When I put together this post of writers smoking, I knew I wanted a pic of Carson McCullers; a basic image search evinces that most pictures of McCullers feature her smoking, or at least posing with a cigarette (also drinking). On one hand, this is a hoary old trope, the hard smoking writer; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that McCullers was never far from a smoke. NB: The man pictured by McCullers in one of the images is the playwright Edward Albee.
Author: Biblioklept
Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (Book Acquired, 2.10.2012)
I try to spend 10 or 20 minutes with every book that comes in to Biblioklept World Headquarters—assessing plot and prose, trying to get a sense of the potential audience for each volume, etc. Sometimes this task is difficult, and especially difficult when I find myself with too much to read, yet intrigued by the book at hand.
This is a lot of hemming and hawing leading up to: I very much enjoyed the first fifty or so pages of Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues. Here’s a plot description from the Man Booker Prize website:
‘Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you…’ The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero’s bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there’s more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero’s fate was settled. In Half Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan weaves the horror of betrayal, the burden of loyalty and the possibility that, if you don’t tell your story, someone else might tell it for you. And they just might tell it wrong…
Edugyan writes in an energetic colloquial syntax, one that matches–and embodies—the spirit of the jazz musicians at the forefront of her narrative. So far, great stuff.
Picador has picked up the book and given it a wider distribution in the US. Check it out.
“A Toad, can die of Light” — Emily Dickinson
“A Toad, can die of Light,” a poem by Emily Dickinson:
A Toad, can die of Light —
Death is the Common Right
Of Toads and Men —
Of Earl and Midge
The privilege —
Why swagger, then?
The Gnat’s supremacy is large as Thine —Life — is a different Thing —
So measure Wine —
Naked of Flask — Naked of Cask —
Bare Rhine —
Which Ruby’s mine
Topless Hemingway, Part III
Smoking Makes You Look Cool, Part II (More Pics of Writers Smoking)
- Zora Neale Hurston
- Rudyard Kipling
- Anne Sexton
(For more pics of writers smoking, check out our first gallery—and don’t worry, people already expressed their hatred for what they perceived to be our endorsement of smoking there).
St. George and the Dragon — Raphael
Leon Sees Seinfeld for the First Time (Curb Your Enthusiasm)
James Joyce’s Caricature of Leopold Bloom
From Richard Ellman’s great big bio James Joyce.
Books Acquired, 2.16.2012
The Chihuly book was too beautiful not to pick up for my wife—cloth bound and so orange. I picked it up along with Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary this afternoon at my fave used bookshop; ostensibly, I was searching for a copy of the Mutis book Noquar reviewed here this week, but who really needs a legit reason to browse the stacks?
Anna Karina Reads from Paul Éluard’s The Capital of Sorrow (Godard’s Alphaville)
. . . the rays of your arms parted the fog . . .
Two Short David Markson Citations on Contemporary Art
From David Markson’s The Last Novel:
People who actually believe that Christo’s tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York’s Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.
People who actually believe that Damien Hirst’s fourteen-foot shark in a tank of formaldehyde has something even remotely to do with art.
Diddling Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe ponders diddling in his essay “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences“:
Diddling — or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle — is sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining — not the thing, diddling, in itself — but man, as an animal that diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of the picked chicken.
Very pertinently it was demanded of Plato, why a picked chicken, which was clearly “a biped without feathers,” was not, according to his own definition, a man? But I am not to be bothered by any similar query. Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man. It will take an entire hen-coop of picked chickeus [[chickens]] to get over that.
What constitutes the essence, the ware, the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. “Man was made to mourn,” says the poet. But not so: — he was made to diddle. This is his aim — his object — his end. And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s “done.”
In Which Clay Davis Offers Up the Line for Which He Is Most Known (The Wire)
Self-Portrait as Ishmael — Bo Bartlett
Valentine’s Books from My Sweetie (Books Acquired 2.14.2012)
Andy Warhol Meets Pope John Paul II
I Choo-Choo-Choose You
