The Book Shopper

Endnotes

Finished up 2014 with a flurry of book activity. Went to New York for Christmas and then stayed on a couple days to do some book shopping. Revisited 192 Books and this time my book-loving partner Denise was able to come with me.  Picked up another map-related book, Mapping It Out: An Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist. (I think bookstore owners pull them out when they see me coming.)

Did some book shopping at the famous Strand Books. It was hectic there with people having gift money to burn. (I only managed to buy a calendar.) Much easier for me to browse at a place like 192 Books, where at the Strand I become overloaded. (I didn't prepare a shopping list). Besides always concerned about making weight on the plane ride back to Atlanta.

On Christmas night, ate at The Cornelia Street Cafe in the Village, which is a restaurant with a small literary venue that hosts readings etc.. On Friday (1/2/15) they are hosting a reading of Charles Bukowski. Why not pose with him? Should "reading more Bukowski" be a New Year's Resolution? (Bukowski Photo Credit: Lizzie Casey)

More Dillion

Still following up from my reading of Brian Dillion's Objects in This Mirror. Edited my review and posted it on  Amazon. (I like promoting the relatively unknown, especially when I am the first reviewer). Ordered the book for my daughter Cynthia in Germany. Able to forgo the Amazon route by ordering directly from the German publisher (Sternberg) who lives right down the street from her in Berlin. How often do you get to say "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"

In the final chapter of the Dillion book he writes about the essays of David Foster Wallace, who is the most respected contemporary writer who I have not read, until now. A work colleague loaned me a copy of his nonfiction pieces, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), which I read while traveling this past week. His two long pieces on the Illinois State Fair and Taking a 7-night Carribbean Cruise are classics (full of footnotes and offsides) and have me interested in reading more of him, but Infinite Jest (1996) is such a huge book.

More Bookmaking

My other daughter Bonnie gave me a deluxe, presentation binding machine suitable for making books out of discarded beer cartons (see last posting). Also am finishing up writing a new book, which will be available in 2015.  It's a resolution I plan on keeping.

 

Related articles

Objects in This Mirror: A Review

Beer and Book Pairings: Best of 2014

Beer and Book Pairings: Best of 2014

I am always trying new ales, lagers, IPAs and seasonal beers. As a matter of fact -- and I can't believe I admitting this --  I probably spent more time "browsing" at local Decatur (GA) places like Taps, Ale Yeah and Sherlock's Wine Merchant than browsing in bookstores this year.  With this mind,  I decided to combine the end-of-the-year tradition of the Best Books in 2014 list with some beers of merit. 

Here's a few pairings of authors and books (some have aged a few years) that I read in 2014 matched with some notable brews.

Rebecca Solnit's A Guide to Getting Lost, & River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003). There are certain breweries and writers I rely on when I want something good.  Solnit is a San Francisco-based author I turn to when I want to insure that I am going to have something engaging without going over the top --  like a good IPA beer from such California breweries as  Stone Brewing or Ballast Point (Sculpin IPA).  Michael Chabon is another writer who has been equally reliable the past few years. My last year's list included the The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007), and this year I must add Chabon's novel set in Oakland, Telegraph Avenue, (2012) to my list of better books read in 2014. (Review here.)

John Banville, The Sea (2005). This was my first Banville book  where the brooding sea is a major character. And his description of characters can sound like descriptions of beer -- "short and top-heavy, all shoulders and chest and big round head." Reminds me of Heavy Seas Brewery, a Baltimore Microbrewery and makers of  Loose Cannon IPA, Great'er Pumpkin, and Winter Storm Category 5 Ale, which conversely sounds like a character out of Banville novel, "...a pronounced bitterness, a mix of pale and dark that give it a tawny color and bigger body."

Modris Ecksteins' Rite of Spring: The Great War and The Birth of the Modern Age (1989).  I prepared for my trip to Amsterdam by practicing my Belgian beer drinking with some tutoring from the Brick Store. It made more sense than taking Dutch language lessons from Pimsleur (especially since everyone speaks English there). It is useful to learn whether to order a Gouden Carolus Cuvee Van de Keizer Blauw or Liefman's Goudenbrand and  that I prefer quadrupels to tripels. I came back able to read a Belgium beer menu, albeit at a 4th grade reading level. 

But I also prepped for the trip by rereading the Modris Ecksteins book. In an early itinerary I thought I might be going to the World War I battle sites at Ypres and Passchendele, so I wanted to review Ecksteins brilliant explanation and scholarship on the psychology that led to the slaughter in the trenches and paved the way to the Second World War as well.

 

Objects in This Mirror: A Review

Whether he  is touring the decrepit sound mirrors near the shingle-laden beaches of Dungeness (see footnotes for photo credit) in southeastern England, or retracing the 1967 sojourn of American artist Robert Smithson's trip to the industrial hinterland of Passaic, New Jersey, or writing his interview with artist Sophie Calle from Calle's perspective, Brian Dillion deftly mixes  art and ideas with personal  narrative.

In this collection of 20+ essays gleaned from other magazines and journals, including Cabinet where Dillion is an editor, Objects in This Mirror: Essays (Sternberg Press, 2014) reminds those of us who dabble in this literary form why it is a "famously vagrant mode of writing:"

...with license to duck out of disciplinary constraints, to digress into the personal or the universal, to court specifics to the point, if artistic need be of eccentricity and even whimsy. but viewed from another vantage point, that of the jobbing critic or cultural journalist, "essay" names a bid for respectability: an effort to aggrandize occasional squibs, commissioned reviews, and dashed-off articles to the condition of quasi-literary monuments.

With the only exception being his (too) long essay, on the early 20th century photographer Jarcques Henri Lartigue, Dillion draws you in to any topic he tackles like a list of nine theses on slapstick comedy, or how those maniacs who vandalize art are often sane and more engaged with art than your average museum goer.  Like the essayists that he most admires (there is quite a rundown in the last chapter and an entire essay dedicated to Roland Barthes), Dillion is a mix of eclectic erudition and personal history wrapped in unpretentiousness.

 A worthy read.