Sonic Youth live in Düsseldorf, Germany in April of 1996. As my buddy Nick points out in the email he sent me with this link: “ridiculously good quality and a killer setlist.”
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Crash by J.G. Ballard. 1994 trade paperback by Noonday (FS&G). Cover design by Michael Ian Kaye and Melissa Hayden.
I had a redneckish college roommate who was way into cars, so I encouraged him to watch Cronenberg’s adaptation of Crash with me, which he did. He was a nice guy. He watched all of it with me and our other roommate. The rest of the year he would joke, “Hey, let’s go crash this car and have sex!”
Marketa Lazarova by Vladislav Vančura. (First) English translation by Carleton Bulkin. First edition hardback by Twisted Spoon Press, 2016. Cover by Dan Mayer. A strange and often violent tale of multiple kidnappings and medieval intrigues, Marketa Lazarova reminds me of Le Morte D’Arthur, Nanni Balestrini’s Sandokan (both in its evocations of brutality and in its marvelous poetic prose), Aleksei German’s film Hard to Be a God, Bergman’s film The Virgin Spring, Bolaño’s sweetly ironic narrators, and, uh, Game of Thrones.
Masquerade by Kit Wiliams. Eighth edition hardback from Shocken, 1981. While no designer is credited, the cover is obviously one of Williams’s lovely paintings. A puzzle book, a treasure hunt.
Evidently, in a world where philological education has almost completely disappeared, where critics are no longer attentive to style, the decision not to be present as an author generates ill will and this type of fantasy. The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author is supposed to be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, the true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget that every individual work has its own story. Only the label of the name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to take for granted that the author of Dubliners is the same person who wrote Ulysses andFinnegans Wake. The cultural education of any high school student should include the idea that a writer adapts depending on what he or she needs to express. Instead, most people think anyone literate can write a story. They don’t understand that a writer works hard to be flexible, to face many different trials, and without ever knowing what the outcome will be.
Biblioklept 