what I’ve been reading lately:
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Please by Jericho BrownNew Issues (Western Michigan University), 2008
When I saw Mark Doty read at The Center, someone asked him, after the reading, if he could recommend a few other poets—this was one of the books that he mentioned. There are three sections of poems in this book, with each section titled after a button on a stereo, though obviously they’re also words
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Averno by Louise GlückFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
Megan said she read this book in one sitting at the best bookstore in Chelsea and loved it, so I decided to get it from the library, and am glad I did. At the start of this book we learn this: “Averno. Ancient name Avernus. A small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy;
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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:
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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
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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
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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