Reading After Graduating

Since the end of this past May, I've been working to reconcile myself with a serious gaping abyss in my life: the lack of syllabi. Of course, the varyingly thick or thin sheaves of paper that I have looked forward to receiving on the first day of each new term over the past four years are largely just symbols of the whole curriculum, community, and support system that comes with full-time enrollment at a liberal arts college. For mixed in with the course description and the central lists of "required reading" and due dates are all the other, often less conspicuous components of my education. There are the office hours that represent the care and involvement of professors and other mentors along with (sometimes) the information that connects you to peers or other members of the community. There are all of those lists of "supplemental" or "recommended" materials that I, at the time, thought were nothing more than cruel jokes designed to instill further feelings of guilt and inadequacy. And now, even the paper that all of those assignments and projects were printed on signifies an access to physical resources that are no longer quite as convenient in my plain-clothes, dilettante "Alumni" status. After nearly six months, it still feels like just yesterday that I was sent out into the world to "do my thing," to prove myself, to change the world and give back to those who've contributed to my growth and ideals (the requests from the Alumni Office started pouring in even before I "walked"). So how am I doing so far?

As a literature and philosophy major, my own evaluation of my progress pretty much boils down to reading patterns. And I guess this emphasis on reading is the only way I can feel okay with my current status as a part-time employee/volunteer who spends most of his time not earning money but cooking, thinking, reorganizing my bookshelves, and flipping pages. Although I have no official "affiliation" with any institution and no formal, professionally-verified curriculum to follow, I still consider myself the same sort of "student" that I have been for the past 4 (or 18) years. On one hand, there is the feeling that holding onto this vocation of student represents an unhealthy and immature understanding of myself and the work I could/should be doing. I guess this is where market/economic-based criticisms of higher education (and perhaps particularly the liberal arts model) offer their recommendations for more practical, "real world" degree or certification programs (see some of the commentary offered here). After all, isn't the point of a B.A. to prepare a person for a job and, more particularly, for a salaried position? When I get going on this line of thought, I can begin to feel overwhelmed and a bit depressed: "What am I supposed to do with all these books on my shelves?" "Did I really just spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars (albeit mostly from other peoples' pockets) on an education that has left me unhearing and speechless, in the sense lacking any practical vocation or immediate sense of calling?" "Am I just supposed to use my diploma to wrap up Big Macs at the drive-thru window?"

Of course, I consider such desperate questions to be merely part of my bad days. That is because, on the other side of the learning-earning dilemma, I can unequivocally confirm my commitment to books—to poetry, philosophy, anthologies, stories, guidebooks and manuals, plays, biographies, and all of the other disciplines and traditions that might find a voice in printed word or textual community. Despite my various critiques of the liberal arts as a curriculum and a system, what I do have no reservations about are certain ways of thinking and doing that are closely affiliated with the diverse field of the "humanities" (including my recent interest in non-human members of our living communities). Self-examination, critical dialogue and discussion, and active and creative engagement with others and with the world are all aspects of living, learning, and working that disciplines such as literature and philosophy can uniquely illuminate and cultivate. This is not just a matter of cloistered, bookish intellectuals spouting ideological discourse. Neither is it just part of the leisure class and the consumer market. Reading, and all that comes with it, is an integral part of flourishing, distraction, belief, pleasure, creativity, hard labor, and all of the other things that make life work living.

Of course, my relationship to "academic interests" and "professional goals," and with these my whole understanding of what I'm doing or where I'm headed, has oftentimes been muddied by my approach to life and learning: my short attention span and flexible schedule, my less-than-rigid boundaries (and priorities), and my tendency to favor holistic and dialectical as well as open-ended thinking have all at times contributed to a sort of drifting. At least, I've found myself at several times over the past few weeks referring to myself as a sort of "buoy." And while all that aimless bobbing does not feel like the most healthy, not to mention secure, state of affairs, I'm hoping that I can both stay afloat and avoid becoming truly washed up before I can apply to grad school in Fall 2011. My obsession with books might just help to keep me buoyant until then; and so this blog, in all its intermittent indirection, will be my way of semi-publicly keeping tabs on my location and (I hope) my progress as a reader and aspiring professional reader. For more unscrupulous metaphorical expansion of what this blog is "like", see: sonobuoy.

Next up: academic theory/practice, more books, and opining for graduate school

The Burden of Books

I'm reminded of one of the more humorous aspects of this summer's cross-country bicycling trek when I find myself explaining to people how I managed to end up on the other side of the country with more than a dozen books on my list of "recent acquisitions". Shopping for and (occasionally) purchasing used and (occasionally) new books has always been one of my favorite parts of traveling: Persepolis in Paris, Dracula in Whitby, Whitman in Boston, and so on. Somehow, the experience of movement on my journey becomes wrapped up with my experience of the books I buy along the way, whether I read it immediately or let it marinate on the shelves for a few years. In both cases, I can recall a time and a place--the food, conversation, weather, architecture, and economy, all in some sort of distilled format--and when memory does this kind of work, then the book-as-souvenir or souvenir-as-book becomes for me a wholly different kind of object. It marks out an unexpected aura in my life that continues to remind and challenge me about where I've been and where I'm going.

At any rate, it turns out that even the modest bookstores in Fargo, ND, or Whitefish, MT, have their share of enticing treasures. And even more dangerous for our cargo poundage, we discovered, were the quirky libraries that lie semi-dormant in podunk towns in the middle of farm country. Open at some of the strangest combinations of hours--1:00pm-2:00pm Tuesdays and 3:30-5:00pm Saturdays, for example--these little nests of sharing and learning (and the Internet) were a staple on our journey. Often maintained on a primarily volunteer basis, they were our source of weather reports, route/lodging information, and contact with friends and family. Every other day, we'd take a pit stop around lunch or dinner time, and we probably visited a string of more than 20 of these over the course of our pedaling. The danger here lay in the shelves that often sat near the front doors (or door) of the library, offering all kinds of strange odds and ends, often for less than a dollar! It seems that, in many parts of North Dakota and vicinity, the books with the highest turnover are the kind that I am highly interested in: "classics" of literature, new releases by renowned authors, cookbooks, or pieces of regional interest. Thus, pristine editions of Umberto Eco or Philip Roth for 25 cents show up alongside eccentric young adult fiction about Norwegian immigrants in the Northern Great Plains. In spite of being strapped for cash and storage space, I made a few purchases along the way, mailing back or gifting what I couldn't cram into my panniers. Oh, and then there are also the books I had sent by mail-order to places we were stopping along the way, the ones people gifted to me, or the ones I found lying in boxes along the side of the highway. The only part I'm proud of is that I actually managed to read the majority of these titles:

Hart Crane - The Complete Poems
W.S. Merwin - Selected Poems
Pablo Neruda - The Separate Rose (very nice, dual-language edition by Copper Canyon Press)
William Stafford - The Darkness Around Us Is Deep
Rolf Jacobson - The Roads Have Come To An End Now (again, the excellent Copper Canyon Press)
William Blake - Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (finally, an edition with text and images of his original "illuminated" pages)
Perry Miller (Ed.) - The American Transcendentalists: Collected Prose and Poems
Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales

Philip Roth - American Pastoral
Roberto Bolano - The Savage Detectives
Erling Nicolai Rulfsrod - Gopher Tales for Papa
Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume
William Faulkner - The Hamlet
Anton Chekhov - The Major Plays

Elinore Pruitt Stewart - Letters Of A Woman Homesteader
Bill Devall and George Sessions - Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered
Ken Kern - The Owner-Built Home
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics

*

Okay, I think that must be all of them. Next up: reading after graduation.

Today's Book Trade

Well, in searching through my pyramid of boxes of books, I amassed a whole separate box of duplicates (3 copies of Walden, 3 copies of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 2 copies of several Dostoyevsky novels, and 2 sets of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy—plus, lots of odds and ends that I decided aren't worth holding onto anymore. I took the whole load over to The Book Rack ("Holly's Book Rack" for us locals who know that it is the only such book-place with a 50-mile radius) and browsed their small section of CLASSICS, nestled in the back behind INSPIRATIONAL FICTION, MYSTERY, and short, squat ROMANTIC bricks as far as the eye can see. They had a surprising amount of treasures there on the "literature" shelves. I actually had to choose between an older edition of Thoreau's Cape Cod accounts, fittingly titled Cape Cod and a strangely neon and pink edition of Hannah Arendt's On Violence. Also, I had both Thomas Pynchon's Vineland weighed against a potentially fascinating piece of agricultural travelogue by the USDA's chief soil conservationist in the 1900s entitled Farmers of Forty Centuries, which details the sort of sustainable, long-term farming and social practices he encountered in a sweeping tour of rural and urban regions of Japan, China, and Korea. Lastly, I had Gary Snyder's Turtle Island set up against collected essays by Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, and a few other choice selections.

What to do?

Well, in case you couldn't tell in my epic description of this brief shopping trip, I ended up with the following:

Gary Synder - Turtle Island (with "Four Changes")
Henry David Thoreau - Cape Cod
F. H. King - Farmers of Forty Centuries

Next up: pulling out and chronicling the heap of books I read/collected on my bike journey out west.

The End (of the Beginning?)

Well, instead of writing some of my last 50 or 60 pages in college (due in less than a week), I thought I'd take this chance to make a little blog post. I spent most of last night (until dawn) combing through a handful of books and articles related to the theme of everyday life, cooking, neighborhoods, politics (Lefebvre and Situationist International?), poetry, and Sufi and Christian mysticism (à la Rumi, Simone Weil, and others). It's a fascinating set of literatures that I hope I can immerse myself in further in the years ahead. It just resonates with me. However, it seems extra tricky and the stakes seem higher when you try to make a theoretical research project out of something for which the whole point is to be untheorized, everyday, common, practical, quotidian, unexplainable, and so on. Finding a way to further discuss and analyze "the practice of everyday life" in all its religious and spiritual significance might be something I have to think about a lot in the future.

Anyways, I'm getting ready to graduate and hit the road, which means a big change in reading habits—potentially for the better, but I'll have to make some serious adjustments, either way. This blog will hopefully be set up for some remote/mobile (what's the techno-lingo these days?) posts, at least to give you the titles of what I get my hands on. Of course, I'm not sure how many books I'll be able to freight along in my panniers... maybe I should have someone mail boxes of books to different stops along the way?

Fall 2009

Besides purchasing books at the beginning of each semester, this listing and summarizing process on the other side of classwork is perhaps my favorite part of being a student. I don't even feel bad if I end up being self-congratulatory, because I love books. So if anyone ever looks at these lists and thinks I'm one of those twisted, cocky, malignant bookworks, well, you're right. But I'll lend you some of my books, if you ask nicely.

This past semester was almost certainly the busiest of my academic career thus far. After a relaxed summer of half-hearted reading endeavours, I was amazed at how much reading can occur once you have 5 or 6 professors making all sorts of unreasonable demands on your time and eyesight. If I could read as much during breaks as I do during peak levels of activity during the semester, I would be able to polish off my "Read Before Dying" list in no time. Just for the record, I've listed below all the books I've engaged with in the past 3.5 months, including those books which I didn't quite finish but spent some serious time with nonetheless but not including articles, handouts, course reading packets, online selections, or books from which I read minor excerpts.

And how about some subject categories, eh?

Mr. William Shakespeare:
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
As You Like It
The Tempest
Henry 5
King Lear
The Merchant of Venice
Measure For Measure
Gabriel Egan - Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism
James Shapiro - 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

Literature:
Lisa Russ Spaar - Satin Cash
The Norton Anthology of Interviews
Nicole Krauss - The History of Love
Seamus Heaney (translator) - Beowulf
J.R.R. Tolkien (translator) - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo
Bede - Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Sir John Mandeville - The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
The Old English Elegies
Medieval English Verse
Norton Anthology Of Literature: The Middle Ages
Julian of Norwich - Revelations of Divine Love
Jennifer Neville - Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry
Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (editors) - A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes

Philosophy:
James K.A. Smith - The Fall of Interpretation
Saint Augustine - De Doctrina (Teaching Christianity)
Martin Heidegger - Being and Time (I'll be able to officially add this to the list after my Contemporary Continental class this spring)
Jacques Derrida - Speech and Phenomena
Roger Poole - Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication
*
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx - Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society
Karl Marx - Capital
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - Empire
Hernando de Soto - The Mystery of Capital
*
Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy
G.W. Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics
David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Thomas Reid - Inquiry and Essays
Immanuel Kant - Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Peter Singer - A Very Short Introduction: Hegel
Søren Kierkegaard - Philosophical Fragments
Karl Marx (and Frederich Engels) - The German Ideology
Frederick Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols

Summer 2008

This past summer didn't work out incredibly well for my lofty reading ambitions. My intermittent work on the farm and for Jamie got me going with some horticulture and some reading in contemporary philosophy of religion (of the continental variety), but I chose to spend most of my time between these projects with cooking and a little travel.

- top 5 + 1:
Jorge Luis Borges - Labriynths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (5 stars)
Eileen Weppner - The International Grandmothers' Cookbook (Favorite Recipes Of Grandmothers From Around The World) (5 stars)
James Tate - The Ghost Soldiers (4 stars)
Wendell Berry - Life is Beautiful (4 stars)
Kevin Huizenga - Curses (4 stars)
Elizabeth Wilson - Bohemians: The Glorious Outcasts (4 stars)

- assorted other titles:
J.D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey (4 stars)
Rolf Potts - Vagabonding (4 stars)
James Shapiro - 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (3 stars)
John D. Caputo - On Religion (3 stars)
Jonathon D. Culler - A Very Short Introduction: Literary Theory (3 stars)
Douglas Coupland - Girlfriend in a Coma (2 stars)
Marcus A. Webb - The Herb and Spice Companion: An A to Z Guide (2 stars)

Late Fees?

A couple of days after arriving at York, I went with Brad and John to the public library. The only necessity of our trip was to procure a library card for local discounts and such, but of course we also managed to pick up a truckload of books. Now, I'm pretty proud that I've managed to actually finish more than half of them, and have spent a little time with each and ever one. That's pretty good for me. But, the due date is already past and thus I am forced to return them before I would like. Here's a record of their life with me, though, before they're returned to the shelves. Who knows if anyone else will spend time with them or love them ever again?

C.K. Stead - "The New Poetic"
- an analysis of British poetry from early Yeats through the Georgians and War Poets up to Eliot's "Four Quartets," this influential book/essay uses a very potent model for tracking the relationships between poet, audience, and subject matter and ends up arriving at the central discussion of what poetry is and does

Czeslaw Milosz - "Facing the River"
- I finally found an actual collection of Milosz's poems and was greatly rewarded; I would highly recommend this dark but fertile revelation of Milosz's mind and life, one of his last

Billy Collins - "Nine Horses" and "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"
- more clever, quirky, occasionally moving, but above all casual poetry from this laid-back master of easy-going poems

Samuel Beckett - "For To End Yet Again and Other Fizzles"
- inciting mind/word-play akin to James Joyce; an intriguing experimental form (or poetry?) but not sustainable beyond the few pages of each individual fizzle

Seamus Heaney - "District and Circle"
- I enjoyed his direct engagement with other writers and his impressive lexicon--an expansive mix of local-feeling Anglo-Saxon words littered like rocks or peat amongst international landscape of bamboo and Italian architecture--but overall, I had trouble engaging the poems

Ezra Pound - "Poems selected by Thom Gunn"
- I read Gunn's brief introduction and a few excerpts--I'm still not sure what I think of Pound, beyond the obligatory nod for his midwifery role in Modernist poetry

Luigi Pirandello - "Collected Plays"
- again, the introduction was informative, but I didn't have time to actually read any of the actual plays

Deitrich Bonhoffer - "Ethics"
- I glanced over the section on Vocation and on Government, only to be slightly disappointed. maybe someday I'll be able to engage the whole book, since he himself considered it such an important undertaking