I'm in, if only because I could never enjoy Algren As much as I'd initially hoped. I was always in need of a more contemporaneous tone.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

I shall do that, Midget w/Length

I found The Coast of Chicago to be extremely tedious. 75% of the stories are about working class Polish people living in 1950's and 1960's Little Village and seem to make the same or similar points. Although with your "[h]is contortion of the naturalist aesthetic of abjection into magical realism is a remarkable achievement" comment, you might have appreciated him on a different level than I did. I'm going to be honest here, in order to have some sense of what you were trying to say, I had to look up "abjection."

For those who are thinking about reading Dybek, and aren't English majors, I would recommend starting with I Sailed with Magellan. It's a collection of short stories, but the vast majority of it traces one character from childhood to early middle age and you get an emotional investment with that character that you do not get with any of the characters in The Coast of Chicago.

I should have specified that much of Dybek's work does, indeed, focus on Polish people. In this respect, he picks up the story of Chicago--and working-class Chicago neighborhoods--where Algren left off. Importantly, though, Dybek reverses the polarity of Algren's writing. Algren sees Chicago as an "October city, even in the spring", a metropolis that has entered an irreversible state of decline. The city's slow death--brought about by the onset of deindustrialization--is conveyed through the collapse of traditional Polish working-class culture, the degeneracy of Polish working-class youth, and the growing incoherence of the Polish neighborhood. Algren responds to the forces of economic and cultural change by rendering them as a kind of horror. Modernization eviscerates the economic, cultural and social foundations of the previously self-contained Polish neighborhood, opening it to new modes of commerce and social experience that are inherently dehumanizing. In contrast, Dybek begins his story from this apocalyptic conclusion, this wreckage, this unspeakable "blight"--the title of one of his most famous pieces--and articulates a much different, far more hopeful vision of the city and working class life. While it's true that the city's working class residents live in the ruins of deindustrialization, Dybek ultimately sees the cultural change that it brings about as a kind of opportunity to form new experiences, new modes of transcendence, and, most importantly, new kinds of communities (however improvised and temporary they may be) that traverse cultural and racial divides. In Dybek's work, the nightmarish rendering of deindustrialization characterizing Algren's work is thus recast as a kind of new Genesis.

As Dybek notes in one of his essays from the early '90s, "You can't step into the same street twice," (to paraphrase Heraclitus). The city is always changing. But that doesn't mean the city is also perpetually dying. "The old days and the old ways" may be, as Algren laments, receding into memory. But a new day is always on the horizon. And with them, Dybek suggests, come new possibilities for reinventing the self, the neighborhood, the city--and, by implication, the social order.

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Damn. I should have consulted you before I read The Coast of Chicago. I probably would have viewed the book through a different lens. Nardi, after Tall Midget gave you that head start, I think you have to read it now.

"These Poems," by June Jordan

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

Not missing much.

However, like James T. Farrell (Stand up and cheer, men of Carmel) and Stuart Dybek, he was a huge Sox fan.

Checked out Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder at the library and cannot put it down. Will probably end up purchasing a copy to keep. Really wish I had read it while in college. Calms MANY creeping doubts I carry with me about poetry. Feeling a real sense of connection and harmony reading this.

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Look at the big brain on Spiral!

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huh, and I thought Zapruder was only into amateur filmmaking

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Just requested this from my liberry....

I hope you get out of it what I'm getting out of it. I think you will find what he says to be very familiar.

It is hard to describe what the book is. A collection of personal essays, a defense of poetry that is accessible to any reader curious about poetry. This is NOT Harold Bloom, and thank God for that.

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Read a book called Norwegian Wood by the famous Japanese author. Lots of sex. Made me horny.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

Haruki Murakami. A horny man's horny man.

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Get it yet?

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No, it's the Chicago Public Library, so it will take time. I'd buy it, but I am currently unemployed. Dying to read it, though.

Don't want to pump it up too much, but IMHO the book does a good job defending poetry but only if the person reading has a more than cursory interest. I could see MANY chapters being used in a classroom setting at the AP or first/second year college level. It is not an overly academic text.

At points it feels as though he's speaking directly to me, but as it turns out MANY have the same fears I do. That's what's been the biggest revelation for me.

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From Adrian Matejka

“Gymnopédies No. 3”


This sunlight on snow.

This decrescendo
of covered stumps & brush —
stop for it.

Stop before the sled end-
over-ends down
the chin of the hill —

the way it always will
at the rock ⅔ of the way down.

Stop & shiver in it: the ring
of snow inside gloves,
the cusp of red forehead

like a sun just waiting to top
the hill. Every ill-built

snowball waiting to be thrown,
every bell-shaped angel

stamped over the brown leaves.
When my daughter ranges
in winter, she works

every dazzling angle —
the crestfallen pinecones,

the grizzled beards
of bushes in the morning,

a furnace’s windup huffing
in this throat-
clearing of snow.

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I am going to assume you're supposed to read this while listening to the Eric Satee compositions.

My wife and I help out with the Evanston overnight shelter program. The last book I was reading I brought with me. One of the guests was thumbing through it, so I said they could have it (I grabbed it from the free lending library by my house anyway.) So right now there is a homeless transgender girl named Melyssa whiling away the hours reading The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters.

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I don't remember half the time if I'm hiding or I'm lost

The ads for the upcoming movie reminded me to suggest the book "Just Mercy" to those interested in the very real concerns regarding fairness and the application of the death penalty.

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If we nominate Trump we will get destroyed & we'll deserve it.- L Graham
I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.- DJT 2016
MAY THEY ROT IN HELL. AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS!- DJT 12/25/23

Gettin' it today...

In m neighborhood they have these little houses that are built and people can put books in there and take other books they want to read. I traded TheOutsider by Stephen King since it is now an HBOseries and took home a hard cover copy of Matterhorn. She’s a biggun and I go to Mexico in less than two weeks so I’m going to try to take that down sitting by the pool.

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Flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami

Have not read that Chas, but I was reading Turtledove. The story is great, but some of the characters are kinda boring. I find myself groaning when some of them appear. Don't know if I can make it through seven books.

Like I said, though, the story is pretty cool. It's the one where the Lizards, thinking we are stil medieval, invade the Earth.

Yeah, it's pretty good! I've read up to the politics chapter so far. I've read some other books like this, and out of all of them, this is the most suitable for the classroom, and the most fun to read. It felt like I took this guy's class ten years ago and then ran into him and he was talking to me out loud. I could hear myself talking back. Just a fun book about poetry--and one that makes me think as well.

In high school, I stole a copy of The Poem as Process from our local liberry. Later, when I was teaching AP Lit, I was trying to explain what poetry was, and I used that book to help me explain. (I emailed the author to explain; he got a kick out of the theft and the fact that someone was using it, thirty years after he had written it.) This would have worked better. He covers much of the "what is poetry?" question by showing what poetry does. Alas, I think my teaching career (at least in teaching literature) is ovah, but if I ever get the chance again, we'll be reading selections of this.

It was funny to hear him talk about Shklovsky. I loved Shklovsky's little book. Made so much sense. Speaking of Russkies, I am envious that he can read some of those Russians, especially Akhmatova, in the original Russian.

My only real criticism is with his sense of audience. I get the feeling that he thinks he's writing to other sons of attorneys. Oh, and the politics chapter is predictable; I had the feeling he was about to Audre Lorde my world, and then whammo!! Talk about un-defamiliarized. (Actually, the chapter entitled "Make It Strange" had good political stuff in there.) Those are small criticisms, though.

He had an interesting comment about Baraka and blaming Jews, and I like how he withheld judgment, to an extent. He's in this for the poetry, not the damning people to hell. Yet he also didn't put away his sense of critical analysis. He walked a tightrope there and I think well-adjusted people will say that he did a good job.

why and the hell is the Books thread in the Movies and TV forum?

anyway..No Country For Old Men. Read this again for my book club. Interesting this was written 15 years ago when it applies exactly to today. In fact if written today it would be panned for the obviousness of it all.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest

One Who Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest as a book is even better than the film. The prose is masterful. You're pulled into the story so much, that you don't want to put it down.

Randle Patrick McMurphy is one of the greatest characters in literature. Both a saint and the devil at the same time.

A few weeks ago I read “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho and “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy on consecutive days.

As much as I think the books are very different I keep finding myself comparing the similar themes of perseverance.

Good stuff.

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@Hatchetman: I know you've read his masterpiece, but All the Pretty Horses is good, too. The entire border trilogy is great.

@jbi11s: The Road was a little much; read it a few times, but never again. Too depressing, even for McCarthy. Coelho cool tho

Pandemics: The Stand, The Hot Zone, The Great Mortality

Just read Dracula to help a person I am tutoring. Some good moments, lots of yawns.

True Grit was a good little read.

A Country Story

"When I was a little girl back in East Texas,"
My mother's mother, Beulah, used to tell,
"There was an outbreak of the German measles,
Mama was pregnant, so I went away
To a neighbor lady's, three or four miles from home
When the first signs showed. I was just eight, and sick,
And lonesome for Mama. One day she came for me.
My little sister had broken out, and Mama
Figuring she would die, and the baby, too,
Wanted us all together for those last weeks.
She wanted me home with her. As it turned out
My sister had been reading by the fire
And broke out from the heat, and it was me
That carried the measles home. After Mama died
I used to think of seeing her out the window
Talking to the neighbor lady on that day,
Crying and wiping her eyes with her apron hem."

-- Kenneth Fields

Pretty Horses was the first McCarthy book I read. The Road took the wind out of me, just having a little boy myself at the time. Blood Meridian is the masterpiece. All of it is horrible. Past couple of years I'm not in the mood for apocalyptic pleasure reading. Get that in the news evey day.

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Reality is your friend, not your enemy. -- Seacrest