Friday, July 11, 2003

Another Friday night at the Bookery. Tomorrow we're having a garage sale early early, after which we're hoping for normalcy. Come and buy something.

I may yet get to the Shippy I was looking at last week but right now it's more fun to browse through some of the newer arrivals at random. Lots to like in the Timothy Donnelly book that was featured in Entertainment Weekly, 27 Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit. I'm left with the impression of remarkably dense formations of verbal wit, with a flicker of Steinian repetition as one of its engines. Some lovely stuff in Katie Ford's Deposition, but I'm put off by the foregrounding of Christian spirituality, or at least Christian imagery (the word apparently means "the taking down of the body of Christ from the cross" along with its more familiar definitions). How many books with a spiritual bent are fundamentally Christian, and me not realizing it because I haven't been trained to think that way? Am I being unknowingly "Christian" when I start thematizing things not seen in my own writing? It gives this secular Jew some pause. Next on my list is a book by a fellow named Mark Ford, Soft Sift, which has captured my attention principally by having an introduction by John Ashbery—I didn't know he did that sort of thing. Also on the list is a book by Michele Glazer, It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We'd Come to See, which bears the imprimaturs of Carole Maso and Jorie Graham (Jorie also blurbs the Ford and Donnelly books); Fanny Howe's Gone, which I've looked at before (more Christianity?); the Shippy book; and a Green Integer book of a Japanese poet I'm unfamiliar with, Hagiwara Sakutaro, because every now and then I am shamed by my ignorance of poetries outside of English. This is a pretty good job sometimes.

Seriously, come and buy something. We've got an iron, no fewer than three computers, some blankets and kitchenware. Lots of stuff. 321 Pleasant Street, Ithaca, 8 AM sharp.

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