what I’ve been reading lately:
-
Dismantling the Hills by Michael McGriffUniversity of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
These are poems from a world I don’t know, the Pacific Northwest of small towns and the lumber industry: paper mills and logging roads, slash piles, steam donkeys, choker setters, the narrator and his father bucking timber. It’s desolate beauty or sometimes just desolation, staying, stuck. “I could say I left town for both of
-
Fire to Fire by Mark DotyHarper Perennial, 2009 (originally HarperCollins, 2008)
I saw Mark Doty read at The Center last month and was reminded how much I like him, and why—his work is so full of observation and exquisite description and shining moments and everyday wonders. This collection of poems, which includes new work and selections from previous books, is just what I want to be
-
Interior with Sudden Joy by Brenda ShaughnessyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999
I wanted to like this book more than I did; I wanted more from it, or maybe just less opacity. There are moments where the play of words, the rhythm of them, feels perfect, and there are images that coalesce, but much of this collection stayed vague, just out of reach. Even so: I probably
-
Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. BorgmanThe MIT Press, 2007
Last month I saw Christine Borgman speak at Columbia, courtesy of the Scholarly Communication Program. After the talk I decided to read her book, which covers much of the same territory, in greater detail. Borgman starts by saying that “The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data-
-
The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah
The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah, after the long middle section, carries on swimmingly: it’s that usual Proustian mix of beautiful observed detail plus funny observed society-life plus jealousy and falling in and out of love and acting more or less foolish about it. There is much about sleep and time and memory and habit:
-
Sodom and Gomorrah, still
“The faithful” of the “little clan,” as the regulars at the Verdurins’ Wednesday-evening salon are known, have shifted a bit over the years since Odette and Swann were part of the group, and even those that are familiar faces from Swann’s Way may have changed a bit..but not too much. Dr. Cottard is no longer
-
More of Sodom and Gomorrah
To pick up where I left off, in the middle of Part Two: “The Intermittencies of the Heart” is sad and sweet and lovely. In this section, our narrator arrives at Balbec and suddenly, a year after the fact, the sorrow and loss of his grandmother’s death are real to him, start affecting him in
-
Proust, in progress
In the past I’ve only written here when I’ve finished reading something, but Proust is such slow going, and there is so much I want to write about, and this volume is so different from one section to the next. So here goes. Part One: Sodom and Gomorrah is, as you might guess, gay gay
-
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane SetterfieldAtria Books, 2006
This is a story of neo-Gothic intrigue, the story of a decaying pile of a mansion and the falling-apart family that lives in it, a story of reading and writing. In the first few pages I decided it had a few things going for it: the reference to The Water Babies (yay classic kids’ books)
-
Wanderlust: A History of Walking (new edition) by Rebecca SolnitVerso, 2006 (originally Viking, 2000)
This book is really smart and satisfying; it’s an excellent blend of the personal and the historical and the philosophical. Early in the book, Solnit talks about walking’s place—or lack thereof—in our daily lives: walking as part of “the time inbetween,” “the time of walking to or from a place” as “uncluttered time,” appreciated by