Alabama Books

Douglas Bailey tells a tale of a small southern town's growth that's nurtured and poisoned by the virtues and vices of one of its own strong men, Buck Bannon.

At 18, Buck leaves his farm-dwelling family to seek out what opportunities await him in nearby Aven. With nothing but a shirt on his back and the will to never plow land again, Buck wheels and deals his way into the upper echelons this new town.

The story is fictional, but seems to have some basis in fact. For example, Aven is really Dothan, Alabama -- Douglas Bailey's hometown.

Also, one of the secondary characters, Tobe Parody, one of Buck's law officers, is certainly a "parody" of Tobe Domingus, a tax-enforcing, gun-slinging marshal who ruled Dothan in the late 1800s.

I enjoyed this book on many levels and especially liked the colorful colloquialisms that I'd never heard, growing up in the south myself.

I also liked the way Buck made his own way and lived by his own rules without excuses or remorse while simultaneously questioning his own motives and treatment of others.

The only part of the story I didn't like was the fact that Buck's selfishness kept him from meeting his only son. But Buck was not perfect, far from it in fact, and didn't claim or try to be anyone but himself -- human.

Marjorie Perloff offers 'Differentials' with her usual erudition, humor, and interdisciplinary insight. These essays, written between 1999 and 2004, address performance poetry, concrete poetry, multimedia poetry, constricted writing, and how teachers might help their students make sense of it all.

Perloff's prodigious knowledge of twentieth century artistic movements allows her to relate the work of Ezra Pound to Marcel Duchamp, to explain "differential poetry" that varies according to the medium of presentation, to compare the performance poetry of Laurie Anderson, Joan Retallack and Caroline Bergvall, and to elaborate on distinctions between Kenneth Goldsmith's rule-generated writing and Ronald Johnson's verbivocovisuals.

And how to teach 'experimental' poetry? Take nothing for granted. Insist on close readings. And a close reading must account for all the elements in a given text, not just the ones that support a particular interpretation, she reminds us.

If twentieth-century art managed to carve new possibilities for painting, sculpture, and music, it was by dropping the ideological baggage of narrative, says Loss Pequeño Glazier in Digital Poetics, and writing may be the last theater of this confrontation.

The digital medium is a real and present form of writing, one that has changed the idea of writing itself, he says. The web is now part of a transformed social fabric and writing will never be the same again.

Glazier founded and directs the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) at SUNY Buffalo. He brings enormous erudition and great passion to this subject to challenge whatever notions we may have of 'poetry' and whatever notions we may have of communication technology.

E-poetry consists of innovative poetic practices in various digital media: It's writing/programming that engages the procedures of poetry to investigate the materiality of language, Glazier says. He cautions that one cannot assume that because a work is in digital format it is by definition digitally innovative.

Digital poetry, or e-poetry, includes a number of specific qualities. These include:
* works that cannot be adequately delivered via traditional paper publishing or cannot be displayed on paper.
* texts with certain structural or operative forms not reproducible in paper or in any other non-digital medium (works employing hyperlinks, kinetic elements, multi-layered features, programmable elements, and events).
* digital media works that have some relation to twentieth-century innovative practices.

I enjoyed giving it to my father as a gift. Pictures are spectacular and the narrative is just so interesting!

The state of Alabama has diverse geographic features, from lush green forests in the middle and northern sections of the state to white sandy beaches along the gulf coast. Wetlands cover a substantial portion of Alabama as well, covering some 3+ million acres. Before this region was settled, almost 8 million acres of wetlands were present. These wetlands are home to thousands of wildlife species and birds. Sadly, the wetlands of Alabama are often misunderstood and most people incorrectly associate them as mosquito infested bogs. This book serves as a showcase of spectacular photographic images by Robert Falls Sr. to illustrate just how beautiful these areas are. The text by Doug Phillips describes how the state of Alabama's economy and livlihood depend on these waters and it also delves into the scary possibility of endangerment and what this would mean to our state. The author makes future projections about the state's population growth and identifies areas that will have the most growth and how these areas will be impacted. This is a beautiful book filled with breathtaking images - a snowy egret perched on a log in the middle of a fog shrouded lake, breathtaking sunsets over bayous, close-ups of pitcher plants and water lilies, an alligator advancing from a stand of grass along the waters edge, etc. It should be an essential purchase for Alabama libraries and anyone who is interested in Alabama's ecology and environment.

Peter Middleton proposes the concept of 'distant reading' as an antidote to the practice of 'close reading' which, he argues, is far out of date. That's because close readings involve narrowly conceived literary political debates and restricted canons of examples. Close readings limit the available languages and concepts for discussing how a poem's meaning may appear.
The practice of 'close reading' is misguided because one cannot locate the meaning of a contemporary poem in a singular, solitary encounter between one printed manifestation of the text and one sensitive reader. Rather, a contemporary poem produces its meaning across networks of readers, performance, intertexts, and visual presentation.
In fact, he argues, a poem is never "finished." A poem is the totality of its ongoing historical activity. Much of that activity will never be recorded in writing and could not be known in its entirety.
The 'work' of a poem is not some meaning or assertion contained in the uttered text. Rather, a poem's work is the entire field of interaction in which performance occurs.
Performance extends, complicates, and sometimes transforms a poem's meaning. Oral performance makes possible an 'extended semantic repertoire' in which poetry fulfills more of its potentialities. "Each poetry reading represents a collective effort to create something out of written texts that is still unarticulated," he says.
I wish this book had included an audio CD of contemporary poets reading their recent work. Given the book's emphasis on performance the inclusion of audio material would be logical and helpful.

This memoir is about the author's youthful life up 'til college time. He comes from a large family and makes it easy for the reader to keep track of everyone. His mother is the stable one (tho she has some strange ways, also) and his father an alcoholic, though he becomes more rational as he ages. Norman is now age 62 and he makes his life most interesting while a youngster in small Southern towns. A fast read, too.

As someone who has researched and studied the civil rights movement, I was impressed and moved by J. Mills Thornton's rich examination of how a movement that changed America sprang forth in three key cities - Montgomery, Alabama (my home town), Birmingham, and Selma. The famous dictum that 'all politics is local' has never read more true. What Thornton does is take the reader inside the world of local politics, re-introducing the readers to the importance of what may seem like small, local decissions, and how even one city commission election can change the course of history for a nation. This book stands with Carry Me Home, Parting the Waters, and Pillar of Fire as essential reading for those who truely want to understand our all too recent history of race, discrimination, and civil rights. While the text of the book is 583 pages (before notes and a detailed index), it is a worthy and enlightening read. Once read, I doubt anyone will miss voting in a local election again.

This is a very readable, enjoyable and inspirational memoir by a doctor who often used his intuition to find solutions to perplexing medical problems. The youngest (and smallest) son of immigrant parents, he grew up in simple surroundings in Mobile, AL. Through a long sequence of chance meetings and coincidental events he was able to put himself through college and medical school and achieve some very interesting medical breakthroughs. I recommend this book, especially to any young person thinking of becoming a doctor.

It's this book that has convinced me that the historical-critical method is one of the most misunderstood and least appreciated approaches to rhetorical criticism. It's not mere historicism, but much, much more. I heartily recommend this book to the critic who does not want to decontextualise the discourse they analyze. Rhetorical criticism must yield real-world implications, not merely critical "insights" based on an ivory tower view from a postmodern perch!