An Essay by Alan Jacobs on Book Culture
Written for (not surprisingly… ) BOOKS AND CULTURE

http://booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/bookcultures.html

It wasn’t until after I read Ted Striphas’ book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control that I realized that its title and subtitle are somewhat at odds with each other. As I began reading, it was the title that governed my expectations: coined by Jay David Bolter, the phrase “late age of print” is meant to be analogous to the Marxist concept of “late capitalism.” “Late” in this case suggests a highly developed, sophisticated set of structures that are beginning to fall into decadence—structures that have lost their essential motive energy and are living off capital generated long ago. With these thoughts in mind, I was expecting and hoping that Striphas would provide a kind of critical ethnography, and perhaps a diagnosis, of print culture in the past hundred years or so.

But no: the book really isn’t about print culture at all; it is rather, as the subtitle more reliably informs us, about book culture.

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Read the full essay:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/2010/julaug/bookcultures.html

http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/missional-small-groups-a-book-review/

After 18 years of pastoring a rather large American church, I would have to say that the second hardest challenge our leadership team has faced as we have labored to make disciples of weekend church attenders is getting people to commit to sharing life with others in a small group context. The hardest challenge, however, has been to get small groups to view themselves as distinctly kingdom communities who come together not simply to hang out or engage in an occasional Bible study, but to carry out the mission God has given us.

My friend Scott Boren, who is also the “Connecting Pastor” at Woodland Hills Church, has just published a book on this topic called Missional Small Groups: Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World (Baker). Scott artfully places his assessment of the challenges facing small groups as well as his proposed solutions to these challenges in a narrative framework.

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Read the full review:
http://www.gregboyd.org/blog/missional-small-groups-a-book-review/

Missional Small Groups:
Becoming a Community That Makes a Difference in the World.
Scott Boren.
Paperback: Baker Books, 2010.
Buy now:  [ ChristianBooks.com ]

The NY Review of Books Reviews
Although Of Course  You End Up Becoming Yourself:
A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/smarter-you-think/

“What I would love to do is a profile of one of you guys who’s doin’ a profile of me,” David Foster Wallace told the journalist David Lipsky in 1996 during a series of conversations now collected as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. “It would be a way,” Wallace continued, “for me to get some of the control back”:

You can’t tell outright lies that I’ll then deny to the fact checker. But…you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing…. I want to be able to try and shape and manage the impression of me that’s coming across.

As Lipsky tells us in his introduction, he loved Wallace’s idea of profiling the profilers:

It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized in—the unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices…. That’s what this book would like to be. It’s the one way of writing about him I don’t think David would have hated.

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Read the full review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jul/15/smarter-you-think/

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself:
A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.
Paperback: Broadway Books, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.issues.org/26.3/br_demello.html

Daniel Callahan’s Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs are Destroying Our Health Care System is both more and less than the title implies. More, in that it is a blunt, thought-provoking view of medical culture that raises difficult but essential questions about our values and public policy. Less, in that it lacks depth and nuance in its treatment of technology, limiting its utility in evaluating short-term policy issues. It is a particularly interesting read in this time of acrimonious health reform debate.

Callahan’s main focus is not technology per se but rather the evolution and prospects of the U.S. health care system as a whole. The challenge is formidable because the starting point is “a messy system, one ill-designed for reform because of the accretion of assorted interest groups with different agendas and vested interests, an ideologically divided public, and a steady stream of new and expensive technologies added to those already in place.”

…
Read the full review:
http://www.issues.org/26.3/br_demello.html

Taming the Beloved Beast:
How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying
Our Health Care System.
Daniel Callahan.
Hardcover: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/june/winner063010.html

Having tackled the ethics and mores of the lab in Intuition, Allegra Goodman turns to the ethics and mores of the late-90s dot.com bubble in what I think is her best novel yet, The Cookbook Collector. I say her best novel yet in part because, often, it takes me a while to start caring about Goodman characters; here they had me from the first chapter.

…

Read the full review:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/june/winner063010.html

The Cookbook Collector: A Novel.
Allegra Goodman.
Hardback: The Dial Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Brett Foster Reviews a New Book
of Illustrations for THE DIVINE COMEDY
For BOOKS AND CULTURE

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/june/foster060810.html

This thin, handsome collection, featuring Michael Mazur’s illustrations of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, alongside Robert Pinsky’s translated passages on facing pages, promises to appeal to various readerships. Those unfamiliar with Dante can gain a terrific first impression of his medieval epic poem and its treatment of the afterlife from these selections (no lengthy text or intimidating notes in sight). On the other hand, longtime lovers of the Commedia will find here cherished lines brought to new life in Pinsky’s renderings, but most refreshing will be the “embedded” perspectives of Mazur’s illustrations. We never see the character Dante or his guide Virgil themselves, as if pilgrims posing on a stage, but experience Mazur’s alluring visions of their supernatural settings as if looking over the characters’ shoulders, or through their own eyes.

As Pinsky recounts in a preface to this volume, Mazur (whom the art world lost recently) had been an avid reader of Dante in Italian for decades, and he supplied monotype images for Pinsky’s popular edition of Inferno in the mid-1990s. Praising Mazur’s images for inspiring and guiding his own translation efforts, Pinsky describes his collaborator’s works as “themselves acts of translation, embodying certain vital principles.” Pinsky explains the suitability of the monotype form for Inferno—not only in its somber, black-and-white effects, but also in how a print is squeezed through the press. The final products, incorporating the “unique, unpredictable results of pressure,” are moving reflections of the pit in Dante’s narrative, its inhabitants enduring the unrelenting pressures of sin.

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Read the full review:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/june/foster060810.html

I’ll Tell What I Saw:
Select Translations and Illustrations from the Divine Comedy.
Michael Mazur
Paperback: Sarabande Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Sonia Sanchez’s latest book resonates as boldly as a jazz ensemble; clear and poignant, it is intransigent in her subject matter. Her impassioned reflections come in the loose form of the American haiku, in groups of two to twenty-one haiku at a time. Primarily ekphrastic, her poems react to and commend the work and activism of African American singers, artists, authors, sculptors, painters, celebrities, and political and social activists, to whom many of the poems are dedicated. Sanchez presents a deeply personal, affected history and promulgation of her race, yet does so in each poem with a fresh breath and new song.

The collection begins with a preface, a “Haikuography.” Most emphasized is the “haiku nature” that resides beneath our rushing lives, the simplest (and nevertheless complex) essence of our existence. Sanchez proclaims that haiku “offer no solutions”; indeed, there are times when no solutions exist, as in “Sister Haiku (for Pat)”:

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Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_06_14.html

Morning Haiku.
Sonia Sanchez.
Hardback: Beacon Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

David Fitch gives us
a (diet and decaf?) foretaste of his coming book
The End of Evangelicalism?

http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/the-caffeine-free-diet-coke-a-metaphor-for-evangelicalism-in-our-day/

Last week or so on facebook, some friends were giving me a hard time for comparing evangelicalism to an ‘empty’ Caffeine-Free Diet Coke. Of course I was referring to philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s famous cultural analyses found in his book, The Fragile Absolute (chapter 3). It’s an example I use in the intro to my upcoming book The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission. There I use Zizek’s Coke illustration to ask questions about the current state of evangelicalism in N America. Allow me to explain.

Zizek narrates how coca-cola was originally concocted as a medicine (originally known as a nerve tonic, stimulant and headache remedy). It was eventually sweetened and its strange taste was made more palatable. Soon it became a popular drink during prohibition that still possessed those medicinal qualities (it was deemed “refreshing” as well as the perfect “temperance drink”). Over time, however, its sugar was replaced with sweetner, its caffeine extracted, and so today we are left with Caffeine-Free Diet Coke: a drink that does not fulfil any of the concrete needs of a drink. The two reasons why anyone would drink anything: it quenches thirst/provides nutrition and it tastes good, have in Zizek’s words “been suspended.”

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Read the full piece:
http://www.reclaimingthemission.com/the-caffeine-free-diet-coke-a-metaphor-for-evangelicalism-in-our-day/

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=967

It has become all too common these days for discussions of North American evangelicalism to transpire solely in terms of disdain, so much so that the very word evangelical has almost become a slur. Obviously, this is not to say that there aren’t many grounds upon which the evangelical tradition, especially in its North American variety, can (and should) be critiqued. Many have balked at the seemingly evangelical idea that the major tragedies of the last decade, namely, 9/11, the tsunami in 2004, Hurricane Katrina, and the recent earthquake in Haiti, were somehow divine retribution for homosexuality, idolatry, or general unbelief. In addition, one could consider the ongoing campaign among many evangelicals in the United States to “take back America” through a perverse wedding of white, middle/upper class, conservative evangelicalism and a Republican agenda. Marching ever onward, this group of evangelicals frequently ends up propagating an agenda that often seems more American than biblical.

The criticism could—and should—go on, but while such critique is always necessary for the healthy growth of the church, there is a world of difference between denigrating the evangelical movement and critiquing it from within as a sort of loyal opposition. Fortunately, this is a point not missed by James K. A. Smith in his recent book, The Devil Reads Derrida and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts. In fact, this commitment serves as his starting point. Understanding his training as a philosopher as providing the platform for a diaconal vocation, a vocation of service to and for the church, Smith here offers a collection of essays directed toward the end of building up the body of Christ.

As is the case with any book of this sort, there is the inherent hurdle of overcoming the occasional nature of each piece in order to create some coherent whole. Smith’s book is no exception in this regard, and it suffers at times because of this. Nevertheless, at the risk of these various writings being reduced to mere cultural musings, Smith successfully manages to offer substantial insights and constructive critiques throughout the volume.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=967

The Devil Reads Derrida and Other Essays
on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts.
James K. A. Smith.
Paperback: Eerdmans, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_06_05.html

Philip Hoare’s account of his “search [for] the giants of the sea” is part travelogue, part history, part scientific discourse, and part elegy, all blended into a wonderful melange. He travels to New England in order to walk around whaling towns that Herman Melville  described in detail in Moby-Dick; discusses at great length the historical development of the whaling trade in both America and England; wanders about museums with various whale artifacts, taking in the immense grandeur of reconstructed whale skeletons dangling from ceilings; bemoans the massive destruction visited upon whale populations over the past century, threatening many species with utter extinction; and even goes into great detail about how ambergris — that rarest of whale treasures used in countless colognes throughout the ages for its distinctive aromatic quality — is actually created (it might lose a bit of its exotic luster when you find out).

All of this would be interesting enough on a strictly informational level, but it’s made especially poignant through Hoare’s eyes and fascination with his subject:

There is something about the sperm whale that leads me on, something that, even now, I find hard to describe. No matter how many pictures I might see, I cannot quite comprehend it. No matter how many times I might try to sketch it, its shape seems to elude me. None the less, my curiosity remains…

Hoare repeatedly mentions the mystical air surrounding these creatures that can dive deeper than any other mammal and who live so much of their lives hidden from our view despite their immense size. Theirs is a world ostensibly set apart from ours.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_06_05.html

THE WHALE: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
Philip Hoare.
Hardback: Ecco, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

THE OTHER JOURNAL’S REVIEW OF
Daniel Bell’s JUST WAR AS CHRISTIAN DISCIPLESHIP

http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=956

Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we have been told by both sides of the partisan fence that we now live in an “age of terrorism.” What is especially novel about our age, so we are told, is not so much that our world is torn apart by violence, but that the “enemy” has no moral compass, no concern for the flourishing of human life. We are told that our extraordinary times may demand that we take extraordinary measures in warfare. In other words, the rules that may have guided warfare in the past may no longer apply. The images of tortured prisoners, maimed Iraqi civilians, and the thousands of flag-wrapped caskets of dead U.S. soldiers remind us of the horrific consequences of the two U.S.-led wars launched against this elusive “terrorist” enemy. Although many Christians opposed the wars from the beginning, others have backed the wars without hesitation, and leaders and spokespersons on both sides of the debate have appealed to just war principles and criteria to support their respective positions. In the midst of polemically charged debates between Internet pundits, political ideologues, and partisan hacks, it has often been difficult to find the space to reflect on, at least with any moral seriousness and clarity, the question of justice with regard to these particular wars. Yet, too much is at stake in warfare—perhaps especially modern warfare—to simply let the pundits control the shape of public discourse, not to mention Christian discourse on war. Indeed, in our time of war and rumors of war, a time when uncritical support of war and nationalist fervor is all too common, not least among American Christians, we are desperately in need of a theologically robust and critical discourse about war.

…
Read the full review:
http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=956

Just War as Christian Discipleship:
Recentering the Tradition in the Church rather than the State.
Daniel M. Bell, Jr.
Paperback: Brazos Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/review/5350/

TONY HOAGLAND is not a poet who sees himself as above anything. Rather, he is inside it all: “I too am made of joists and stanchions, / of plasterboard and temperamental steel, / mortgage payments and severed index fingers, / ex-girlfriends and secret Kool-Aid-flavored dawns.” From pop culture to the mundane, from the glittering Britney Spears to the undeniable hulk of a cement truck, Hoagland wades through the noise and confusion of American material culture with a mixture of awe and disgust. His language—personal, inviting, unpretentiously graceful—pulls the trusting reader along behind, unsure at times whether to laugh or cry.

It would be hard not to see Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty as in many ways a critique of contemporary culture. Hoagland wanders through the grocery store and the mega-mall, seeing beneath all the Muzak and bright colors and splashy ads the fraught and complex web that strings across the globalized world.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/review/5350/

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty: Poems.
Tony Hoagland.
Paperback: Graywolf Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

BOOKS AND CULTURE Reviews
A New Book of Alexis De  Tocqueville.

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/may/newpolitics.html

At a conference on Democracy in America several years ago, one of the speakers took up Alexis de Tocqueville’s prediction that increased centralization and equality in the United States would produce the “soft despotism” of a “schoolmaster” state: “Above [the citizens] rises an immense tutelary power that alone takes charge of ensuring their pleasures and watching over their fate,” Tocqueville writes.

It is absolute, detailed, regular, farsighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood. It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment …. The sovereign power doesn’t break their wills, but it softens, bends, and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action. It doesn’t destroy, but it prevents birth; it doesn’t tyrannize, but it hinders, represses, enervates, restrains, and numbs, until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals, with the government as their shepherd.

Read the full review:

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/may/newpolitics.html

Tocqueville’s Discovery of America.
Leo Damrosch.
Hardback: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Buy now: [ Amazon.com ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/review/Kennedy-t.html

One day, apparently before the rise of Google Book Search, Marilyn Johnson made an odd request at the New York Public Library. She needed to find the symptoms of an imaginary illness called “information sickness,” which she recollected from a 1981 novel by Ted Mooney, “Easy Travel to Other Planets.” She couldn’t find her own copy, so a team of librarians went spelunking in the stacks, wearing miner’s helmets, as Johnson tells it. They surfaced with a copy preserved, strangely enough, on micro­film, and soon Johnson was reading the dimly remembered passage in which a woman keels over, blood gushing from her nose and ears as she raves about disconnected facts. When the woman recovers from her fugue state, she says: “I was dazzled. I couldn’t tell where one thing left off and the next began.”

…
Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/books/review/Kennedy-t.html

THIS BOOK IS OVERDUE:
How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All.
Marilyn Johnson.
Hardback: HarperCollins, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon.com ]

A Review of the Recent Movie
About the Latter Years of Leo Tolstoy’s Life
The Last Station,
From our Friends at Jesus Manifesto

http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2010/04/the-last-station/

“Everything I know I know only because I love”
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

This is the quote that opens The Last Station, a film based on the novel by Jay Perini. The Last Station chronicles the final years of perhaps the greatest writer of the 20th century, Leo Tolstoy. Featuring terrific performances by Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, it is a simple film and slightly specialized, but gives us a glimpse into the epic life and marriage Tolstoy had.

…

Read the full review:

http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2010/04/the-last-station/

The Powells Books Review of
Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture
by Darrin Nordahl

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_04_20.html

America’s relationship with food is dysfunctional. Obesity, childhood malnourishment, fast-food addiction, E. coli and salmonella outbreaks — the list of problems is as familiar as it is dismaying. Though average Americans are fundamentally disconnected from the vast industrial networks that disgorge their daily meals, they were not always so removed from food production. Even after the United States converted from an agrarian to an industrial economy, there were periods when large numbers of the country’s citizens helped to grow the food they ate. During World War II, the public heeded the U.S. government’s call to raise “victory gardens” to ease the strain of supplying canned goods to overseas troops. In 1944, an estimated 20 million victory gardens yielded eight million tons of food.

In Public Produce, city designer Darrin Nordahl describes how towns and cities are working diligently to tap that spirit again and create civic cornucopias. He has more in mind than the occasional community garden. He wants the largest landlord in most cities — the municipal government — to expand the uses conceived of for public places beyond recreation and aesthetic pleasure to include farming.
…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_04_20.html

Public Produce: The New Urban Agriculture
Darrin Nordahl.
Paperback: Isaland Press, 2010.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/movies/05secret.html

There is a lot to look at in “The Secret of Kells.” Nearly every frame of this 75-minute animated feature is dense with curlicued and cross-hatched patterns and figures. Your eye travels over Celtic crosses and through forest glades, studies architectural schematics and drinks in delicately washed landscapes. The human characters come in a variety of shapes and hues. Some are cute, some are sinister, some angular, some roly-poly. A few resemble science-fiction robots, while others look like pixies out of Japanese anime.

But you might take special notice of their hands, which are squared off and elongated in a way that suggests both crudeness and grace. These appendages are also large, appearing slightly out of proportion to the bodies, which makes sense given that the subject and method of this film is handicraft. “The Secret of Kells,” directed by Tomm Moore, concerns the Book of Kells, a medieval illuminated manuscript that ranks among the most important artifacts of Irish civilization. And it is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing — the almost sacred magic of color and line — should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.

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Read the full review:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/movies/05secret.html

Now playing in select US cities…

BOOKS AND CULTURE reviews
Dominic Erdozain’s
The Problem of Pleasure:
Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion.

http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/april/larson040809.html

Although he does not cite Neil Postman, Dominic Erdozain’s thesis is that the churches in late 19th-century Britain amused themselves to death. The background is the earlier evangelical war on pleasure. Evangelicals disproved of most forms of recreation—even sports were censured as unbecoming to the earnestness of a Christian man.

Evangelicals therefore gained a reputation for being killjoys, and eventually even they came to feel that some of their flat bans were untenable. Erdozain’s real story is about the disastrous overcorrection. With remarkable rapidity, evangelicals went from lifting the prohibition on sports to facilitating recreation through official church programs to replacing the real work of the church with entertainment.

…
Read the full review:
http://booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/2010/april/larson040809.html

The Problem of Pleasure:
Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion.
Dominic Erdozain.
Hardback: Boydell Press, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/review-of-the-swallow-anthology-of-new-american-poets

In his introduction, editor and contributor David Yezzi suggests that this collection reconciles the traditional division in the poetry world between those who prefer classical forms and those who favor free verse. According to Yezzi, these thirty-five new poets (although many of the authors included here stretch the meaning of newcomer) have accomplished that balance within a “climate of extremes,” as they choose to write their poems utilizing a variety of forms.

“The old battle lines,” as he calls them, between the old and the new, the classic and the contemporary, have become entrenched. Arbitrary divisions lead to dogmatism, and from there, he says, there can be no forward movement.

Yezzi makes a good point about entrenchment. For many free-verse poets, the strictures of traditional form—the seemingly arbitrary and rigid adherence to line length, syllable counts, and end rhymes—often seem forced instead of found. Conversely, traditionalists bemoan the seeming “anything goes” milieu of the free-verse writers as sloppy, syntactically confused, loose lines.

…

Read the full review:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/03/review-of-the-swallow-anthology-of-new-american-poets

The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.
David Yezzi, ed.
Paperback: Swallow Press, 2009.
Buy now:  [ Amazon ]

FLOURISH Magazine Reviews
Ragan Sutterfield’s New Book
FARMING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE.

http://flourishonline.org/2010/03/flourish-book-review-farmin-as-a-spiritual-discipline-by-ragan-sutterfield/

Last week, I was listening to a scientist on public radio describe the mating calls of the amphibians she was studying. She said, only half-jokingly, that these frogs had been around for thousands of years and would still be around long after humans were gone.

This idea that humans are at best a trivial part of the natural world, and at worst “some sort of colossal mistake on the landscape,” is one of two “heresies of human alienation in creation” that Ragan Sutterfield describes in his small book of essays, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. The other heresy, one of which many Christians have been guilty, is that humans are masters of creation, and that nature is utterly submissive to the needs of humanity.

Sutterfield describes what should be our correct relationship with nature: that of creatures of a loving God who, by extension and Imago Dei, should love creation. Practically speaking, Sutterfield says that farming is a route to reconnecting with the ways of loving creation that we have forgotten.

…

Read the full review:
http://flourishonline.org/2010/03/flourish-book-review-farmin-as-a-spiritual-discipline-by-ragan-sutterfield/

FARMING AS A SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE.
Ragan Sutterfield.
Paperback: Doulos Christou Press, 2009.
Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Press ]

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/foster032510.html

Some might consider Robert Hass to be the Dominating Golden General of contemporary American poetry, although any hint or taint of the tyrannous will seem remote from him. Hass is winsome, widely respected in the literary world, and his poems (and the voices speaking in them) are vastly appealing. These should be reasons enough to obtain and take pleasure in The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. In some volumes sharing this format, the new work is thin, serving mainly to garnish the literary buffet of several previous books. Hass’ existing readers will be pleased to know that the “new” section here is substantive—forty pages of elegies, a ballad, and notebook meditations. Also generous are the inclusions from Hass’ five prior books, including the seminal Praise and his last collection, the critically lauded Time and Materials. One of Hass’ best known poems appears in the former book, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” with its distinctive mix of discursiveness and poststructuralism (“The idea, for example, that each particular erases / the luminous clarity of a general idea”) and love-making and bread and a clown-faced woodpecker and an assertion that, while paradoxical, still outlasted high theory: “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.”

…

Read the full review:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/webexclusives/foster032510.html

The Apple Trees at Olema:
New and Selected Poems.
Robert Hass.
Hardback: Ecco, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

“Texts and Context”
Michiko Kakutani in the NY TIMES on
The State of Reading Today

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html

In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

Read the full essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_03_18.html

Pay attention is the message of Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature  by Kathleen Dean Moore, a philosophy professor at Oregon State University and the director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word.

This collection of essays, reveries and meditations interweaves keen observations of the natural world with descriptions of wilderness travel, conversations, stories and philosophical musings.

“I had begun to write about happiness,” Moore shares on the first page, “but events overtook me.”

Friends and family died by drowning, disease and accident, and, as Moore admits, “my life became an experiment in sadness.”

She turned to the natural world for solace.

“The earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.”

…

Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_03_18.html

WILD COMFORT: THE SOLACE OF NATURE.
Kathleen Dean Moore.
Paperback: Trumpeter, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]