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David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: william bronk

Books of the Year 2012

So many books, so many books. I consciously tried to expand my reading horizons this year, which has helped to swell my reading list to unmanageable lengths.  Sifting out worthy entries in disciplines with which I’m not especially familiar is not at all easy, so sometimes I just have to go on faith that apparent hard work, diligence, and care have resulted in an enlightening end product.

Krasznahorkai’s Satantango is certainly for me the book of the year, though in its way Lucan’s Civil War was as well, and I was very happy to have William Bronk‘s later poetry collected.

I have hardly read all of all of the nonfiction selections–I’ll be lucky if I ever read the Bailyn book cover to cover–but they have all been of note to me at least as reference or inspiration. Some stragglers from 2011 have snuck in as well.

If anyone’s curious as to why some book or other made the list, feel free to ask in the comments. Reviews on a couple are forthcoming.

(As always, I do not make any money from these links–this was just by far the simplest way to get thumbnails and metadata.)

Literature

Satantango

Price: $50.00

8 used & new available from $38.21

Galley Slave (Slovenian Literature)

Price: $28.51

5 used & new available from $28.51

Bursts of Light: The Collected Later Poems

Price: ---

0 used & new available from

Wild Dialectics

Price: $17.00

12 used & new available from $15.23

Leeches

Price: $24.00

37 used & new available from $6.73

Marginalia on Casanova: St. Orpheus Breviary I

Price: $22.00

18 used & new available from $18.00

Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012

Price: $154.84

2 used & new available from

The Snail's Song

Price: $14.00

2 used & new available from $14.00

An Ermine in Czernopol (New York Review Books Classics)

Price: $12.94

23 used & new available from $5.89

Berlin Stories (New York Review Books Classics)

Price: $15.95

35 used & new available from $4.28

Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts

Price: $29.99

23 used & new available from $4.66

Happy Moscow (New York Review Books Classics)

Price: $15.56

22 used & new available from $3.19

Civil War (Penguin Classics)

Price: $17.31

17 used & new available from $6.17

Petersburg (Penguin Classics)

Price: $17.11

24 used & new available from $8.78

Tyrant Banderas (New York Review Books Classics)

Price: $11.60

27 used & new available from $5.99

The Person I Am Volume One (Laura (Riding) Jackson series Book 1)

Price: $9.99

1 used & new available from $9.99

The Person I Am Volume Two (Laura (Riding) Jackson series Book 2)

Price: $9.99

1 used & new available from $9.99

The Holocaust as Culture

Price: $20.80

2 used & new available from

Minuet for Guitar (in Twenty-Five Shots) (Slovenian Literature)

Price: $481.16

1 used & new available from

Mathematics: (French Literature)

Price: $15.95

1 used & new available from $15.95

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Price: $8.69

39 used & new available from $5.39

 

Comics

Black Paths

Price: $20.80

35 used & new available from $4.50

Ralph Azham: Why Would You Lie To Someone You Love (RALPH AZHAM HC)

Price: $10.45

30 used & new available from $5.94

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes

Price: $33.73

1 used & new available from

 

Nonfiction

Oral Literature in Africa (World Oral Literature Series Book 1)

Price: ---

1 used & new available from $0.00

Modernism

Price: $75.84

17 used & new available from $20.45

Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition

Price: $37.00

10 used & new available from $32.03

Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography

Price: $35.00

11 used & new available from $27.83

Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770-1850

Price: $62.00

13 used & new available from $44.99

Memory: Fragments of a Modern History

Price: $24.95

20 used & new available from $5.46

The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition

Price: $62.00

14 used & new available from $38.50

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature

Price: $34.80

8 used & new available from $26.20

German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and beyond

Price: $100.55

13 used & new available from $34.35

Reality: A Very Short Introduction

Price: $12.99

44 used & new available from $5.19

American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

Price: $19.97

40 used & new available from $5.00

Augustus

Price: $11.83

28 used & new available from $5.00

Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives

Price: $23.99

19 used & new available from $23.23

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Price: $18.74

130 used & new available from $3.45

Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame

Price: $22.31

44 used & new available from $10.97

More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India

Price: $59.00

10 used & new available from $59.00

Governing the World: The History of an Idea

Price: $9.46

42 used & new available from $2.48

 

William Bronk: There Is Ignorant Silence in the Center of Things

Because it is that gloomy sort of week:

There Is Ignorant Silence in the Center of Things

What am I saying? What have I got to say?
As though I knew. But I don’t. I look around
almost in a sort of despair for anything
I know. For anything. Some mislaid bit.
I must have had it somewhere, somewhere here.
Nothing. There is silence here. Were there people, once?
They must have all gone off. No, there are still
people, still a few. But the sound is off.
If we could talk, could hear each other speak
could we piece something, could we learn and teach,
      could we know?

Hopeless. Off in the distance, busyness.
Something building or coming down. Cries.
Clamor. Fuss at the edges. What? Here,
at the center — it is the center? — only the sound
of silence, that mocking sound. Awful. Once,
before this, I stood in an actual ruin, a street
no longer a street, in a town no longer a town,
and felt the central, strong suck of it, not
understanding what I felt: the heart of things.
This nothing. This full silence. To not know.

William Bronk

Reflections on this poem and Bronk’s style to come.

William Bronk: In Contempt of Worldliness

In Contempt of Worldliness

Granted it may be true as is said,
is as, ourselves, we make it, or granted if you want,
there’s no place else for us, but even so,
isn’t it right we feel contempt for those
too much at home here? How one comes
to despise all worldliness! World, world!
We cling like animal young to the flanks of the world
to show our belonging; but to be at ease here
in mastery, were to make too light of the world
as if it were less than it is: the unmasterable.
Strangely, the same thing makes too light
of us, as though it mattered this world, to us.

William Bronk

[This is for flowerville.]

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