Fragment (Monkey, Pufferfish, and Peaches), 2019
Fragment (Horse with Two Swans), 2019
Fragment (Lion and Humpback Whale), 2019
Author: Biblioklept
Blog about some books acquired, 8 Nov. 2019
I took a shoebox of old books to my favorite used bookstore this afternoon and came back with three books. I picked up a Vintage Contemporaries edition of Frederick Exley’s novel A Fan’s Notes on something of a whim. Can’t remember what I was looking for when I saw it, but I saw it and grabbed it.
I was shuffling around in the B’s, looking for a copy of Anne Boyer’s The Undying but I did not find it, but I saw Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which was a big hit a few years ago, which means I sort of ignored it, but I saw it today, a few copies, and grabbed one, after reading “Taken out of Context” at Granta,” but not really in that order—I mean, I’d read that piece earlier this year, my mental ears pricked up, and etc.
I also couldn’t resist another copy of Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. I mean, fuck me, I’m a fucking idiot, I bought it for the cover. Or really, I bought it for the cover and for the handfeel—I mean it felt good as a copy to read, strange short fat like me. Very readable. So maybe I should read it again.
I gave away my ugly movie tie-in cover a few years ago and replaced it with this number, which isn’t so bad:
—but this midcentury edition isn’t very readable. I mean, I haven’t ever wanted to thumb through it. Great book though (hard to read, a bit repulsive, thoroughly depressing). Anyway. Peace to you this Friday.
Butcher Lesson — Xiao Guo Hui
Butcher Lesson, 2015 by Xiao Guo Hui (b. 1969)
Body bloopers became part of the act, and life got harder | Robert Coover
I am not now who or what I was when I wrote this. I change as you read. I am changing now. I have had a strange and difficult life. Am having.
Like you, I was only an actor with, in my case, a bit part in a family comedy. That is to say, the others in the family were mostly comical, but I wasn’t. Take my mother-in-law, I’d say, and I’d be answered by a sullen silence. No, please, take her. Nothing. I did all I could. I sat on chairs that weren’t there, dropped my pants, slipped on banana peels, feigned astonishment at my own punchlines, clowned in front of mirrors, gave myself neck cramps from double takes, took humiliating pratfall after pratfall, got hit by ice water, custard pies, avalanches, trains and the flung contents of chamber pots. Only a restless stirring in response. The dumb little freckle-faced kid in the family got more laughs just by saying Yikes! and rolling his eyes. Finally, the producers decided to implant a morpher to see if something funny would happen. Something did. They turned it on, and couldn’t or wouldn’t turn it off.
At the first change, an off-the-shelf test transformation into a fat dwarf, I accepted it calmly as an everyday part of life for an actor. While I was terrified by the prospect of losing my familiar self, I also longed for success. But it was shockingly excruciating. They didn’t tell me! Everything inside seemed to be splintering and breaking. I screamed. You’ll get used to it, the producers said, and continued the morph until I was two feet shorter and three hundred pounds heavier. A little ball on flat feet. They were still making me new costumes then, and I was outfitted in a black suit and top hat like a banker. If I was tipped over, I rolled, but the hat stayed on. If I rolled onto my head, the hat folded up, then sprang open again. Not much reaction to the banker, but some laughter when I screamed.
More screams, more laughter followed as I was warped into a circus clown, then a cross-eyed pipsqueak, the world’s tallest man, a child tap dancer, a mustachioed muscle man. Every change hurt more than the one before. I morphed, but my clothes didn’t, so I kept the wardrobe people working overtime. Eventually, as everything speeded up, it was too much for them, and I had to go through the changes without costumes. That got a few laughs and sarcastic whistles, especially when the morpher accidentally switched the dancing boy’s peewee with the muscle man’s tallywhacker. Yikes! I said. Yikes! And brought the house down both times. Body bloopers became part of the act, and life got harder.
Read the second half of Robert Coover’s very short story “M*rphed” at Granta.
Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove — Christian Schad
Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove, 1929 by Christian Schad (1894-1982)
Fantastic Beasts — Sanam Khatibi
Fantastic Beasts, 2019 by Sanam Khatibi (b. 1979)
Judith Slaying Holofernes — Mitchell Villa
Judith Slaying Holofernes, 2018 by Mitchell Villa
Catfish Envy — Masami Teraoka
Catfish Envy, 1993 by Masami Teraoka (b. 1936)
Myth America: Beginning — Mu Pan
Three Books
Don Quixote by Kathy Acker. Grove Press trade paperback, 1986. Cover design by Neil Stuart. Cover illustration by Catherine Denvir.
A messy punkpostmodern cartoon, a big long jazz howl at the moon.
The Egghead Republic by Arno Schmidt; English translation by Michael Horowitz. Marion Boyars trade paperback, 1982. Cover design by Imre Reiner, who likely drew the illustration (although he is not explicitly credited).
I found the first 50 pages utterly exhausting, and there were 100 more. I tried. The cover designer Imre Reiner is most famous for his font designs, but he also illustrated many many books, including a 1941 edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz; English translation by Celina Wieniewska. Cover design by Neil Stuart. Cover illustration by Bruno Schultz. (The novel includes thirty black and white illustrations by Schultz.)
A gross, surreal, dispiriting nightmare. I recall “enjoying” it.
Two Plants — Lucian Freud
Two Plants, 1980 by Lucian Freud (1922-2011)
Jiří Kolář’s A User’s Manual (Book acquired, some time in late October)
I’ve been slowly enjoying the poems and collages that comprise Jiří Kolář’s collection A User’s Manual (in English translation by Ryan Scott). There are 52 poems and collages here. Each poem is a kind of surrealist recipe, a set of commands that I’ve been trying to follow (in my imagination, I mean).
The book itself is beautiful—hardback with full color and black and white illustrations, it fits perfectly with the aesthetic that its publisher Twisted Spoon has been developing for ages now.
Here’s Twisted Spoon’s blurb:
Written in the 1950s and ’60s, the “action poems” comprising a A User’s Manual were published in their complete form in 1969 when they were paired with the 52 collages of Weekly 1967, the first of Kolář’s celebrated series in which he commented visually on a major event for each week of
the year. Taking the form of directives, largely absurd, the poems mock communist society’s officialese while offering readers an opportunity to create their own poetics by performing the given directions. The collages on the facing pages to the poems are composed of layered documents, image cutouts, newspaper clippings, announcements, letter fragments, reports, or decontextualized words, oftentimes forming concrete patterns or the outlines of figures, to create a sort of “evidential” report on the year. Text and image taken together, the volume displays Kolář’s enduring interest in extracting poetry from the mundane to demolish the barrier separating art from reality, or even to elevate reality itself through this dual poetics to the level of art. What art historian Arsén Pohribný wrote about Weekly 1968 equally applies to Weekly 1967: it “shocks with its abrupt stylistic twists” and is “a Babylonian, hybrid parable of multi-reality.” The volume also includes the complete Czech text as an appendix.
“Ode to Dirt” — Sharon Olds
“Ode to Dirt”
by
Sharon Olds
Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters—the plants
and animals and human animals.
It’s as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine. Subtle, various,
sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain,
you’re our democracy. When I understood
I had never honored you as a living
equal, I was ashamed of myself,
as if I had not recognized
a character who looked so different from me,
but now I can see us all, made of the
same basic materials—
cousins of that first exploding from nothing—
in our intricate equation together. O dirt,
help us find ways to serve your life,
you who have brought us forth, and fed us,
and who at the end will take us in
and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit.
47 still frames from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
From Blade Runner, 1982. Directed by Ridley Scott with cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth. Via Screen Musings.
Blade Runner film poster by Kilian Eng
Deckard Reading (Blade Runner)
13 still frames from The Wolf Man
From The Wolf Man, 1941. Directed by George Waggner with cinematography by Joseph A. Valentine. Via Film Grab.
Biblioklept 