Literary T-Shirts

You have probably already spied the line of T-shirts from Brooklyn's Out of Print Clothing at your local independent bookstore or trendy gift shop. The soft tees feature eye-catching vintage covers from classics like Slaughterhouse Five and 1984.

Here's Moby Dick:

This led me to thinking . . . which Godine covers would make the best T-shirt design? Here are a few of our favorites . . .

Annie Proulx

In the spring, Godine is proud to publish Ernest Hebert’s novel, Never Back Down. Hebert lives in New Hampshire and teaches writing at Dartmouth College. He is continually producing pieces for his students on the craft of fiction writing and we wanted to share an essay or two on the blog for our dear readers to enjoy.

Annie Proulx
By Ernest Hebert

My introduction to Annie Proulx was back in the old days when she was writing for Gray's Sporting Journal. I can't remember just what it was I read. What sticks in my mind was that the writing was alive and distinctive. Her name popped up again years later when my wife Medora took her picture for the Valley News, which serves New Hampshire and Vermont in the Hanover area. Annie had published Heart Songs, her first collection of short stories.

I knew that Proulx was a North Country writer, writing about North Country people — I knew I had to read her. I considered it part of my job to keep in touch with up country authors; it was the right thing to do. I can't say I was looking forward to the experience. I have a strong streak of pettiness and professional jealousy that I have failed to subdue over the years. A part of me would like to line up the writers in my genre against the wall and open fire. I try to hide these evil feelings behind a facade of good cheer, openness, and generosity. I'm such a phony, but in your own way so are you, dear fellow writer, so are you. It's okay. Nurture your sins, rejoice in them. Without sin we would have nothing to write about; without sinners we would have no interesting characters; without sinning ourselves we wouldn't know how accurately to portray real life. I would read Heart Songs out of a sense of obligation to my career, but I didn't have to like it, nor its author.

Everything changed in five minutes after I opened the pages of Heart Songs. The stories were original and powerful, the characters realistic, but what touched me, took hold of me, and turned me upside down was Proulx's voice, its ability to excite the mind and heart with language: [She was] "thin as a folded dollar bill, her hand as narrow and cold as a trout." After an hour with Heart Songs I was a changed man. That nasty, petty little demon ran scared out of my heart back into the bowels where he belonged. This is what great writing does for readers. It brings out our better nature. It gives us hope in our species. It inspires us to rise above our frailties. What great writing does for writers is to raise our standards at the same time that it gives us confidence to go on with our work.

Some of the downside of the writing life (like the actor's life or the painter's life) is that sometimes you wonder if it ever amounts to anything. I mean if a plumber comes to my house and fixes my toilet it's undeniable that his work has amounted to something. But if I go to the plumber's house and leave a haiku on his kitchen table, whether my work has amounted to anything remains forever debatable. Thank you, Annie Proulx. You made me proud to be a writer. In a time when I weakened you sent me back to the word processor in search of . . . what? Well, I'm not sure exactly, but it has something to do with my attempts to provoke in others that soaring feeling of humanity that you brought out in me.

Annie is long gone from New England. My guess is I'll never see her again. What I will remember about her as a person will be an incident that summarized what I most admired about her, her fearlessness. She had just won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Shipping News. She was not only coming into her own at an age some writers are finished, she was making good money for the first time in her life. The result was she was selling her house in Vershire, Vermont, and starting elsewhere.

I dropped by to visit her and found her on the roof fixing some shingles, I think. The house was built on the side of a hill so that the rickety ladder went up three stories. Annie was half up the roof when she spotted me — and slipped. I watched in horror as she slid down the roof. One foot caught the top rung of the ladder and pushed the ladder outward. I thought the ladder might fall over. Annie barely clung to the roof with her hands while the ladder wavered under her foot until she was able to bring it back into position. She climbed down the ladder, greeted me as if nothing had happened. Annie Proulx is the kind of person you'd want by your side if you had to go to war.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Dirigible a. Everyone is familiar with this word as a noun meaning airship; but of course it is originally an adjective meaning "capable of being directed, steerable." Thus an airship was a dirigible balloon. When the party is breaking up and everyone is starting to worry about Melanie, who is upright but distinctly glassy-eyed, you ask: "Is she still dirigible?"

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Dirigible appears in the First.

Reading for your next snow day

From The New Yorker's The Book Bench:

Great White New York by Elizabeth Minkel

It’s a shame, really, that the grown-up snow day means working from home and periodically going out to shovel the front walk. If you were a sensible eleven-year-old, you spent blizzards playing outside or sitting in your pajamas watching daytime television (never mind that “working from home” might mean the same thing). If you’re one of the lucky adults blessed with a proper, do-nothing snow day today—and if you aren’t looking forward to finally catching an episode of “The Dr. Oz Show”—you may as well curl up with a good book. At the very least, you’ll make everyone who had to trudge into the office today (read: me) ridiculously jealous.

But what’s appropriate snow-day reading? My first instinct is to go for the other extreme: something tropical, or a desert scene, or maybe some Faulkner—try conjuring up summer in Mississippi on a day like today. But perhaps it’s best to grab the bull by the horns and actually read stuff about snow: long Russian winters, Orhan Pamuk, anything on this list, composed by the Guardian books staff during a snowier-than-usual British winter.

I think, though, that one of the best snowy reads you’ll find today was penned more than a century ago. The blizzard that struck New York in 1888—the “Great White Hurricane”— remains one of the worst in recorded history. More than four hundred people died, commuters were trapped on trains for days, and though the city itself only received a few feet of snow, the resulting snowdrifts were three stories tall (my hometown, Saratoga Springs, was apparently the worst hit, with fifty-eight inches of snowfall).

Wall Street during the blizzard of 1888 (Trinity Church is in the background). The power lines that draped major streets became a particular hazard under the weight of the snow.

The Times’s coverage of the storm—they called it “annoying and detrimental” and “a surprise party of the worst kind”—is absolutely delightful. It’s hard, at times, to tell what’s vaguely tongue-in-cheek and what’s simply the reporting style of the Gilded Age (New Yorkers who couldn’t receive daily milk and newspaper deliveries “began to seriously question whether life was worth living after all”). But the heartwarming stuff is pretty great:

Stories were told, jokes were cracked, and jovial good-fellowship prevailed. Nobody put on any airs. The aristocratic banker and merchant was "hale fellow well met" with the artisan, helpful to the shopgirl, and kind to the inevitable old lady whom even the blizzard couldn't keep at home.

The complete failure of the city’s infrastructure led to serious changes, including shifting telephone and telegraph lines and elevated subway tracks underground (if only the fallout from the last blizzard could do the same for our current infrastructural problems). But even if the storms of the twenty-first century bear little resemblance to the Great White Hurricane, the closing description of New York City in the snow will always ring true:

It's hard to believe that in this last quarter of the nineteenth century that for even one day New York could be so completely isolated from the rest of the world as if Manhattan Island was in the middle of the South Sea.

Say It, I Say—Say It!

Carlin Romano, Critic-At-Large at The Chronicle of Higher Education, praises Godine's recently released Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric:

Imagine a young person today applying for a writing job. She informs the hiring editor that she’s good at epizeuxis, not bad at epanalepsis, okay at anaphora. In fact, she adds, if the editor parses her letter, he’ll notice some pretty swift epistrophe, anadiplosis and polyptoton.

Alas, one more young body on the unemployment pile.

We don’t talk like that anymore, if we ever did. Ward Farnsworth knows that. He understands that the grand rhetoric of rhetoric enjoys little place in English today. But in Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric, his decorously delightful volume just out from David R. Godine, this Boston University law professor organizes his sterling material by the old categories. No matter that he’s really just talking about things like repeating words, putting them in odd order, asking questions that needn’t be answered, and so on.

“Everyone speaks and writes in patterns,” Farnsworth begins, arguing that our choices among patterns still make a powerful difference in whether words work for us or not. Such rhetorical figures “tend to show up often in utterances that are long remembered” he notes—the Rev. Martin Luther King’s eightfold “I have a dream” repetition was pure anaphora, and JFK’s “Ask not… ” a case of pure chiasmus—so it’s worth identifying them.

At the same time, Farnsworth recognizes that rhetorical figures often fail because, in the hands of politicians, they‘re “strained efforts to make dull claims sound snappy,” or they don’t sound “spontaneous,” or a speaker simply overdoes it.

How, he wisely asks, “does one study techniques that succeed only when they seem unstudied?”

His answer: by piling on examples until any idiot can separate the spellbinding from the spectacularly flat.

And so it comes to pass. Beginning with Farnsworth’s chapter on figures of repetition (all the terms in our imaginary young writer’s letter describe such devices), a rhetorical miracle takes place. As Farnsworth analyzes and explains his examples, you start reading them aloud because, well—they just sound so good.

For a moment, in the privacy of your office, you’re Churchill in the House of Commons, 1940: “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air….we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender….”

. . .

So, dear reader, I say it even if I say it myself—get this book! No, really, get this book! Read clever Farnsworth, and read him again, and you may become more clever yourself.

Read the full review here.

Superior Person's Tuesday! (just a little late)

We're sorry we missed you on Tuesday but better late than never, right? At least we're still in time to catch Boston's big snow storm. Stay warm everybody!

Cacosmia n. A condition in which the sufferer experiences awful tastes and smells without any external physical cause. (In the later stages of his brain tumour, George Gershwin constantly experienced the smell of burning rubber.)

"Yes, I know it's an awful smell, dear, but don't worry, it's not cacosmia, it's just that you-know-who has just passed this way."


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Cacosmia appears in the Third.

A Deserter by Charles Reznikoff

The Poetry Foundation has just posted the poem A Deserter by Charles Reznikoff, a "blood-and-bone New Yorker," from the Black Sparrow collection The Poems Of Charles Reznikoff: 1918-1975:

A Deserter

Their new landlord was a handsome man. On his rounds to

collect rent she became friendly.

Finally, she asked him in to have a cup of tea. After that he

came often.

Once his mouth jerked, and turning, she saw her husband in

the doorway.

She thought, One of the neighbors must have told him.

She smiled and opened her mouth to speak, but could say

nothing.

Her husband stood looking at the floor. He turned and went

away.

She lay awake all night waiting for him.

In the morning she went to his store. It was closed.

She sent for his brothers and told them he had not been home.

They went to the police. Hospitals and morgues were

searched. For weeks they were called to identify drowned

men.

His business had been prosperous; bank account and all were

untouched. She and their baby girl were provided for.

In a few years they heard of him. He was dead.

He had been making a poor living in a far off city. One day he

stepped in front of a street-car and was killed.

She married again. Her daughter married and had children.

She named none after her father.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Clishnaclaver n. Silly Gossip. Another of those Scottish words. Why are they all so pejorative?


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Clishnaclaver appears in the Third.

“What takes place in our mind, in our soul, when we read a novel?”

The Harvard University Press offers an excerpt today from Noble Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s book The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist. All fans of literature will likely nod in agreement . . .

"I have been reading novels for forty years. I know there are many stances we can adopt toward the novel, many ways in which we commit our soul and mind to it, treating it lightly or seriously. And in just the same manner, I have learned by experience that there are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being. There was a time in my youth when I completely dedicated myself to novels, reading them intently—even ecstatically. During those years, from the age of eighteen to the age of thirty (1970 to 1982), I wanted to describe what went on in my head and in my soul the way a painter depicts with precision and clarity a vivid, complicated, animated landscape filled with mountains, plains, rocks, woods, and rivers.

What takes place in our mind, in our soul, when we read a novel? How do such interior sensations differ from what we feel when we watch a film, look at a painting, or listen to a poem, even an epic poem? A novel can, from time to time, provide the same pleasures that a biography, a film, a poem, a painting, or a fairy tale provides. Yet the true, unique effect of this art is fundamentally different from that of other literary genres, film, and painting. And I can perhaps begin to show this difference by telling you about the things I used to do and the complex images awakened within me while I was passionately reading novels in my youth.

Just like the museum visitor who first and foremost wants the painting he’s gazing at to entertain his sense of sight, I used to prefer action, conflict, and richness in landscape. I enjoyed the feeling of both secretly observing an individual’s private life and exploring the dark corners of the general vista. But I don’t wish to give you the impression that the picture I held within me was always a turbulent one. When I read novels in my youth, sometimes a broad, deep, peaceful landscape would appear within me. And sometimes the lights would go out, black and white would sharpen and then separate, and the shadows would stir. Sometimes I would marvel at the feeling that the whole world was made of a quite different light. And sometimes twilight would pervade and cover everything, the whole universe would become a single emotion and a single style, and I would understand that I enjoyed this and would sense that I was reading the book for this particular atmosphere. As I was slowly drawn into the world within the novel, I would realize that the shadows of the actions I had performed before opening the pages of the novel, sitting in my family’s house in Beóiktaó in Istanbul—the glass of water I had drunk, the conversation I’d had with my mother, the thoughts which had passed through my mind, the small resentments I had harbored—were slowly fading away.

I would feel that the orange armchair I was sitting in, the stinking ashtray beside me, the carpeted room, the children playing soccer in the street yelling at each other, and the ferry whistles from afar were receding from my mind; and that a new world was revealing itself, word by word, sentence by sentence, in front of me. As I read page after page, this new world would crystallize and become clearer, just like those secret drawings which slowly appear when a reagent is poured on them; and lines, shadows, events, and protagonists would come into focus. During these opening moments, everything that delayed my entry into the world of the novel and that impeded my remembering and envisioning the characters, events, and objects would distress and annoy me. A distant relative whose degree of kinship to the real protagonist I had forgotten, the uncertain location of a drawer containing a gun, or a conversation which I understood to have a double meaning but whose second meaning I could not make out—these sorts of things would disturb me enormously. And while my eyes eagerly scanned the words, I wished, with a blend of impatience and pleasure, that everything would fall promptly into place. At such moments, all the doors of my perception would open as wide as possible, like the senses of a timid animal released into a completely alien environment, and my mind would begin to function much faster, almost in a state of panic."

Forthcoming Franz Werfel titles

In Spring 2011 David R. Godine, Publisher will publish two titles by Franz Werfel, the great German-language poet, essayist, novelist, and dramatist:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is Werfel’s masterpiece, the novel that brought him international acclaim in 1933 and drew the world’s attention to the Armenian Genocide. This book, long out of print in English, is now available again in Geoffrey Dunlop’s classic translation, with revisions and expansions by James Reidel.

“In every sense, a true and thrilling novel . . . It tells a story which it is almost one’s duty as an intelligent human being to read. And one’s duty here becomes one’s pleasure also.” New York Times Book Review

The second Werfel title, Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand, is published for the first time in English and translated by NEA-award-winning translator James Reidel, is a prequel to what is known as Holocaust literature. A departure from Werfel’s best-selling epic novels of the 1930s, this short novella about interwar Austria is a glimpse into Werfel’s own time and milieu, a tragic love story, and an unsparing critique of the evasions and self deceptions of the Austrian bureaucracy in the final days before the Anschluss.

Josh Lambert of Tablet ("A New Read on Jewish Life") mentioned our forthcoming publication in "On the Bookshelf" yesterday:

"Franz Werfel, the expressionist playwright who attended school with Kafka in Prague, has now had his final untranslated novel rendered into English as Pale Blue Ink in a Lady’s Hand (David R. Godine). Werfel started writing this tale of a married Austrian diplomat and the Jewish girl he once loved in 1940, after anti-Semitism forced him to flee Vienna; by year’s end, he found his way to—where else?—Hollywood."

Janine Pommy Vega, 1942-2010

We deeply regret the passing of the poet Janine Pommy Vega, author of The Mad Dogs of Trieste (Black Sparrow, 2000) and The Green Piano (Black Sparrow, 2005), who died on December 23, 2010, at the age of 68. Her sudden death will be mourned by all those whose lives were touched by her generous friendship, her tireless social work in schools and prisons around the world, and her luminous poems.

Her obituary by William Grimes appeared in the New York Times on January 2nd: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/arts/03vega.html

Elizabeth David - How to Keep It Simple at Christmas

Johnny Grey Studios has posted an excerpt from Godine's Elizabeth David's Christmas (Foreword by Alice Waters). Here’s Elizabeth’s take on how to keep it simple at Christmas:

"If I had my way – and I shan’t – my Christmas Day eating and cooking would consist of an omelet and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening. This lovely, selfish, anti-gorging, un-Christmas dream of hospitality, either given or taken, must be shared by thousands of women who know it’s all Lombard Street to a China orange that they’ll spend both Christmas Eve and Christmas morning peeling, chopping, mixing, boiling, roasting, steaming. That they will eat and drink too much, that someone will say the turkey isn’t as good as last year, or discover that the rum for the pudding has been forgotten, that by the time lunch has been washed up and put away it’ll be teatime, not to say drink or dinner time, and tomorrow it’s the weekend, at it’s going to start all over again.

Well, I know that any woman who has to provide for a lot of children or a big family has no alternative. This grisly orgy of spending and cooking and anxiety has to be faced. We are so many fathoms deep in custom and tradition and sentiment over Christmas; we have gotten so far, with our obsessive present-buying and frenzied cooking, from the spirit of a simple Christian festival, that only the most determined of Scrooges can actually turn their faces to the wall and ignore the whole thing when the time comes. At the same time, there must be quite a few small families, couples without children, and people living along, who like to celebrate Christmas in a reasonably modest and civilized way: inviting over a friend or two who might otherwise be alone (well, maybe, like you and me, they’d rather be alone, but this is an eccentricity not accepted at Christmas time) – and for much small-scale Christmas meals, at least, the shopping and cooking marathons can be avoided, the host and hostess can be allowed to enjoy themselves, and the guests needn’t have guilt about the washing up.

For such a meal, I’d make the main dish something fairly straightforward and conventional, the color and festive look being supplied by something bright and beautiful as a garnish. Not inedible decorations, but something simple and unexpected such as a big bowl of crimson sweet-sour cherry sauce with a roast duck; a handsome dish of tomatoes stuffed with savory rice with a capon; a Madeira and truffle-scented sauce with a piece of plain roast beef; slice oranges with a pork roast or a ham.

The first course I’d make as painless as possible for the cook: if money were no object, lots of smoked salmon or Parma ham to precede the duck; before the beef, a French duck pate with truffles and pistachio nuts, avocado pears, or simply a lovely dish of egg or prawn mayonnaise. Or, if you’d cooked a ham or piece of gammon or pickled pork to last over the Christmas holiday, then a few finely carved slices of that, with a bowl of cubed honeydew melon or some pickled peaches – there’s no reason why English cooked ham should not make just as good a first course as the raw Parma or Bayonne ham.

As for pudding, unless you feel you absolutely have to have at least the traditional mince pies (those who only each the Christmas pudding because of the brandy or rum butter will find it equally delicious with mince pies), most people will be grateful if you skip straight to the Christmas dessert fruits. Usually one is too full to appreciate the charms of Malaga raisins, Smyrna figs, almonds, glacé apricots and sugar-plums, or you could perhaps finish up with a big bowl of mixed fresh pineapple and sliced oranges."

—

"If we were to bushwack our way back to the true source of modern American food culture, we would find that it is not Julia Child, but Elizabeth David. [Her] recipes are all charm."
— The New Yorker

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Omniphagous a. Eating everything. One of the great experimental omniphages was William Buckland, the first Professor of Geology at Oxford University. He ate hedgehog, crocodile and mole meat, and even a bluebottle fly, the taste of which he considered the most repulsive he had ever experienced. Once when lost on a dark night during a ride to London with a friend, he dismounted, scooped up a handful of earth, smelt it, and immediately declared "Uxbridge!" The Archbishop of York once proudly showed Buckland a snuff box containing the heart of Louis XIV, which the Archbishop had brought from a tomb-robber when in Paris during the revolution. Remarking "I've eaten many things, but never the heart of the king," Buckland seized the heart and swallowed it on the spot.


Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Omniphagous appears in the Third.

One Hundred Portraits - Barry Moser

One Hundred Portraits receives a nod from the Wall Street Journal:

It is the face of a put-upon man. While Herman Melville had enjoyed early success, it gave way to hard toil in obscurity and Manhattan's Custom House. Barry Moser has portrayed a man whose greatest works lie unheralded and (seemingly) forever forgotten. The woodcut, originally created for a limited edition of Melville's underrated poetry, is a chiaroscuro masterpiece, a symphony of textures—wispy filaments forming the beard, dense crosshatching for the waistcoat, a freer hand creating the untidy coat.

Perhaps the finest printmaker at work today, Mr. Moser has over the past 40 years captured countless famous countenances. 'One Hundred Portraits' (David R. Godine, 125 pages, $35) collects the best, mainly literary: from a delicately rendered Lewis Carroll lost in reverie to an appropriately dismal Theodore Dreiser and an owlish Flannery O'Connor. In his more recent works, the bravura use of visual effects has given way to a sparer style, with a strong use of shadow that adds a sense of mortality. The most fascinating textures tend to be the folds of flesh itself, as in the magnificently rumpled face of W.H. Auden. But then there are the eyes sparking the portraits to life: How magnificent is the stare of his chin-raised Fanny Burney.

—The Editors

Red Sox star Carl Crawford will not open an antiquarian bookstore (probably)

From Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy (Los Angeles Times):

On Tuesday, baseball bloggers and book lovers around Twitter enthusiastically circulated the news that newly minted Red Sox outfielder Carl Crawford was planning to open an antiquarian bookshop in the Boston area. The former Tampa Bay Ray was said to be both a rare book collector and a fan of early American writings, including William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" and "The Puritan Origins of the American Self."

Alas, this was not the case.

Crawford is very good at baseball — he just signed a $142-million contract — and was also such a good high school football player that he'd been recruited by college programs. But he's not the type to be seen "wearing a heavy fisherman's sweater and clutching a newly purchased diary of 1655 Connecticut Governor Thomas Welles," as blogger Will McDonald wrote on Royals Review, a fan-centric site dedicated to the Kansas City baseball team that is under the AP's SB Nation umbrella.

McDonald confirmed by e-mail that his post was satire.

That's not how the Harvard Bookstore saw it. Located in Cambridge, Mass. (though unaffiliated with the university, the bookstore responded to the idea that the Red Sox had just brought on a very literary player. "File this under 'amazing,' " the store tweeted, with a link to McDonald's story. "Holy cow!" added Massachusetts-based book blogger Megan Sullivan when she retweeted it.

Then the story went viral on Twitter. I was among those contaminated (I'm a Dodger fan, but I'm fond of the Red Sox too). Boston360, book journalist Sarah Weinman, author Julie Klam and publisher Norton Critical Editions were among the hundreds eager to spread the word. Sadly, the story wasn't true. Crawford is not a rare book collector, and it has not been his dream to open an antiquarian book shop.

"It was intended to be a joke," McDonald said in an e-mail, "though I wish it was true."

Strangley, at 6 p.m. Tueday, Crawford promised — or joked? — that McDonald's wish might become a reality. Responding to the flood of positive tweets to the (satiric) antiquarian bookseller announcement, the baseball star tweeted, "Yes for those asking, I am going to open a bookstore" from his verified Twitter account. "Details to come."

The Syntax of Style

The Wall Street Journal has a lovely review of Godine's Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric today, which Henry Hitchings describes as "a guide to the literary tropes and rhetorical forms that once made English prose so stylish and compelling."

From the review:

"'I worry incessantly that I might be too clear,' Alan Greenspan once claimed. He intended the remark to be crowd-pleasing, but it served as an acknowledgment of the necessary ambiguity of professional economics. To be clear is to leave oneself open to attack; there is safety in obscurity. In many quarters clarity is interpreted as oversimplification, and the cryptic utterance is regarded as a mark of expertise. Yet the murkiness of public discourse often results not from willful indistinctness but simply from a blithe, untutored lack of rhetorical know-how.

In Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric, Ward Farnsworth sets out to remedy this. A professor at the Boston University School of Law, Mr. Farnsworth has previously published The Legal Analyst, which he described as 'a collection of tools for thinking about legal questions,' and a guide to chess tactics. This book manifests his familiar pragmatism and distaste for rarefied theory; billed as 'a lively set of lessons,' it is in fact more akin to a well- curated exhibition of rhetorical accessories."

. . .

"The most immediate pleasure of this book is that it heightens one's appreciation of the craft of great writers and speakers. Mr. Farnsworth includes numerous examples from Shakespeare and Dickens, Thoreau and Emerson, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln. He also seems keen to rehabilitate writers and speakers whose rhetorical artistry is undervalued; besides his liking for Chesterton, he shows deep admiration for the Irish statesman Henry Grattan (1746-1820), whose studied repetition of a word ('No lawyer can say so; because no lawyer could say so without forfeiting his character as a lawyer') is an instance, we are told, of conduplicatio. But more than anything Mr. Farnsworth wants to restore the reputation of rhetorical artistry per se, and the result is a handsome work of reference."

"Bad Writing," the movie

From Jacket Copy:

"What do George Saunders, Margaret Atwood, Miles Corwin, Nick Flynn, Aimee Bender, D.A. Powell, Lee Gutkind, Steve Almond and David Sedaris have in common? They all agree that Vernon Lott's poetry is pretty bad.

Don't worry, Lott asked for it. In his documentary "Bad Writing," Lott presents these well-known authors with a sample of his poetry in an attempt to suss out what, exactly, makes writing bad. He'd found his early —and yes, mostly lousy — poems in a basement, and the older-and-wiser Lott struck out across the country, visiting writers and writing professors asking them what bad writing is, exactly.

Lee Gutkind, an icon in creative nonfiction, tells him gently, "there is a sense of embarrassing sincerity about this piece." Novelist Margaret Atwood is sweetly merciless. "There's no rule that says you get steadily better," she says.

The very independently produced documentary opens at the Sunset 5 in Hollywood on Friday night, where it will show in limited engagement through Thursday. It's a must-see for any writer who's ever wondered, "Am I any good?" or even "Is my writing bad?"

Some of the places Lott goes in the film will be particularly satisfying for writers and writing students. George Saunders' writing is superb and dark, but only those who've met him realize how gentle and kind he can be to students. Watching the faces of some of the writers as they hear Lott's bad poetry is pretty funny, but Nick Flynn's the best: he keeps a neutral expression for a while, then finally breaks into laughter when the poem go from bad to worse."

The Woman in Black - Review

Thank you to Jessica at the Williamsburg Regional Library in Virginia for this wonderful review of Godine's The Woman in Black, a forthcoming major motion picture starring Daniel Radcliffe:

"The English accord the holidays with a sensible emotional treatment: fear and dread. There is a place for joy, cheer, goodwill, etc., but the English storytelling tradition acknowledges that horror is an appropriate state of mind for this time of year. To that end we’ll feature a week of creepy stories to celebrate the Ho-Ho-Horror of the season.

The opening pages of Susan Hill’s novel are cozy and comfortable. A happy family is gathered about the fire on Christmas Eve, the snow falling gently outside. But right at the best part of the evening, when the family members start to tell ghost stories, an aging Arthur Kipps abruptly makes his leave; the others might enjoy festive ghost stories, but Kipps finds himself reflecting on a dark secret from his past. . . . Though published in 1983, this shivery ghost story has the classic feel of a Gothic thriller. Susan Hill slowly builds suspense as she reveals clues about the desolate English manor, the twin tragedies of a child’s death and his mother’s suffering, and the vengeful rage of a spirit who cannot rest. Just when the reader thinks it is safe to breathe, Hill throws in a terrifying plot twist to ratchet up the horror. With such a deliciously malevolent storyline, it’s no surprise that we’ll be seeing the novel adapted into a 2011 film, to be directed by James Watkins and starring Daniel Radcliffe as Kipps."

Georges Perec

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is now featuring an exhibit with photographers that work without a camera. Instead, they create images on photographic paper by casting shadows and manipulating light, or by chemically treating the surface of the paper.

One of the featured works by photographer Pierre Cordier is inspired by Georges Perec. Godine published the first English translation of Perec's masterpiece, Life: A User's Manual, over twenty years ago.

Pierre Cordier, Chemigram 31/7/01 Hommage à Georges Perec, 2001

Life: A User’s Manual tells the story of a Paris apartment building and its inhabitants. In this piece, the apartments form a 10 x 10 grid, which serves as the structure of the book’s narrative. Each is dealt with according to the moves made in the ‘knight’s tour’, a chess-based mathematical problem in which the knight must visit each square exactly once.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Autophobia n. Not, as might be imagined, the fear of automobiles, but the morbid dread of oneself, or of being alone. Do vampires, perhaps, have autophobia? They ought to. Politicians, perhaps?

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Autophobia appears in the Third.

Rilke in New York City

The Inner Sky is a new bilingual selection of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems and prose pieces, many of them little known and never before translated in English. These translations, by the NEA- and PEN-award-winning author and translator Damion Searls, present a significant new voice for Rilke, one more intimate than oracular. Here is Rilke, not in his usual role of channeling the gods, but looking up from a book, musing about the girls of his Czech homeland, sharing his hallucinatory dreams, and the olfactory pleasures of keeping lemons on his writing desk in winter.

. . .

We are right at the start, do you see.
As though before everything. With
a thousand and one dreams behind us and
no act.

I can imagine no knowledge holier
than this:
that you must become a beginner.
Someone who writes the first word after
a centuries-long
dash.

. . .

Searls will discuss various issues of translation and read excerpts from The Inner Sky at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY) (11 East 52nd St, New York, NY) on Tuesday, December 14th at 6:30pm.

"Searls wipes clean the often-foggy lens through which non-German readers of Rilke have hitherto experienced him, and the result feels like a dream in which you can understand perfectly a language you didn't think you knew. Rilke's thrilling precision and disorientations and purposefulness are all suddenly there in English."
— Jonathan Franzen

Swimmer in the Secret Sea

Thank you to the literary review site The Mookse and the Gripes for this thoughtful, beautiful review of William Kotzwinkle's Swimmer in the Secret Sea.

"I’ve had my eye on Swimmer in the Secret Sea (1975) since I read about it earlier this year and saw that it was published by Godine, one of my favorite publishers . . . This short book (just under 100 pages of generously large type and margins) was originally published in Redbook, but in the same year it was published as a paperback. I believe it is a rare thing for a magazine short story to find its way into its own cover. To remain in print through the years is also quite a feat. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one other that has similar success: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (and even it is actually two stories).

. . .

The book’s strength is the simple story, the seemingly simple way it is told, and the cold landscape that all at once emphasizes the book’s tragedy and its hope. The anxiety and the calm, a landscape that is both lonely and comforting, a child that never arrived but is deeply missed, tragedy and hope — or is there really any hope at all here? Such contradictions give the simplicity a full range of emotion. Another strength: the book’s ability to make the reader question any warmth he or she may be feeling."

Philanthropy: A Holiday Pie Worth Sharing

By Kit Bakke, author of Godine's Miss Alcott's Email

The older I become, the more I realize that luck and chance run our lives far more than any sort of “deserving.” Of course I’ve made tough choices and of course I’ve worked hard, but many people make tough choices and work hard and still don’t end up happy and healthy with their butts in a tub of butter, which is pretty much how I’d describe my situation.

If you start by being a white middle-class educated American with a house, a car, a fridge, an oven, and a computer with an Internet connection, you’ve exceeded the resources of 95% of your 6.8 billion fellow human beings. Put another way, if the world’s population were shrunk to a village of one hundred people, half the world’s wealth would be in the hands of six of them, mostly Americans. That’s us.

Being aware of our luck, my husband and I have become increasingly involved in the philosophy and practice of philanthropy. The language of giving is interesting — it used to be called “charity” and now it’s often called “social investment.” Like so much else in our society, philanthropy has become increasingly organized, results-driven, studied, monitored and, one hopes, more creative, collaborative, and effective.

Charitable giving in the US runs a little over $300 billion annually. This includes corporate, foundation, and individual gifts to all sorts of national and international nonprofits including churches, schools, social service organizations, and environmental and arts institutions. Corporate giving is about 5% of all gifts, foundation giving about 20%, and individual giving makes up 75% of all charitable donations. So next time you think you are small potatoes compared to the Gates Foundation, think again. You are part of, by far, the biggest slice.

Food banks, shelters, and community clinics have been inundated with service needs over the last two years, and in many areas that need continues unabated. Donations dropped in 2009 (the second least-charitable year since 1956), and although they appear to be picking up for 2010, it hasn’t been enough to meet the increased need. More bad news is on the way as states are slashing their human services and Medicaid budgets for 2011. Preventive and bridge services are often the first to be jettisoned, which only adds to the long-run economic, social, and human costs. For some reason, we’d rather house the mentally ill in jails (most colleges are cheaper) and care for them in expensive emergency rooms than provide them with less expensive supportive housing, counseling, and appropriate treatment.

Donors nowadays aren’t shy about questioning the effectiveness of the organizations they give to. Being part of a successful result is a bigger draw than being guilt-tripped. Gone are the days when a donor would trust United Way or the American Cancer Society to spend their charitable dollars with no follow-up reporting. There is now a flurry of research going on to help nonprofit organizations figure out how to measure and communicate the results of their work. For instance, a health care clinic for low-income people can’t just report the number of patients they saw; they need to provide information on what they did for those patients and whether or not those patients got better.

The Center on Philanthropy of Indiana University is an excellent resource for trends in research on philanthropy. There are even data showing that people who volunteer and donate to nonprofits are happier and healthier than those who don’t. Talk about win-win!

Another excellent resource is Charity Navigator. They have recently upgraded their rating system to include three areas: financial health (Is the organization financially stable and how much of its budget goes to overhead vs. direct service?); accountability (Does the organization engage in ethical practices, have good governance structures, and is it accountable to its constituents and target populations?); and outcomes (Can the organization demonstrate positive change in the lives of the people they serve?).

I am a member of the Washington Women’s Foundation, which gives away about $500,000 annually to nonprofits in five areas: the arts, the environment, education, human services, and health. We have three criteria for our grant review process in addition to Charity Navigator’s important list. We want to fund projects and organizations that are responding to urgent and critical needs, that incorporate new approaches to ongoing problems, and that are working on bold new ventures.

Which slice of the (guaranteed calorie-free) philanthropy pie do you like?

Happy holidays to ALL 6.8 billion of us!

Eddie Chuculate on Iowa Public Radio

Iowa City writer Eddie Chuculate discussed his new Black Sparrow collection of short stories, Cheyenne Madonna, on Iowa Public Radio's recent Native American literature program. Check out the interview here.

"Chuculate presents a profound disconnect between the mythology of Indian art and the present-day reality of Indian artists, who rarely get to be artists without the cultural qualifier. He also lays bare the effects of wide-spread multi-generational addiction without making excuses for the way his characters treat each other. There are no saints in here, and no demons, either. Cheyenne Madonna is a fantastic debut."
— Jennifer Levin at The Santa Fe New Mexican

"Chuculate writes forthright prose in a somber key, examining without judgment the lives of Native American characters like Old Bull, a Cheyenne who, in 'Galveston Bay, 1826,' the collection's one stand-alone story, ventures out to see the ocean for the first time, only to get savaged by a hurricane. Memory and will converge here to powerful effect."
— Publishers Weekly

Opening night at the Grolier

Here are photos from the recent opening night of the David R. Godine, Publisher exhibit at The Grolier Club in New York City. The exhibit runs until January 7, 2011 in the second floor gallery.

David with Bill Henderson, the publisher of Pushcart Press, editor of "Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses" annual anthology, and, last but not least, Godine author of the forthcoming All My Dogs: A Life.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Zzxjianw n. A Maori drum. The recommended use is in Scrabble. The technique is to save up, at all costs, the letters Z, X, J, O, and W (or a blank that can be used in place of any you don't manage to acquire); to wait for a dangling AN on which you can build; and then to strike. The satisfaction to be derived from this single act altogether outweighs whatever chagrin you might otherwise experience through losing the game, as you assuredly will – even that experienced through losing six games in succession, if need be, before you can effect your coup.

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Zzxjianw appears in the First.

Meet Barry Moser!

You may remember the interview and post on Moser's One Hundred Portraits last week. Now meet the man himself:

Wanda Coleman by Norn Cutson

NYC illustrator Norn Cutson debuted a very cool piece on Black Sparrow's own Wanda Coleman:

Barry Moser on WAMC

Barry Moser was recently on WAMC's The Roundtable with Joe Donahue. Listen to the interview here.

Moser is considered one of the most important book artists of our time. Godine just published One Hundred Portraits: Artists, Architects, Writers, Composers and Friends, Moser's latest book, which includes wood and relief engravings of personalities as varied as Charles Dickens, Daniel Webster, Stephen Crane, Dante Alighieri, Frédéric Chopin, Nelson Algren, Jean Cocteau, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rembrandt van Rijn, Ben Shahn, Jim Harrison, Flannery O'Connor, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Eric Carle, Kaye Gibbons, Virginia Hamilton, Nancy Willard, Patricia MacLachlan, Jack Coughlin, Jane Yolen, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others.

In addition, Ann Patchett, the recipient of the 2002 Pen Faulkner Award and Great Britain's prestigious Orange Award, contributes a splendid essay about Moser's portraits and the subject of portraiture in general.

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Yirn v. To whine, to pout, or show petulance by facial grimaces. Pronounced the same as yearn. "My husband is an idealist; he's always yirning for something."

Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Yirn appears in the First.

The Godine 40th anniversary limited edition poster is in!

It's really a thing of beauty:

This limited edition poster has been designed with painstaking care by longtime friend of the house, author, and illustrator Glenna Lang. Its image depicts our little house's "cottage industry" beginnings, a time when, as David Godine writes, "The narrow, personal world of trade publishing was still run by opinionated individuals, whose names were often eponymous with their companies, and who more or less published what they liked and did their crying in private;" when "It was still possible to dream of becoming a general trade publisher whose list would cover a variety of subjects and whose books could be produced to high standards, and to do it all with a minimum of fuss and compromise."

It was hand-silkscreened in eight colors on fine acid-free paper by master printer Luther Davis at Axelle Editions in Brooklyn, NY. This is a limited edition of 250 prints, each signed and numbered by the artist.

The print would make an excellent holiday gift and at $50 is truly a great bargain. Purchases can be made through our website.

What's Daniel Radcliffe going to do next?

Radcliffe stars in the motion picture release of The Woman in Black, due out in 2011:
"The 21-year-old took a 10-day break from 'Woman in Black' to promote 'Deathly Hallows - Part 1,' but he'll soon be headed back to the set for another four weeks of filming. Based on a 1983 thriller by Susan Hill, the supernatural thriller follows Arthur Kipps (Radcliffe) as a lawyer who travels to sort out a recently deceased client's affairs, encountering dark secrets and haunting presences when he arrives. Radcliffe told us he's been loving the production, which is just a fraction of the size of a 'Potter' film. 'It's faster," he said. "I'm loving it. It's very, very exciting.'"

Stills from the film were just released:


Godine is proud to publish the US edition of The Woman in Black!

Holiday Email Promotion!

It's about that time . . . Season's greetings everyone! To celebrate, David R. Godine, Publisher will be sending out a holiday email promotion on Monday, 11/22, (just before the Black Friday madness) to our subscription list.

We will be offering an amazing 30% off some incredible titles—books featured on the big and small screen, food writing, and, of course, children's books.



By joining our subscription list, throughout the year you will get special discounts on backlist books (and new titles sometimes); updates from authors, information about author readings, lectures by David, and other fun events. We promise to not share your information with anyone and to never crowd your inbox.

From the Griffin Museum

Godine and friends (Michael Russem, Steve Stinehour, and Paul Parisi) at his well-attended lecture on photo books last night at the Griffin Museum in Winchester, MA.

A recap of Godine at the Grolier Club in NYC

The blog of the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton University offers a lovely post on David Godine's opening night event for the exhibition of his books at The Grolier Club in New York City:

"'It began in a barn with one press and three smart people,' said the fine press publisher David Godine last night at the opening of an exhibition of his books held at the Grolier Club in New York City. While still in his early twenties, Godine rented an abandoned cow barn in Brookline, Massachusetts, for the price of one book a year. 1968 and 1969 were spent fitting it out with the basics—electricity, heat, and plumbing—before he, Lance Hidy, and Martha Rockwell could begin production.

David R. Godine Inc. had three basic guidelines: to offer a wide selection of books of editorial and textual importance; to produce books that delighted the eye and did not offend the purse; and to maintain the highest production standards.

One of their most ambitious early projects was Specimen Days by Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Because of the large edition size, the book was set at Stinehour Press and printed by Meriden Press. 'We would be the architects, but not necessarily the builders,' writes Godine. A three-page rave review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review assured the book’s success. 'The next day Richard Abel called from Oregon to order five hundred copies. We had never shipped more than three copies of anything to anyone in our history.' (GAX Oversize 2007-0365Q)

I am one of the fortunate few who walked away last night with a copy of the keepsake Godine wrote and printed for the occasion: 'David Godine: the Letterpress Years: Offprint from Matrix 29.'"

Superior Person's Tuesday!

Xenoglossia n. The supposed ability to communicate with others in a language which you do not know. (A term from the world of so-called "psychic research.") The impracticability of this concept is soon exposed if you attempt to talk with your teenager using some of the terms that you have heard him use in conversation with his friends. This will, however, at least afford him considerable entertainment, and you will be pressed, with much sniggering, to "say that again" — something that he will never otherwise say to you.



Each Tuesday, we’ll offer up a Superior Word for the edification of our Superior Readers, via the volumes of the inimitable Peter Bowler. You can purchase all or any of the four Superior Person’s Books of Words from the Godine website. Xenoglossia appears in the Third.

Kim Smith on Romantic Gardens

"Richly illuminated with drawings, watercolors, and engravings, Godine has joined with the Morgan Library and Museum and the Foundation for Landscape Studies to produce this sweeping and superbly researched survey of the development of the Romantic movement in landscape design in Europe and America. This beautiful and beautifully written scholarly, yet accessible, book will become a highly valued resource for landscape designers, architects, landscape architects, historians and students of the Romantic movement. And, as do all Godine books, Romantic Gardens makes for a treasured and thoughtful gift. The book was written to accompany the exhibition Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design held at the Morgan Library and Museum during the summer of 2010. The authors Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Elizabeth Eustis, and John Bidwell co-curated the exhibit.

Drawn from the Morgan’s holdings of manuscripts, drawings, and rare books, from the collections of the authors Rogers and Eustis, and from collections across the nation, Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art, and Landscape Design features approximately one hundred and fifty texts, outstanding works of art, plan drawings, and photographs providing an overview of ideas championed by the Romantics and also actualized by them in private estates and public parks in Europe and the United States. Notable are the plan drawing and early photographs of Olmstead and Vaux’s winning Entry No. 33 of Central Park, a J.W. Winder photograph of Adolphe Strauch’s Spring Grove Cemetery, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and several Frederic Edwin Church landscape vistas in oil, including a view of Olana, Church’s estate overlooking the Hudson River."

Read the rest of the review on Kim Smith's site.

Godine at the Griffin Museum!

Our fearless leader, David R. Godine, will speak at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA on Wednesday, November 17th from 7-8:30pm.

Godine will discuss the photo books he has published, starting with Arnold Newman, moving to the work of Southworth and Hawes in The Spirit of Fact, then to the contemporary photographs of George Tice, Sally Mann, Olivia Parker, and Nick Nixon, etc. He will also explain how he has used photographs to elucidate certain themes, such as Stryker's role in the FSA in The Likes of Us or the role and place of postcards in Prairie Fires & Paper Moons and As We Were or of marine photos in On the Wind.


We hope that you can join us!