“In the Dumps,” originally published in The New Yorker, is collected in Spiegelman’s latest MetaMaus.
(Via/about).
It is to be observed that the chief seat of Lycanthropy was Arcadia, and it has been very plausibly suggested that the cause might he traced to the following circumstance:–The natives were a pastoral people, and would consequently suffer very severely from the attacks and depredations of wolves. They would naturally institute a sacrifice to obtain deliverance from this pest, and security for their flocks. This sacrifice consisted in the offering of a child, and it was instituted by Lycaon. From the circumstance of the sacrifice being human, and from the peculiarity of the name of its originator, rose the myth.
From Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves (1865)
The good people at Contra Mundum Press are putting out the first English language translation of Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca’s Self-Shadowing Prey. Mary Ann Caws translates. Here’s the first poem in the book:
at the edge of a forest
whose trees are slender ideas
and each leaf a thought at bay
the vegetal reveals to us
the damned depths of an animal sect
or more precisely
an old insect anguish
waking up as man
the only way
the only basic weapon
to animate a mental state
that I hurry to write mantil
like a mantis
if only to mark
with a dry warning laugh
the devouring word
Entity and antithesis of the bush
a sort of wild and organic brush
grows in the head of that man
ravaged
by the heresy of parks and greenhouses
like the orgasm of a key
a lovely door
So the legendary passivity
the famous and ample passivity of plants
changes here to idle hate
to mad rage
to sex brawl and dare
luring by sap blood lava . . .
as rapid as the passage of woman
to beast
she empties us of a foul ancestral
wound
which in a spurt relieves us
of these fixed plaints
and these false death rattles plumbing us
our calm gestures of the interred
Now only terror
is still able to insert
in the tropism of body and of guilty
spirit
this prism as doubled echo
where brains and senses capture
the violent innocence
of a flora and a fauna
whose marriage is a long seizure
and a rape as slow as gold
in the implacable lead
And it’s around the mental equator
in the space delimited by the tropics
of a head
at the angle of the eye and what surrounds it
that the myth of a kind of utopian
jungle surges into the world
As virgin as the unknowable
or the other “face” of the moon
and never in the reach of a gun
or an axe
its prey is the snow
sand ball hip if not the trap
that the diffuse breath of a dream
lights up
For tangled
soldered to massive corkscrew keys
the vines
the branches stoves and rituals
fuse
around the forms placed
as if by miracle
at the crossroads of dryads
of druids and of man
So many points to aim at
all these yes and nos that
outside outside of time
of space and weight
select a sort of coupled oasis
and hamlet
to descend in these gods
from before the ages
the gods-place-beast-island-ash-fire
come forth as from the coupling of bird
and branch
and those exiled from the center
and from the shade of a golden foliage
will adore one day
between the walls of their somber cities
From Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin by H.L. Stephens, 1865.
Book shelves series #19, nineteenth Sunday of 2012.
When I started this project, this shelf was all Tolkien and Joyce; now it’s mostly Gaddis and Joyce.
I have dupes of most of the Joyce books here; there’s also Joyce criticism/guides on the shelf.
Another angle. Glare is horrible. iPhone is not a good camera; lots of glare; shelf is much taller than me, etc.:
Here’s a tight shot of the Brownie Six-16 that serves as bookend:
Something from Finnegans Wake :
If technology in general is at once a form both of self-extension and of amputation, then the branch of it that concerns itself with information and its relay—communication technology—is a true field-hospital operating -theater floor of hacked-off limbs, of bereaved bodies. A quick glance at the history of almost any comm.tech device will illustrate this perfectly.
Take the telephone: Alexander Bell, its inventor, grew up in the shadow of his father who ran a school for deaf-mutes and was continually inventing machines to substitute their powers of hearing and speaking. As a student, Alexander stole an ear from a morgue so that he could try to reproduce its inner workings mechanically; a few years later he brought home another defunct ear and, attached to it, the woman he’d marry, deaf like his mother. After his first brother died when his lungs gave out on him, he made a pact with the remaining one that if a second of them should die, the survivor would invent a device capable of receiving messages from the afterlife, should such a thing turn out to exist. The second brother did die, and Bell invented the telephone. He would probably have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic vis-a-vis the question of existence after death—but only because his brother never called. The desire for the call was there, wired into the very apparatus, haunting it.
From Tom McCarthy’s forthcoming essay “Transmission and the Individual Remix.”
Biblioklept 