these questions have been floating through the blogs for quite a while but nobody tagged me … so i take the liberty to cheat on quite a few and name more than one title … and i’ve added a few questions of my own …

consider yrself tagged if you feel like it …

What is a book that changed your life?

The Book of Ecclesiastes

The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain

Writing with Power by Peter Elbow

What is a book you’ve read more than once?

A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Grendel by John Gardner

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf

and many others (an occupational delight)

What is a book you’d want to take with you to a desert island?

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (B. Ward translation)

No Man Is An Island by Thomas Merton

What is a book that made you giddy?

If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

What is a book that made you sad?

A Stone is Nobody’s by Russell Edson

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

Maus I & II by Art Spiegelman

What is a book you wish you had written?

Walden, or Life in the Woods by what’s his name

no …

Alice in Wonderland by uh …

no …

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

no …

Baby Be-Bop by Francesca Lia Block

What is a book you are currently reading?

The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

What is a book you’ve been meaning to read?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

Underworld by Don Delillo

What is a book that somebody stole before you could finish?

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

What is a book you never could finish?

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

What is a book you never returned to a library & felt real bad about for quite a while or at least until you gave it away?

some big thick art book whose title i can’t remember … bad bad brother

Which of your books has a couple waterlogged pages?

The Names of the Lost by Philip Levine

What is a book you’d be happy to lose on a bus?

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein

What is your most physically beautiful book?

Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs, 1924

Tibet: Through the Red Box by Peter Sis

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware

What is the most atypical book in your library?

Dictionary of Scientific Literacy by Richard P. Brennan

Which book smelled quite foul when you first acquired it but gradually came to smell sort of like your other books?

The Misanthrope & Tartuffe by Moliere (Wilbur trans.)

New and Selected Poems: 1942-1997 by John Tagliabue

In which book did you find one of your college report cards or some other antique & possibly embarassing scrap?

Chaucer’s Major Works

o yeah … he’s got it bad … (of course, by which we mean … good)

been reading a bit of dickens … i’ve never paid him much attention … so here’s Hard Times … which i’ve “read” once or twice before … think i even “taught” it back in houston … what a surprise … 1854 … reacting to industrial crimes against nature …

A sunny midsummer day. There was such a thing sometimes, even in Coketown.

Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays. You only knew the town was there, because you knew there could have been no such sulky blotch upon the prospect without a town. A blur of soot and smoke, now confusedly tending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell, or changed its quarter: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness:- Coketown in the distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be seen.

The wonder was, it was there at all. It had been ruined so often, that it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks. Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used - that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts - he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ’sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals. The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly
in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels.

mr. dickens & mr. berry would have had some things to say to each other … hmmm …

and is that … Sarcasm … i detect? eternally necessary tool in discourse with/about Power …