okay, so i guess a third entry today, because i never mentioned that, at the last HPB megasale, i managed to find two books of haiku written in english and published by a teeny press in japan AND a FOLIO SOCIETY anthology of modern poets (ted hughes, eavan boland, etc) writing poems in the style of pushkin.

i am a lucky, lucky girl.

other curiosities: in chicago a long, long time ago i found a full orchestral score for scherezade, which i cannot spell, and bought it for gili. who flipped his shit over it, btdubbs, so that must've been kind of a cool thing to find also.

you know what? i wonder if anyone besides sarah ever actually pays attention to this thing. whatever, dudes. as phoebe sings on friends all those years ago, "when i play i play for ME! i don't need your chariTY!" of course, she was protesting being forced not to play in the coffeehouse at the time.

aaaanyway...

i have some stuff coming in from amazon, so it's time for the list round-up that will hopefully remind me to write about some of this stuff at a later date:

- bittersweet: tales and recipes from a life in chocolate by alice medrich (spelling / title not guaranteed accurate; purchased due to the section on truffles)
- creative weaving by sarah howard
- 32AA
- the interaction of color
- 1,000 journals project by someguy (no, seriously, that's the author's actual name)
- mars life by ben bova

i also have two new CDs by the faint, one by vashti bunyan and a copy of DDR for the playstation coming to me, but as those aren't books, this is the last you'll hear on those subjects.

so lately i've been in a very library frame of mind. thanks to allyson, i discovered about a month ago that there's a branch of the city public library in a strip mall about five minutes away from where we live; i've been using the existence of this branch to acquire books i've always wondered about (weaving books, cookbooks) and books i wanted to read but not buy (barbara walters's autobiography).

( only i hate reading library books, and here's why. )

erich fromm would probably say that all these things are signs that i haven't progressed fully from a narcissistic state and am thus incapable of love. (i checked the art of loving out of the library recently.) he's got a weird beef with capitalism stuck in the center of the book, in the section on the disintegration of love in modern western civ. up until this point i was totally on board, found his statements all very interesting even when there was room to debate them - but in the section on modern civ, i recognized myself in some of the negative portraiture and lost the ability to read objectively. maybe if it hadn't been a library book i could've put it down and come back to it once i had adjusted to some of its ideas. /snerk. as it is, i think i finished the book on autopilot, which is sad as it had a lot of provoking things to say. this is just further evidence that i'll never be in the "beautiful mysticism" camp from middlemarch, i suppose. [1] it's also interesting anecdota regarding how my brain handles challenges to its core behavior, and i think it translates over into my social behavior, but that's really beyond the scope of this entry. :P

hey, i also checked out audition by barbara walters and the collected stories by leonard michaels. audition is 579pgs long and is almost upsetting to read in that i feel like i've got to rocket through it to get it back by its due date. and yet... do i need to own this book? NO. a catch-22...

[1] this isn't a statement against mysticism at all - it's a reference to that one section where the guy says, "that's a beautiful mysticism!" and the girl stops him and tells him not to attribute her statements to any movement, because her thoughts are her own.

i'm reading the offbeat bride right now, which i got from the library, and i have this to say to the author:

dear god, please stop using the following phrases. just stoppit. no more of:
- aging hippies
- aging ravers
- urban hippies
- dirty hippies
- Burning Man

PLEASE GOD STOPPIT.

this book is overall pretty entertaining, but... repetitive stereotypical descriptions of your friends and family much? also, dude, i don't smoke pot. i can be offbeat and not smoke pot, right? right.

we met david sedaris at BookPeople last night! it was insane. they had over 600 people there and he signed every single book. the first 500 in got to sit on the same floor as him for the reading, and the rest milled about downstairs listening to it on loudspeakers. they had us color-coded by wristband into groups of 100. allyson and i were in the fourth group, and managed to get in the very beginning of our group's line. how long did we wait to meet him and get our books signed?

FOUR AND A HALF HOURS.

allyson: "what is it about our culture that makes us willing to stand in line for hours just to get someone's signature on a book?"

maybe it's the fact that david sedaris is clearly AWESOME, because when we finally got to him and allyson stepped up to the table, the first words out of his mouth were, "i hope you're not offended, but you have magnificent breasts."

we were at BookPeople for a total of seven hours, and it was definitely worth it to hear a famous author say allyson had nice boobs. only i wish there had been an interesting comment for me, but then, my boobs were all covered up. oh, well.

i've been working on picking up items from my amazon wishlist lately (it annoys me to have this whole backlog of stuff to buy sitting around) and i realized that there were several things on the list i didn't even WANT to buy from amazon. so i moved them here - a to-do list for acquiring books.

( library list. )

( HPB list. )

the rest of the days of the sale had better not involve me spending this much money.

tonight at the south lamar HPB, i scored:
- radclyffe hall (sp?), the well of loneliness, the very controversial lesbian novel of the 1920s, which virginia woolf testified on behalf of when it was being banned in england for obscenity. i found this in the clearance section for $1.

- dawn powell, the locusts have no king. also $1 in the clearance section. whoo dawn powell.

- meg cabot, queen of babble in the big city. this is what i went in looking for - i knew it was there but i was super-worried someone would buy it, as it's brand new and the price with coupon was actually pretty great. but it was still there! joy!

there was something else in the clearance section that i bought, but i can't for the life of me remember what it was. will update this entry when i remember.

UPDATE: it was tantalus in love, poetry by alan shapiro

UPDATE II: today, tuesday, day 2: got another laurie colwin, a big storm knocked it over. and nothing else. go me.

- i polished off poems in three lines. not much to report except that i finished it. keyword: bizarre. it's interesting to give it different genre IDs as you read and see how it changes your perception of the text.

- literary honesty again... i've now bought and read all nine existing volumes of the princess diaries. it is a little worrisome how involved i got in what is essentially high school chick lit. i haven't been traumatized by a plot like this since season three of alias kicked off and my then-friend amy and i had to leave ourselves little post-it notes everywhere that said "ALIAS IS NOT REAL" to help ourselves recover.

- i can see why people do not like radio on. because, while i am not actually reading radio on, sarah vowell does talk about music in take the cannoli and when she does it makes me want to thump her. she has some interesting things to say but says them in very annoying ways. i do like her writing style, though. sarah vowell was recommended to me by a librarian at kenyon. /random trivia.

- od magic is fun. if you haven't read any patricia mckillip yet and you like fantasy, hop to it. i had to hide it under my pillows last night to stop reading it and go to bed.

no i did NOT just find a virginia woolf biography IN COMIC BOOK FORM.

HPB is having another of their big coupon sales, so on my lunch break i hit up the one (one of the ones) near my office. in addition to the virginia woolf comic book, i also (FINALLY) got family happiness by laurie colwin. this is the book that inspired the single off the coroner's gambit (my first and favorite tMG album). the HPB near me hasn't had laurie colwin in ages and ages, but this one had several of her books. i was trying really hard to only buy the book i would use the coupon on; unfortunately i just couldn't say no to the comic book.

anyway. driving to the office is the shit, whoo whoo whoo. i have to drive again friday because i have a doctor's appointment, so maybe i'll swing by the same HPB that day too (i have many many coupons this time, as i got online coupons AND two mailers - w00t).

now for the stop at the one near my apartment tonight. they have dawn powell and some chick lit i want. mmmbooks.

went to HPB with the boyfriend yesterday. we decided we needed some retail therapy, what with the coil in my stove blowing up a little bit and all.

( this is what we bought. )

recent discoveries and acquisitions, since i haven't updated in a really long time:

- Ugly Duckling Presse is an awesome non-profit that publishes some letterpress-printed, hand-bound chapbooks and such. they also publish a poetry journal that is letterpress-printed and bound with a rubber band. it costs $3 and ships for free (all their books ship free). i highly encourage y'all to check them out, as they are chock full of awesome.

- i finally read "howl". i am a loser for getting so up in years before reading it. it was quite good. the size of the book was so satisfying, too. beautiful publication. take that, kindle! amazon is selling several (almost all) books by ginsburg as a buy three get one free promotion, so there may be much more in my future soon. and they all look alike, and i love things that match.

- lynn hejinian's "my life" is here. thus far, also quite good.

- "novels in three lines" is a fun little book of little french news blurbs from Back in the Day (i believe the 1800s). it is depressing how many crimes of passion are reported. still fun though.

- "a good year" by peter mayle is so much fun - a cleansing reading experience after all my Novels About Adultery and Unfaithfulness - despite having been made into one of the worst movies evar.

- "run river" by joan didion is an excellent novel, despite being depressing as hell due to its theme of Adultery and Unfaithfulness. Good Books are beginning to bore me with their identical "no one is ever happy and semper fidelis in real life", which is why i've begun to read so much escapist literature lately.

"take the cannoli" (sarah vowell) was marked down at Half Price Books yesterday, so when i am next in the area i'm going to swing by and pick it up. spent too much $$$ already as i was over budget for this month. hey, my oven exploded a little bit, i'm allowed to spend $10 on books to recover.

over n out.

HPB 50% OFF COUPON DAY AHOY.

what started out as a desire to venture in and pick out one item to use the coupon on while simultaneously completing a buy offer [1] turned into "buying every damn thing in the clearance section PLUS two regular price books PLUS one volume of kierkegaard to use my coupon on.

AUGH. it's kind of frightening how much money i lay out on a monthly basis. equally frightening is that i can apparently afford to lay out this amount of money, since i'm not spending from savings OR accumulating credit card debt. it's kind of dizzying.

( anyway, so this is what i bought. )

for serious, how can you turn down a $1 copy of "the dewey decimal system of love"? it is not possible. ESPECIALLY when you went in looking for cheesy chick lit.

the clearance section at the south HPB is undoubtedly the best, for the simple reason that it's all a dollar. every other HPB i've been to has had mostly $3 clearance books, which makes it juuust expensive enough for me to not enjoy browsing.

anyway. to sum up. i am a horrible person who spent $23 on books (plus the $5.50 she got from the buy counter) instead of the $4 that was intended. at some point i think i may be punished for this.

[1] HPB lingo for "selling your books to us for an obscenely low price"
[2] a terminal illness that shows no signs of abating
[3] n.b., gili - not as cute as you. [4]
[4] the rest of you, stop vomiting.

i finished my laurie colwin reading spree a L-O-N-G time ago, and despite being very, very impressed, i appear to have neglected writing up an entry.

( this is clearly because i am lame. or perhaps it is because i don't much care to review books about infidelity. )

i also finished a collection of beauties at the height of their popularity, finally (this week, in fact). it's a very depressing book, in that it's filled with people who are high or chock-full of ennui. it's a twenty-something drug culture book, kind of like the Hold Steady would sound if they were female novelists instead of a stereotypically male indie band obsessed with guitar riffs. [1] a refresher: the construction of this book is motivated by ukiyo-e prints and the scholarship behind them, and also (briefly and oddly) dawn powell. it's a very loose connection of stories all revolving around the same people / places. it isn't particularly innovative (to put it nicely) to construct a story like this, but i was struck by it for two reasons. (1), that it's form-bending (short story collection having a baby with a novel), and we know that kind of writing is my drug of choice, and (2) its focus on ukiyo-e as the clear backbone, as opposed to any of the narrative elements themselves, was downright fascinating. THIS, however, is very much a woman's book, in the stereotypical sense. it's very fragrant and soft; there's no distance whatsoever; it's not very aggressive in how it depicts the pain characters suffer within the narrative. i'm not sure yet what i think of that.

almost done with an origin like water, to which i have this to say: eavan boland, you're a talented poet, so stop boring me. i'm glad you got better as you aged.

i have not bought anything else since my last post - shocking. i did, however, get zoology out of the library based on a review i read in the Washington Post.

[1] keep in mind that I LOVE THE HOLD STEADY LIKE WHOAH, so this is not an insult, however it might sound to those of you who don't appreciate a nice guitar riff.

culpeppers, you have outdone yourself with the presents this year.

i cannot believe that everybody loves ramen exists. run, do not walk, to amazon.com to look up everybody loves ramen. if you are very, very lucky, there will be a "look inside!" option and you'll be able to browse some of this book's recipes, including... ramen pancakes.

oh my.

there was also a book of irish poetry (well, poetry by an irish poet - ciaran carson, belfast confetti), which i am assuming sarah bought me because of our recent conversation about how all the good contemporary poetry is coming out of ireland these days. very excited about it. the book itself is *gorgeous*. sarah, have you gotten to hold this book in your hands? anyway, there will be a serious write-up of that once it's been read.

(there was further awesomeness as well, but as it was non-book it cannot be mentioned here, per my strict rules. most excellent box o random this birthday, culps :D )

off to study cert questions until i'm ready to shoot myself in the head!

KENYONITES! you ain't gonna like this...

DENIM SUTCLIFFE'S IS CLOSED.
PERMANENTLY.

they apparently turned it into an administrative building. woe, woe, woe.

---

it has been a very, very long time since i made an entry, and i'm sure many, many books came and went in that time. i'm just going to review my most recent adventures, because... over the past week i've acquired nearly twenty new books. :/

( the one exception being... that i passed my cert exam! and gili and i went to HPB to celebrate! )

HPB is having their four-day coupon bonanza this week - started on thursday. by coincidence, i also found out about the public library's independently located used bookstore last week - and it has two-for-one specials on thursdays.

( oh, the mayhem! )

yesterday and today's coupons netted me anne carson's autobiography of red and virginia woolf's melymbrosia - a reconstruction of the first draft of the voyage out, which was substantially more political.

...i stopped by HPB as a reward for having done a very stressful drive that scared me shitless.

i acquired:
-virginia woolf, freshwater
-laurie colwin (author of family happiness, the title of which john darnielle used for the name of the first mountain goats song i ever heard, off of the coroner's gambit), four random books (none of which were family happiness. they were in the clearance section for $1/ea, so i bought them all in order to go on a laurie colwin spree.
-a book in japanese on painting with acrylics
-the first half of a two-volume retrospective of the poetry of eavan boland

also, here in gambier, after finishing both of the books i packed to travel with, the largesse of The Boyfriend has provided me with:
-jonathan safran foer, everything is illuminated (long-ago rec. from erlend)
-menis koumandareas, koula (random find in the "half-off, these were selling poorly" pile at the bookstore - already finished this one)
-ovid, the heroides (FINALLY)

DENIM SUTCLIFFE'S IS CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS. :( and the selection at the bookstore has gotten very, very suck-festival. it took us two trips to find the books i bought. so the whole 'acquiring further reading material' process was somewhat painful, and left me really missin' the Pile of books in austin.

gili also got men and cartoons by jonathan lethem via MY largesse.

TIME FOR MORE AWESOME FOOD!

in the past week or so i've finished five books!

( poets and poets and poets, oh my! )

( the devil wrote the devil wears prada. )

( evelyn waugh. )

so, on friday i went up to UT for a doctor's appointment. turns out friday was the last day i could get treatment from UT, so when i found this out as i attempted to book an appointment at work, at noon, i panicked - and i mean PANICKED. before i could go to UT for the appointment, i had to make it home and get my medical records. that's a 1hr 30mins trip all by itself. so i panicked and left work immediately in an attempt to make sure i got there in time.

( as a result, i ended up with 30mins to kill on the Drag at UT before my appointment. )

i followed this outing up with a saturday trip to HPB, which was having an "extra 20% off everything" sale in honor of memorial day, AND a "buy a $25 gift card, get a $5 coupon" special.

( there's 45 cents left on my gift card now. )

reading update for the week:
- finished tales from the grand tour (bova). thanks for ripping us off by making half of this volume excerpts from your novels, ben "cheater" bova.
- in media childhood's end. very much not liking it. intense critique forthcoming upon completion.

well, it does.

( Gili: Those stories are good, unless I'm reading them. )

other than that - i recently... let's say "found"... three new books - leslie marmon silko's storyteller, the devil wears prada, and a novel by evelyn waugh (sp?), the name of which i cannot currently remember. very excited about all three of these, especially the silko, which i heard referenced back when i was doing all that reading about genre theory.

before i go on, gili and i made a deal the other day: i buy the Bright Eyes tickets for the show sunday and he pays for the Prime subscription. sarah has already called her slot (and should send me a check after we add her); one slot left, so shoot me an email - we're only looking for $20 (or less if nobody offers $20). one year of free two-day shipping on anything they sell, folks. you know you wanna.

okay, so i think i'm probably the last person on the planet to read the alchemist. there's something kind of charming, though, about finding and buying a used copy of a book i remember being interested in when it first came out years ago. my brain somehow thought it was... sci-fi. hoo-boy - good one, brain. the jacket blurb compares it to the little prince, which i think is fair. for me, at least, it really worked, and i don't get why. it should have been hokey pseudo-mysticism, BS and unenjoyably simplistic. while i certainly don't find it full of spiritual revelations like some people do, i did find it really charming, in an oddly ageless way. it's like a really good children's book in that respect.

i also finished tales from ovid today. ted hughes chose a really small subset of pieces to translate, so i hadn't realized how far along i was - i only had pyramus and thisbe left. oh, my god, ted hughes, i fuckin' hate you. i mean, i knew he was arrogant before, but... ARGH. first off, the title pisses me off. "tales from ovid"? dude, there are no translations of the heroides here. HOW CAN YOU MAKE A GENERAL COLLECTION WITHOUT THE HEROIDES? so very much of ovid's best work is not in the metamorphoses. and if you want the metamorphoses anyway... go with mendelbaum. big, beautiful oversized mendelbaum that looks like it ought to be a hand-numbered edition in a case, that has illustrations and is typeset beautifully. read it in an edition with some heft, not a dinky little selection like this.

all right, i am not being fair, ripping into it like this, but the thing is, it's not "tales from ovid". it's "ted hughes using tales of passion and subsequent transfiguration from the metamorphoses to say his own thing". i hardly think poets doing translations ought to be literalists, but dude, strap on a pair and leave your ego in the closet. david slavitt and anne carson know how to translate with their poetry in a way that's faithful as well as being a re-authoring. ted hughes does not. to be fair, he does interesting things with the material, but i wish he wouldn't attribute it to ovid.

also, his edition is quite pretty, so sorry for dissing it, publishers and designers. but it ain't got nothing on mendelbaum.

now i am onto Roethke again (i took it home but didn't feel up to it pre- or post-op), as well as jonathan lethem's the wall of the sky, the wall of the eye. it's a short story collection; i was last reading it a year ago and got halfway through it before it freaked me out too badly to go on. it's a very flannery o'connor collection. but now i feel stoked to get started again.

HPB has a "buy a $20 gift card, get a $5 coupon" deal going, so hell ya with that. i have some DVDs and my old management textbook (remember the ranting?) to sell to them, too. i wish i weren't spending so much money right now, tho. never been much good at that.

(sp?)

I HAVE AMAZON PRIME AGAIN

OH, THE JOY

also, i am back in austin. i've been away from mah books ever since i left for surgery, so this entry is a weird one about two books i had in maryland, one of which i haven't finished because it is still in maryland.

sarah will be gratified to hear that i am finally reading memory for forgetfulness - i can't recall her evangelizing this hardcore about anything since the irony of fate. and i do think it's good, but i feel very disloyal to gili reading a book written from a palestinian perspective. which is kind of silly - even gili says so. other issue: altho i'm in general fond of the writing, there are some places where the historical references have been tweaked and obscured to the point of ridiculousness.

i didn't finish MfF, tho, and there wasn't room in my suitcases to bring it back. [1] so that's all i have to say about that so far.

also read the undomestic goddess (sophie kinsella) which was so girly that i doubt most of you will be interested in it. it is nick hornby for chick lit, britishisms and all. and i've got to say, reading it really highlighted how wonderful it is (a) not to be an English major anymore and (b) not to be ian's girlfriend anymore. i think i am going to adopt a new policy - the I Don't Apologize for My Taste in Books/Movies/Music policy. [2] because, dammit, i really liked this book.

TIME FOR A PRIME ORDER!
anyone who wants in on the membership when gili and i sign up for it officially, holler.

-----

[1] conversation between myself and a southwest baggage check agent:
Me: "Can I have fragile stickers for these?"
Angry agent: "Why? What's in them?"
Me: "I don't remember anymore."

i bet the FAA has a fun time going through my bags. worst was the time when i packed my electric razor amongst my underwear and then my underwear got searched. un-comf-torable!

[2] WARNING, SNOBBISHNESS AFOOT:
like i need to apologize for my taste in any of these things anyway.
*snort*