Finds

Now that I'm on a home IV antibiotic regiment, I'm tethered to a bag of drugs every six hours, every day, for two weeks. It's a strict regiment that has me finishing my last dose at 1 a.m. and starting my next one up as the sun rises around 6 a.m. As it is, I'm not sleeping much, but I am feeling a lot better.

Other than a few hours here and there, I'm also not getting out of my apartment much, but today, I was determined to do something other than take care of myself, so I headed over to Bookman's. For those of you not familiar with the Tucson scene, Bookman's is an amazing chain of used-book stores, and for a guy who grew up in Jersey frequenting garage sales and flea markets on sundays with his grandparents, it's a place that reminds one of the pleasures of persistent browsing. I came across some real finds today--

Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography by David S. Reynolds (a like new copy of this finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award back in '95)

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann (the best and most definitive biography on Joyce ever written, or so I hear--I haven't yet had the chance to read it. Finally, my own copy...)

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (a new hard-cover edition for only $10!)

A sweet-smelling copy of a ragged pocket edition of French Symbolist poetry for $2.

Also in the mail today I received my copies of Paul Guest's first book, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, and his new chapbook, Exit Interview, from New Michigan Press. I love receiving books in the mail, and, in fact, I'm still waiting on a new copy of Finnegans Wake to replace my worn, coverless Penguin edition. I'll have to transfer underlining and marginalia to the new edition, which is annoying, but, then again, I won't have to worry anymore about losing pages or holding the whole thing together with a rubber-band.

Ah, life's little trade-offs.