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10 Obscure Books Recommended by CU English Faculty

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:35:55 +0000

10 Obscure Books Recommended by CU English Faculty Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/04/2021 - 15:35

Grace Dearnley

A month into 2020, most people are still staying home. After they tear through everything on Netflix and Hulu, many are turning to the pages of books to occupy their minds. Grab a cup of tea and a fluffy blanket, then get cozy in your favorite reading nook to escape into one of these 10 little-known books recommended by CU English faculty.

1. A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Recommended by Professor John Stevenson.

A Time of Gifts follows the true story of an Englishman who walked across Europe in the early 1930's — from London to Constantinople. In this first book, Fermor documents his travels from London to Hungary, after which the sequel, Between the Woods and the Water, recounts the remainder of his adventure. Stevenson wrote that, “beautifully written, full of observations and ideas and adventures, it’s a book for the ages.”

2. Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story by Alfred Hassler and Benton Resnik

Recommended by Professor William Kuskin.

Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, which came back into print nearly 60 years after its initial publication, is a 16-page graphic novel detailing the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott in which Dr. King, Rosa Parks and 50,000 others fought against the segregation of city buses. The comic book is credited for inspiring MARCH, the graphic novel autobiography trilogy by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell.

3. The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing

Recommended by Associate Professor Cheryl Higashida.

Originally published in 1946, The Big Clock is an American noir novel that takes place in the publishing industry of New York City. The main character, George Stroud, gets tangled up in a murder mystery and must prove his own innocence. Higashida writes that it is a “super fun and thought-provoking novel” that “raises questions about time and identity in industrial capitalism.”

4. La portentosa vida de La Muerte (The Astounding Life of Death) by Fray Joaquín Bolaños

Written in Spanish and originally published in 1792, La portentosa vida de La Muerte was one of the first Mexican novels, written by a Franciscan priest. The book takes the reader through the journey of Death, Adam and Eve’s daughter, who falls in love with several people but whose husbands keep dying off before their wedding night.

5. Ice by Anna Kavan

Recommended by instructor Jason Gladstone.

Ice takes place in a frozen, apocalyptic landscape where walls of ice tower and governments vie for control. The narrator must take a glacial journey to find and save a glass girl with silver hair before the ice closes in on the world. This science fiction novel is called a warning against climate change and totalitarianism, a feminist exploration of violence and trauma, and an allegory for the author’s struggles with addiction.

6. Ancient Lights by Davis Grubb

Recommended by Professor Ruth Ellen Kocher.

In Ancient Lights, a modern epic novel, country bumpkin Sweeley Lynch of West Virginia is the only man who can save the world from the founders of an electronic conspiracy. Kocher called the book “bizarre in a very druggy, hallucinatory, Hunter S. Thompson kind of way.”

7. Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks

Recommended by Assistant Professor Khadijah Queen.

Although Brooks is well-known for her poetry, this coming-of-age story, originally published in 1953, was her only work of fiction for adults. The novella is compiled of a series of 34 vignettes, set in the 1940s, that come together to create what Brooks called a “kind of portrait of a young Chicago woman’s life.”

8. The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhol

Recommended by PhD candidate Grace Rexroth.

The true-crime book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper tells the stories of the women killed in 1888 by the unknown man who became the media sensation known as Jack the Ripper. Rexroth writes, “We seem to have this fascination with perpetrators of violence that often has gendered connotations (usually some version of: male killer becomes infamous while his female victims are elided). This book tackles that very problem. It … does the feminist work of making Jack the Ripper's victims visible and legible to a modern audience.”

9. The Story of Harold by Terry Andrews/George Selden

Recommended by Professor Elisabeth Ann Sheffield.

The Story of Harold follows a man named Terry’s journey through a life of tortured and unfulfilled relationships, first with a woman whom he cannot fully love, then with an unreciprocating father of six, and another with a young boy who is already doomed to a life of insecurity and failure. Terry strives to redeem the boy — even as he prepares his own suicide.

10. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

Recommended by Professor John Stevenson.

Set in the 1930s, Rogue Male is the story of a hunter passing through an unnamed central European country controlled by a vicious dictator. In his self-appointed mission to kill the ruler, security catches up with him just before he pulls the trigger. Stevenson called it the “unputdownable story of a man on the run … Clever escapes from certain capture follow one after another, right up to the potent conclusion. The best thriller I have ever read.”

Other great books submitted to the list:

All-Negro Comics #1 by Orrin Evans

Kari by Amruta Patil

Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy

Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

The Talking Room by Marianne Hauser

Among Family by Marie NDiaye

The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

Grab a cup of tea and a fluffy blanket, then get cozy in your favorite reading nook to escape into one of these 10 little-known books recommended by CU English Faculty.

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What's in My Phone: Adam Bradley

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 06:00:00 +0000

What's in My Phone: Adam Bradley Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/01/2019 - 00:00

English professor Adam Bradley is the author of The Poetry of Pop and co-author of The New York Times bestseller One Day It’ll All Make Sense, the 2012 memoir of rapper and actor Common.

How soon after waking up do you look at your phone? Under three seconds. I’m checking whether my six-year-old’s waking me up at 5 or 5:30 a.m.

App you can’t live without: It’s a tie between Audible and the podcast apps. My brain eats words.

App you wish you had the inner strength to delete: Any social media app, starting with Facebook and working my way up.

Last person you called: Probably my wife, the law professor Anna Spain Bradley.

Duration of longest call last week: Just under three minutes, to my wife.

Location of last selfie: Took one with my two girls next to the six-foot inflatable rainbow unicorn lawn-sprinkler I bought them. Father of the Year.

Does anyone else have your passcode? I wouldn’t put it past my eight-year-old.

Most-used emoji: The thumbs-up emoji (brown-skinned version) is my new version of “K,” which was my new version of “OK,” which was my new version of “Okay,” which was my new version of actually writing people messages with substance.

First thing you’d do if you lost your phone for a day: Enjoy the silence. …Then call AT&T and get myself back up and running.

Apps

Last downloaded:

Waze (to explore the Cayman Islands)

Favorite app:

Audible

Most-used app:

Apple Podcasts

Most-used emojie:

Photo courtesy Adam Bradley

English professor Adam Bradley is the author of The Poetry of Pop and co-author of The New York Times bestseller One Day It’ll All Make Sense, the 2012 memoir of rapper and actor Common.

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The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination

Anonymous — Tue, 29 May 2018 16:43:02 +0000

The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/29/2018 - 10:43

By Nan Goodman
(Oxford University Press, 216; 2018)

Buy the Book

In Nan Goodman’s book, The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination, she traces a sense of kinship that emerged from within the larger realm of Puritan law and literature in late seventeenth-century New England. She argues that these early modern Puritans – connected to the cosmopolis in part through travel, trade, and politics – were also thinking in terms that went beyond feeling affiliated with people in remote places, or what cosmopolitan theorists call "attachment at a distance." In this way Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others, but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as ethically related to people all around the world. Such thought experiments originated and advanced through the law, specifically the law of nations, a precursor to international law and an inspiration for much of the imagination and literary expression of cosmopolitanism among the Puritans.

The Puritan Cosmopolis shows that by internalizing the legal theories that pertained to the world at large, the Puritans were able to experiment with concepts of extended obligation, re-conceptualize war, contemplate new ways of cultivating peace, and rewrite the very meaning of Puritan living. Through a detailed consideration of Puritan legal thought, Goodman provides an unexpected link between the Puritans, Jews, and Ottomans in the early modern world and reveals how the Puritan legal and literary past relates to present concerns about globalism and cosmopolitanism.

Goodman is a professor at CU Boulder in English and Jewish Studies and is also the director of the Program in Jewish Studies and the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Archive Project.

In Nan Goodman’s book, “The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination,” she traces a sense of kinship that emerged from within the larger realm of Puritan law and literature in late seventeenth-century New England.

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Video: Professor or Rock Star? Both

Anonymous — Mon, 07 May 2018 22:06:34 +0000

Video: Professor or Rock Star? Both Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/07/2018 - 16:06

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOdtqfjozeo&feature=youtu.be]

Professor or rock star? Both.

Steve Lamos, who teaches English, writing and rhetoric at CU Boulder, is also the drummer for American Football, a late-’90s rock band that Rolling Stone ranks among the “Top 10 All Time” emo bands.

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Books and Movies

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 23:01:10 +0000

Books and Movies Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/01/2018 - 16:01

Janice Podsada

When Mitchell Kaplan (Eng’76) launched Books & Books in Miami in 1982, the business was the size of a one-bedroom apartment.

Still, Kaplan, then 27, fled the tiny bookstore with more than titles — he brought in real live writers, unusual at the time. Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer was among the first.

“From the beginning we established ourselves as the store where literary events took place alongside the selling of books,” Kaplan has said.

Early on, he also set about putting Miami on the literary map, helping found the Miami Book Fair in 1984. The annual weeklong festival now hosts hundreds of authors and draws hundreds of thousands of participants.

“In the 1980s, Miami was off the radar screen,” said Oren Teicher, head of the American Booksellers Association, a trade group based in New York. “It wasn’t a place where publishers wanted to send their authors. He helped change that.”

Over the next three decades Kaplan, now 63 and originally from Miami Beach, added seven more South Florida stores. The flagship store occupies a 9,000-square-foot building with a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

His labor of love would become a landmark for bibliophiles. In 2015, Publishers Weekly named the business “Bookstore of the Year” citing its “outsized influence” on independent bookstores “and the literary culture at large.”

“You have to be able to communicate to your customers that value isn’t only measured by price,” said Kaplan. “There is value in meeting an author, being a place where ideas are shared, value in bringing writers into the schools.”

Recently he developed a publishing arm and a partnership with film producer Paula Mazur. Their first feature-length movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, with Christopher Plummer, was released in November.

It was a novel that inspired Kaplan to apply to CU Boulder. Captivated by a character in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums who writes poetry on a mountaintop, Kaplan envisioned Boulder as an “exotic land of mountains and snow,” he said. “I saw CU for the first time the day I got there.”

Professor Sidney Goldfarb’s literature courses — which included histories of the “great bookstores,” such as Shakespeare and Co. in Paris and Manhattan’s Gotham Book Mart — made a deep impression on Kaplan, not least for their role as defenders of First Amendment freedoms.

After CU, he tried law school in Washington, D.C., but found himself spending more time in bookstores than in the law library. He left after two years, returned to Miami, taught high school English, then yielded to his persistent urge: to become a bookseller.

When he opened the first Books & Books, he had a lot to learn: “I knew more about Pablo Neruda and Thomas Pynchon than I did about interest rates or bank charges,” he said.

It’s been a risk that paid: “I’ve been able to make some small contribution to Miami becoming a world-class city.”

Photo courtesy Mitchell Kaplan

When Mitchell Kaplan launched Books & Books in Miami in 1982, the business was the size of a one-bedroom apartment.

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Better than Babel

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 09:57:00 +0000

Better than Babel Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 03:57

Eric Gershon

Like millions of Americans before him and after, Samuel Boyd took high school Spanish.

Since then, he’s learned some other foreign languages, bringing his total, at last count, to 26, including dialects — and he’s got room in his head for more.

“I started to learn Sumerian but had some scheduling conflicts,” said the 38-year-old CU Boulder professor, referring to a language spoken about 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, now part of Iraq. “I’d like to come back to it.”

Nearly all Boyd’s languages are “dead” — no longer spoken, except as a scholarly exercise. Few use the Roman alphabet (the ABCs).

But they’re all key tools in his work as a professional student of the Bible, the Western world’s most famous book.

Reading the languages of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures that produced it some 2,500 years ago helps him assess subtleties lost in translation. It also allows him to decipher contemporaneous records that illuminate context and meaning.

Boyd's cover band, The Dead Sea Trolls, nodded cheekily to the scholarly life ahead of him.

Guiding this work are two endlessly ponderable questions: “What is the Bible, and what are we supposed to use it for?”

These are not questions with final answers.

But meticulous study of the literary and archaeological evidence left by biblical cultures informs current understanding of what the Bible’s authors meant to convey. This shapes how people interpret and act on those messages now.

"I'm not here to convert anybody out of or into a particular religious tradition,” Boyd said. “I’m here to help people think critically.”

Boyd first grew interested in ancient languages while working as a currency derivatives analyst at a big bank in Charlotte, N.C. It was the early 2000s and he was fresh out of college.

Inspired by debates about religious fanaticism after the Sept. 11 attacks, by his upbringing in the heavily Christian American South and by a childhood obsession with Indiana Jones, he enrolled in an online course in ancient Greek. He wanted to read the New Testament as it was first written.

Greek sucked him in.

Professor Samuel Boyd knows 26 foreign languages, including dialects. A sample:

Hebrew
Greek
Akkadian
Hittite
Syriac
Aramaic
Ge'ez
Phoenician
Ugaritic
Moabite
Classical Arabic

“I’ve got the bug,” Boyd told his bosses at the bank, where he also played guitar in a cover band called The Dead Sea Trolls, a cheeky nod to the latent interests that led to a new life.

Within 18 months he’d left finance and begun a master’s program focused on extinct languages. He added more as a PhD student.

Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic came after ancient Greek, then Ugaritic and some modern languages, German and French, which he also reads better than he speaks.

Eventually Boyd picked up Akkadian, Syriac and Classical Ethiopic (also known as Ge’ez), as well as Phoenician, Moabite and Hittite, among about a dozen others.

He even helped identify and decipher a lost Aramaic dialect inscribed on a nearly 3,000-year-old monument discovered in Turkey.

Scholars of the Bible tend to know many languages — often half a dozen or so, according to Jeffrey Stackert, one of Boyd’s graduate school professors at the University of Chicago. It’s really the only way to do the job. Stackert himself knows 12, including dialects.

But even among his peers and mentors, Boyd stands out.

Two big questions guide his work: "What is the Bible and what are we supposed to use it for?"

“This level of language competence is pretty uncommon,” said Stackert, who called Boyd “a natural” who “combines a remarkable memory with a keen interest and indefatigable drive.”

Boyd candidly noted another secret to his success: Many languages in his repertoire are related.

Phoenician, Hebrew and Moabite, for example, belong to the northwest Semitic language family and share many common features, including certain characters used to form words and convey ideas, aspects of grammar and some vocabulary. Punic and Ammonite, once spoken in North Africa and what is now Jordan, respectively, in turn resemble Moabite.

In a Western context, this is like someone knowing Italian and Spanish and adding Portuguese or French — other Romance languages.

Still, it takes a lot of study, and Boyd spent years heads-down.

It helped that “I was a single guy” during graduate school, he said.

Now married with children, Boyd emerged as an uncommon talent whose linguistic abilities make him a versatile scholar.

“He is able to address complex research questions that span significant time, geography and culture and that require considering a number of different types of evidence in ways that few scholars can,” Stackert said.

Sometimes the dictionary is wrong.

At home at night, Boyd reads Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are aloud to his children in Hebrew.

Despite his linguistic aptitude, Boyd doesn’t consider himself a hyperpolyglot — a person who speaks lots oflanguages. (Zaid Fazah of Lebanon claims to read and speak about 60.)

“Texts are my thing,” he said.

Predictably, Boyd's office shelves all but sag with dictionaries, which he consults freely — and skeptically.

“Sometimes, the dictionary might be wrong," he said.

[soundcloud width="100%" height="300" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/437866647&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true"][/soundcloud]

Illustrations by Michael Waraska

Samuel Boyd has a way with languages.

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The Poetry of Pop

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 20:13:45 +0000

The Poetry of Pop Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/28/2017 - 14:13

The Poetry of Pop (2017, Yale University Press) By Adam Bradley, professor of English

By Adam Bradley

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Extended Version: Drummer Has a PhD

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 07:00:00 +0000

Extended Version: Drummer Has a PhD Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 03/01/2017 - 00:00

Andrew Daigle

Steve Lamos, who teaches English, writing and rhetoric at CU Boulder, is also the drummer for American Football, a late-’90s rock band that Rolling Stone ranks among the “Top 10 All Time” emo bands. The group recently reunited after 15 years and released a second album, American Football (LP2).

American Football returned to the stage in October with three sold-out shows at Webster Hall in New York. Were you expecting this reception?

I sort of knew Webster Hall was a big deal, but I thought we were playing the basement. The venue said, ‘We’re going to book you upstairs and see what happens.’ Within one minute of tickets going on sale, all 1,500 were gone. Webster Hall suggested adding a Saturday show since the Friday sold out so quickly. The Saturday tickets went in 10 minutes. Then they said, “We should try Sunday.”

How was it?

I had never played anything the size of Webster Hall. People kept introducing themselves and telling us they flew in from Europe or Malaysia or Scandinavia or Australia. People were taking pictures with us and showing us their band tattoos. I’ll never forget that weekend.

Were you aware of how popular American Football has become since it originally disbanded?

I was almost completely oblivious. When murmurs of this reunion began and we started getting offers for more money than we had ever thought about, it started to sink in. It’s interesting to watch history revise itself. People did not like the first album when it came out, and reviews were lukewarm at best. Fifteen years later, though, we’re in “Top 10 All Time” lists for the “emo” genre in Spin and Rolling Stone. But at the time, nobody cared. The biggest crowd we ever drew was maybe 100 people, and they were completely bored.

What is it about American Football that has stuck with listeners?

We all had records that were 15 to 20 years old that meant a lot to us when we were kids and we tried to transform those sounds into something we liked. It’s gratifying to think that there are other people for whom our music occupies some similar niche. I don’t think you can predict what will circulate, but once something gets picked up and people start connecting with it, that’s interesting.

Do your students know that you’re part of one of the “most influential” and beloved ’90s rock bands?

Some grad students in English were teasing me about it a while ago. As cool as the whole band thing is, it’s a tiny piece of life. On campus, I’m here to do a different job entirely.

Did you always know there was more in store for American Football?

I always did feel like the band ended prematurely. That said, I never thought it would all come back together. I had to earn tenure and music was very much on the backburner. Not that this has changed. I still love doing my job, but there is a little more headspace when I’m not on campus.

**You play drums and trumpet?**

I’ve played the trumpet since I was six. My dad had this dance polka band and he would bring me on stage when I was little. It came about with American Football because there were a couple melodies that it went well with. When we do festivals, we don’t see too many other brass instruments.

Did you also start playing drums at an early stage?

I didn’t start playing drums until I was 21. I was ready for a break from the trumpet, and I wanted to be in rock bands, so the drums had an immediate attraction. From years of lessons on trumpet and violin, I at least knew how to practice.

What was it like meeting up with your college buddies to practice again?

I was in Chicago giving a keynote speech and had the opportunity to play with the guys for the first time in 15 years. After four hours of practicing, my wife called. She was eight months pregnant. She tells me, frantically: “Our daughter is coming!” After playing with the guys for the first time in forever, I rushed to O’Hare, jumped on a plane and drove to the hospital. My daughter was born an hour later.

**How did American Football (LP2) come about?**

After about 30 shows back together, we started asking, “Do we want to think about new music?” We did—and evidently Polyvinyl Records agreed. We wrote in earnest for about three months. The album was coming out in October, so it had to be done by March. We wrote a lot over long distance. I recorded my parts over Spring Break in Omaha at a studio owned by Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis.

What do you love about the new album?

I’m awfully proud of this one, especially the slow-burning tracks like “Born to Lose” and “Give Me the Gun.” Mike [Kinsella] did a nice job imagining what the characters of the first album would be thinking about 15 years later. There was no attempt to sound like the first record. All I can hope is that it will stand up and have legs like the first one has.

Were the bonus tracks on the re-released original LP really recorded with a boombox?

We would practice at this little house that I was renting. We would jam and whenever we’d stumble upon something, we’d hit record on the boombox. The “bonus tracks” on the re-release are simply the contents of old tapes we found.

What’s next for American Football?

We’ve got some weekend gigs in the spring and a few longer trips for the summer. The record company has shown a lot of faith in us. Part of the goal is to try to get new fans without making the old fans mad. As long as I can balance it with my life here at CU Boulder, I’ll keep doing it.

Condensed and edited by Andrew Daigle (PhDEngl’16).

Photo by Daniel Inskeep/Rachel Gulotta (top)

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