Aug 9-12, ALECC books

Academic conferences can be wonderful, and they can be not worth attending. Recently I've drawn a circle, more or less, around my home to define the furthest I'll go to attend conferences. ALECC this year fell safely inside the circle, in Kelowna BC, but at this point, I'm prepared to burn a lot of carbon to participate in this community. I'll try to post some comments within the next few days, but for now, let me just say that there's no other group of people with whom I share closer intellectual connections: the quality of papers is very high, the discussions afterward are very good, and the unstructured conversation is the very best kind of shop-talk I can imagine.

In keeping with the blog's mandate, though, I should first note simply that I picked up some seriously appealing books, viz.:

• Daniel Coleman, In Bed with the Word: Reading, Spirituality, and Cultural Politics ($19.95:)
• Gatherings, vol. VII: The En'owkin Journal of First North American Peoples (trivia prize at the banquet)
• Garry Gottfriedson, Skin Like Mine ($15.95: when he read his unpublished poem "1492" at the banquet, he got the night's only spontaneous mid-reading sustained applause, which given the quality of the other three readers is saying something!)
• volume 7 of Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment ($10: how can this be the second-last issue?!? Aargh!)
• Rhona McAdam, Digging the City: An Urban Agriculture Manifesto ($16.95: brand new just this month from Rocky Mountain Books)
• Harold Rhenisch, Caraway and Pippins (given by Harold to his audience members who promised to send him something in return; a self-published essay about, among other things, the history of apples in the Okanagan)
• Stefan Schutz, Peyote (translated by Harold Rhenisch, who so kindly gave me a copy)

More on the conference another day, I promise!