I am a sucker for ‘listicles’ like this one of 44 ‘Great American Bookstores.’ Not in the least, because I do a fair amount of ‘bookstore tourism.’ Seeking out the best bookstores in any city I visit is always a priority.
I’ve visited nine from this list: #1, #3, #10, #14, #16, #19, #23, #24, and #33.
#1 is Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Iowa. I worked in Iowa in 2002 and as I was leaving the state, I stopped in Iowa City to visit this particular bookstore.
#3 is John K King Used and Rare Books. I visited that one recently when I fortuitously passed it by on my way from my sleazy motel to the location of a conference I was attending in downtown Detroit. Four stories of books in a former glove factory. Yup. Awesome.
#10 and #14 are Maple Street Books and Faulkner House Books, both in New Orleans. I stopped in on separate visits to New Orleans. Maple Street was just good luck that my friend and I were walking about and we saw it and I can never resist going into a bookstore. If I recall, Faulkner House Books was a little disappointing. Too many Anne Rice novels scattered about the place.
#16 I didn’t think much of at the time. Dog Eared Books is in San Francisco and I used to go there a bit for work and visit friends when I was LA. I was just wandering and came upon it.
#19 is my beloved Skylight Books, which must be the greatest bookstore in the country. Seriously.
#23, Symposium Books, I went to while I was in Rhode Island. It’s near the Rhode Island School of Design and has an amazing selection of books on art theory and crit.
#24 is DC’s own Politica & Prose. You and I already know how awesome that place is.
#33 is McNally Jackson in New York City, which I visited, but, honestly, I didn’t think much of at the time. It was a good bookstore, but it didn’t stick out in my mind.
I’m wondering how it is that I’ve never been to #28, Atomic Books in Baltimore. Sounds amazing!
The Shadow of Sirius perfectly encapsulates what there is to love about Merwin and what is so frustrating about Merwin. It is one of his most accomplishments, but there is such a sameness to all of his poetry. It’s a little petty to complain, because it is such wonderful poetry, but just adding some old age (a different approach to memory and mortality) doesn’t change the fact that Merwin has been stylistically the same for over forty years. And while much of The Shadow of Sirius may be technically better than them, I still say that Merwin has been repeating shadows (pun intended) of those wonderful, powerful poems from The Lice (1968, I believe) and Carrier of Ladders (1970, I believe).
In the poem Escape Artist, writes: When they arrange the cages/for experiments/they have long known/that there is no magic/in foxes at any time
The poem is (at least partly; ostensibly) about raising animals for their fur and also for experimentation. The Merwin of The Lice would have been more engaged on the issue, but this Merwin meanders off into a gentle melancholy. Merwin was rarely fierce, but not always so passive.
But credit where credit due – I loved this short poem:
The Curlew
When the moon has gone I fly on alone
into this night where I have never beenthe eggshell of dark before and after
in its height I am older and youngerthan all that I have come to and beheld
and carry still untouched across the cold.
That poem has some wonderful touches of surrealism and tweaks the Merwin style with hints of an almost rhyme scheme (semi-heroic couplets?). I would have been happy had there been more of that and less of the rest.
First Heaney, now Kinnell. If Eavan Boland passes tomorrow, I’m going to lose it.
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms absolutely hooked me, yet left me with little reason and less desire to read the sequels (it’s the first in a trilogy, apparently). The world building is superb, if limited to a small segment of the world’s society: magic heavy, high fantasy with cutthroat politics and fallen gods roaming an impossible palace in the sky.
But at the end, the main character, Yeine, turns into a goddess. This is after learning that she’d been implanted as a fetus with the soul of a murdered goddess (sort of Kali-like goddess – representing both birth/life and death) and also having mind blowing sex with an enslaved god (the brother/lover of the murdered goddess) named Nahadoth, but more commonly called the Nightlord. This ending had a consequence of upturning the structure of world we’d been introduced to, as well as taking most of the characters we’d come to know best out of play. Because the world we’d experience was such a small segment, there was no real sense of the impact of the changes and, one a micro level, there was a very real sense of disappointment that these folks we’d come to know would probably not be around for the sequel. So, a well done standalone novel for me, but a poor start to a series.
I do want to give the author credit for making the hero a woman of color with healthy attitude towards to sex (which is not to say promiscuous) who is not particularly physically attractive. It doesn’t quite pass the Bechdel test, but that’s nitpicking.
At the last poetry reading at the Folger, they brought together three poets published by Graywolf Press: Vijay Seshadri, Claudia Rankine, and Matthea Harvey. Stephen Burt moderated the conversation that followed brief readings, where he was, to be generous, more of an enthusiastic rather than moderating presence (he was deeply interested in hearing what all the poets had to say, but in his excitement, inadvertently made himself the subject).
Claudia Rankine’s fiercely political collection, Citizen: An American Lyric, is the poet du jour and she did not disappoint. But I had already bought Seshadri’s collection, 3 Sections, a month prior.
3 Sections
is an interesting collection. There is a gentle thread of politics that winds through it all. At the time, it was hard not to compare that more wistful scent of the political to Claudia Rankine’s, who writes far less gentle political poems (which is not to say strident; but they are fierce). Maybe that less parenthetical word is the key: he does not write fiercely, but with a touch of melancholy, a lot of gentle humor, and something approaching fatalism.
Rankine participates in the Other as a black woman born in America. Seshadrii participates as an Indian born outside of this country. The comparison made vivid two different kinds of alienation.
There were several long poems, including a long (over ten pages) prose poem. During the conversation, he resisted the term ‘prose poem,’ as being something belonging specifically to the surrealist poets of the 30s. But it will do as a shorthand.
It’s about fishing, with discussions of the character and prejudices of fishermen in the American northwest, and also Russian fishermen. And also the Cold War. And a journey onboard a Japanese fishing vessel and the narrator (is he?) getting debilitating seasickness. It could be read as a longform essay, but it is, in a way I can’t articulate, definitely poetry.
He also has an ambivalent view towards technology. Or jaded. He doesn’t believe it changes much.
Here is the fourth (of five) stanzas from a poem entitled New Media:
It’s not the thing,
there is no thing,
there’s no thing in itself,
there’s nothing but what’s said about the thing,
there are no things but words
As a birthday present, my mother found me a copy of the first issue of Fantasy Magazine, published in February, 1953. Inside was a then previously unpublished novella by Robert E. Howard, entitled The Black Stranger. It stars (actually, almost guest starring) his most famous creation, Conan. Howard killed himself in the thirties, so didn’t live long enough to see his character become an icon and his stories the foundational texts of modern fantasy.
Howard is rather like Arthur Conan Doyle, in some respects. The quality of the writing is mixed, to be generous (Howard is a worse writer than Doyle, but better than another foundational pulp figure, Edgar Rice Burroughs, without whose John Carter stories, we likely would not have Star Wars). But despite the obvious inadequacies of Howard and Doyle, they both created something ineffably compelling in their most famous characters. They have also both not always been well served by the onscreen depictions of their characters. Holmes has always been so much elusive and complex on the page than in any of the television and movie versions (I’ll make an exception for the old BBC series starring Jeremy Brett, which were quite literal). Conan, too, is a far more interesting and three dimensional character on the page than he ever will be on the screen. The (relatively) recent movie actually reflected the cunning pirate of the printed pages, but at the expense of building a small and petty character. Schwarzenegger brought the subtlety of sledgehammer to his acting, while Oliver Stone and John Milius brought all their respective left and right wing paranoia to the screenplay and direction, respectively, but at least they combined to make him into something mythic, even if the finer points were trampled on, ground into fine dust, and finally tossed under steamroller before being buried under a Walmart parking lot.
The Black Stranger is written in the third person, but, except at the very beginning and the end, keeps the focus on other characters. Even when Conan reappears in the middle, the effect is of viewing him through others’ eyes. It is far from the best Conan story, which are generally some of the shorter ones, but there’s not really such a thing as a bad one, if you’ve got a taste for pulp.
Like Burroughs, Howard wrote when genre designations like sci fi and fantasy didn’t really exist. Look at the names of the early magazine and what do you find? Weird Tales. Astounding Stories. Amazing Stories. Howard and Lovecraft were pen pals and (sort of) friends and both published in many of the same periodicals, though that would not be true today. Howard has such an outsized influence that he effectively created (with co-creation credit going to Tolkien) the genre of fantasy out of the more nebulous genre of ‘weird.’
the coffee philosopher 