Titles Read in 2022

January 

Rattle

v.27 n.3, Fall 2021

Without Words and Without Kneeling: a serialized zine novella

1st installment

Tomas Moniz

The World Is One Place: Native American poets visit the Middle East

Diane Glancy, Linda Rodriguez, editors

And Then They Were Gone: teenagers of People’s Temple from high school to Jonestown

Judy Bebelaar and Ron Cabral

Usagi Yojimbo, v.26: Traitors of the Earth

Stan Sakai

Mother Tongue Apologize

Preeti Vangani

Play It As It Lays

Joan Didion

26 Compliments

Marvin K. Hiemstra

The Indelible Occasion

Sheila E. Murphy

A Tale of Two Omars

Omar Sharif Jr

Usagi Yojimbo, v.27: A Town Called Hell

Stan Sakai

Through the Habitrails

Jeff Nicholson

Redwood Burl

Marvin K. Hiemstra

Sky Island: a Trot & Cap’n Bill adventure

Amy Chu and Janet K. Lee

Artifacts

Britta Austin

Chalcedony’s First Ten Songs

Clive Matson

February 

Inner East: illuminated poems and blessings

Marcia Falk

Swimming with Piranhas at Feeding Time: my life doing dumb stuff with animals

Richard Conniff

Letters for Lucardo

Noora Heikkila

Usagi Yojimbo, v.28: Red Scorpion

Stan Sakai

Mississippi in Africa: the saga of the slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and their legacy in Liberia today

Alan Huffman

Modern Poetry of Pakistan

edited by Iftikhar Arif and Waqas Khwaja

Beyond the Chain Link

Rusty Morrison

Child of War

Genny Lim

How to Kill a City: gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood

Peter Moskowitz

Living Quarters

Adrienne Su

The Blithedale Romance

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ticket That Exploded: the restored text

William S. Burroughs; edited by Oliver Harris

The Castafiore Emerald

Herge

Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire

Michelle Penaloza

March

Love Is a Tanka

Jeanne Lupton

Usagi Yojimbo, v.29: Two Hundred Jizo

Stan Sakai

Flarf: an anthology of flare

edited by Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon, Sharon Mesmer, et al.

Quatrefoil

James Barr

Poetry

December 2021, v.219 n.3

Gay Bar: why we went out

Jeremy Atherton Lin

Coolidge and Cherkovski in Conversation

edited by Kyle Harvey

Doom Patrol, book three

Grant Morrison, writer; artists: Richard Case, Ken Steacy, et al.

Nocturnes for the King of Naples

Edmund White

Walking the Tightrope: poetry and prose by LGBTQ writers from Africa

edited by Timothy Kimutai, Tatenda Muranda, Spectra, et al.

Akitsu Quarterly

spring 2022

Time Magazine

May 13, 2019 - Pete Buttigieg cover story

The Snow Goose and the Small Miracle

Paul Gallico

April

Deep Hanging Out: wanderings and wonderment in Native California

Malcolm Margolin

Usagi Yojimbo, v.30: Thieves and Spies

Stan Sakai

Sing: poetry from the indigenous Americas

edited by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Conscious: a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind

Annaka Harris

Haiku: a poet’s guide

Lee Gurga with Charles Trumbull

Usagi Yojimbo, v.31: The Hell Screen

Stan Sakai

100 Parades: California Poets in the Schools statewide anthology 2000

edited by Molly Fisk

Shapeshift

Sherwin Bitsui

No Pity: people with disabilities forging a new civil rights movement

Joseph P. Shapiro

May

A Vast Sky: an anthology of contemporary world haiku

editors: Bruce Ross, Koko Kto, et al.

Own Face

Clark Coolidge

Flood Song

Sherwin Bitsui

Dissolve

Sherwin Bitsui

Usagi Yojimbo, v.32: Mysteries

Stan Sakai

Gilmpse

sp 2022, issue #55

George J. Searles, editor

Beauty Is a Verb: the new poetry of disability

edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen

The Best American Poetry 2021

Tracy K. Smith, editor; David Lehman, series editor

Shang-Chi, v.1: Brothers and Sisters

Gene Luen Yang, writer; Dike Ruan, et al., artists

Some Kind of Hero

James Kirkwood

Sky Sea Birds Trees Earth House Beasts Flowers

Kenneth Rexroth

Shang-Chi, v.2: Shang-Chi vs. The Marvel Universe

Gene Luen Yang, writer; Dike Ruan, artist

Usagi Yojimbo, v.33: The Hidden

Stan Sakai

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, v.1

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer; Brian Stelfreeze, artist

No Time to Spare: thinking about what matters

Ursula K. Le Guin

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, v.2:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer; Chris Sprouse, artist

June

Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, v.3:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writer; Brian Stelfreeze, Chris Sprouse, et al., artists

How the South Won the Civil War: oligarchy, democracy, and the continuing fight for the soul of America

Heather Cox Richardson

Bayou Magazine

issue 64, 2015

Statics #1

a comic book by Jeffrey Lewis

Usagi Yojimbo, v.34: Bunraku & other stories

Stan Sakai

Masquerade: queer poetry in America to the end of World War II

edited by Jim Elledge

Third Wave: the new Russian poetry

edited by Kent Johnson and Stephen M. Ashby

Usagi Yojimbo, v.35: Homecoming

Stan Sakai

Rattle

sp 2022, v.28 n.1, whole n.75

Zarafa: a giraffe’s true story, from deep in Africa to the heart of Paris

Michael Allin

P.S. Your Cat Is Dead

James Kirkwood

Burning the Empty Nests

Gregory Orr

Life’s Edge: the search for what it means to be alive

Carl Zimmer

Sudden Windows

Richard Loranger

Akitsu Quarterly

sum 2022

Flight 714

Herge

July

Usagi Yojimbo, v.36: Tengu War

Stan Sakai

Tintin and the Picaros

Herge

Tintin and the Lake of Sharks

based on the cartoon film by Raymond LeBlanc

The Red House

Gregory Orr

The Anarchivist: history, memory, and archives

Geof Huth

Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? confessions of a gay dad

Dan Bucatinsky

Kiss My Gay Ass: my trip down the Yellow Brick Road through activism, stand-up, and politics

Tom Ammiano

The Grand Piano: an experiment in collective autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, part one

Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steven Benson, Carla Harryman, et al.

We Must Make a Kingdom of It

Gregory Orr

Sassy Planet: a queer guide to 40 cities

Harish Bhandari, David Dodge, Nick Schiarizzi

World War 3 Illustrated #50: Shameless Feminists, a comics anthology

Substrate

Jim Powell

Capyboppy 

Bill Peet

New and Selected Poems

1988. Gregory Orr

[having recently read Orr’s earlier books, I just the “new” section]

City of Salt

Gregory Orr

Out of This World: an anthology of the St. Mark’s poetry project, 1966-1991

edited by Anne Waldman

Locke & Key: The Golden Age

Joe Hill, writer; Gabriel Rodriguez, artist

August

The Grand Piano: an experiment in collective autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, part two

Bob Perelman, Ted Pearson, Rae Armentrout, Barrett Watten, Steven Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, et al.

Gay Sunrise: writing gay liberation in San Francisco, 1968-1974

edited by James Mitchell

Digging to Wonderland: memory pieces

David Trinidad

Embers in the House of Night

Edvard Kocbek; translated by Sonja Kravanja

Unit of Agency

Richard Loranger

Innocents Aboard: new fantasy stories

Gene Wolfe

Colorado Review

v. 48 n.1 sp 2021

Nothing Is Lost: selected poems

Edvard Kockbek; translated by Michael Scammell & Veno Taufer

The Art of Haiku: its history through poems and paintings by Japanese masters

Stephen Addiss

Where I’m Reading From: the changing world of books

Tim Parks

Oziana 1971 

as an ebook 

Oziana 1972

as an ebook

Oziana 1973

as an ebook

Suicide by Language

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

(ebook)

September

Mollyhouse

issue #1, edited by Raymond Luczak

(ebook)

Why I Moved to San Francisco

Dale Jensen

(ebook)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: the history and future of reading

Leah Price

Extended Remark: poems from a Moravian parking lot

Michael Martin

Akitsu Quarterly

fall 2022

Northerners

Seth Abramson

Smuggling Cherokee

Kim Shuck

October

A Mouthful of Breath Mints and No One to Kiss: a Cathy collection

Cathy Guisewite

The Checklist Manifesto: how to get things right

Atul Gawande

Contemporary Yugoslav Poetry

edited by Vasa D. Mihailovich

Voyagers: the settlement of the Pacific

Nicholas Thomas

Where the Wild Coffee Grows: the untold story of coffee from the cloud forests of Ethiopia to your cup

Jeff Koehler

Denver Quarterly

v. 55 n. 2, sum 2022

Rattle

#76; v. 28 n. 2; sum 2022

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, my father, and me

Ada Calhoun

Trash Panda

v. 3, sum 2022

Lisa Anne Johnson, editor

[includes haiku by me]

November

Madness, Rack, and Honey: collected lectures

Mary Ruefle

The Best American Poetry 2022

Matthew Zapruder, guest ed., David Lehman, series ed.

Forum: City College of San Francisco literary magazine

v. 14 n. 1; sp 2022

[includes my poems “What Must Be Used Is Readily Available” and “This Tunnel”]

Know Me Here: an anthology of poetry by women

edited by Katherine Hastings

A House By Itself: selected haiku by Masuoka Shiki

translated by John Brandi, Noriko Kawasaki Martinez

Horizontal Vertigo: a city called Mexico

Juan Villoro, tr. Alfred MacAdam

Who Ate the First Oyster? the extraordinary people behind the greatest firsts in history

Cody Cassidy

Postcards from the Edge

Carrie Fisher

Unfinished Sketches of a Revolution

Brane Mozetic

Blue Colonial

David Roderick

The Half-Finished Heaven: the best poems of Tomas Transtromer

translated by Robert Bly

Cerasus Magazine

issue #4, 2022, London

[includes two chapters from Autobiography of a Book]

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

Chen Chen

December

Tintin: the Complete Companion

Michael Farr

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and me

Bill Hayes

Lucien’s Story: a memoir of Lucien Duckstein

Aleksandra Kroh, translated by Austryn Wainhouse

Orpheus and Eurydice: a lyric sequence

Gregory Orr

Banalities

Brane Mozetic, translated by Elizabeth Zargi and Timothy Liu

Holiday in the Islands of Grief

Jeffrey McDaniel

The Grand Piano: an experiment in collective autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980, part three

Bob Perelman, Ted Pearson, Rae Armentrout, Barrett Watten, Steven Benson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson

The World Between Two Covers: reading the globe

Ann Morgan

You Suck at Art and Bad Friend

two self-published mini comics by Sappho Bushtit

Four Letter Words

Truong Tran

Rattle

#77, v. 23 n. 3; fall 2022

A Dynamic Range of Various Designs for Quiet

Josh Bettinger

Butterflies

Brane Mozetic, tr. Ana Jelnikar

Weird Book

Kyle Harter

Bury It

Sam Sax 

men dying in their 40s

I remember as a kid hearing about men dying in their 40s. I never thought of that as old. My mother had me at 43, after all. Nine days later she celebrated her 44th birthday, thrilled, no doubt, to be changing the diapers of her early birthday present. 

This week I was reading two books that happen to describe the deaths of two men in their 40s. 

In his memoir Insomniac City Bill Hayes writes about his partner of sixteen years, Steve, dying beside him in bed, and not peacefully: 

His death had been as swift as it was inexplicable: He had been only forty-three and remarkably fit, with no history of heart problems. At first, I thought he was having a nightmare, but he was thrashing so violently and unable to speak. I called 911, began CPR, EMTs came. I remember how they kept asking me if we’d been doing drugs; the question seemed absurd; Steve was so clean-living, so wholesome really, he never even drank a beer. They got him to an ER just a few blocks away. But by then he was gone.

In The Grand Piano, a collection of autobiographical essays by poets associated with the Language Movement, Carla Harryman writes about the theater director Philip Horvitz: 

[At] forty-five years old … his heart stopped beating while he was on a plane between New York and San Francisco, where he was headed to attend his brother Bill’s wedding in Sonoma County. Because of heart trouble, the San Francisco engagement [of Harryman’s Memory Play] following the wedding would have been his first solo performance in many years. 

My father had a heart attack at 49*. I am well past 40, and 50 is rather behind me as well. We’re getting to those years where the risks to life arise at least as often in the body as through misadventure. All my life I’ve tried to eat well. I walk regularly; I do yoga. Yet last year during an angiogram I was diagnosed with a blocked artery — 80 to 90% blocked. I don’t know how close a heart attack was lurking. In lieu of major heart bypass surgery the doctor inserted a stent. The stent re-widens the artery and keeps it propped open. I have since learned I have friends who have multiple stents. The stent has reset my capacities by a few years — as far as my subjective experience is concerned. No more angina symptoms. Those were, in case you're interested, a gripping tension in my upper back, which would subside when I stopped walking uphill (I never had any problem walking downhill!), and bad nighttime leg cramps, which made my legs ache deep inside and jerk and twitch. Although I still get mild body aches, there’s really no comparison.  

Odd to think one has made it past the years one could get credit for dying early. 

sources:

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and me

by Bill Hayes

2017. Bloomsbury, New York

The Grand Piano, part 3

an experiment in collective autobiography, San Francisco, 1975-1980

by Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout, Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson, Ted Pearson

2007. Mode A / This Press, Bloomfield Township, MI

______

* My sister, who has a clearer memory for these things, corrects my original guess, which was 50. 

Compare the Central Americans to the Irish?

I try to pay attention to what’s going on in Latin America, my major at Cal was Latin American Studies, after all. But Latin America doesn’t lead the news in the US, unless events there impinge on us, and even then the slant is often unsympathetic. The rage on the American right wing against immigrants from the south seems mostly racism — and, yeah, deeply antagonistic, way beyond unsympathetic. Sadly, even in news sources that aren’t pushing an anti-immigrant agenda, the lede is how US authorities are dealing with the immigrants rather than the root causes that force them to leave their homes. I could have delved deeper into what has caused such trauma recently --  in Central America in particular -- but I confess I really haven’t. I remember the civil wars of the 80s and 90s, but I hear that deaths and crime has spiked in the 2010s and 2020s beyond even those horrible times. Yet there are no rebel armies to negotiate with. 

So I’m reading a book on coffee, where it originated, how it spread throughout the world, and what its current situation is, and I come across this passage:

In 2013, coffee rust affected 74 percent of El Salvador’s crop, 70 percent of Guatemala’s, and 25 percent of Honduras’s, causing losses of nearly two hundred thousand jobs in the trio of countries. … Coffee was the livelihood for more than two million Central Americans. For many of those households, it was their sole source of income, money they used to cultivate staple foods. Jobless farmworkers poured into the cities looking for employment. Gang membership increased. Violence surged. El Salvador became the word’s murder capital, only to be overtaken by Honduras in 2016. Parents sent their children north, often unaccompanied and entrusted with coyote smugglers, passing through a series of way stations as they tried to reach extended family in the United States. … ‘To discuss the current Central American immigration crisis without talking about the coffee rust,’ one newspaper wrote, ‘is like talking about the 1845 Irish immigration without mentioning the “potato blight.”’

As my source was published in 2017, I looked at current news for an update. Says a December 2021 Reuters story: “[T]his year has been particularly ruinous, according to interviews with about a dozen farmers across the region, the heads of one regional and three national coffee institutes plus an executive at a U.S.-based international coffee association.” Damn. 

source: 

Where the Wild Coffee Grows: the untold story of coffee from the cloud forests of Ethiopia to your cup

by Jeff Koehler

2017. Bloomsbury, New York

shoes dangling from wires overhead

When I first saw shoes dangling from telephone lines, I thought them rather whimsical, an ad hoc celebration of ugly, as if a festive ornament could be anything, so long as it swayed in the breeze. The tableau was given a darker spin when I was told the shoes marked places for street drug dealing. Considering how randomly placed such shoes seem to be, the connection is likely a folk etiology, that is, somebody made the connection in their head — and it was an explanation that immediately made sense. Of course, there’s a nefarious reason for the shoes! Who knows, maybe that was the purpose at one time, but with shoes swinging here, there, and everywhere any connection must quickly have lost its usefulness. I’ve come back around to the notion that shoes dangle on overhead lines because it’s just fun to throw them up there, and it feels like a lasting accomplishment to see them swinging away every time you go by. How else are you going to get any satisfaction from throwing away worn out old shoes?

In his book on Mexico City Juan Villoro looks up from the ground level gridlock, the careless drivers, and the gaping holes in sidewalks to those seemingly footloose shoes:

Shoes hung on electric lines offer another parable of transit. Since the streets are dead ends, the final steps must be made aloft. The dead shoes reach that desired beyond, the paradise where the pedestrian strolls the sky.

source:

Horizontal Vertigo: a city called Mexico

by Juan Villoro, translated by Alfred MacAdam

2021. Pantheon Books/Penguin Random House, NY

the dead poet gets paid

In her book about poets, remarkably few lines of poetry are quoted. Ada Calhoun explains by doing some accounting for us:

[F]or permission to share … six lines [by W. H. Auden] I had to sign two contracts and pay $285.37. … [Breaking it down further she says] to use these six lines in the audiobook and in print for countries excluding the US, Canada, and the Philippines, I paid Curtis Brown, Ltd., $195.37. For print rights in the U.S., Canada, and the Philippines I paid Penguin Random House $90.”

That’s pretty good scratch for six lines, no? Too bad Auden isn’t alive to enjoy it. Auden didn’t leave behind kids or a spouse, so I wonder what heir(s) get a cut?

source: 

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, my father, and me

Ada Calhoun

2022. Grove Press, New York NY

being a ghost

There are different kinds of writers. Ada Calhoun is one I’m not, that is, she’s a professional. She writes in order to pay the bills, so she writes to order. She is able to write to please people who will cut her a check. In her new memoir about failing to write a Frank O’Hara biography Calhoun describes some of her projects:

A few years ago, I got a call from my agent telling me that a celebrity needed someone to redo the twenty thousand words the first ghostwriter had done and then to finish the hundred-thousand-word manuscript in five weeks. The book came out and hit the New York Times bestseller list.

A couple of years after that, I sensed that a memoir on which I was the ghost might be in jeopardy. The celebrity was making sounds about the pages not sounding quite right, a red flag. I asked for a sample of writing that worked. Then I spent hours mapping the grammar of that sample, line by line, onto each story I’d been told. That book came out on time, and it, too, hit the New York Times bestseller list.

I wouldn’t be able to do this. I could probably mimic a preferred style for a page or two. Even then it would be torture. I remember back in the 90s when I was going to UC Berkeley, Fodor’s created a new travel guides imprint to compete with Lonely Planet. The Berkeley Guides were going to be hip and happening, man, and Fodor’s was going to take advantage of Berkeley’s rep for being counterculture, which Fodor’s definitely wasn’t. Fodor’s set up shop on or near campus — and began advertising for writers and editors. I took out an application, pored over it, and ultimately realized it was not for me, neither as editor nor as writer. I just can’t crank out copy. I can write, but I can’t write like that.

source: 

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, my father, and me

Ada Calhoun

2022. Grove Press, New York NY 

tornado lucky

I don’t think there are any disaster-free zones on this planet. I live in earthquake country. Florida gets lashed by hurricanes. Tornadoes tear through the plains states. But then, being an Ozophile, twisters have that extra romance. In his short story “Monsters” David Franke writes about tornados from a kid’s perspective:

The weatherman came on again to say we were no longer having a tornado watch but that it had turned into a tornado warning. His voice became both flatter and more excited. … The weatherman named roads and landmarks, saying a funnel cloud had been spotted southwest of town and was moving northeast at about thirty miles an hour. We got information at school about this. You are supposed to make sure there are no yard tools lying around; they can cause injury in high winds. Do not sit near glass windows. Flying pieces of broken glass can blind you. If you are in car, park and crawl into the nearest ditch and lie down and wait, which sounded like fun. My dream was to crawl up under a bridge abutment when a tornado came so I could watch it come close, and all I’d have to do is hang on. It was supposed to roar like a train. Some people got sucked up in a tornado, as in The Wizard of Oz. You never know when you’re going to get lucky.

source:

Colorado Review, v.48 n.1, Spring 2021

events to which no one came

I have scheduled events to which no one came. I have been scheduled for events to which no one came. 

One odd night at the San Francisco series I was co-hosting, Poetry & Pizza, the two featured poets did not show. Fortunately (?), no audience did either. 

For Clearly Meant, the reading series I host out of the Berkeley Public Library’s Claremont Branch, there was one reading with a total audience of one. Because he was intelligent and lively in the discussion and talked in an interesting fashion about his own poetry, I later scheduled that audience for his own reading. 

I have probably hidden memories of some of my own empty/singular audience readings. There was that one at a cafe in Cotati where the coordinator couldn’t make it. A friend filled in for her. But there was a table near the door that talked louder as I read, as though they weren’t going to let any dumb poetry reading interfere with their good time. No one shushed them. Why was I there? I asked myself. But I carried on like, I imagined, a professional. Besides my co-reader, a friend I’d brought along from Berkeley, and my husband and the host, there was maybe one person, or two?, that looked like they might be paying attention. 

I don’t know whether it’s reassuring to hear from others who have had similar experiences, or sad. 

Fanny Howe writes about reading for the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York City: 

I have read there a few times — always in atrocious weather (hailstorms, blizzards, and gales) — and have had a wonderful audience nevertheless. Once, however, when I was giving a talk, no one came. Ron Padgett recorded me as I read to him alone, and then a mad woman roamed in from the wet streets and tore my talk to shreds.

source:

Out of This World: an anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 1966-1991

edited by Anne Waldman

1991. Crown Publishers, New York

Godey’s Lady’s Book speaks up for herself

Shepherding Autobiography of a Book into the world I find myself checking out other books about books. I brought home from the Claremont Branch two books that (totally coincidentally?) have titles that riff on books by Raymond Carver, Where I’m Reading From by Tim Parks (Carver title: Where I’m Calling From) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Books by Leah Price (Carver title: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). I enjoyed both. I wrote to Leah Price via her website, hitting her up for a blurb. No response. Ah well. Everybody’s busy. Plus it’s pretty weird, this writing to a stranger out of the blue to ask them to endorse your book. So I totally understand her ignoring me. One of the arguments for going for an MFA in creative writing is the networking — you’ll have professors who’ll provide blurbs! Maybe!

Leah Price may not have seen Autobiography of a Book yet, but she did find another literary object speaking up for itself:

In 1855, the American magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book ran a story titled ‘The life and Adventures of a Number of Godey’s Lady’s Book Addressed Particularly to Borrowers, Having Been Taken Down in Shorthand from a Narration Made by Itself.’ The ‘number’ (what we would call an issue) complains bitterly of the wear and tear it suffered when lent by subscribers to all their friends. Each girl should buy their own copy, the long-suffering magazine declared, the same way she bought her own bonnet: ‘How would you like that passing from head to head?’

Price also brings back to light a fun list. It's a list of coinages meant to blacken the reputations of those skinflints who borrow — but don’t buy — books:

book weevil

borrocole

libracide

booklooter

bookbum

bookkibitzer

culture vulture

greeper

bookbummer

bookaneer

blifter

biblioacquisiac

book buzzard

greader

Price’s source is dated 1931. I don’t think any of these pejoratives caught on. Considering the love of the bookish for public libraries, I’m guessing there isn’t a critical mass for shunning the infamous borrower. 

source: 

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

by Leah Price

2019. Basic Books, New York 

word of the day: fonds

word of the day: fonds

context: 

“We cannot save the whole world, so we save that part of it we assess as essential. The process of appraisal usually encompasses multiple fonds or subfonds, so we are always creating a collection of records, even if that collection consists of records from the same central fonds. In a manuscripts environment, this is even more so the case, yet the collection we create out of various manuscript collections functions best when the records have conceptual connections between them.”

definition (Dictionary of Archives Terminology): the entire body of records of an organization, family, or individual that have been created and accumulated as the result of an organic process reflecting the functions of the creator

I knew Geof Huth as a poet, but he is also a professional archivist for New York City courts. Having now read The Anarchivist, Huth’s essays on archival theory, I have a better idea of what he does in his day job. Archives are storage facilities for records, but archivists like Huth want their mess of data to be useful, so they do their best to clean them up and keep them organized so researchers, writers, journalists aren’t just faced with dusty boxes and catawampus piles and mouse-chewed bundles. 

This was the first time I encountered an archivist term of art: fonds. When seeking a definition you have to make sure you include the “s” at the end, otherwise you wander down trails wholly unrelated. An archivist could be fond of his fonds, I suppose, but fondness and fondsness do not seem to be related. 

One of the examples given for a fonds at Wikipedia: “the writings of a poet that were never published”

I have serious fonds, it seems. 

source:

The Anarchivist: history, memory, and archives

by Geof Huth 

2020. AC Books, New York

word of the day: meed

word of the day: meed

This passage in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance has narrator Miles Coverdale congratulating himself on his skills as an observer, a passionate, yet disinterested observer. 

context: “Of all possible observers, methought a woman like Zenobia and a man like Hollingsworth should have selected me. And, now, when the event has long been past, I retain the same opinion of my fitness for the office. True, I might have condemned them. Had I been judge, as well as witness, my sentence might have been stern as that of destiny itself. But, still, no trait of original nobility of character, no struggle against temptation, — no iron necessity of will, on the one hand, nor extenuating circumstance to be derived from passion and despair, on the other, — no remorse that might coexist with error, even if powerless to prevent it, — no proud repentance that should claim retribution as a meed, — would go unappreciated. True, again, I might give my full assent to the punishment which was sure to follow. But it would be given mournfully , and with undiminished love. And, after all was finished, I would come, as if to gather up the white ashes of those who had perished at the stake, and to tell the world — the wrong being now atoned for — how much had perished there which it had never yet known how to praise.”

definition (Collins): a merited recompense or reward

Quite a performance, that passage. Perhaps, in a sense, it is an apology. I did your story justice, he seems to be telling his protagonists, even if you didn’t come out looking very good. 

source: 

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

1852. 1960, Dell Publishing, New York

word of the day: sillabub

word of the day: sillabub

Miles Coverdale, the poet narrator of Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, has moved away from Blithedale, a utopian rural community of which Coverdale was a founder. He was only taking a break, he thought, to check out civilization again. Once back in town, though, he feels more in tune with it than he ever was with the farm. 

context: “I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a charm, on which — a devoted epicure of my own emotion — I resolved to pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away. Whatever had been my taste for solitude and natural scenery, yet the thick, foggy, stifled element of cities, the entangled life of many men together, sordid as it was, and empty of the beautiful, took quite as strenuous a hold upon my mind. I felt as if there could never be enough of it.”

definition (dictionary.com): 1. a drink of milk or cream sweetened, flavored, and mixed with wine or cider. 2. a dessert of beaten cream that is thickened with gelatin, sweetened, and flavored with wine or liquor. [also spelled syllabub]

source: 

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

1852. 1960, Dell Publishing, New York

word of the day: ebullition

word of the day: ebullition

Hawthorne’s first person narrator in The Blithedale Romance is Miles Coverdale, a poet. He never shares a line of poetry with us. In this passage Coverdale reveals a hint of insight into the situation of women, a proto-feminism as it were. His (soon-to-be-former) friend, the pontificating Hollingsworth, has just declared that the role of women is to be subservient to men. 

“I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent — as I felt, by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought — this outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her very soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere incident in the great sum of man.”

defintion (Merriam-Webster): the act, process, or state of boiling or bubbling up

Zenobia is an assertive and intelligent woman. Wouldn’t she readily challenge Hollingsworth’s pronouncements? Coverdale is disgusted when, instead, Zenobia acquiesces. He grumbles to himself about this surrender. “‘Is it in their [women’s] nature? Or is it, at last, the result of ages of compelled degradation?’”

source: 

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

1852. 1960, Dell Publishing, New York