Flucht (Flight), 2018 by Walton Ford (b. 1960)
The Misfortunes of Silenus (detail), c. 1500 by Pierro di Cosimo (1462-1522)
I made an Instagram account for Biblioklept. (The handle is @bibliokleptogram — somebody already snagged “Biblioklept”).
The content for Biblokleptogram is not the same as the blog’s content (although the feed is integrated into the blog—it’s down on the bottom right).
Most of the time I’ll post photographs of book covers, poems, prose, etc. My only “rule” is that I’ll only post photographs I’ve taken myself. I don’t plan on using Instagram to write.
This is the first post from the account, a poem by Roberto Bolaño:
And here is a post from yesterday, which happened to be Herman Melville’s 199th birthday:
Nude Reading, 1915 by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941)
The Badger’s Song II, 2015 by Michaël Borremans (b. 1963)
Man Reading a Newspaper, 1941 by Russell Drysdale (1912-1981)
The Misfortunes of Silenus (detail), c. 1500 by Pierro di Cosimo (1462-1522)
Visit, 2015 by Axel Krause (b. 1958)
“Lunch”
by
William T. Vollmann
Faces at lunch, oh, yes, smirking, lordly, bored or weary—here and there a flash of passion, of dreams or loving seriousness; these signs I saw, notwithstanding the sweep of a fork like a Stuka dive-bomber, stabbing down into the cringing salads, carrying them up to the death of unseen teeth between dancing wrinkled cheeks; a breadstick rose in hand, approached the purple lips in a man’s dull gray face; an oval darkness opened and shut and the breadstick was half gone! A lady in a red blazer, her face alert, patient and professionally kind like a psychoanalyst’s, stuck her fork lovingly into a tomato, smiling across the table at another woman’s face; everything she did was gentle, and it was but habit for her to hurt the tomato as little as possible; nonetheless she did not see it. Nodding and shaking her head, she ate and ate, gazing sweetly into the other woman’s face. Finally I saw one woman in sunglasses who studied her arugula as she bit it…It disappeared by jagged inches, while across the table, in her husband’s lap, the baby watched in dark-eyed astonishment. Her husband crammed an immense collage of sandwich components into his hairy cheeks. He snatched up pommes-frites and they vanished in toto. When the dessert cart came, the starched white shoulders of businessmen continued to flex and shine; the faces gazed at one another over emptiness, maybe happier now that they had eaten, unthinking of what they had wrought.
Red Wall, 1910 by Karoly Ferenczy (1862-1917)
Allegory of Inclination, 1615 by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653)
Capillary Locomotion, 1959 by Remedios Varo (1908-1963)
Self Portrait as After Party, 2013 by Julie Heffernan (b. 1956)
Young Bean Farmer, 1991 by Peter Doig (b. 1959)
The Demon Seated, 1890 by Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910)
The Misfortunes of Silenus (detail), c. 1500 by Pierro di Cosimo (1462-1522)
One out of several humiliating features about writing fiction for a living is that here after all is just about everybody else, all along the capitalist spectrum from piano movers to systems analysts, cheerfully selling their bodies or body parts according to time-honored custom and usage, while it’s only writers, out at the fringes of the entertainment sector, wretched and despised, who are obliged, more intimately and painfully, actually to sell their dreams, yes, dreams these days you’ll find are every bit as commoditized as any pork bellies there on the financial page. To be upbeat about it, though, in most cases it doesn’t present much moral problem, since dreams seldom make it through into print with anything like the original production values anyway. Even if you do good recovery, learning to write legibly in the dark and so forth, there’s still the matter of getting it down in words that can bring back even a little of the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience. So it’s a safe bet that most writers’ dreams, maybe even including the best ones, manage to stay untranslated and private after all.
Barthelme, however, happens to be one of a handful of American authors there to make the rest of us look bad, who know instinctively how to stash the merchandise, bamboozle the inspectors, and smuggle their nocturnal contraband right on past the checkpoints of daylight “reality.” What he called his “secret vice” of “cutting up and pasting together pictures” bears an analogy, at least, to what is supposed to go on in dreams, where images from the public domain are said likewise to combine in unique, private, and, with luck, spiritually useful ways. How exactly Barthelme then got this into print, or for that matter pictorial, form, kept the transitions flowing the way he did and so on, is way too mysterious for me, though out of guild solidarity I probably wouldn’t share it even if I did know. The effect each time, at any rate, is to put us in the presence of something already eerily familiar … to remind us that we have lived in these visionary cities and haunted forests, that the ancient faces we gaze into are faces we know.
From Thomas Pynchon’s introduction to The Teachings of Don B. The introduction was republished yesterday in The Paris Review in a version that omits the first two paragraphs. You can read the full version of Thomas Pynchon’s essay on Donald Barthelme at ThomasPynchon.com.
Biblioklept 