Share your latest bookstore haul!

[Brendan]

Realized I never shared my spoils from my trip last month to the Hobart Book Village. Also…thinking it would make for a fun ongoing topic here to share your latest batch of bookstore acquisitions!

Similar to Share a cover — books you're reading, but rather than current / on-deck reads, show us your latest finds…which almost by definition will be books in your antilibrary, so no need to share more than title + anything about the book that caught your eye.

Here are the ones I picked up from Hobart last month (I bought books from 3 of the 5 stores in the book village — Adams, Liberty Rock, and Blenheim Hill!)

Please share any of your own recent book finds below

• Radical Artifice by Marjorie Perloff
• Vision and Resonance by John Hollander
• Explorations in the Field of Nonsense ed. by Wim Tigges
• The Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman
• Simulation Games in Learning by Sarane S. Boocock & E. O. Schild
• Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks

• Signifying Rappers by Mark Costello & David Foster Wallace
• African Rhythm and African Sensibility by John Miller Chernoff
• Teaching Oral Traditions ed. by John Miles Foley
• The Single Best Idea, Ever ed. by Amanda Chesworth et al
• Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares by Nancy Langston

I’m excited to have picked up a couple cool ones on poetics / experimental writing, and some that explore the musicality of language and oral tradition. “The Single Vest Idea Ever” looks like a very fun anthology about Darwin’s theory of evolution. And “The Lifetime Reading Plan” reminded me a lot of curating my own reading lists and antilibrary. Lots of fun finds; definitely suggest checking out the Hobart Book Village if you’re ever in the area or looking for a fun weekend trip!

[Brendan]

A few I picked up last weekend from Press Play, a cool art / music / publishing fair in Brooklyn:

The one in the middle is from Siglio Press, the other two from Litmus Press…both great indie publishing companies with excellent names!

• SIR by Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle
• Intermedia, Fluxus, and the Something Else Press Ed. by Steve Clay & Ken Friedman
• The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times, Ed. by Joan Retallack

[Word]

My last visit to a bookstore was on March 14th of this year, not long before brick and mortar retail in Virginia ground to a halt. I had been trying to visit this particular bookstore for a while but their hours and my hours never would seem to line up. It is curious in hindsight then, to note that my efforts to visit Black Swan Books in Staunton, Virginia finally paid off just as the gravity of the black swan that is COVID was emerging in Virginia. I don’t know how the store is surviving the pandemic, but their website indicates that all their inventory is available for purchase through the website.

Although I went in looking for books by Bergson, Deleuze, and Tarkovsky, I was not disappointed by the consolation prizes I found in their stead.

• Something Like an Autobiography by Akira Kurosawa
• Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

While I love the title of Kurosaway’s memoir, I was amused to learn the original title was “Gama No Abura” (Toad Oil; a traditional Japanese ointment for medical purposes), and that the book was originally published serially. This book remains solidly on the shelf of my physical antilibrary for the time being (right between Kandkinsky’s “Point and Line to Plane” and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Line by Line”).

Metaphors We Live By has been bouncing on and off the shelf of my antilibrary, competing as it is with the Quixote, several Borges collections, Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, and Peter Levine’s In an Unspoken Voice. I have been hearing about this book for a while and have been increasingly aware over the past few years (and even more pointedly over the past few months) of the power of metaphor as a resource for healing and transformation. This book arose in large part from the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose “Language, Thought, and Reality” is a personal (as yet half read) favorite.

In the first chapter the authors point out the way war is used as a metaphor for argument in our culture, listing a number of linguistic examples (“Your claims are indefensible; He attached every weak point in my argument; His criticisms were right on target; I demolished his argument, I’ve never won an argument with him; You disagree? Okay, shoot!; If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out; He shot down all of my arguments”). Then they pose the question of what our experience of argument might be like if it were grounded in the metaphor of dance instead of war. Of course, it would be unrecognizable as argument in our culture; such is the depth and impact of this metaphor. But the tradition of debate in Tibetan Buddhism immediately came to my mind.

[Brendan]

@Word

This book remains solidly on the shelf of my physical antilibrary for the time being (right between Kandkinsky’s “Point and Line to Plane” and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Line by Line”

Nice! I knew I’d come across Point and Line to Plane recently, and just remembered someone shared at an Antilibraries book brunch a few months back “Books about lines” is a fun antilibrary shelf.

@Word

Peter Levine’s In an Unspoken Voice

Ah this one looks very interesting too, thanks.

I have not been keeping up with this topic at all but I believe my last physical bookstore purchase was:

Imagining Language - An Anthology

Here’s an awesome one that’s one of the last books I bought at a store in the weeks before lockdown: When works such as “Finnegans Wake” and “Tender Buttons” were first introduced, they went so far beyond prevailing linguistic standards that they were widely considered "unreadable, " if not scandalous. Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery take these and other examples of twentieth-century avant-garde writing as the starting point for a collection of writings that demonstrates a continuum of creati…

Or I think around the same time, picked up this John Cage collection which looks fascinating:

Silence

[Word]

So sorry I missed your response when it arrived, @Brendan! Glad to have a chance to catch up with it now.

@Brendan

“Books about lines” is a fun antilibrary shelf

I’ll say! Now I have to go see what else I might have on that shelf!

Thanks for the info on Imagining Language and Silence. Sometime in the past few years I heard the origin story for Cage’s “4:33,” and it cracked me up. Have you heard this? The details are fuzzy in my memory, but it goes something like this: he was artist in residence at a Buddhist institution in the Southwest and some insight into the students’ meditation practice led him to believe they would benefit from being made to sit in silence, listening, for a set period of time, without knowing they were being asked to meditate. Thus, “4:33.”

It is not unlike an echo of the old Zen story about the student asking the teacher, “What is Zen?” and teacher asking the student if he could hear the stream in the distance, which he could not - until he could - at which point the teacher tells him, “that is Zen.”