“IMPORTANT Book reading is a solitary and sedentary pursuit, and those who do are cautioned that a book should be used as an integral part of a well-rounded life, including a daily regimen of rigorous physical exercise, rewarding personal relationships, and sensible low-fat diet. A book should not be used a as a substitute or an excuse.”
― Garrison Keillor
Category: Staff Blog (Page 14 of 32)
On James Agee’s Cotton Tenants, by roundabout means.
Whether or not you’ve been keeping up with the Confederations Cup I’m sure that you’ve at least heard something about the massive riots that have accompanied it. I will assume that you know nothing about the cup and give you a brief rundown: Brazil will be hosting the 2014 World Cup. The Confederations Cup is kind of a trial run to prepare for the big show next year; to see how things run from stadium to stadium, city to city, etc. So why all the civil unrest in Brazil? Brazilians are supposed to love soccer, right? They do, but what they don’t love is the amount of money their government has spent on these stadiums for FIFA (an estimated 12.4 million USD). Could not this money have been more wisely spent, say to better the shabby educational systems, or to lower the public transportation fares, or perhaps build upward of ~100,000 homes for the vast number of poor in their country? These are the questions being asked by the Brazilian populace and one can hardly blame them when people living in ditches fall asleep to the lights of stadiums like stars. There are a lot of things this money could have been used for, but let’s be honest, helping the poor is not nearly as sexy as watching Italy’s Pirlo floating around with Mario Balotelli in a billion dollar stadium to the roar of the earth’s upper in rapture. There is no telling how many peasants Balotelli has personally put in the ditch with his Maserati.
So while we alleviate our sense of societal injustice by throwing a couple of coins at the Salvation Army bell-ringer or buying our delicious fair trade this and that, there is in mass a people group (world wide) being subjected to every variety and variation of poverty. Charity is great for the wellness of ones’ subjectivity or ‘soul’ and should be encouraged at every moment, but to think that these social problems are going to be solved on an individual case by case is ignorant. If we are to even get close to solving these issues a system must be put in place of the global capitalist one that perpetuates the subjugation of a class/’s for the benefit of another. Do we seriously love soccer so much that we are willing to sacrifice human lives for it? Baseball? Football? All the ‘goods’ we dump exorbitant amounts of money into keep others from having the most basic of needs: shelter, food, and clothing.
Shelter, food, and clothing. These are the most basic needs that poet James Agee wrote about in his article for Fortune magazine in the 30’s. This article was never published, got shelved and forgotten. Melville House has now published it under the title Cotton Tenants. This can be seen as a precursor to the book he’s most known for, Let Us Know Praise Famous Men. Melville House Press did a wonderful job with this book; nice size and feel, sexy cover, and it is full of Walker Evans’ stunning photos.
Why is it important for us to read this book now?
I’ve recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk with my grandfather about his childhood, youth, etc. This is sort of a rare situation in that he was surprisingly candid about how poor his family was, something which still stings him with embarrassment. You see, he grew up in a sharecropping family in Dumas, AR. I read Cotton Tenants a week before this talk with my grandfather, and though I’ve heard a good deal of his growing up from my mother, I’ve never quite grasped just how desperate it was until having read Agee’s account. Agee looked into the lives of three tenant families with a ferociously piercing eye and put down his account so that we might make some connection to the destitute. Read this book as it was meant to when it was written. Agee asks us to look around us and ask the hard questions. Can we not spend our money to help those who cannot help themselves? The picking yourself up by the bootstraps argument fails as soon as you say it to someone without boots.
When Agee called our society “a dizzy mixture of feudalism and of capitalism in its latter stages” he now speaks this to our globalized society. Riots are kicking off everywhere. There is a reason for this; the tenants are greater in number while the lords are fewer.
I went out to Livingston Farmer’s Market last night. I happily live in Jackson but was ready for a change of scenery. This is the third year for the farmer’s market and every time I go there is something different. I met old and new friends, but my favorite new friends were the chickens on the new little farm. So far there is a large vegetable garden, some little piggies destined to be someone’s dinner (though I’m not sure if they’ll make it to the dinner table–everyone is getting attached), and these chickens. The eggs are for sale and I was lucky to take some home with me and I had a delicious scrambled egg sandwich for dinner. (Thank you Stephanie and Cameron!)
Have you ever thought about having chickens? Many living places allow it and it seems to be the new thing to do as people tire of big box store consuming and look to find new ways to acquire the staples in life, from farms to markets to local businesses to your own back yard. As Martha would say, It’s a Good Thing.
You can see more photos of Livingston Farmer’s Market on their Facebook Page and see what’s coming up for the rest of the summer.
If you’ve been wondering if you could have chickens in your own back yard, there are many books on the subject. Lemuria usually has several on hand.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in his study in October 1879.
There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
-Italo Calvino
We are sad to hear that Mary Ward Brown passed away on Friday at the age of 95. Sarah Mahan of the Selma Times-Journal writes:
Nichols described Brown as a “gentle and wonderful person,” who loved reading and literature.
“She would enter a room quietly but everyone would notice her,” Nichols said. “When you sit with her, she would just draw you in, much in the same way you become drawn to her stories.”
Brown leaves behind not only family and friends, but a celebrated literary legacy. Read the full article here.
Mary Ward Brown’s collection of short stories Tongues of Flame won the Penn/Hemingway Award for Fiction. She last signed at Lemuria in August of 2009 (pictured above with John Evans) for the publication of her memoir Fanning the Spark. Brown writes:
“When I was writing the stories in Tongues of Flame, nobody, including me, thought that what I wrote would ever be worth the effort, so I was thought to be deluded and was generally let alone. When “The Amaryllis” was published in McCall’s and a newspaper reporter tried to find me, he was told that I was something of a recluse. It hurt my feelings, because I’ve never wanted to shut myself away from the people or the life around me. But to write, one does have to somehow be shut away. In bed every night, I think of people I haven’t stayed in touch with, letters and emails I haven’t answered, opportunities I’ve let go by, even flowers I haven’t put on the graves of my family.”
Mary Ward Brown is just the kind of person–even if you know her just a little–who you wish could stay with us forever. At Lemuria, we’ll continue to share her beautiful writing with others.
One good thing usually leads to another, and World Book Night led me to Roderick Red of Jackson Voices. The purpose of Jackson Voices is to put “the power of storytelling in the hands of Jackson residents with the goal of elevating voices not often heard, particularly within the African-American community.”
Roderick Red is one of ten Jackson correspondents and he found out about Sheila O’Flaherty, a regular on JATRAN, who was giving away books for World Book Night on April 23rd. As you’ll hear in the video, I met Sheila through World Book Night a couple of years ago and have always admired her love of reading and her desire to share it with others.
See Roderick’s full post here: Booklover Shares Reading with Fellow Bus Riders: A Video
Jackson Voices is a project of The Clarion Ledger and The Maynard Institute.
If you haven’t participated in World Book Night before, you can sign up for their newsletter and be ready to sign up to be a World Book Night giver for 2014. SIGN UP HERE.
Reading Alain Badiou’s wonderful play, The Incident at Antioch or L’incident D’antioche, is like stepping into a suspension of thought enzymes. I’m not really sure how that comes off, so I’ll just let you know it’s invigorating. Something I love about reading Badiou is… he’s a contemporary philosopher! You know, that discipline that is riddled with old <dead> men? Well, here is yet another old man we call a philosopher, but look! He’s living! So, we don’t have to dig through obscure cultural space-time events with this guy.
L’incident is the latest installment in the very cool Columbia University Press series INSURECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE. The play, a three-act tragedy modeled from Paul Claudel’s play The City, is very innovative in both its language and structure (creation). Badiou uses a technique that is best left in the words of Susan Spitzer <via the translator’s preface> when she says:
Rather than being “based on” Claudel’s play, The Incident could be said to enact a sort of musical “sampling” of one playwright by another. Many of Claudel’s lines are lifted intact, or only minimally changed, and set down in The Incident where they function as often as not to invert Claudel’s conservative, religious message. In standing Claudel on his head, so to speak, Badiou freely appropriates the earlier playwright’s lyricism for his own purposes.
I like this “sampling” terminology. It is very modern in the sense of a lot of our music <#glitch #dubstep #electro #beats #KatyPerry #etc.> and it also brings to mind Jonathan Safran Foers’s Tree of Codes, but a great deal less stilted craft-art and a lot easier to physically manipulate. But, know that this is no foreign construction either, as it is in the same vein as many of the ancient playwrights, who would take a piece and rework it in the same way Badiou does here.
It is not only Paul Claudel that Badiou borrows from but another Paul, viz. Saint Paul. The title of this play recalls the incident at Antioch where Paul and Peter clash over the status of the law. The main character in L’incident is a feminized Paul <Paula> who takes on the role of political revolutionary. Paula fittingly has a Pauline conversion experience from {revolutionary} to {one whom seeks to not take hold of power once they are in position to do so}. This is dubbed on the back cover of the book as a “transition from classical Marxism to a ‘politics of subtraction’ far removed from party and state.”
Here is the play in superflash:
This play is political. The dialogue is wholly concerned with politics and the characters are political figures. Two brothers Jean and Pierre Maury represent right and left-wing politicians, respectively. Cephas (Peter) is a classical Marxist revolutionary who overthrows the government with the help of the working class. Claude Villembray, Paula’s brother, is the only “hope” for the current system to sustain itself, though he refuses and falls into a nihilistic spiral until he is murdered by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the overthrown state. Cephas, after attaining his violent ruin of the city, realizes he no longer has purpose and abdicates his leadership over to David, the son of Paula and Mokhtar (an Arab factory worker). It is in the final act that Paula the converted is able to “convert” her son David into this politics of withdrawal. There are a few other characters that I did not mention though they are important.
The plotline is less the point than normal with this play. What I mean is the plot, which in most things, is like a sexy sports car, carrying us along with its fancy story and its sex factor, or maybe an economy class something or other, but with this story, though the story is good, the plotline acts more like a utility vehicle, something that is solid and will get us to our destination, it won’t break down on us mid trip, but it wont be so flashy as an Acura TL or, whatever. So, with this utility vehicle, we get lots of scenery, and plenty of time to look at it. The meat of this play is its political dialogue, which I’m not going to delve into here; you will just have to read it yourself (so worth it).
Jumping to the end of L’incident, we are left with Badiou’s answer, which is to take this ‘politics of subtraction,’ but we are left questioning: how do we realize this? In this sense, Badiou has no answer, but only some vague direction and his ‘politics of subtraction’ becomes more of a ‘politics of abstraction.’ The play, at this point, may look to you like a truncated cone – it will never reach its point. But Badiou has some really great ideas. This play is not made to give us a clear answer on how to get where he is thinking, but asks us to come together and answer this as a people and not a person.
One thing I cannot get behind Badiou on is a violent revolution. If anything in the future is to work, any new politics, it must be based on pacifist principles. Revolution is great, but it must be nonviolent. If we do not come to see this, then, well, we will kill this world with smart-bombs. The technology of warfare is getting so efficient at killing, that (everyone, think ender’s game here) your children playing video games, those kids are going to be the most valuable recruits for the next forever. Killing is no longer an intimate thing – killing has become so abstracted from reality that a child in the military can guide a missile with a joystick and melt millions of living, breathing, children, women, men, good and bad, without ever having to face it. We have dehumanized the enemy, and if we stand here without doing anything about it, Hitler will have been just the tip of the iceberg.
L’incident D’antioche may not be where you stand politically, morally, or anywhere, but it will make you face those things, which is so necessary right now.
L’incident D’antioche is Badiou’s first literary work translated into English. Exciting times, y’all.
Here are some cookbooks whose insides are easy to navigate and clear, but that challenge you creatively. To me, many of the rules for choosing a good bedside novel also apply to cookbooks: don’t judge all of them by their covers – read the first page in order to tell if it will be a good fit for you, and only buy a book you will use. Of these four books, everyone with a little kitchen motivation could find a great fit.
Mr. Wilkinson’s Vegetables: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Garden by Matt Wilkinson, $27.50, Black Dog & Leventhal
This brand new gem is a good read for people wh
o both grow in containers and are seasoned gardeners. Matt Wilkinson writes about both gardening and cooking in an approachable way, and the book is filled with pictures and has a very hip design. It is organized by 26 vegetables that are common in American gardens, including tomatoes, leaves from the garden, and fennel. Following a unique, pagelong introduction to each vegetable are recipes that incorporate it, tips, and explanations about technique. It’s a youthful book, and doesn’t presume much of anything about the kitchen that it ends up in.
Nigellissima: Easy Italian-Inspired Recipes by Nigella Lawson, $35.00, Clarkson Potter
Nigella is the famed author of the cookbook How to be a Domestic Goddess, and is a force in the cooking world. Just look at her website, nigella.com. Her new book covers the gamut of Italian recipes, all of which seem intoxicatingly rich and are paired with beautiful photographs. Each recipe has very clear, ordered instructions. This book is a graceful combination of the gorgeous gift cookbook and a methodical introduction to rich Italian recipes.
The Improvisational Cook by Sally Schneider, $27.50, William Morrow
This one has been around since 2006, but still seems unique in its approach. Combining recipes with explanations of how they work and examples of how they can be improvised upon, this is a book for someone who seriously wants to learn to cook off the cookbook. It is less a cookbook than a class in cooking. It includes glossaries on pantry essentials and how to create various ethnic flavors.
Home-Cooked Comforts: Oven Bakes, Casseroles, and Other One-Pot Dishes by Laura Washburn, $24.95, Ryland, Peters & Small
This is the best book of one-pot dishes I’ve come across in my time bumbling around the cookbook section. Tons of delicious meat, poultry, fish, and vegetarian recipes, and good photos paired with each.
by Whitney
One of the great things about shopping at Lemuria during the holidays is that the staff reads various types of books. You will walk in and see the books that we are working on as a store 
like The Racketeers by John Grisham, A Daring Life by Carolyn Brown (which I did read and loved) and My Bookstore by various authors (Barry Moser wrote an essay about Lemuria) but I can guarantee that each one of us has a list of books that is different from one another as the day is long!
I built a spinner near the Front Desk that has the books I recommend from 2012 but here is a sampling ( they are not in particular order):
If you haven’t read this I am not sure what is taking you so long and it is a must give for Christmas! Here is a link to a blog I wrote earlier this year. I hope Jay Sones sees this one!
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The Absent One by Jussi Adler- Olsen
This is the sequel to my favorite mystery of 2011, The Keeper of Lost Causes. Yes, he is a Scandinavian author but while the books are a little dark the author has come up with some fantastic murder and there is also a touch of comic relief. I will keep reading this series until the end which I hope is not anytime soon. His third book, A Conspiracy of Faith, will be available in May 2013 so right now is the perfect time to start this mystery series! I wrote a blog on this one too. Jussi Adler-Olsen is an author I would love to have come to Lemuria for a signing one day! Fingers crossed!
This is a long time favorite of mine. This is a southern slice and dice series set in Georgia. I do recommend starting this series at the beginning with BlindSlighted (which we do have in paperback) but if are already into Karin Slaughter make sure you have picked this one up!
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The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty
If you like to read fiction that is based on real life people like Loving Frank and The Paris Wife then you will not want to miss The Chaperone. I loved this book so much that I practically forced Anna Booth to read it and guess what…she loved it too! Here is the blog she wrote earlier this year!
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The Truth of All Things by Kieran Shields
I just finished A Study in Revenge, the sequel to The Truth of All Things, which comes out in January. So this is the perfect time to check out this new series. If you like period mysteries with a little twist of the occult then this series is what you are looking for! Kieran Shields is one of my debut author finds of 2012.
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These are just a few of the books that I absolutely loved in 2012. Frankly, I could sit in the booth all day and post all the books on the spinner to the blog, but come on…it will be tons
more fun if you swing by Lemuria and let me show them to you. The spinner is full of ’em! We can talk books and you can tell me what you think I shouldn’t miss from 2012! I love it when someone ‘sells’ me a book! If you can’t come in please comment below and let me know what your “Don’t Miss of 2012” are!!
Happy Holidays to Y’all!
Oh, I have already started reading for 2013 and it is gonna be a great year!