Category: Art

Enigmatic Variation II — Enrico Pinardi

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Enigmatic Variation II by Enrico Pinardi (1934-2021)

Mass-market Monday | Herman Melville’s Redburn

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Redburn, Herman Melville. Doubleday Anchor Books (1957). Cover art by Edward Gorey. 301 pages.

Redburn is as good a place as any to start with Melville, I suppose. From Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “Melville in Love,” which prompted me to finally read Redburn:

Melville’s state of mind is revealed…with a purity of expressiveness in the novel Redburn, one of his most appealing and certainly the most personal of his works. He is said to have more or less disowned the book, more rather than less, since he claimed it was only written for tobacco. Whether this is a serious misjudgment of his own work or a withdrawal, after the fact, from having shown his early experience of life without his notable reserve and distance is, of course, not clear. For a contemporary reader, Redburn, the grief-stricken youth, cast among the vicious, ruined men on the ship, walking the streets of Liverpool in the late 1830s, even meeting with the homosexual hustler Harry Bolton might have more interest than Typee’s breadfruit and coconut island and the nymph, Fayaway. But it is only pertinent to think of Redburn on its own: a novel written after Typee, Omoo, and Mardi in the year 1849, ten years after he left Lansingburgh to go on his first voyage.

 

The 16 Types of Dads (Life in Hell)

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Nude Girl — Gwen John

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Nude Girl, 1910 by Gwen John (1876–1939)

Mass-market Monday | Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan

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Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake. Ballantine Books (1968). No cover artist credited. 543 pages.

The uncredited cover artist is Bob Pepper, who also provided the covers for Ballantine editions of the other two novels in Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. The covers are actually segments from one painting:

The edition also includes black and white illustrations by Peake (including eight glossy inset pages).

I have no idea how I had never even heard of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy until some point late in 2019. I grew up reading fantasy and yet somehow never encountered these strange, dense books. I consumed them in 2020, pressing extra copies on my son.

From my 2020 reading roundup end-of-year post:

Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake

The first of Mervyn Peake’s strange castle (and then not-castle trilogy (not really a trilogy, really)), Titus Groan is weird wonderful grotesque fun. Inspirited by the Machiavellian antagonist Steerpike, Titus Groan can be read as a critique of the empty rituals that underwrite modern life. It can also be read for pleasure alone.

Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

Probably the best novel in Peake’s trilogy, Gormenghast is notable for its psychological realism, surreal claustrophobia, and bursts of fantastical imagery. We finally get to know Titus, who is a mute infant in the first novel, and track his insolent war against tradition and Steerpike. The novel’s apocalyptic diluvian climax is amazing.

Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake

A beautiful mess, an episodic, picaresque adventure that breaks all the apparent rules of the first two books. The rulebreaking is fitting though, given that Our Boy Titus (alone!) navigates the world outside of Gormenghast—a world that doesn’t seem to even understand that a Gormenghast exists (!)—Titus Alone is a scattershot epic. Shot-through with a heavy streak of Dickens, Titus Alone never slows down enough for readers to get their bearings. Or to get bored. There’s a melancholy undercurrent to the novel. Does Titus want to get back to his normal—to tradition and the meaningless lore and order that underwrote his castle existence? Or does he want to break quarantine? 

Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon as Medieval Saints — Edmund Dulac

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Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon as Medieval Saints, 1920 by Edmund Dulac (1822–1953)

The Enamored Mage — Jess

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The Enamored Mage (Translation #6), 1965 by Jess (1923-2004)

In the Park — Marie Laurencin

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In the Park, 1924 by Marie Laurencin (1883-1956)

Posted in Art

Mass-market Monday | Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

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One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez. Translation by Gregory Rabassa. Avon Bard (1971). No cover artist credited. 383 pages.

I am a huge fan of the Avon Bard Latin American literature series. (I do wish, however, they had done a better job crediting the cover artists.)

I listened to One Hundred Years of Solitude on audiobook (narrated by John Lee) last week while undertaking a largish home project. I had read the novel maybe twelve years ago, after several false starts, and enjoyed the audiobook very much, even if the story was much, much sadder than I’d remembered. I had registered One Hundred Years of Solitude in my memory as rich and mythic, its robust humor tinged with melancholy spiked with sex and violence. That memory is only partially correct—García Márquez’s novel is darker and more pessimistic than my younger-reader-self could acknowledge.

From John Leonard’s wonderful contemporary review in The New York Times (in which he employs the word haruspex in the second sentence:

You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendia family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is also a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendias (inventors, artisans, soldiers lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride biological tragi‐cycle in circles from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.

 

 

Puppy Play Date — Salman Toor

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Puppy Play Date, 2019 by Salman Toor (b. 1983)

Tuxedo — Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Tuxedo, 1983 by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

Mass-market Monday | Thomas Pynchon’s V.

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V., Thomas Pynchon. Bantam Books, third printing (1964). No cover artist credited. 463 pages.

Although artist James Bama is not credited, you can see his signature on the right side of the cover, just above the horizon.

I reread V. a few years back, concluding my piece with,

The grist, grit, and horror of the big postwar world will cling to the present. Nobody’s stepping down from heaven, or Heaven, and there are no magic words—but there is a kind of love, a loving with your mouth shut, a kind of radical, earnest, transcendent love that Pynchon evokes, soils, and sanctifies here.

Leda Got a Gun — Anne Herrero

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Leda Got a Gun, 2024 by Anne Herrero (b. 1984)

Mass-market Monday | Samuel R. Delany’s Nova

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Nova, Samuel R. Delany. Bantam Books, ninth printing (1979). No cover artist credited. 215 pages.

Although he is not credited, Eddie Jones is the artist for this marvelous cover to Bantam’s mass-market reprint of Delany’s 1968 novel Nova. 

Nova is one of my favorite SRD novels. Let me self-plagiarize myself from a few years ago:

I couldn’t make it through Delany’s cult favorite Dhalgren a few years back, but Nova was easier sledding. The book is a riff on Moby-Dick, tarot, monoculture, and the grail quest. It’s jammed with ideas and characters, and if it never quite coheres into something transcendent, it’s a fun quick read (even if the ending, right from the postmodern metatextual playbook is too clever by half).

Straw Boats — Mu Pan

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Straw Boats, 2023 by Mu Pan (b. 1976)

On Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, pp. 223-76 | I love coarse aesthetics! Fucking people up furiosamente!

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Previously on Blue Lard…

pp. 1-47

pp. 48-110

pp. 111-61

pp. 162-87

pp. 188-222

The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.

When I started this series of posts, I was rereading the print edition of Blue Lard after having read Max’s manuscript translation a few years ago. I have gotten so behind in this post series that I am now re-rereading. After having read the book essentially three times now, I find that it is far more precise and controlled than my initial impression–which I guess makes sense. Blue Lard is hypersurreal, shocking, deviant. But it’s also more balanced and nuanced than a first go-through might suggest, not just absurdist shit-throwing and jabberwocky, but an accomplished analysis of the emerging post-Soviet era.

We left off our Blue Lard riffs with the pop art glamour and swagger of the Stalin family, drawn in bold but neat caricature. Stalin departs the dramatic inner circle/family circle on his way first to lieutenant Beria’s and then to his part-time lover Khrushchev’s, but as he’s on his way, “a fat woman dressed in rags hurl[s] herself toward the motorcade with a mad cry.” Stalin’s guards draw their weapons, but Our Boy is quicker: “‘Don’t shoot!’ Stalin ordered. ‘It’s Triple-A! Stop!'”

Triple-A is the poet Anna Akhmatova (who we first met via reincarnation as the kindaclone Akhmatova-2 back in the future). She’s fat gross and happy, pregnant with an aesthetic revelation of abjection:

Her wide, round face with its broken nose was flat and her small eyes shone with madness; tiny rotten teeth stuck out from beneath her formless wet lips; her unbelievably tattered rags adorned a squat body that widened freakishly as it went down; her dirty gray hair stuck out from beneath a ragged woolen kerchief; her bare feet were black with filth.

AAA is one of Sorokin’s fouler concoctions, proclaiming proclamations like

“Did you know that Kharms feeds canaries with his worms?” Stalin asks AAA. (The absurdist poet and children’s author Daniil Kharms died in a Soviet prison in his mid-thirties. “Send him to the deepest north!” Sorokin’s Akhmatova advises Sorokin’s Stalin.) The conversation over Soviet writing continues: “‘I have an active dislike for Fadeyev’s Young Guard,'” declares Stalin.” A paragraph or two later, AAA licks the soles of his boots. I don’t know nearly enough about Soviet and Russian literature to figure out what or if Sorokin is satirizing here, but I think I know enough about the relationship of aesthetics and power to take a big hint. 

Stalin’s motorcade drove up to Arkhangelskoye. Here, in a magnificent palace built during the reign of Catherine II, lived the count and previous member of the Politburo and of the Central Committee of the CPSU Nikita Aristarkhovich Khrushchev, who had been removed from his state duties by the October Plenum of the Central Committee.

There is a famous infamous horny sensual sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev coming up, one that has made Blue Lard famously infamous—but let’s set that aside for now. Sorokin’s Khrushchev’s patronymic Aristarkhovich doesn’t gel with our historical Khrushchev’s patronymic Sergeyevich. Is the “new” patronymic “Aristarkhovich” an allusion to the avant-garde painter Aristarkh Lentulov? 

Sorokin’s presentation of Khrushchev as a hunchback may allude to the following incident, as reported in a 1973 The New York Times profile on the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko:

Mass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red

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The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Ishmael Reed. Bard Books, First Bard Printing (1976). Cover art is by Andrew Rhodes (not credited). 191 pages.

From my review of The Last Days of Louisiana Red:

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.”