Sunset, 1991 by Yu Hong (b. 1966)
Evening Song, 1938 by Franz Sedlacek (1891-1945)
Temptation of Eve, 1994 by Charles Steffen (1927-1995)
Luděk Maňásek’s illustration for “The Snake King.” From Jaroslav Tichý’s Persian Fairy Tales, Hamlyn, 1970. (English translations in the collection are by Jane Carruth).
Portrait of Neal Cassady, 1952 by Carolyn Cassady (1923-2013)
In the Cradle of Frederick the Great, 1917 by Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930)
Solar Lottery, Philip K. Dick. Ace Books, first edition, second printing (1959). Cover art by Ed Valigursky. 188 pages.
Here is a summary from this edition’s first page:
WINNER TAKE THE WORLD!
By the summer of 2203, Ted Benteley managed to break away from his old Industrial Hill oath and was free at last to offer himself in new bondage to Quizmaster Verrick. Of course, like everyone else on Earth, Ted held a ticket on the great lottery that could suddenly make him the next quizmaster with the whole world as his possession, but he could hardly figure on that one chance in six billion!
What Bentley didn’t realize when he went to swear himself forever to Verrick was that the lottery was about to take a wilder turn than ever before, one that would make Benteley himself the deciding factor in a power game of truly cosmic proportions!
Philip K. Dick’s first-published novel, Solar Lottery (1955) is hardly his finest work (even as it points to his later themes). Neither is Ed Valigursky’s pulp fiction cover especially creative, at least when compared with the dozens of covers that came after. But I figured today’s solar eclipse made Solar Lottery a nice pick for an inaugural series where I kinda sorta go through all the mass-market paperbacks I can’t seem to get rid of and post something about them. Many if not most of the mass-market paperbacks I own were, at least on their first go around, marketed in genre ghettos, assuring that they actually got cool art and interesting designs—even if Valigursky’s hammy space dude cover can’t match, say, the Cronenberg vibes of Edward Soyka’s cover for Collier’s 1992 reprint, it’s still more interesting and human than the handsome, sterile series of PKD reprints Mariner Books did in the 2010s which seemed to scream, No, this isn’t really sci-fi, this is literature!
Illustration from The Green Man, 1979 by Gail E. Haley (b. 1939)
Rhinoceros, James Ensor (1860-1949)
“Good-bye to the Fruits”
by
John Barth
I agreed to die, stipulating only that I first be permitted to rebehold and bid good-bye to those of Earth’s fruits that I had particularly enjoyed in my not-extraordinary lifetime.
What I had in mind, in the first instance, was such literal items as apples and oranges. Of the former, the variety called Golden Delicious had long been my favorite, especially those with a blush of rose on their fetchingly speckled yellow-green cheeks. Of the latter–but then, there’s no comparing apples to oranges, is there, nor either of those to black plums: truly incomparable, in my opinion, on the rare occasions when one found them neither under- nor overripe. Good-bye to all three, alas; likewise to bananas, whether sliced transversely atop unsweetened breakfast cereal, split longitudinally under scoops of frozen yogurt, barbecued in foil with chutney, or blended with lime juice, rum, and Cointreau into frozen daiquiris on a Chesapeake August late afternoon.
Lime juice, yes: Farewell, dear zesty limes, squeezed into gins-and-tonics before stirring and over bluefish filets before grilling; adieu too to your citric cousins the lemons, particularly those with the thinnest of skins, always the most juiceful, without whose piquance one could scarcely imagine fresh seafood, and whose literal zest was such a challenge for us kitchen-copilots to scrape a half-tablespoonsworth of without getting the bitter white underpeel as well. Adieu to black seedless grapes for eating with ripe cheeses and to all the nobler stocks for vinting, except maybe Chardonnay. I happened not to share the American yuppie thirst for Chardonnay; too over-flavored for my palate. Give me a plain light dry Chablis any time instead of Chardonnay, if you can find so simple a thing on our restaurant wine-lists these days. And whatever happened to soft dry reds that don’t cost an arm and a leg on the one hand, so to speak, or, on the other, taste of iron and acetic acid? But this was no time for such cavils: Good-bye, blessed fruit of the vineyard, a dinner without which was like a day without et cetera. Good-bye to the fruits of those other vines, in particular the strawberry, if berries are properly to be called fruits, the tomato, and the only melon I would really miss, our local cantaloupe. Good-bye to that most sexual of fruits, the guava; to peaches, plantains (fried), pomegranates, and papayas; to the fruits of pineapple field and coconut tree, if nuts are fruits and coconuts nuts, and of whatever it is that kiwis grow on. As for pears, I had always thought them better canned than fresh, as Hemingway’s Nick Adams says of apricots in the story “Big Two-Hearted River”–but I couldn’t see kissing a can good-bye, so I guessed that just about did the fruits (I myself preferred my apricots sun-dried rather than either fresh or canned).
Study of Patin — Félicien Rops (1833–1898)
“Hell”
by
Virgilio Piñera
translated by Mark Schaffer
When we are children, hell is nothing more than the devil’s name on our parent’s lips. Later, this notion becomes more complicated, and we toss in our beds through the interminable nights of adolescence, trying to extinguish the flames that burn us — the flames of imagination! Still later, when we no longer look in the mirror because our faces have begun to resemble that of the devil, the notion of hell is reduced to an intellectual fear, and in order to escape so much anguish, we attempt to describe it. Now, in old age, hell is so close at hand that we accept it as a necessary evil and even show our anxiety about suffering it. Even later (and now we’re in its flames), while we burn, we begin to see that perhaps we could adjust. After a thousand years, a somber-faced devil asks us if we’re still suffering. We tell him that there is far more routine than suffering. At last, the day arrives when we are free to leave, but we emphatically refuse the offer, for who gives up a cherished habit?
Crucifixion, 1923 by Ivan Milev (1897–1927)
My family and I took our Florida asses to the West Coast for a wonderful week earlier this month. We flew into LA, stayed in Santa Monica for a few days and nights, riding bikes up and down the beautiful coast and visiting proximal neighborhoods. We later drove east to Joshua Tree, where we stayed in a lovely little house for a few days, visiting the National Park as well as nearby towns and sites, like Twentynine Palms, Palm Springs, and Mt. San Jacinto State Park. We saw coyotes and roadrunners and lots of little desert cottontails. Famous times.
While in Santa Monica, I could not convince my family (or frankly myself) to trek the hour or so south to visit Thomas Pynchon’s old apartment in Manhattan Beach. We did, however, stop by Small World Books in Venice Beach. Small World is right across from the Venice Beach Skatepark, where we watched kids of all ages skate for almost an hour while someone blasted nineties hip-hop from a boombox (one of the nicest hours of the trip for me).
Small World is a well-stocked bookshop with an emphasis on literature and the arts; it carries plenty of indie titles and a handsome stable of standards. There was a nice cat in there too. Founded in 1969 by Mildred Gates and Mary Goodfader, Small World seems to retain some of the older vibes of Venice Beach, which is generally pretty touristy (in a fun, tacky way). It seems a bit out of place among the keychains and bad art and nasty tee shirts of Venice, what with its stock of NYRB translations, poetry zines, and novels by indie imprints like And Other Stories. But it’s clear that locals come to buy books there.
I picked up three: Lydia Davis’s Our Strangers, June-Alison Gibbons’s The Pepsi-Cola Addict, and Ann Quin’s Three. I’d been looking to buy Davis’s collection for a while now–you can buy it online, but I wanted to get it from an indie bookshop, per Davis’s intentions. Three is the only Ann Quin book I haven’t read yet; I loved her novels Berg and Passages, and I guess I wanted to leave something in the Quin take for later. The highlight purchase though for me has been Gibbons’s The Pepsi-Cola Addict, which was Small World’s featured book (I think they did a book club on it this month). I had never heard of the book or its author, but the pop art cover and goofy title caught my attention, followed by an even goofier blurb which started by describing the Pepsi-Cola Addict as the “legendary lost novel in which fourteen-year-old Preston Wildey-King must choose between his all-consuming passion for Pepsi Cola and his love for schoolmate Peggy.” The novel is not goofy though—it’s abject and odd and distressing and also very well-written, somehow naive and sophisticated, raw and refined, resoundingly truthful and plainly artificial. Here’s the full blurb:
Written by June-Alison Gibbons when she was only 16, The Pepsi Cola Addict is considered one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature. More than just a literary curiosity, however, this tale of a teenager whose passion for a well-known cola drink threatens to ruin his life is the uniquely vivid expression of a young woman trying to make sense of the confusing, often brutal world she in which found herself.
Published in 1982 by a vanity press who took £500 from its young author and gave her only a single book in return, it’s thought that fewer than ten original copies still exist in the world.
Shortly after its publication, June-Alison and her sister Jennifer would become infamous as “The Silent Twins” and find themselves cruelly incarcerated for over a decade in Broadmoor Hospital. This author-approved edition makes June-Alison Gibbon’s remarkable vision widely available for the first time.
I hope to have a full review to come. I read The Pepsi-Cola Addict in Joshua Tree and absolutely loved it (even though (and I guess because) it made me feel odd and ill).
Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to Angel City Books & Records in Santa Monica. I had also wanted to visit Space Cowboy Books in Joshua Tree, but didn’t realize it was closed midweek. I did drop by The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs, and was again pleasantly surprised by the rich stock of titles, which eschewed the bestseller list stuff I might have expected for a somewhat touristy area. My son conned me into buying him a Taschen volume of Michelangelo drawings and studies; he’s been copying them into his notebooks for days now.
We loved Joshua Tree (park and city), and one highlight was the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum, a loose, sprawling collection of sculptures, installations, and buildings cobbled together out of the detritus of the twentieth century. Walking through the Museum is kind of like being on the disused set of a post-apocalyptic film, under the beautiful clear California sun filled sky. Cottontails and roadrunners hopped about as we wandered among Purifoy’s deconstructed constructions, sometimes apprehensive to enter or touch, before the sun and wind and arid sky itself reminded us that the whole tableau was naked, exposed, raw on the earth, open for contact.
Untitled (Mitusia) by Aleksandra Waliszewska, b. 1976
Biblioklept 