Visit, 2012 by Susanne Kühn (b. 1969)
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Category: Art
Throughout the Neighborhood — Tia Peltz
Tia Peltz (1923-1999)
Three Women in a Courtyard — Kent Monkman
Three Women in a Courtyard, 2018 by Kent Monkman (b. 1965)
In the Intermission — Vasily Meshkov
In the Intermission, 1932 by Vasily Meshkov (1867-1946)
On the Beach — Boris Talberg
On the Beach, c. 1970s by Boris Talberg (1930-1984)
Blog about some books acquired, 17 July 2019 (and some Poe and Whitman illustrations)
Despite having a pretty large TBR stack, I killed this afternoon’s spare hour at my favorite used bookstore. This particular bookstore is a maze of used books, labyrinthine walls of books, with ever-mutating shelves growing from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. I confess I don’t always stoop low—I get old, I get dizzy—but stooping low to look for something else (which I now misremember; I get old) I found a big fat stack of copies of John Kennedy Toole’s cult novel A Confederacy of Dunces. Which I have never read. Which was recommended to me twenty years ago when I wasn’t so old, when I was way into Vonnegut, Burroughs, Hemingway. Which was recommended to me by someone who had made me read Tom Robbins. Which was why I didn’t bother to read A Confederacy of Dunces. I’ve always sort of assumed that I’d missed my window with this one—not sure why—-like that I should’ve read it before I was thirty. Anyone, I threw it out on twitter and some smart folks gave me the go ahead. So we’ll see.
I also found a copy of The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart. Again, I wasn’t looking for this book. Actually, I found this Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series edition quite by accident, but recalled the NYRB edition (both are translated by Barbara Bray) and picked it up. I usually am not a big fan of photographs of people on covers, but I really like this one. I’ll steal NRYB’s blurb:
This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.”
My good luck streak of finding old massmarket paperback copies of Strugatsky brothers novels continued when I found Prisoners of Power (English translation by Helen Saltz Jacobson).
I also found myself intrigued by some large illustrated editions of Melville and Poe, although I resisted picking them up. I really love the simple design of this 1931 omnibus Romances of Herman Melville—
As far as I could tell, the publishers failed to credit the edition’s illustrator, but he signed it—Edward S. Annison.
The editors of an oversized 1973 David R. Godine edition of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym did bother to name the illustrator: Gerry Hoover. Hoover’s illustrations are pretty creepy:
Okay—maybe the last one isn’t creepy. But the tortoise’s grimacing beak is intense.
Two Sisters — John D. Graham
Two Sisters, 1944 by John D. Graham (1881–1961)
The Lovers — Liu Xiaodong
The Lovers, 1995 by Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963)
Salome Sphinx — Nikolai Kalmakov
Salome Sphinx, 1928 by Nikolai Kalmakov (1873-1955)
The Death Bed — James Pryde
The Death Bed, 1913 by James Pryde (1866–1941)
Untitled (Tree) — Hans-Georg Rauch
From HG Rauch’s En Masse (Collier, 1975).
29 still frames from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice
From Inherent Vice, 2014. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson with cinematography by Robert Elsit. Via Film Grab.
The Blind Reading Stories to Storyteller — Davor Gromilovic
The Blind Reading Stories to Storyteller, 2018 by Davor Gromilovic (b. 1985)
Hidden Presence — Alessandro Papetti
Hidden Presence, 2014 by Alessandro Papetti (b. 1958)
A Sign, A Swan — Mimi Parent
Un signe, un cygne (A Sign, a Swan), 1978 by Mimi Parent (1924–2005)
Read “Human Moments in World War III,” a sci-fi story by Don DeLillo
“Human Moments in World War III”
A note about Vollmer. He no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space. This last was his most ambitious fling at imagery. The war has changed the way he sees the earth. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn’t see it any more (storm-spiralled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and colour) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation.
At two hundred and twenty kilometres we see ship wakes and the larger airports. Icebergs, lightning bolts, sand-dunes. I point out lava flows and cold-core eddies. That silver ribbon off the Irish coast, I tell him, is an oil slick.
This is my third orbital mission, Vollmer’s first. He is an engineering genius, a communications and weapons genius, and maybe other kinds of genius as well. As mission specialist, I’m content to be in charge. (The word specialist, in the standard usage of Colorado Command, refers here to someone who does not specialize.) Our spacecraft is designed primarily to gather intelligence. The refinement of the quantum-burn technique enables us to make frequent adjustments of orbit without firing rockets every time. We swing out into high, wide trajectories, the whole earth as our psychic light, to inspect unmanned and possibly hostile satellites. We orbit tightly, snugly, take intimate looks at surface activities in untravelled places. The banning of nuclear weapons has made the world safe for war.
I try not to think big thoughts or submit to rambling abstractions. But the urge sometimes comes over me. Earth orbit puts men into philosophical temper. How can we help it? We see the planet complete, we have a privileged vista. In our attempts to be equal to the experience, we tend to meditate importantly on subjects like the human condition. It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compass arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.
I tell myself it is only scenery. I want to think of our life here as ordinary, as a housekeeping arrangement, an unlikely but workable setup caused by a housing shortage or spring floods in the valley.
Continue reading “Read “Human Moments in World War III,” a sci-fi story by Don DeLillo”
Siegfried and Kriemhild — Henry Fuseli
Siegfried and Kriemhild, 1807 by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)
