Book Finds, Lincoln Logs

Day 253 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and I am blogging early due to plans later in the day, after blogging on Calculus, Carson, and Camus last night, so I am stepping on my own toes.  Fell over.

Anyhoo, I am enjoying some books passed along to me by co-workers, one borrowed, to be returned to our reference shelf at the bookstore, and one a gift: Writing Illinois: The Prairie, Lincoln, and Chicago, by James Hurt, a scholar and English professor who, alas, died just this past June.  This is a work of literary criticism and historical inquiry that I will place next to Lincoln's Favorite Poets (picked up in a vintage bookshop in Ohio) on my special Lincoln shelf at home.

Aauugghh, both are first editions!  Must get mylar jackets!  This I have learned from Book Finds, by Ian C. Ellis, and from working at Babbitt's for three years.  But I wasn't working there when I put my address label on the front free endpaper of Lincoln's Favorite Poets, by David J. Harkness and R. Gerald McMurtry.  Sigh....  On the other hand, these are books I want to keep and read, not resell.

I have a jillion books.  Someday some of them may be very valuable, so my home library may turn out to be the legacy and inheritance I leave my children, who are quietly laughing behind their hands at me much of the time, because I am a poet.  No, really, my kids are sweet about all that, but they know I will never be rich and famous.  I love coming across phrases like "much ignored" in Book Finds, applying to writers now immortal because their work stood the test of time and their first editions are very valuable, et cetera, because then there is hope for the "much ignored" me!

Because I am a great reader, and love to discuss books "shared inquiry" style, and because I have read How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler, I do indeed underline and write marginalia in many of my books!  But, now that I know better, not in any more first editions or advance reader copies.  This is my legacy, kids!

Another thing I love about Book Finds is that I can identify things about it!  It is the first printing of the Updated 3rd Edition, which does not increase its value one whit because it is a remaindered trade paperback, with a black remainder mark in the spine corner of the bottom textblock edge, and full of Sarah's pen notes.  I am reading all the chapters, including the ones that say, "Skip" beside the chapter title!  It is a book that must frequently be updated, as prices and trends change, and the specific examples must change even if the core information holds true.  And it has some typographical and proofreading errors!

Which reminds me!  I got to handle a Louisa May Alcott first edition yesterday, with a typographical error in it--a repetition of the word "at--or a "point" that distinguishes it from other states and editions of the book.

So, Sarah, when you are a famous bookstore owner, like Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, your pen notes are going to make that little remaindered trade paperback very, very valuable!

And, if I keep at it, I may leave a legacy in books, if not in poetry.  But I'm still committed to the poetry, "much ignored" as it is!

Please visit the blog of Bill Radawec, and see his art and read accounts of his work and exhibits.  You'll want to read about the Slightly Altered show, the John Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright connection, and all about Lincoln Logs.  This is his log cabin.

A Whale of a Time

Day 224 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and Mary is reading a big stack of books--somewhere under the stack of whales--while a fine young man is happily reading a stack of stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Meanwhile, a local Lincoln impersonator took home from Babbitt's today a stack of our newly-acquired Lincoln books...bungee-corded to the basket on the back of his motorcycle!  Life is a stack of amazements.

And over at Whale Sound, Nic Sebastian is recording a stack of poems in her beautiful voice, including one of mine, sort of a scary persona poem called "The Way Back."  If you want to read it while she reads it aloud, she provides the link back to Apparatus, where it was published online, as do I, on the right side of this blog.

Have you seen that commercial where Abe Lincoln is standing behind Mary Todd Lincoln, and she asks,"Does this dress make my backside look big?"  He's Honest Abe, poor guy.  What can he do?

"Does that poem make me sound like a whale?"

Mary's having a whale of a time with her bedside stack:

Phoebe Gloekner: A Child's Life & Other Stories, and The Diary of a Teenage Girl
Mary Karr: Lit
Eve Ensler: I Am an Emotional Creature
Anthony Bourdain: Medium Raw and The Nasty Bits 

And her good news is that she found a poem she was searching for: "Flower of Five Blossoms," by Galway Kinnell, in his book When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.

Or a long time in a whale....

Melancholy Baby

Day 43 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Today, and since last night, I am feeling a little melancholy. The spring itself is joyous--the sunshine, temps in the 60s, birds and animals out, dogs barking at the new smells, etc.--but perhaps the shift to the new season, or the energy it takes to shift, creates this other, poignant mood.

So I'll tell you that Beth is reading "Ode on Melancholy" by John Keats, and two other poems with a strain of melancholy in them, for a poetry discussion tonight. Her discussion group is also reading T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and that's melancholy with its yellow fog and whispering women, doubts and regrets, mermaids singing. So is Walt Whitman's "Facing West from California's Shores," even with its "very pleased and joyous moment," as it's about traveling the world and not finding, or quite remembering, what one set out to discover.

And melancholy is one of those mixed emotions, isn't it? The sadness is dominant, but the sweetness is underlying. I think of Abraham Lincoln's melancholy. 2009 was a big Lincoln year, especially here in Illinois, and I am still halfway through Team of Rivals, which I want to finish 1) before the movie comes out and 2) before I start The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, by the poet Daniel Mark Epstein, whose book Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington I very much enjoyed. I'm also a loyal reader of Epstein's poetry because he's a Kenyon College alum, like me!

Some years ago, I had my Lincoln College students read an excerpt from Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk. I heard Doris Kearns Goodwin speak, and she does like that more open term, melancholy, to describe Lincoln's famous sadness. She prefers it to the clinical-sounding "depression." The discussion of the medications of the time in the Shenk book and Atlantic excerpt fascinated my college students, as several of them were also medicated on our more modern drugs; in Lincoln's day getting treated for ailments might add lead poisoning to the list of troubles!

Biographies and memoirs are particularly good at exploring strains of sadness in our lives. Paulette is now reading Hermione Lee's thick biography of Edith Wharton. I have been reading it, too, slowly, and my bookmark in it is in roughly the same spot as my bookmark in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, by Blake Bailey--that is, about a quarter of the way through each. I can report that one summer, reading a number of things at the same time, I made it all the way through Cynthia Griffin Wolff's thick biography of Emily Dickinson. I think what happens is that I encounter a rough spot in someone else's life...and just can't get past it...but I must, as I am reading to learn how to be human.

And Michael and Kay, who sometimes read the same book at the same time, took up Half Broke Horses, a "true-life novel," by Jeanette Walls, after reading her memoir The Glass Castle.

Tonight I'll be attending a poetry reading by David Baker, who is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. It's poetry, so I imagine I'll encounter a bit of melancholy there...but perhaps in the way that blues music relieves by giving voice to the blues...