Partial transcript from The Library of Congress:
Before I leave America I must see you again–there is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much. With warm affection, and honourable admiration, Oscar Wilde.
The Walt Whitman Archive fleshes out the story:
On 18 January 1882 Wilde visited Walt Whitman in Camden, where the poet was then living with his brother and sister-in-law. Wilde told Whitman that his mother had purchased a copy of Leaves of Grass when it was first published, that Lady Wilde had read the poems to her son, and that later, at Oxford, he and his friends carried Leaves to read on their walks. Flattered, Whitman offered Wilde, whom he later described as “a fine large handsome youngster,” some of his sister-in-law’s homemade elderberry wine, and they conversed for two hours. Asked later by a friend how he managed to get the elderberry wine down, Wilde replied: “If it had been vinegar I would have drunk it all the same, for I have an admiration for that man which I can hardly express”
I was happy to get a trade paperback of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King this weekend (thanks Hachette!) for a few reasons. First, I detest hardback books — that didn’t stop me from picking up (and reviewing) TPK when it debuted last year — but I know I’ll prefer this paperback for rereadings. More to the point, the paperback boasts four vignettes not published with the hardback last year, which I’m sure is in no way a cynical marketing ploy cooked up by the publishers. On those scenes:
Okay, so yes, I read them. They’re short, and they don’t really add to the novel; actually, they probably take away from the Michael Pietsch’s fine editing work. Still, DFW fans will eat them up. I’ll try to reflect more later.
There’s also one of those reading group guide sections, which cracks me up. Are book clubs gonna read this book? I mean, I hope they do, but they’ll likely hate it. Here’s a question that caught my eye, mostly because I wrote a bit about §19 this summer.
I picked up Harry Crews’s novel The Knockout Artist, which I hadn’t read, after his recent death. I was not the only person to pick up Crews books: the Crews section of my favorite used bookstore, once swollen is now depleted (the omnibus and collections all snapped up).
William Gaddis’s last novel Agapē Agape was my occasion (as if I needed one) for visiting said store; I ordered it after finishing The Recognitions. I managed to bend the cover badly in the first five minutes of ownership. I started it over the weekend and then got distracted by a friend calling me to meet at a bar. I started it again last night and got about a third of the way in. Full review on the horizon.
I have no idea why I picked up Lish’s novel other than the fact that Lish is awesome; it’s a first edition paperback and the cover is awesome. Maybe that’s why. I have no idea when I’ll get around to reading it. Compulsive behaviors.
The Mutis novel, or collection of novellas, is half of the book that Dave Cianci aka Noquar reviewed on this blog a few months ago. I wanted the full version, which collects six novellas, but I’ll settle for this (it’s used; I have store credit, etc.). Anyway, Noquar’s review made me want to read it, so I’ve slated it for summer reading (May?).
From Barry Hannah’s novel Hey Jack!:
I began hollering at my wife for her shortcomings. She left the house, 11 P.M. I’d quit drinking and smoking. She brought me back a bottle of rye and a pack of Luckies, too. I hadn’t smoked for two weeks. I must have been a horrible nuisance.
I took a drink and a smoke.
Then I was normal. My lungs and my liver cried out: At last, again! The old abuse! I am a confessed major organ beater. I should turn myself in on the hotline to normalcy.
How many brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins of all degrees a little story has! And how few of the tales we listen to can lay any claim to originality! There is scarcely a story which I hear which I cannot connect with some family of myths, and whose pedigree I cannot ascertain with more or less precision.
Shakespeare drew the plots of his plays from Boccaccio or Straparola; but these Italians did not invent the tales they lent to the English dramatist. King Lear does not originate with Geofry of Monmouth, but comes from early Indian stores of fable, whence also are derived the Merchant of Venice and the pound of flesh, ay, and the very incident of the three caskets. But who would credit it, were it not proved by conclusive facts, that Johnny Sands is the inheritance of the whole Aryan family of nations, and that Peeping Tom of Coventry peeped in India and on the Tartar steppes ages before Lady Godiva was born?
If you listen to Traviata at the opera, you have set before you a tale which has lasted for centuries, and which was perhaps born in India. If you read in classic fable of Orpheus charming woods and meadows, beasts and birds, with his magic lyre, you remember to have seen the same fable related in the Kalewala of the Finnish Wainomainen, and in the Kaleopoeg of the Esthonian Kalewa. If you take up English history, and read of William the Conqueror slipping as he landed on British soil, and kissing the earth, saying he had come to greet and claim his own, you remember that the same story is told of Napoleon in Egypt, of King Olaf Harold’s son in Norway, and in classic history of Junius Brutus on his return from the oracle . . .
Herman Melville’s markings and annotations on the last page of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Birth-mark.” From Melville’s Marginalia Online.
153. A Good Book Needs Time. —Every good book tastes bitter when it first comes out, for it has the defect of newness. Moreover, it suffers damage from its living author, if he is well known and much talked about. For all the world is accustomed to confuse the author with his work. Whatever of profundity, sweetness, and brilliance the work may contain must be developed as the years go by, under the care of growing, then old, and lastly traditional reverence. Many hours must pass, many a spider must have woven its web about the book. A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Part II.
Bruno Jasieński was one of the leaders of the Polish Futurist movement, and his novel I Burn Paris looks fascinating. It’s also a beautiful looking book — publisher Twisted Spoon has done a lovely job here — an embossed hardback with no superfluous jacket, and even a nice lace bookmark (doesn’t show up in my photo). There are also illustrations by Cristian Opris.
I’m hoping to get into this this weekend, but for now, here’s publisher Twisted Spoon’s description:
I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland’s most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 inL’Humanité (for which Jasienski was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris’s water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian émigrés, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred — the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of “The Internationale” with a broadcast of popular music.
With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Parishas lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliché and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core.
This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention with recent publications such as Caviar and Ashes.
Pitchfork has reported the death of singer-songwriter Cynthia Dall. Dall was a frequent collaborator with fellow Drag City musician Bill Callahan, who sang and played on her 1996 album, which is now called Untitled, but was simply known as that record with the awesome cover and strange awesome songs when it came out: there was no attribution, although it clearly bore the mark of Callahan and fellow Drag City wunderkind Jim O’Rourke. Untitled was the strange hazy soundtrack for my last teenage years; Dall’s songs are still in my blood and brain. Her young death—she was only 41—feels surreal. Dall released Sound Restores Young Men in 2002, and was apparently working on demos for a new album at the time of her death.
From the Drag City website:
We are shocked and deeply disappointed to post this notice: Cynthia Dall passed away at her home in Sacramento last Thursday.
Cynthia was a muse that crossed over into actual-artist-dom. Her self was her original art, a spirit and image that was inspirational on first sight. The ’90s were a great time to start playing music when you didn’t really know the first thing about it other than you liked it, andCynthia was able to use her unique abilities along with her incredible energy to inspire those around her to help her make two really great albums.
It hasn’t sunken in yet that we won’t be hearing from Cindy again. Though she hadn’t released a new album in ten years, she called in regularly, sometimes to talk about her music and plans, sometimes to talk about everything BUT music and plans. She was an enormous fan of the world, and there were few topics that didn’t engage her in some way. Even outrage was conveyed with an enormous vivacity that could not be suppressed. It was this energy that lifted her up above the melancholy that infused her songs, and the devastating visions they often conveyed.
When Cynthia rang us the week before last with an update on the progress of new demos, we were glad to know it; glad to think of her getting her music together and to think of another chapter in the Dall Saga. It is stunning not merely because of the loss of that vision and that unheard record; more stunning and hurtful is to know that we will won’t be talking to her anymore. A light has gone from this world — and we hope you will join us in hoping that it has gone to place of greater peace.
Goodbye Cynthia — we’ll carry your love and joy and sorrow with us until we too are gone.
Biblioklept 