Still recovering from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Haven’t felt so zapped by a book in a long time. Amazing. Try to write something about it on here soon. Million thanks again to BLCKDGRD for sending it my way.
Author: Biblioklept
Status Anxiety III — Gan Chin Lee
Two photographs of William Burroughs by Andy Warhol
Insomnia — Kojiro Ankan Takakuwa
Three Books
Victor Halfwit: A Winter’s Tale by Thomas Bernhard. English translation by Martin Chalmers. Illustration and design by Sunandini Banerjee. First edition oversized hardback from Seagull Books. On thick, heavy paper, Banerjee’s rich full-color digital collages illustrate what is essentially a microfiction by Thomas Bernhard. I bought this a few years ago at Faulkner House, a tiny bookstore in New Orleans.
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner. 1973 Vintage mass-market paperback edition. Cover photo by Robert Wenkham; no designer credited. My favorite Faulkner, although I’ve not read them all. I bought this for grad school, which explains the cheap used mass-market edition, but I love the cover. 
Fractured Karma by Tom Clark. First edition trade paperback from Black Sparrow Press. Design by Barbara Martin. The cover painting, Waiting Room for the Beyond, is by John Register. This is the first Tom Clark book I read. Amazing.
Narcissus — Jamie Vasta
Milton When a Boy Instructed by His Mother — Henry Fuseli
Sounds of Disillusionment
The Echo Chamber — Leonor Fini
The novel is the first large-scale example of “mass art”
As practical men, the new middle classes found literature frivolous; as pious ones, they found it idolatrous; as class-conscious citizens, they felt it too committed to court and salon. Yet they could not live without it; a lust for images of their own lives, projections of their own dreams and nightmares moved them obscurely. They demanded a form that would be really their own, a mass-produced commodity to be bought or rented in the marketplace like other goods, a thick and substantial item to be placed on the table with other evidence of their wealth and taste. The novel is the first large-scale example of “mass art.” It is quite different from “folk art,” with its handmade appearance and its air of knowing its place, for folk art is rooted in the country and in agriculture; it changes slowly and almost imperceptibly, its chief appeal being its resemblance to what has come before. “Mass art,” on the other hand, is urban art, changing with the rapid changes of fashion, and seeming as much the product of new advances and technique as in any profound shift in the imagination. Like the wood-block engravings of 18th-century Japan, or the movies later on, or jazz on records, its triumphs depend chiefly on developments in manufacturing, packaging, and distribution. Like other mass-produced products, it tends to drive out of existence craft objects, which cannot survive the class structures which demand them and the class-consciousness which defines their consumers. Just as the spectacular rise of the novel is inconceivable without the perfection of printing, its final victory is inconceivable without the invention of the circulating library; mass-produced, it is also mass-circulated like any commodity in an expanding mercantile economy.
From Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).
The Eye of Lorca — Martin Springett
Le Long du Chemin — Leonor Fini
Under the Unminding Sky — Gregory Thielker
He began to wonder about the noise that colors make (Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red)
It was not the fear of ridicule,
to which everyday life as a winged red person had accommodated Geryon early in life,
but this blank desertion of his own mind
that threw him into despair. Perhaps he was mad. In the seventh grade he had done
a science project on this worry.
It was the year that he began to wonder about the noise that colors make. Roses came
roaring across the garden at him.
He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of stars crashing against
the window screen. Most
of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear
the cries of the roses
being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully,
like horses in war.No, they shook their heads.
Why is grass called blades? he asked them. Isn’t it because of the clicking?
They stared at him. You should be
interviewing roses, not people, said the science teacher. Geryon liked this idea.
The last page of his project
was a photograph of his mother’s rosebush under the kitchen window.
Four of the roses were on fire.
They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets
and howling colossal intimacies
from the back of their fused throats. Didn’t your mother mind—
From Anne Carson’s novel-poem Autobiography of Red.
The Magic Flower Game — Dorothea Tanning
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”
176 part two. Jennie Richee waiting for the rain to stop… — Henry Darger
Biblioklept 