What better way to celebrate my birthday than to go to the semi-annual Friends of the Library Book Sale? I am reliably informed that Ithaca's is one of the three largest in the country. Brought a box full home yesterday and a bag today, after which I really must cut it out. The birthday money is all but exhausted.

New acquisitions in no particular order:

Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters
Paul Valery, Aesthetics (Vol. 13 of The Collected Works in English)
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (nice Random House hardcover)
Muriel Rukeyeser, Out of Silence: Selected Poems
Simone Weil: An Anthology
Jim Elledge, ed., Frank O'Hara: To Be True to a City
Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
John Wieners, Selected Poems 1958-1984
Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Barbara Guest, Moscow Mansions
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography
James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Steve McCaffrey, Bouma Shapes: Shorter Poems 1974-2002 (especially happy about this because it has "Some Versions of Pastoral" that appeared in BAP 2004)
Four copies of the Henry Rago Poetry, all with Zukofsky contributions in them: June 1959, February 1960, May 1960, December 1960. Can you believe that a chunk of Bottom: On Shakespeare appeared in Poetry? Which is now such a sinkhole of self-importance, stuffiness, and outright malevolence (q.v. the "Antagonisms" feature in the latest issue)?

But I digress. I also acquired a few CDs, the most interesting of which by far is The Mother of Us All, an opera with music by Virgil Thomson and text by Gertrude Stein. Looking forward to giving that a listen.

Thanks for the happy birthday wishes, y'all. It's been a peaceable transition so far.