The UPB Post:
Minds on Fire

Slow Reading Dinners at UPB

Dinner and Reading Gatherings on the fourth Monday of each month

Join us around UPB’s great table, where we will eat and talk about reading in the slow lane. We will enjoy wine and edibles prepared by the Musical Offering’s genius chef Erick Balbuena, featuring many ingredients gathered from the Berkeley Hills. We ask everyone to bring a paragraph or a few words you love that must be read carefully, and savored slowly.  Martin Holden and Bill McClung, hosts

6 to 8 on March 22 and April 26

$40 per person, wine, tax, and gratuity included

($15 for students and starving artists)

Reservations please at outreach@universitypressbooks.com

Or at the UPB Front Counter, or reply to this posting.

UNIVERSITY PRESS BOOKS/BERKELEY

2430 BANCROFT WAY 548-0585

 

 

 

 

Juan Garcia reading from "Soil and Civilization, January 2010

 

 

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Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan, $11 paper, Penguin Books, 2009

Eating wisdom from a Berkeley sage in bite-sized morsels we can enjoy every day. May save our lives, or at least make them better.  William McClung, UPB

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Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books, Edited by Jo Steffens, Yale University Press, 2009, $20 cloth

A delightful set of meditations and lists (along with striking images of their heavily laden shelves and a gem of an essay by Walter Benjamin: “Unpacking My Library”) by several renowned contemporary architects who view their vocations and their passionate relations with printed volumes as bound up with a kindred aesthetic obsession, and for whom form, function and content (and contentment) are most happily wedded in the experience of their beloved beautiful books.  Peter Johnstone, UPB Frontman

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Tamalpais Walking; Poetry, History, Prints by Tom Killion and Gary Snyder, cloth, $50, Heyday Books 2009

A premier Bay Area woodcut artist and one of our greatest living American poets collaborate on the most beautiful book I’ve seen this year—already a local bestseller because we should all own one. It is history, it is poetry, it is the history of local poetry and the art of local natural history. The woodcuts are the best Killions you’ve ever seen, 72 views of Mt. Tam, in prints a la Japonaise. Just the cover is a thrill, and that’s just the start.  Christina Creveling,  UPB Manager

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UPB: About Authors and Readers

“We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavenly and the earthly world.”

That’s Emerson on Goethe in Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write (Iowa, 2009), which I am nominating for UPB’s Best Gift Book of the Year.

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The Simple Act of Reading

Now that the weather is turning cold, the type of book I seek out is one in which I can lose myself on a rainy day.  For this purpose I highly recommend Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (HarperCollins, 1994).  At 1474 pages (and 2.5 pounds), this is not a book to be picked up lightly.  But this sprawling, absorbing and occasionally comic novel has plenty of rewards for those who do.  It’s surprising— 15 years after the novel was published and 57 after it is set— how many of the themes and events are echoed in today’s headlines from South Asia:  Hindu-Muslim violence, Congress Party politics, and, of course, arranged marriages.  The story is essentially about Lata, our heroine, and her mother’s attempts to find her a “suitable boy.”  Encompassing four extended families, politicians, courtesans, judges, shoemakers, Calcutta high society and Ganges pilgrimages, the connecting threads of this book are a pleasure to discover.  This book reminded me how much pleasure it is possible to get from the simple act of reading.  I ended the novel not exhausted from the length but instead wanting to read more about the characters- and fortunately for me, a sequel has been announced, entitled- what else?- A Suitable Girl.  I’ve ordered a copy for the store in case this sparks interest. Nicola DeRobertis-Theye, UPB Author Events Coordinator.

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What is it you are writing for, anyway?

“You should start,” he told his young friend, “with no skeleton or plan.  The natural one will grow as you work. Knock away all scaffolding. Neither have exordium or peroration. What is it you are writing for, anyway? Because you have something new to say?  It is the test of the universities and I am glad you have made it yours.”

From Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson’s Creative Process, page 25,  “Practical Hints”   (University of Iowa Press, 2009)

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National Bookstore Day

The estimable Harvard/MIT/Yale representative, Patricia Nelson, writes this week:

What’s a day without a bookstore? We cherish you all as wonderful retreats, browsing heavens, the perfect place to meet, the perfect date, the perfect outing with children, a wonderful daily oasis, a welcoming place of solitude, a magic theater of words, a generous place of discussion and shared passions, a constantly surprising calendar of authors and ideas, a communitarian center, a place of democracy in action.

The Guardian UK has been posting favorite bookstores for years, may I echo the sentiments of the Guardian’s  Jeremy Mercer saying:

“Bookstores are sanctuaries. Places to lose yourself, escape the harsh demands of daily life, find new ways to dream and new sources of inspiration. I love all booksellers; anybody who helps spread the word is doing noble work. But my favourite bookstores are the small eccentric independents run by passionate and usually slightly mad book lovers.”

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Kaja Silverman at UPB/Musical Offering, 29 October 2009

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Kaja Silverman reads Flesh of My Flesh, in conversation with Judith Butler and Anne Wagner.

From the description of Flesh of My Flesh (Stanford University Press):

What is a woman?  What is a man?  How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for “wholeness” refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh.

From the book:

“All of our stories really are part of the same great volume: the Book of Life. And unlike the logos, the words in this book do not have to become flesh in order to save us. They are flesh.”  Introduction, page 14.

Some 125 people crowded into the Musical Offering Cafe on October 29 to hear a riveting  discussion of this new book.

From the discussion:

“I never write about books I don’t love.”  Kaja Silverman

•   •   •

Practical Water by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan, 2009)

Hillman’s lyric experimentalism, as displayed in Practical Water, her eighth collection of poetry and third installment in a proposed tetralogy on the elements, offers an unlikely mediation between aesthetic and political concerns. Interested in engaging both traditions, Hillman rejects any partitioning that would disallow her political or aesthetical concerns from being hashed out simultaneously in the measure of a poem. With Practical Water, the State of the Union and State of Being are addressed with equal parts sensitivity and acuity. Hillman’s poems ask a reader to share in the activity of observation and contemplation regarding the complexities of everyday life as a citizen of the political and aesthetic. Here, the poem offers one an opportunity to retry one’s own philosophical and political opinions in a circuitry devised by an exquisite hand. While the conscience is at work mulling over one’s role in geo-political atrocity the heart endures the abstract shudder of pleasure that only poetry can afford. 10.29.09  Pablo Lopez

Hillman 2

Brenda Hillman Reading at UPB in September


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About the UPB Post

We intend this UPB Post to be a kind of BERKELEY READS forum, a place where we and our intellectual friends can project what we find in books.

You can blog here, too, by sending not more than 300 words to us at this email address.

Occasionally we will post a cri de coeur for the fate of books and our bookstore, seeking respect and support.

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And an occasional joie de vie as there is so much good life in the books we carry and in this place.

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  • Pablo Lopez
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  • Sorayya Carr
  • William McClung
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