Books Acquired Recently

Books Acquired Recently


Beachy, Kirsten Eve, ed. Tongue Screws and Testimonies: Poems Stories, and Essays Inspired by the Martyrs Mirror. Scottdale: Herald, 2010.


I've been meaning to buy this for a while. The Martyrs Mirror is a compilation of Anabaptist martyr stories first published in 1660. It is traditionally given as a wedding or graduation gift by Mennonites as a way of passing down Mennonite values to younger generations. I received it as a Christmas present when I was 16 and read my way through it over several years (it is 1300 folio-sized pages long). I have always been fascinated by it; I think an anthology of literature inspired by people's interactions with it is an excellent idea, and I know several of the contributors, so I am very excited to read it.


Brandt, Di. Walking to Mojacar. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 2010.


Brandt is one of my favorite poets. Her language crackles with energy, and her poems are unashamedly activist while at the same time being beautifully crafted. Unfortunately, as a Canadian, she is not well-known in the U.S., which is a failing of the American English teaching community. There is generally not an institutional space for Canadian literature to get taught in the U.S. because most departments are too small to offer courses in it (and there might not be student interest, but it is our job as teachers/critics to build this interest), and Canadian writers tend to get ignored in postcolonial literature courses. As a result, it is virtually impossible for Canadian writers to gain any traction in the U.S. unless they are lucky enough to be published in high-profile venues such as the New Yorker, as is the case with Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.


Schakel, Peter, and Jack Ridl, eds. 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009.


I ordered this as a desk copy because I will be using it in my Introduction to Literature course this coming semester. It has a nice selection of poems from the Renaissance throught the twenty-first century, a range that is difficult to find. Incidentally, Jack Ridl gave a reading at my alma mater, Goshen College, my last year there. I enjoyed his work.

The Flying Troutmans

I just finished reading Miriam Toews's novel The Flying Troutmans, and quite enjoyed it. The plot is not especially fascinating (it's a typical "road trip" narrative), but the characters are fantastic. The 11-year-old girl Phebes is especially good. She is a precocious child similar to Oskar in Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (her talents are artistic rather than scientific, though). Her adult-like persona is almost unrealistic at times, but Toews does a good job of mixing in enough childishness to make her believable. Phebes's brother Logan's single-minded devotion to basketball is also well-done, and is somewhat humorous because he's Canadian (Steve Nash notwithstanding).


The pastiche of pop culture references that Toews mixes in is also entertaining because of its highly eclectic nature. It includes Fight Club (109), the Bible (83), Sylvia Plath (167), Scrabble (63), David Bowie (125), the Beatles (83), and James Bond (116) among others. The novel has a postmodern feel despite its realist chronological narrative, in part because of its pastichiness and in part because of its continued emphasis that hoping for centers in human existence is futile: nothing is universal or infallible. It manages to convey this somber message in an enjoyable, often humorous way, though.

A Miscellany

The combination of blogger.com being down for a few days last week and a very busy weekend hosting family has led to me not posting for nearly a week, so today's entry is wide-ranging.


I was listening a bit to the Rolling Stones the other day and was struck by the oddness of "Mother's Little Helper." What possessed Mick Jagger to write this song? Why did he, the epitome of (packaged, mainstream) nonconformity and a heavy drug user, feel the need to sing about the dangers of housewives abusing drugs and the rise of pre-packaged food products? It's bizarre.


Manchester United's clinching of their 19th league championship (12 in the Premiership and seven in the old First Division) on Saturday was incredibly satisfying. I fancy their chances of winning the Champions League final against Barcelona more than most (and not just because I am a United fan). All of the pressure will be on Barcelona, and the final is at Wembley! Don't underestimate the "home" advantage for United, as well as all of the ghosts from their 1968 European Cup win, also at Wembley. Plus the revenge factor from losing to Barcelona in the 2009 final. United have all of the intangibles on their side, and they have shown throughout Sir Alex Ferguson's tenure that they know how to use intangibles to their utmost advantage.


I just finished reading Nnedi Okorafor's novel Who Fears Death, a science fiction/fantasy narrative that is a pastiche of themes from Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Dave Eggers's What is the What. It does not explicitly acknowledge that it is an allegory of the genocide in Sudan until the very end, though this correlation is obvious from the very beginning. It was a fun read, not especially accomplished technically, but interesting as a fictionalized response to real-world catastrophe, which is an area of scholarly interest for me.


Books Acquired Recently


Dlugos, Tim. A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos. Ed. David Trinidad. Callicoon: Nightboat, 2011.


I wrote last month about how I enjoy Dlugos because of his similarity to Frank O'Hara, and sure enough, the first blurb on the back of the book is Ted Berrigan calling Dlugos "the Frank O'Hara of his generation." The back cover also claims that Dlugos is "a major American poet," which at this point is just wishful thinking, but it is a statement that deserves to be true. It also calls him the "seminal poet of the AIDS epidemic," ha ha.


Toews, Miriam. The Flying Troutmans. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008.


I've been meaning to read this for a while. I really enjoyed Toews's previous novel, A Complicated Kindness, and am interested to see what she does with characters that (as far as I can tell from reading about the book) are not Mennonite. Toews is also excellent as Esther in the film Silent Light, which is probably the best movie about Mennonites/Amish, beating both Witness and Hazel's People.

Thoughts on Re-Reading

Later this afternoon I am going to begin re-reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses for the first time since I bought it at the Strand (12th and Broadway in NYC) in summer 2003. I claim Rushdie as one of my favorite authors, but I haven't actually read any of his work since reading Midnight's Children in late 2005. Thus I am excited to get back to him.


I have done hardly any re-reading over the past seven years while I've been in graduate school (except in those instances where a book was assigned in several of my classes or I assigned a book to my classes multiple times [e.g., Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close], and also when studying for my Ph.D. exams) because I have not had the time. This is a practice that I miss, because I almost always find that I gain new insights into a text the second (or third, etc.) time around. I like the idea of having a set of texts that one returns to for sustenance throughout one's life as reminders for who one is and where one finds beauty in the world. Religious persons would use the term "sacred texts" to label what I am describing, and I like this term even though I am not religious and don't really care whether a "God" exists (actions are what is important, not whether some unprovable supernatural being is out there or not) because it signifies the idea that some texts help us experience the sublime, the beauty of the world (which are both important concepts for secular folks to claim) better than others.


Texts that have played this "sacred" role for me in the past and that I wish I had time now to re-read, but do not, include Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China, Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Di Brandt's poetry. Two authors that I have been able to re-read and continue to re-read as I have the time are Walt Whitman and Samuel R. Delany, both of whom I try to teach whenever possible. In Whitman's case, it's much easier to find time to re-read a poem or two (or a section of "Song of Myself" as the case may be) than a novel.


Part of what makes it so difficult to re-read is that I am always finding new books to read as well. I have at least a dozen new books on my shelf (mostly novels) waiting for me. Certainly my book-buying addiction does not lend itself to contemplative returns to old friends.


Also, sometimes I love parentheses a little too much.