Tag: titles

Small Stacks

/ dmueller

A couple of reading lists, nine titles ordered and delivered to Halle Library on behalf of the First-year Writing Program, and then another pile, an odd-stack, maybe I’ll get to these this summer and maybe I won’t, read bottom to top and top to bottom, shuffled and reshuffled depending on where I leave a copy, depending on what time I have, depending on mood and disposition and weather and gut bacteria, depending on nothing much at all sometimes.

For Halle Library, nine titles.

I am reminded upon posting just the one photo (above) that reading habits run a fickle, snaking course–meandering and irregular, never especially disciplined-seeming except perhaps in their continuing, on-going. Anti-library, nomad-habit, ambivalence, juxtaposition, re-reading, crumb trails, low on fucks or high, intention and purpose or their lacunae, and then add to it finishing up with writing one’s own books, with others or solo, mid-careering, wondering only but so effortfully what’s next and why would this be next but not that. Not the most strenuous May-June ever, litotes.

The Little Mushroom the Englightened Yogi Secretly Stayed With, Untroubled

Implicitly (until now) there is some kind of faint jostling between these stacks, different microlibraries, hints of interest and curiosity washed back by life and distraction, laziness and Netflix, accidental and well-intentioned anti-library, I meant to read you. I really did. I was going to. I was going to read everything.

There’s much missing here, too, another gift, Murakami’s The Strange Library, a couple of books from Ypsilanti Public Library due last night by 11:59 p.m. whose deadline I beat by an hour to renew–a miracle–even though they’re all read, finished, complete, ready for the return slot. Read with greater urgency the books that go back, temporary visitors, ones who would if they could but who cannot stay.

CCCC Vendor Booklists

/ dmueller

It’s only a partial list–titles from Pittsburgh, Southern Illinois, and Parlor–collected into a PDF after gathering them at the most recent CCCC book exhibit. Got me thinking about how it would be nice to have such lists compiled and aggregable, year after year, a kind of time series list amenable to isolating years or small clusters of years just for noticing what was circulating at the time. I’d picked them up in the first place because we have a tiny sliver of funding for supplying rhetoric and composition/writing studies focused books to Halle Library on campus, but when I mentioned this to a colleague, she asked for the complied PDF, too, because it carries over readily to placing more direct requests to libraries for end-of-budget-year acquisitions.

2016 CCCC Vendor Booklists by DerekMueller

Twenty-One is Aces

/ dmueller

Remember Richard Leahy’s "Twenty
Titles for the Writer"? A classic. Need a snappy title, revisit Leahy,
and you’ll have twenty to choose from, nineteen more than you needed.

I didn’t assign Leahy’s piece this semester (never have assigned it,
if you want to know the truth), but I did do something different with titles for
this first essay in 195. I asked students to use
googlism.com to come up with something.
And, while there remain a few of the usual platitudes (thankfully, nothing
innovatively spun from Prince Hamlet’s existential crisis), there are some that
kick up sparks, pique my interest, and provide that extra little nudge to read
on. Among them:

The Internet Is Not Printed On Paper
Urban Dictionary Is My Girlfriend
Learning Is Now At WWW
Answers Is On Answer Page
Literacy Is Fundamental Please Sign My Guestbook
Literacy Is Not What You Thought It Is

And now, for the rest of this rainy weekend: reading, commenting, grading.
Well, and so that I don’t become too one-track, a veggie lasagna, Is.’s first
swim lessons, and re-playing Be Kind Rewind so I can properly continue
Watson preparations for next month.