Mu Pan’s Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), 2019 by Mu Pan (b. 1976)
Mu Pan’s Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), 2019 by Mu Pan (b. 1976)
Inge, 1965 by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)
Big Girls, 2014 by Dan Lydersen (b. 1980)
Mu Pan’s Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), 2019 by Mu Pan (b. 1976)
Uomo Fiorente II (Flowering Man II), 2011 by Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967)
War, 1915 by Patrick William Adam (1854–1929)
“The Balloon-Hoax”
by
Edgar Allan Poe
THE great problem is at length solved! The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon! and this too without difficulty—without any great apparent danger—with thorough control of the machine—and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S.C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, at 11, A.M., and 2, P.M., on Tuesday, the 9th instant, by Sir Everard Bringhurst; Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck’s; Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known æronauts; Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, author of “Jack Sheppard,” &c.; and Mr. Henson, the projector of the late unsuccessful flying machine—with two seamen from Woolwich—in all, eight persons. The particulars furnished below may be relied on as authentic and accurate in every respect, as, with a slight exception, they are copied verbatim from the joint diaries of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, to whose politeness our agent is also indebted for much verbal information respecting the balloon itself, its construction, and other matters of interest. The only alteration in the MS. received, has been made for the purpose of throwing the hurried account of our agent, Mr. Forsyth, into a connected and intelligible form. Continue reading ““The Balloon-Hoax” — Edgar Allan Poe”
April (The Green Gown), 1919 by Childe Hassam (1859–1935)
Ship of Fools, c. 1490–1500 by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516)
Links to and brief excerpts from reviews I mustered this month (and an unrelated wombat):
I reviewed João Gilberto Noll’s short novel Lord, writing,
…Lord is an abject and surreal tale of madness. Madness is perhaps not the correct term, although it does point towards Lord’s gothic and abject modes. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that in Lord, Noll gives us a consciousness dissolving and reconstituting itself, a first-person voice shifting from one reality to the next with absurdly picaresque energy.
I also wrote about Ishmael Reed’s novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red. First grafs—
Ishmael Reed’s 1974 novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a sharp, zany satire of US culture at the end of the twentieth century. The novel, Reed’s fourth, is a sequel of sorts to Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and features that earlier novel’s protagonist, the Neo-HooDoo ghost detective Papa LaBas.
In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed gave us the story of an uptight secret society, the Wallflower Order, and their attempt to root out and eradicate “Jes’ Grew,” a psychic virus that spreads freedom and takes its form in arts like jazz and the jitterbug. The Last Days of Louisiana Red also employs a psychic virus to drive its plot, although this transmission is far deadlier. “Louisiana Red” is a poisonous mental disease that afflicts black people in the Americas, causing them to fall into a neo-slave mentality in which they act like “Crabs in the Barrel…Each crab trying to keep the other from reaching the top.”
I really dug Joy Williams’ debut short story Taking Care. From my review:
…enduring, patient love is unusual in Taking Care, where friendships splinter, marriages fail, and children realize their parents’ vices and frailties might be their true inheritance. These are stories of domestic doom and incipient madness, alcoholism and lost pets. There’s humor here, but the humor is ice dry, and never applied as even a palliative to the central sadness of Taking Care. Williams’ humor is something closer to cosmic absurdity, a recognition of the ambiguity at the core of being human, of not knowing. It’s the humor of two girls eating chips on a beach, unable to decide if the people they are gazing at are drowning or just having a good time.
I also reviewed Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. First paragraph of the review:
Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower imagines what a radical affirmation of life might look like set against a backdrop of impending extinction. Set between 2024 and 2027, Parable of the Sower conjures a crumbling America. Hyperinflation abounds, infrastructure is falling apart, water is scarce, environmental collapse is imminent, and the social institutions that bind the nation have all but frayed.
And I reviewed Jon McNaught’s graphic novel Kingdom for The Comics Journal.
First two paragraphs:
Not much happens in Jon McNaught’s latest graphic novel Kingdom. A mother takes her son and daughter to Kingdom Fields Holiday Park, a vacation lodge on the British coast. There, they watch television, go to a run-down museum, play on the beach, walk the hills, and visit an old aunt. Then they go home. There is no climactic event, no terrible trial to endure. There is no crisis, no trauma. And yet it’s clear that the holiday in Kingdom Fields will remain forever with the children, embedded into their consciousness as a series of strange aesthetic impressions. Not much happens in Kingdom, but what does happen feels vital and real.
“Life, friends, is boring,” the poet John Berryman wrote in his fourteenth Dream Song, before quickly appending, “We must not say so / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns.” In Kingdom, McNaught creates a world of flashing sky and yearning sea, natural splendor populated by birds and bats, mice and moths. In Kingdom Fields, waves crash in gorgeous dark blues, the sun rises in golden pinks, rain teems down in violet swirls, and the wind breezes through meadows of grass. It’s all very gorgeous, and the trio of main characters spend quite a bit of the novel ignoring it. The narrator of John Berryman’s fourteenth Dream Song understood the transcendental promise of nature’s majesty, yet also understood that “the mountain or sea or sky” alone are not enough for humans—that we are of nature and yet apart from it.
Promised wombat:
The Invalid – Cheyne Walk 1869, 2017 by Walton Ford (b. 1960)
The Duel, 2011 by Norbert Schwontkowski (1949-2013)
The Tree of Tongues, c. 1930-37 by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973).
From The Morgan Library & Museum’s exhibition “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth.”
Triptych, 1963 by Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979)
RIP Agnès Varda, 1928-2019
The Visionary, 1904 by Serafino Macchiati (1861-1916)
Antoine Volodine is interviewed by Andrew Wilson at The Evergreen Review. The interview focuses on Volodine’s 1990 novel Lisbon, Last Frontier. (Wilson’s translation of the first chapter of Lisbon, Last Frontier was recently published in The Evergreen Review). The interview touches on a number of subjects, including Volodine’s invented genre, post-exoticism. From the interview:
AW: Is post-exoticism simply anti-exoticism?
AV: Yes, what’s important in post-exoticism is that it does away with exoticism. You suggested anti-exoticism, and it could just as well have been anti-exoticism, in as much as what characterizes exoticism is the absolute distinction between the metropolis and the margin, between the center and the periphery. With exoticism, there is an interest in the margins–the writer lives on the margins–but it’s all for the sake of the center. In exoticism, one describes the margins with ideas that come from the center, whereas in our books, the characters—who are dying, or perhaps already dead, who are birds, or animals, or insane—have no center, or rather it is their margin that is the center—the center no longer exists. For us, mental derangement doesn’t refer to a discourse of normality outside of it. In the books, it is present, and it is the center, it is what’s creating the world. In Lisbon, Last Frontier, it’s Ingrid Vogel who creates the world. The reader might think she’s completely mad, schizophrenic, paranoid, but, in fact, the book never refers to an outside normality, from which one could judge Ingrid’s experience. Yes, the book enters her imaginary; yes, it creates imaginary spaces for her to inhabit, but it never refers to a normality outside of her. And it’s through this precise mechanism that the books are on the margins, in the dustbin (to borrow an expression from Lisbon, Last Frontier); it’s in this way that they are dustbin literature, a literature from elsewhere, and that’s what comes into being with post-exoticism. That’s what’s important I think: a literature that doesn’t refer to normality, that doesn’t refer to the center. In that sense it’s more anti-exoticism… but of course I’m not going to change it now. It’s too late; it’s post-exoticism until the end!
Contingent by Lukifer Aurelius
Biblioklept 