
Though Trump helped to bring the idea mainstream, he was following in some authors’ footsteps from a decade earlier. Some of the first books known to make the list with the help of bulk purchases were Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 Valley of the Dolls and Wayne Dyer’s 1976 Your Erroneous Zones. The list started in 1931, so there are probably authors who used this method we’ll never know about.
For those unaware of how bestseller lists work, here’s a primer…
The business of literature: “A History of Buying Books onto the Best Seller List.”
[Image above: source]
* Flannery O’Connor
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As we rethink rankings, we might recall that it was on this date in 1936 that two masters of classic noir fiction, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, met for the first and only time. The occasion was a Black Mask magazine dinner in Los Angeles, at which the two were among the ten pulp writers (plus an editor) attending. In the event photo below, both are standing: Chandler is smoking a pipe; Hammett, the tallest, is farthest right.
“Books are a uniquely portable magic”*…
A “Pack Horse Librarian” returning for a new supply of books
The Pack Horse Library initiative, which sent librarians deep into Appalachia, was one of the New Deal’s most unique plans. The project, as implemented by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), distributed reading material to the people who lived in the craggy, 10,000-square-mile portion of eastern Kentucky. The state already trailed its neighbors in electricity and highways. And during the Depression, food, education and economic opportunity were even scarcer for Appalachians.
They also lacked books: In 1930, up to 31 percent of people in eastern Kentucky couldn’t read. Residents wanted to learn, notes historian Donald C. Boyd. Coal and railroads, poised to industrialize eastern Kentucky, loomed large in the minds of many Appalachians who were ready to take part in the hoped prosperity that would bring. “Workers viewed the sudden economic changes as a threat to their survival and literacy as a means of escape from a vicious economic trap,” writes Boyd.
This presented a challenge: In 1935, Kentucky only circulated one book per capita compared to the American Library Association standard of five to ten, writes historian Jeanne Cannella Schmitzer,. It was “a distressing picture of library conditions and needs in Kentucky,” wrote Lena Nofcier, who chaired library services for the Kentucky Congress of Parents and Teachers at the time…
Unlike many New Deal projects, the packhorse plan required help from locals. “Libraries” were housed any in facility that would step up, from churches to post offices. Librarians manned these outposts, giving books to carriers who then climbed aboard their mules or horses, panniers loaded with books, and headed into the hills. They took their job as seriously as mail carriers and crossed streams in wintry conditions, feet frozen in the stirrups.
Carriers rode out at least twice a month, with each route covering 100 to 120 miles a week…
A New Deal program brought books to Kentuckians living in the most remote areas: “Horse-Riding Librarians Were the Great Depression’s Bookmobiles.”
* Stephen King, On Writing
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As we check it out, we might send shocking birthday greetings to the enfant terrible of French letters, Arthur Rimbaud; he was born on this date in 1854. In his adolescence and early adulthood (he wrote his final work when he was 21), and with his buddy, Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud was a leader of the Decadent Movement; fueled by absinthe and hashish, he succeeded in shocking a literary establishment that was nonetheless awed by his visionary verse, which influenced modern literature and arts, inspired a number of important musicians, and prefigured Surrealism.
All known literature is written in the language of common sense—except Rimbaud’s – Paul Valéry
“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation”*…
The librarian greeted me, asked for my name, and scanned a shelf of books along the wall. She pulled one from the collection, and placed it on the counter—but left her hand on the book. She smiled. “Don’t remove this white band,” she said. “Don’t rip it. Don’t touch it. It will cause problems.” I nervously smiled in return. There is nothing more frightening than a confident librarian.
The white band on the book, as fellow devotees of the glorious InterLibrary Loan system know, contains all of the information to facilitate return of the item to the lending library. Removed bands slow down the system. And the last thing that I would ever want to do is hurt, in any way, a system that has been so good to me…
A brief history (and celebration) of the apex of human civilization: “InterLibrary Loan Will Change Your Life.”
* The Books in My Life
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As we disobey Polonius, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a jealous Robert Frost heckled Archibald MacLeish at a reading of the latter’s poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vt. Bill Peschel recounts:
The gathering was held at Treman Cottage, and Frost was among the attendees, sitting in the back. It was a time when Hitler was on the ascendant, and the United States was divided between warning against the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy, and those who didn’t want to intervene in another European war. MacLeish was anti-Fascist, and Frost despised MacLeish’s support of Roosevelt.
That night, as MacLeish read from his poetry, Frost began heckling him. “Archie’s poems all have the sametune,” he said in a whisper that could be heard. When MacLeish read the single-sentence poem, “You, Andrew Marvell,” smoke could be smelled. Frost had accidentally, on purpose, set fire to some papers and was beating them out and waving away the smoke.
Most people accepted the story of the accident, and the reading eventually concluded. MacLeish was still the center of attention, and he was asked to read from one of his plays. But Frost was not done with him. As [Wallace] Stegner wrote:
“His comments from the floor, at first friendly and wisecracking, became steadily harsher and more barbed. He interrupted, he commented, he took exception. What began as the ordinary give and take of literary conversation turned into a clear intention of frustrating and humiliating Archie MacLeish, and the situation became increasingly painful to those who comprehended it”. Even Bernard DeVoto, a scholar and friend of Frost, had enough, calling out, “For God’s sake, Robert, let him read!” Frost ignored him, but shortly thereafter, on some pretext, “said something savage,” and left.
Afterwards, Frost’s defenders tried to kick sand over the events. One friend wrote only of “unfounded allusions” and “behavior not proven by fact.” There were people there who didn’t even notice what Stegner saw that night. But baiting MacLeish had caused a permanent rift between DeVoto and Frost. At the end of the conference, when they met and shook hands, DeVoto told him, “You’re a good poet, Robert, but you’re a bad man.”
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