Bookity Bookity Books

Some people might do a "what's in your purse?" post, but I incline away from bags and towards shelves. Looking over this post, I have concluded that I really need a study, some day. Or at least a home office that is not my bedroom.

If you click on the pictures, you can even read the titles

Books in the hall (some of these are PDK's and Ms. E's)

Living room shelves look better when decorated with books, right?

British fiction section in the living room

Dissertation books within easy reach in the hutch over my desk

For fun books, American poetry, and acquisitions that have no assigned location yet!

Don't even look at this -- this is the pile of library books I can't squeeze onto my shelves.

Library books, Irish books, and literary criticism

I love books, as you all well know!  When I first moved in with PDK, I took the opportunity to organize my books by (in descending order) genre, nation of origin, and alphabetically by author's last name.... since then, though, the organization has gotten a bit crazy as I moved some of the for-fun books out to make room for the dissertation books closer to my desk so they will be right at hand when I need them.


But somehow, I have decided I still have room for more! So, after walking down to the Santa Barbara Farmer's Market on Saturday, PDK took the groceries home while I stayed at The Book Den, a great used and antique bookstore that also does a brisk business online in downtown SB. Borders and Barnes and Noble closed down a couple months ago in town, but I couldn't really give a damn, because I don't think they did much for real readers anyways, other than undervalue books and treat them like a mass commodity, putting small publishers and small booksellers in dire straits. I am hoping that the demise of the big box chains pushes business back toward the independent bookstores in town... and encourages people to open new ones in towns that have been left entirely bereft of books.


My eyes had lighted on a sign in The Book Den's window on Friday night, when I went to the Town Hall meeting on Friday to learn about the potential solutions to California's budget troubles: "Pomes Dolar each -- 571 volumes of Poetry."  So.... I bought twenty-seven books of poetry for a smidgen less than thirty dollars. Oh my, am I now in heaven and in hell, because how am I going to have the time? But, I have a plan: If I get up an hour earlier every day (ugh), I can read a book of poetry with tea before I start the rest of my day. And, I hope it will put me in a readerly and writerly state of mind for the dissertation work ahead of me each day.


So, in celebration of Poetry Month and of books over all,  here is a small smackerel of the beauty and delicious indulgence that comes from small pieces of printed paper, folded and sewn or glued into covers and lined up on shelves (errr... or on the floor):


Books You Can Eat!  The International Edible Book Festival was held a couple weeks back, and I think my favorite was the Fahrenheit 451 submission from 2009! Check out the images in the festival's albums.

The Book Surgeon -- featured on My Modern Met (via The Good. The Bad. And The Internet)

Penguin's redesign of classics
I love this vision of Little Women -- the reference has to be to Jo cutting her hair, right?

Books as Jewelry! (via JunqueTreasures on Etsy)

There is a lot more out there, I am sure, but I am going to leave it at this, since I have reading and writing to do myself, as I am sure you do too! So I will just leave you with this link to an inspiring article in the poetry blog About a Word: Who I Read Before I Write. 

National Poetry Month is Underway!

Celebrate it every way you know how! I will be celebrating it by planning the reading for the summer course I am putting together: "Modernist and Avant-Garde Poetries and their Contexts" .... a bit of a mouthful, but it was the only way to get everything in.

I've also been busy making treasuries to feature some of the wonderful broadsheets and books of poetry available from vintage and handmade sellers on Etsy! I love letterpress, and I am so glad there are other people who have access to presses and can make beautiful editions of poems that I can buy. There is a letterpress machine at UCSB, but I think I'd have to sign up to take a Book Arts course, which would be awesome, but it is such a time commitment! In my last semester of college I took a course in letterpress (to fulfil my arts requirement... when it comes down to it, I really double majored in English in college, I took so many book-based courses). It took me the whole semester to create a broadsheet of the last lines of Joyce's Ulysses and tiny book of quotes about my hometown. I already am spending too little time on my diss as it is.

Memories of Ireland, part 2

I wrote about my first visit to Ireland last week, and that visit only began a long-term interest in (even fascination with) the place.

In college, one of the first classes I took was on Irish literature. I'd read the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland in high school, and I knew I wanted to know more. That class was one of the best I ever took -- and Eavan Boland even came to read and speak to the class!

The next year I took the same professor's course on Joyce's Ulysses (a great comic book version is online at "Ulysses Seen"), and it was a crazy ride.  I had known before I even went to college that I wanted to spend a year abroad, and reading Joyce's tribute to Dublin cemented in my mind exactly where I wanted to go. His novel is a masterpiece, but I couldn't truly understood it until I lived in Dublin and 1) understood just how walkable it is and 2) really got to know the culture, which, while it is obviously not the same as it was at the turn of the 20th century, still retains echoes and remnants of that time and place.

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

Below are some of my best and most indelible memories of going to Trinity College Dublin for my junior year. Some were entirely cliche, and a lot were entirely unexpected:

Memories of Ireland, part 1.

With all the mentions of Guinness and Dublin and the wild west coast of Ireland that I've been seeing lately, I am getting more and more nostalgic for my years of living in and travelling around Ireland. Looking back over what I have written, it's gotten very long!  I hope you all don't lose patience with me.

My father's family is mostly Irish, and my grandmother  was entirely Irish (a Holland by birth, her parents both hailing from County Sligo) and fairly fierce about it.  The family never did any of the typically Irish-American stuff though (other than being Catholic), but there was a true connection to Ireland that was a thread running through the family. My grandparents sent clothes to the poor Irish relations for years, and even visited in the 1960s. My father and two of his siblings had also visited our relations in Kilkenny and Sligo in the late 1970s, and Christmas cards were exchanged regularly.  But most importantly, to my young bookworm self, my grandparents had a print of a WB Yeats poem, "The Fiddler of Dooney," illustrated by Jack B Yeats, on their wall, and I knew that poem so well from visiting them and staring at it -- now it hangs in my parents' house, in the room I stay in when I visit. 

"And dance like a wave of the sea."