Read, Listen, Watch

Staff Picks and Suggestions

Score with books on soccer

I suspect plenty of Americans, like me, only pay attention to professional soccer every four years during the World Cup!  Whether that describes you also, or whether you’re an all-time afficianado, there’s plenty at Snell Library to keep you informed and up-to-date. If you look to the foreign press for great coverage of professional soccer, try PressDisplay, which brings together World Cup headlines from South Africa, Canada, Italy, Mexico, and over 70 other countries.  And for all you coaches out there, subscribe to the RSS feed for  Soccer Journal from Ebsco, a bi-monthly magazine for coaches.  There are plenty of books about soccer skills and coaching at Snell Library, too. Like all games, soccer is cultural.  On the professional level, it’s political, too, and our book collections definitely reflect that. More than just a game For example, just as World Cup soccer arrives in South Africa, a moving sidenote in apartheid’s history has just been published: More than just a game : soccer vs. apartheid by Chuck Korr with Marvin Close.  This is an inspiring story about inmates at Robben Island prison in South Africa in the 1960’s who formed a soccer league, and how it gave them dignity in the face of oppression and adversity. And if you’ve ever wondered how serious the nationalism around soccer can be, read  Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War which tells the story of the 1970 war between El Salvador and Honduras that was ignited by a soccer match, or the highly entertaining How Soccer explains the world by Franklin Foer about soccer, culture, and globalization.  African soccerscapes Africa’s rise in the world of soccer is described in the timely African Soccerscapes. And Soccer Empire by Laurent Dubois profiles Zinedine Zidane, the French-Algerian soccer star, as a symbol of French imperialism both in his most glorious and his most tragic moments. Soccer empire Are you a parent of a soccer player or a former youth player?  Enjoy the insights into youth soccer culture in W.D. Wetherell’s  Soccer dad, or Nina Savin Scott’s practical Thinking kid’s guide to successful soccer (online from netlibrary).  Inspire your kids with the biography Young Pele or the mystical novel Keeper by Mal Peet , about a goalie and his supernatural mentor in the South American rain forest, both in the Favat children’s collection on the 2nd floor. Of course many at NU are interested primarily in the medical aspects of sports–including soccer–for those, there are books about soccer health and rehabilitation. Search for recent medical research in PubMed (customized for NU), SportDiscus and Medline. And if you just want to watch…see you in AfterHours, where all the matches are on the big screen!

To Read: John Gardner

John Gardner was one of our most unusual writers. He was distinctly American, yet had far-flung interests involving Medieval lore and fairy tales. He was a writing teacher, staunchly preferring the traditional standards of direct language, character-driven plots and deploring everything post-modern and cynical. Yet he wrote some wildly experimental fiction himself, which could nearly be self-consciously stylized. He also did translations, biographies, books for children, books of poetry, treatises on the craft of writing and short stories in addition to his handful of novels. He died at only forty-nine years old in a motorcycle accident, in 1982. Considering that he did not get any books published until his 30’s, that gives a good idea of just how prolific he was, and everything else we may have missed. John Gardner first came to my attention with his book On Becoming a Novelist, which I read in my senior year of high school. I was required to read it for my creative writing class. I initially hated him. I thought he was a pompus academic of the most despicable kind and let the teachers know this. To the lay person, who is first confronted with his opinions, especially in his book On Moral Fiction, this reaction is not uncommon. Gardner had a conservative curmudgeonliness about him, and tended towards making outrageous denunciations of writers who were accepted as fairly great: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike, for example. However, my own reticence was accompanied by a curiosity. Soon I found myself seeking out other books he had written, or at least browsing them. One thing that additionally attracted me was how hard they were to find, how ancient and cast-aside they seemed. It was impossible to find any of his books aside from Grendel and On Becoming a Novelist in a regular bookstore. Many of his novels are accompanied by illustrations, giving them the impression of a folktale. My first introduction to Gardner’s actual fiction was Grendel; this is a book written from the point of view of the monster in Beowulf, who meets his astonishing fate at the hands of the warrior in the title. That it is told from the point of view of a creature rather than a person and is written in a semi-colloquial, semi-philosophical rambling style is what I mean when I say Gardner himself was an experimental writer. Following Grendel, I read Nickel Mountain, a beautiful book set in the Catskills; although it contains elements of magic realism, it is a generally straighforward story set in contemporary times, and is probably my favorite of his works that I’ve read. I read some of his short stories and eventually his final novel, a long, exasperating book called Mickelsson’s Ghosts. What was equally interesting, to me, were the various stories I sometimes heard about him, from people who had either seen him lecture or met him in person. My father said he visited his college to read from his most recent novel in the 70’s. Another person I know as an acquaintance said he worked as a bartender at a writer’s retreat in upstate New York where Gardner occasionally went; he simply remarked that Gardner was a “strange person.” In most pictures you can find of him, he has long, white hair and is smoking a pipe. It seems he was something of an alcoholic, which likely contributed to his motorcycle accident. The saddest fact I would come to realize about Gardner was that the literary world had the same reaction to him that I initially had. His criticisms of contemporary writers were seen as mean-spirited and his own novels were criticized as being long-winded and self-indulgent. Once a literary star, he was banished from the literary world and is now almost unread. New Directions Paperbacks, however, has recently republished a select few of his novels, one of which– The Sunlight Dialogues— we have here in Snell. Go and check out this great unknown’s books while you can; we have a handful on the shelves.

Summertime, living’s easy

Our summer reading display is up. Go to the lobby and check out the large display case. All the visuals and designs are courtesy of Krissy Lattanzio. I still am debating putting some actual books up in the case, but not every book mentioned. I feel this would help grab people’s attention and make the display jump out. So there may be more to come.

New Favorite DVD: Avant Garde: Experimental Shorts, 1922-1954 (vol. 3)

We can be thankful for Kino on Video; for years, they have been a faithful distributor of silent, neglected, provincial (but broadly interesting), and plain peculiar films. In the Snell DVD stacks sits a collection of experimental short films that Kino released a few years ago. It is volume three of a trilogy. Considering the subject matter, the DVD is handsomely packaged with a sleek blue cover, enticing bonus features, and not one but two discs. And what of the subject matter? Thirty or so films from off the beaten path of film history, culled from all over the world, made by various propagandists, intellectuals, artists and outright novices, all conforming in some way to the broad styles of surrealism and/or absurdism. The title of the collection is “Experimental” shorts. Of the films I was able watch, that title is apt. On disc one, one film called Rien Que Heures (Nothing but Time) stands out. It is a forty-six minute collage of images shot on the streets of Paris, from sunrise to sundown. There is something nostalgic about the way it is presented, in a plotless, wordless form; it gives the film the feel of a deeply recalled memory. Also on the first disc, I have to  recommend Tomatoes Another Day, a film made in 1930, at the advent of “talkies.” Apparently, the film– dealing with two lovers who encounter the woman’s husband when he unexpectedly returns home– was intended to be a parody of the obvious, unintentionally hilarious style of  early talkies. Thus, the acting style is incredibly bizarre; a deliberately non-expressive blend of dialogue and gestures. What it brought to my mind were the films of David Lynch, especially Eraserhead. Anybody familiar with his work is encouraged to see this film. Disc one also contains an early example of color animation, called Tarantella, while disc two starts with a piece of (deliberately?) amateur animation called Plague Summer. The film references “The Journal of Albion Moonlight” as the work it is based on. At first I thought that was a non-existent book, but when I looked it up on Amazon.com, I found that it does exist. It was an anti-war novel written by the poet and pacifist Kenneth Patchen. If nothing else, Avant Garde is a collection to be seen for the sake of its far-flung oddities rather than for great filmmaking. It could also be interesting to watch the film knowing that many of the people who made them were not professional filmmakers; Tomatoes Another Day director James Sibley Watson, for instance, was a publisher who made only three short films. It is worth mentioning that this DVD is only the third in a series. Snell does not own volumes 1 or 2. While inherently for an adventurous niche audience, I think it’s worth ordering

Summer Reading exhibit needs your suggestions!

To all blog visitors/posters: We are in the process of creating a summer reading exhibit to go in the large display case just off the lobby of Snell Library. Please leave comments here with any suggestions for books that you would recommend as summer reads. For the sake of popular wisdom (I may be saying this more as a reminder to myself than anybody else), please suggest books that are fast-paced, accessible, maybe cinematic reads. We will include several new releases, but also older books that stand the test of summer-reading time. We want to include mostly books that are on the shelves in Snell. Look forward to reading your suggestions.