Red Door, 1994 by F. Scott Hess (b. 1955)
Detail from Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), 1546 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553)
A highlight of an unexpected trip to Los Angeles a few weeks ago was getting to meet “in real life” with some people I’ve gotten to know over the internet. I met up with Ryan Chang, who’s written a number of excellent reviews for Biblioklept, and Adam Novy, whose novel The Avian Gospels is one of the best contemporary novels of the last decade. The weirdest part about hanging out was that it wasn’t weird at all.
After lunch and coffee, Ryan and I visited Alias Books East, a small but well-stocked book shop in Atwater Village. Plenty of books on art and film, and lots of literature in translation. I asked Ryan to pick out something for me to buy, and he chose Bohumil Hrabal’s The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, a title that had grabbed his attention when we first entered the store. Here’s NYRB’s blurb for the Hrabal:
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer.” “Cutting It Short” is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Maryška, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Maryška drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. She’s a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. “The Little Town Where Time Stood Still” is told by Maryška and Francin’s son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new post–World War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life. Together, Hrabal’s rousing and outrageous yarns stand as a hilarious and heartbreaking tribute to the always imperiled sweetness of lust, love, and life.
Ryan picked up a first edition hardback of an Edward St. Aubyn novel and something else I can’t remember. The clerk also let us check out some of the signed hardbacks behind the counter, and I somehow didn’t spend sixty bucks on a copy of Ray with Barry Hannah’s signature.
I spent most of the next day wandering around downtown Los Angeles. Everyone had told me to check out The Last Bookstore, and I wasn’t disappointed. I spent over an hour browsing the huge space, wishing I had more time to linger, especially in the upstairs labyrinth and the wonderful little annex of art books and monographs.
I ended up buying the first book I handled at The Lost Bookstore, RE/Search’s 1990 oversized and illustrated edition of J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. This is one of the first Ballard books I read, actually—a good friend of mine collected RE/Search titles throughout the nineties and let me borrow them. (I always returned them).
Opener:
And a random two-pager:
I also picked up another Ballard RE/Search title, a fat little book I’d never seen before named Quotes. Perfect airport reading. (And of course, being Ballard, there’s a whole section on airports). Random page:
I didn’t make it to the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood, but, hey, save something for next time, right?
Detail from Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), 1546 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553)
Idyllic Childhood, 2009 by Haley Hasler
At the Hairdressers, by Gely Korzhev (1925-2012)
tooThe Nobel laureate William Faulkner died in the hot July preceding the September riots. It was good he didn’t have to watch. He was a racial moderate, read nigger lover in these parts then, and left much of his estate to the United Negro College Fund. I mention him only to place this story on the map and call to memory, now I’m an old man, that not all of us were rot. I did understand much of Faulkner’s greatest books. Personally I disliked him as a snob who with no effort at all could have been kinder to the neighbors in the village we were then. He was passing strange and spiteful to many. You had to reckon with some conceit as birthright, which made him contemptuous of the very humble folk he was celebrated for taking to his heart on the page. You will often see pure words and a great wash of self-atonement, no people necessary to them.
From one of Barry Hannah’s last short stories, “Lastword, Deputy James.” Published posthumously in the collection Long, Last, Happy, the story (often evocative of Cormac McCarthy, at least to me), along with the others in the last section of the collection, reads like part of a perhaps-unfinished novel, one that answers seriously to Southern history in a way that Hannah’s earlier work obliquely evades.
William Faulkner died 6 July 1962. He dropped out of the University of Mississippi–Ole Miss—as a young man, just like my grandfather.
The Ole Miss riot of 1962, sometimes styled “the Battle of Oxford,” began the night of 30 September 1962. The riots–a battle really—were the result of racist segregationists’ opposition to the James Meredith’s enrollment in the university. Meredith, a black man, served in the U.S. Air Force from 1951-1960. He graduated from Ole Miss on 18 August 1963, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science.
Detail from Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), 1546 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553)
The Apartment, 1943 by Jacob Lawrence (1938-2000)
The Virgin of the Annunciation and the Archangel Gabriel, 1465 by Andrea della Robbia (1435-1525)
Virgin Adoring the Christ Child with St. John the Baptist and Two Angels, c. 1500-1520 by Tomasso (c. 1500-1550)
Satan, c. 1836 by Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807-1852)
The Bellelli Sisters (detail), 1865-1866 by Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
The Dragon Slayer, 1913 by Franz von Stuck (1863-1913)
The Page Piccolo of the Hotel Stadt Gotha, Dresden (detail), 1918 by Thomas Baumgartner (1892 – 1962)
Two Girls Reading, c. 1890-1891 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
The Disillusioned One, 1892 by Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918)
Portrait of a Woman Holding a Pencil and a Drawing Book, c. 1808 by Robert-Jacques Lefevre (1755-1830)
Satan and Death with Sin Intervening, 1799-1800 by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825)
The 10th of August, 1792 (details), c. 1795-1799 by Baron François-Pascal-Simon Gérard (1770-1837)
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The Death of Lucretia, c. 1730 by Ludovico Mazzanti (1686-1775)
Wolfgang Hilbig’s novella Old Rendering Plant (translated from German by Isabel Fargo Cole) is new from Two Lines Press. It looks pretty cool—a blurb from the NYT comparing him to Sebald and that quote on the cover from Krasznahorkai don’t hurt either. Here’s TLP’s blurb:
What falsehoods do we believe as children? And what happens when we realize they are lies—possibly heinous ones? In Old Rendering Plant Wolfgang Hilbig turns his febrile, hypnotic prose to the intersection of identity, language, and history’s darkest chapters, immersing readers in the odors and oozings of a butchery that has for years dumped biological waste into a river. It starts when a young boy becomes obsessed with an empty and decayed coal plant, coming to believe that it is tied to mysterious disappearances throughout the countryside. But as a young man, with the building now turned into an abattoir processing dead animals, he revisits this place and his memories of it, realizing just how much he has missed. Plumbing memory’s mysteries while evoking historic horrors, Hilbig gives us a gothic testament for the silenced and the speechless. With a tone worthy of Poe and a syntax descended from Joyce, this suggestive, menacing tale refracts the lost innocence of youth through the heavy burdens of maturity.
Suggestive and menacing? Poe and Joyce? This one’s next on my list. I was hoping to dig into it over the July 4th weekend(ish), but I was a bit crosseyed from Bloody Marys and other good spirits, and got almost no reading done for five days in a row.
I loved the last novella I read from Two Lines, by the way—João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner.
Detail from Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), 1546 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553)
Head Games, 2016 by Rose Freymuth-Frazier (b. 1977)
Detail from Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), 1546 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553)
Detail from Der Jungbrunnen (The Fountain of Youth), 1546 by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553)
Untitled (from The Democratic Forest) by William Eggleston (b. 1938)
For years after, there were tales told in Colorado of the amazing, world-reversing night of Fourth of July Eve 1899. Next day’d be full of rodeos, marching bands, and dynamite explosions—but that night there was man-made lightning, horses gone crazy for miles out into the prairie, electricity flooding up through the iron of their shoes, shoes that when they finally came off and got saved to use for cowboy quoits, including important picnic tourneys from Fruita to Cheyenne Wells, why they would fly directly and stick on to the spike in the ground, or to anything else nearby made of iron or steel, that’s when they weren’t collecting souvenirs on their way through the air—gunmen’s guns came right up out of their holsters and buck knives out from under pants legs, keys to traveling ladies’ hotel rooms and office safes, miners’ tags, fencenails, hairpins, all seeking the magnetic memory of that long-ago visit. Veterans of the Rebellion fixing to march in parades were unable to get to sleep, metallic elements had so got to humming through their bloodmaps. Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers’ offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed. .
A passage from Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day.
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