Below is a list of the books I found time to read in the past year. The list is a bit shorter than it might have been. 2007 saw the purchase of a new house and a wedding. I reread some books I had already read several times, such as Hart Crane’s The Bridge, which I returned to after reading Yvor Winters’s essay. In addition to these books, I read a variety of periodicals, including Harpers, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, Poetry, The New Criterion, the Times Literary Supplement, BookForum, Threepenny Review, Firsts, Rare Books and Collections, VIZ, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, and some others I’m probably forgetting at the moment.

What did you read last year? Send in some of your favorite books.

Permit me to begin with a poem I wrote on the subject of books. I hope to include this poem in my second book, What We Call Monsters:

Cover to Cover
Ernest Hilbert

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. — Walter Benjamin

I don’t collect them. They just accumulate,
Tower higher into shoddy columns,
Climbing weirdly like crystal formations
Or pillars of coral. The thought of their weight
Crushes, their coarse traffic of wars I’ve thumbed
Through, their long summers and snow. They weigh tons.
They slide onto the stove, under the fridge,
Into the tub. They prop open windows,
Serve as coasters. They have traveled with me
And slept beside me. They fashion a bridge
To vanished rooms, sorrows, and suns. Lord knows
Why I haul them from city to city.
They slot together like bricks and become a wall,
My greed, my fears, everything, nothing at all.

THE LIST: BOOKS READ BY ERNEST HILBERT IN 2007

Alistaire Horne, The Age of Napoleon
Philip K. Dick, Selected Stories
Henry Reed, The Auction Sale, introduction by Jon Stallworthy
Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me
Catullus, Odi et Amo, translated by Roy Arthur Swanson
Jennifer Omand, Squarecat Comics, Volume One
Mark Steyn, America Alone
W.H. Auden, About the House
Michel Rabagliati, Paul Moves Out
Jon Stallworthy, Body Language
Marilyn Taylor, Subject to Change
George Herbert, Selected Poems, edited by R.S. Thomas
Eric Pankey, For the New Year
Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves
C.K. Williams, The Vigil
Gustave Dore/Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
C.K. Williams, Flesh and Blood
Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Chris Ware, Quimby the Mouse
Ovid, Amores, translated by Peter Green
Morri Creech, Field Knowledge
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga
Par Lagerkvist, The Dwarf
August Kleinzahler, The Strange House Travelers Keep
Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers
Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems
Frederick Seidel, Going Fast
Joshua Beckman, Shake
G.M. Hopkins, Poems
Debra Ginsberg, Waiting
Philip Larkin, Girl in Winter
W.H. Auden, The Double Man
Scott Donaldson, E.A. Robinson, a Life
Sam Lipsyte, Home Land
Gilbert Hernandez, Sloth
Peter Porter, Selected Poems
Lynn Truss, Talk to the Hand
James Merrill, Water Street
Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
Justin Quinn, Fuselage
Justin Quinn, The O’o'a’a Bird
James Merrill, Braving the Elements
Michel Houelbecq, Possibility of an Island
Chuck Klosterman, IV
Peter Young, English Civil War Armies
Adrian Tomine, Summer Blonde
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
Dana Gioia, Barrier of a Common Language
Raymond Carver, Ultramarine
Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli
Dana Gioia, Interrogations at Noon
Dana Gioia, Daily Horoscope
William T. Vollman, Poor People
Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness
Bob Dylan, Chronicles I
H.L. Hix, Surely as Birds Fly
Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon, Pride of Baghdad
Thomas Lux, The Cradle Place
Andrew Marvell, Poems, with drawings by Kurt Roesch
Rodney Jones, Transparent Gestures
Michael Schmidt, Great Modern Poets
David B., Epileptic
Scott Morse, Southpaw
Adrian Tomine, 32 Stories, the Best of Optic Nerve
Philip K. Dick, Man in the High Castle
X.J. Kennedy, Cross Ties, Selected Poems
Adriane Tomine, Optic Nerve, #5-10
Jeffrey Brown, Cat Getting Out of Bag
Seamus Heaney, District and Circle
Joe Queenan, Queenan Country
James Merrill, Country of a Thousand Years of Peace
W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists, New and Selected Poems
Charles Bukowski, Come On In!
Jeffrey Brown, Clumsy
Bill Coyle, God of this World to His Prophet
Eavan Boland, Selected Poems
Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians
Jack Wiler, Fun Being Me
Jeffrey Brown, Every Girl is the End of the World for Me
Jan Schreiber, Orvietto, wood engravings by William Rueter
Don Paterson, Landing Light
David Jones, The Sleeping Lord
John Ashbery, Can You Hear, Bird?
Marilyn Taylor, Seven Very Liberal Arts
Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women
James Fenton, Children in Exile
Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns
Major Jackson, Leaving Saturn
Lawrence Durrell, Justine
Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan, eds., A Passion for Books
William Logan, Reputations of the Tongue
Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis
Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems
Charles Simic, Walking the Black Cat
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
Richard Wright, Native Son
William Logan, Vain Empires
Joe Matt, Spent
Jeffrey Brown, Unlikely
Henry James, Washington Square
Sharon Olds, Satan Says
Jeffrey Brown, Miniature Sulk
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Justin Quinn, Waves and Trees
Charles Bukowski, Women
Rebecca Wolff, Figment
Par Lagerkvist, The Sybil
Charles Bukowski, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Being to Bleed a Bit
Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos
Joshua Mehigan, The Optimist
William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
Charles Simic, Book of Gods and Devils
John Ashbery, Houseboat Days
Philip Roth, My Life as a Man
Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (includes The Morality of Poetry, The Experimental School, Poetic Convention, Primitivism and Decadence, The Influence of Meter on Poetic Convention, Maule’s Curse, The Significance of Hart Crane’s The Bridge)
Hart Crane, The Bridge
Scott Miles, Trenches
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
W.D. Snodgrass, Make Believes, Verses and Visions
Jeffrey Brown, Big Head
Jeffrey Brown, Any Early Intimacy
Elizabeth Dieffendorf, Books of the Century
David Horowitz, Indoctrination, U.
P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores
James Merrill, Scattering of Salts
Joshua Furst, Short People
Sarah Hannah, Longing Distance
William Faulkner, Light in August
Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories
Seth, Vernacular Drawings
Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium Eater
Ernest Hemingway, True at First light
Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes
C.P. Cavafy, Poems
John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants
Toni Morrison, Sula
Jeanette Winterson, Stone Gods
Best American Comics 2007
Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Henry Green, Loving
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals

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Last Christmas, Lynn bought me the complete works of Bach on 155 CDs. Some of the recordings are a bit lackluster, but any Bach listener worth his salt already has a dozen recordings of certain more “popular” pieces, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Cello Suites, the Goldberg Variations (Simone Dinnerstein’s luxuriantly patient recording of the variations on Telarc CDs is my most recent addition). The beauty of a set like that is that I now can boast all of the cantatas (though nothing beats Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing cantatas 82 and 199) and organ works (my father was an organist, so these bring back memories of him playing them on the church organ at St. Andrew’s Church in Mount Holly; however, I find that organ music is much like organ meat: a little bit is divine — too much is death).

This year, Lynn gave me the complete works of Mozart, on 170 CDs! I am midway through the symphonies at the moment. Both sets contain PDF discs with all song texts and libretti, in multiple languages. Thanks, Lynn! This beats the new socks, even though I do actually love getting new socks . . . a sign of early onset something, I’m sure.

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Well, Paul and I have been running in circles and occasionally bumping our skulls together this season, so the next episode, “Rock n’ Roll,” will probably not appear until the new year. We will also have an E-Verse “best of 2007″ mini-episode. In the meantime, let’s get into the Christmas spirit. Here is last year’s “Christmas” and “Shopping” episodes for your holiday enjoyment. So pour some more rum or bourbon into that egg-nog, turn up Spinal Tap’s “Christmas With the Devil,” and watch some holiday E-Verse. Just click on the screens below to watch.

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The American heavy metal band Manowar—best known for wearing loin-cloths, hectoring their audience with Conanesque measures of violent rhetoric, and riding horses through the forest in their videos—have issued their very own Christmas song. And it’s completely serious. In fact, their dour seriousness and complete lack of reflection or self-consciousness are precisely what makes them so wonderful in their way. Click on the picture below to visit their official website. Then click on the language you would like use. Then you can hear their version of “Silent Night” in English or German, your choice.

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Mark Bauerlein on the New Critics and Garrick Davis’s forthcoming book in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When Garrick Davis told me he had assembled an anthology of New Criticism, I reached across the table and shook his hand. Davis is the founder of the Contemporary Poetry Review (http://www.cprw.com), an online magazine that covers the poetry scene inside academe and out, and he had wanted to compile a selection of essays by that loose cohort of academics from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s who had advanced a formalist study of literary language and tried to erect a discipline upon it. Davis came to literary study through Practical Criticism (I.A. Richards), Seven Types of Ambiguity (William Empson), The Well Wrought Urn (Cleanth Brooks), The Verbal Icon (W.K. Wimsatt Jr.), Language as Gesture (R.P. Blackmur), and other midcentury classics, and he remains a devotee. The New Critics taught him to focus on a poem’s verbal detailnot its historical context or political/psychological/philosophical ideas, but its metaphors, ironies, and ambiguities. In graduate school in the 90s, he never succumbed to the postmodernist insight on the impossibility of meaning and objectivity and closure, and the blandishments of various political criticisms left him cold.

That makes him, of course, a throwback. For most graduate students interested in literary theory of any kind in the 80s and 90s, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, et al. were a passion. Students might have felt a thrill when they read Hegel on tragedy or Nietzsche on nihilism, but the latest thinkers had an added aura of the new. They bore the romantic air of radicalism, and if they were the revolutionaries, then their predecessors were the ancien regime, quaintly obsolete. As the literary theorist Peter Brooks put it a few years ago, “The coming to America of continental ‘theory’ in the 1970s created a new avant-garde of sorts—a genuine one, I think.” It changed fields in the humanities so quickly and sweepingly that it joined the ranks of other great paradigm shifts in the career of thought, this one given momentous titles such as The Poststructuralist Turn.

Read the full article here:

http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=mPywn2Tths9mjCSR8wncgP8Rksh2kDYv\

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