Author: Biblioklept

Book Acquired, 3.26.2012 (The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection)

BibliokleptLeave a comment

20120328-204340.jpg

I’ve never read any of Alexander McCall Smith’s No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books, or any of his books, but I like the cover of this new one, which is called The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection. I was photographing it clumsily with my old iPhone when my daughter decided to get in the pics and help me out. So, thanks honey.

Jacket copy from publisher Random House:

Precious Ramotswe is haunted by a repeated dream: a vision of a tall, strange man who waits for her beneath an acacia tree. Odd as this is, she’s far too busy to worry about it. The best apprentice at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors is in trouble with the law and stuck with the worst lawyer in Gaborone. Grace Makutsi and Phuti Radiphuti are building the house of their dreams, but their builder is not completely on the up and up. And, most shockingly, Mma Potokwane, defender of Botswana’s weak and downtrodden, has been dismissed from her post as matron at the orphan farm. Can the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency help restore the beloved matron to her rightful position?

As wealthy and powerful influences at the orphan farm become allied against their friend, help arrives from an unexpected visitor: the tall stranger from Mma Ramotswe’s dreams, who turns out to be none other than the estimable Clovis Andersen, author of the No. 1 Ladies’ prized manual, The Principles of Private Detection.Together, Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi, and their teacher-turned-colleague help right this injustice and in the process discover something new about being a good detective.

The Fox Hunt — Winslow Homer

Biblioklept1 Comment

“Review of Winslow Homer Show at LA County Art Museum” — Steve Martin

BibliokleptLeave a comment

20120328-164325.jpg(I read my parents’ copy of Cruel Shoes at least a dozen times. At least. Let’s say it was formative stuff).

“For the Dead” — Adrienne Rich

Biblioklept7 Comments

RIP Adrienne Rich. “For the Dead”:

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

Against the Disparagers of Brevity — Nietzsche

Biblioklept2 Comments

127. Against the Disparagers of Brevity. —A brief dictum may be the fruit and harvest of long reflection. The reader, however, who is a novice in this field and has never considered the case in point, sees something embryonic in all brief dicta, not without a reproachful hint to the author, requesting him not to serve up such raw and ill-prepared food.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Part II.

Plum Scene (Mystery Train)

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Beata Ludovico — Eric Fischl

Biblioklept3 Comments

“Dangerous Books” — Nietzsche

Biblioklept3 Comments

From Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Part II:

58. Dangerous Books. —A man says: “Judging from my own case, I find that this book is harmful.” Let him but wait, and perhaps one day he will confess that the book did him a great service by thrusting forward and bringing to light the hidden disease of his soul.—Altered opinions alter not at all (or very little) the character of a man: but they illuminate individual facets of his personality, which hitherto, in another constellation of opinions, had remained dark and unrecognisable.

“Love” — Nancy Adams/Robin Hood

Biblioklept2 Comments

“Enjoyment and Non-enjoyment of Poisons”

Biblioklept1 Comment

41. Enjoyment and Non-enjoyment of Poisons. —The only decisive argument that has always deterred men from drinking a poison is not that it is deadly, but that it has an unpleasant taste

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, Part II.

Portrait of William Gaddis — Julian Schnabel

Biblioklept2 Comments
Bill Gaddis by Julian Schnabel, oil, plates and bondo on wood (1987)

William Gaddis Fiction-to-Music Entelechy Transducer — Gregg Williard

Biblioklept2 Comments

“Gaddis Fiction-to-Music Entelechy Transducer” by Gregg Williard (More graphs/via).

“Up There in Orbit” (Permanent Vacation)

Biblioklept1 Comment

Book Shelves #13, 3.25.2012

Biblioklept7 Comments

20120325-104552.jpg

Book shelves series #13, thirteenth Sunday of 2012: Four by the late great Russell Hoban. A few Philip K. Dick volumes, although it’s worth pointing out that most of the good stuff I’ve owned by him has been loaned out and never returned and/or exists in ratty coverless mass market editions. PK Dick transitions to William Burroughs to JG Ballard (another writer who I used to own other books by before they were dispersed . . .). Martin Bax’s The Hospital Ship is a thoroughly obscure volume in a Ballardian/Burroughsian vein; it deserves a reprint. Gardner, Brodkey, Gass, Kosinski. I’ve owned Raymond Carver’s Cathedral since high school, or maybe freshman year of college. It’s all the Carver that any library needs. Lish comma Gordon. Two by Malcolm Lowry. Two by Barry Hannah. Four from Sam Lipsyte.

The Carver and Kosinski volumes are part of the 1980s Vintage Contemporaries line that all feature awful, hyper-literal covers. I have about a dozen such volumes and I’m planning a piece on them in the future. Observe:

20120325-104614.jpg

St. Jerome in the Wilderness — Albrecht Dürer

Biblioklept3 Comments

Paul Robeson Talks About Othello

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Barry Hannah’s Hey Jack! (Book Acquired, 3.23.2012; Or, Gee, Isn’t It Kinda Sad That This Ex-Library Book Was Checked Out Only Twice in 24 Years?)

Biblioklept1 Comment

20120324-143113.jpg

I bought Barry Hannah’s seventh book Hey Jack! over the internet after my favorite local bookstore told me it would be difficult or expensive for them to order. I bought a first edition hardback brokered by Amazon. It was an ex-library copy. It looks like no one ever read it, and it seems to have been checked out only twice in twenty-four years. A sad business.

I put some wear and tear on it today, reading it outside on my porch during a thunderstorm, using it as a beer coaster at one point, and then taking it into a salted bath where it got damp and curly. I read half of it. Hannah’s novel-in-vignettes is still ahead of its time. Who writes better sentences? (“Christ, the South has been pickled in the juice of its own image”).

20120324-143122.jpg