Paperback Igloo

Last semester, I had given up my search for a good used bookstore. The best I could find was Eagle Eye, which was decent, but didn't have enough selections or a very open trade-in policy. It was fun to go to sometimes, but not so compelling that I walked out with an armful of books.

Last week, I heard news of renewed hope from a gaming friend, Yunus. It was The Book Nook, nestled closely next to a Papa Johns pizza surrounded by an intersection and apartment complexes, an island in orange construction tape. I mentioned it to Leslie, but we didn't make it before she left.

Today, needing to get out for a while, I ran a few errands, stopped at a few stores, and then went there. I was afraid, even though Yunus would know what he was talking about. Initially I walked in and looked around. The inside front of the store looked more like a comic book shop that happened to sell old VHSes, with a few books in the back. I walked through the old movies, a little dumbfounded and disappointed, even though the titles themselves were pretty hard to find. Then I rounded the corner and looked at the DVDs they had. I picked through them a bit. Then I rounded the corner of that wall.

There were the books. Paperback and hardback bundles of joy, all crammed tightly in very basic wooden bookshelves, organized by genre and alphabetically, as high as I could reach, across several rows in a space that was much larger than it initially appeared. I may've danced. They had lots of science fiction, including two copies of an unofficial guide to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings written in 1969, several copies of books I'd been keeping an eye out for, books with interesting covers, old editions of books, and many, many more books I had never heard of.

I'd resolved myself against buying any fiction, since I'd been planning out my reading. Like McKay's, though, I couldn't resist getting a couple of morsels. They had a really good translation of Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, as well as one for Andreas Capellanus's The Art of Courtly Love, both very important medieval works. Then I got a book of poetry.

And finally, a poorly conceived attempt at a found poem, from a quote in this article. Found poetry is interesting because when it's good, it's good by a combination of sheer accident and artful arrangement. Mostly, it's terrible and should scarce be called poetry. Nonetheless, it's a game to see if anything can come out of it at all. I just did this because I wanted to see if I could make anything out of a random article.

It's a pretty amazing
experience
to witness.

People who don't live here
could never understand.
We live in an open country
where trees can burn up quickly,
and so people have to make
very quick decisions.

Fire is part of our lives,
part of what we do.

But it is still
extremely
frightful.

For some found poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, look here. It's amusing, anyway.