From Jan Bergh Eriksen’s Trolls and Their Relatives, illustrated by Per Aase. Dreyer Bok-Stravanger, Norway, 1983. My grandparents gave me the book, which they bought on a trip in Norway. I think I was 9 when they gave it to me.
And here is “The Sermon,” Ch. IX of Herman Melville’s great novel Moby-Dick, in which Father Mapple gives us the tale of Jonah—
There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women’s shoes, and all was quiet again, and every eye on the preacher.
He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.
This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog—in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy—
"The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom,
While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
And lift me deepening down to doom.
"I saw the opening maw of hell,
With endless pains and sorrows there;
Which none but they that feel can tell—
Oh, I was plunging to despair.
"In black distress, I called my God,
When I could scarce believe him mine,
He bowed his ear to my complaints—
No more the whale did me confine.
"With speed he flew to my relief,
As on a radiant dolphin borne;
Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God.
"My song for ever shall record
That terrible, that joyful hour;
I give the glory to my God,
His all the mercy and the power."
Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper page, said: “Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah—’And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah.'”
“Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters—four yarns—is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah’s deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God—never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed—which he found a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do—remember that—and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists. Continue reading “Jonah — Albert Pinkham Ryder”
From The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales told by Virginia Hamilton.
From Washington University’s marvelous Modern Literature Collection YouTube channel.
I swung by my favorite used bookstore this afternoon; it’s right near the grocery store and I needed to pick up some mint and some ricotta. I was hoping to pick up Elena Ferrante’s novel My Brilliant Friend at the bookstore. I started the audiobook of My Brilliant Friend today, after finishing the audiobook of Adrian Jones Pearson’s novel Cow Country this weekend. (Full review of Cow Country forthcoming but a real quick review: great performance/reading of a very strange book which I enjoyed very much, but which I also suspect will have very limited appeal. Cow cult classic to come). But so anyway, I’m really digging the Ferrante, and decided I wanted to obtain a physical copy to reread passages (and maybe share some on this blog). My store had several copies of four of Ferrante’s novels–but no Friend. While scanning the F section, my eye alighted (alit?) on a strange-looking hardback spine—Warren Fine’s Their Family. I turned it around and the cover…well, I knew I was gonna leave with it. Knopf, 1972—a few years before Gordon Lish was to become editor there, sure, but interesting bona fides I suppose. Fine does not seem to be beloved by anyone on the internet, and his books seem to have failed to go into second printings of any kind. The Fs are near the Es, and I glanced over the works of Mr. Stanley Elkin, who has his own section there, somehow. I finally broke through the second chapter of his novel The Franchiser this weekend (it’s all unattributed dialog, that chapter, sorta like Gaddis’s JR); I’m really digging The Franchiser now that I’ve tuned into the voice. (It also helps to not try reading it exclusively at night after too many bourbons or wines). Again, the spine of the novel looked interesting so I flipped The Dick Gibson Show around and, again, I knew I was gonna leave with it. Henri Michaux’s Miserable Miracle I found in the “Drugs” section—which I was not perusing (because I am no longer 19)—well I guess I was perusing it, but that’s only because it happens to be right next to this particular bookshop’s collection of Black Sparrow Press titles, which I always scan over. Anyway, the Michaux’s Miserable Miracle was turned face out; NYRB titles always deserve a quick scan, and the cover reminded me of a Cy Twombly painting. Flicking through it revealed a strange structure, full of marginal side notes and doodles and diagrams and drawings. And oh, it’s about a mescaline trip, I think. You can actually read it here, but this version is missing all the drawings and sidenotes.
Oh, and so then I forgot to go pick up the ricotta and the mint.
Andersen’s Fairy Tales translated by E.V. Lucas and H.B. Paull. Illustrations by Arthur Syzk. First edition cloth-bound hardback by Grosset & Dunlop, 1945. No designer credited, but the cover illustration is by Syzk. This was a gift from a former student.
Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi. English translation by Anjali Singh. First Pantheon paperback printing, 2009. Cover image by Satrapi; cover design credited to Brian Barth. I reviewed Plums some years back.
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrera. English translation by Lisa Dillman. 2016 paperback by And Other Stories. Cover design by Hannah Naughton from an image credited to iivangm. I wrote a bit about Bodies here; full review next month closer to its publish date.
I finished Herrera’s novella The Transmigration of Bodies a few days before Prince died. The book’s neon purple cover seemed to glare at me from my coffee table when I returned home on the afternoon of April 21, 2016, stunned—yes, stunned is the right word—at learning of the death of one of my heroes. Not just stunned—but stunned at how stunned I was, how sad I felt, how awful and sick Prince’s unexpected, uncalled for, fucking cosmically unjust death was and is. —Wait, I didn’t sign on for this, you protest, eh, dear reader? —No, I didn’t ask for another remembrance or whatever this is, especially not from some blog dude who never knew the guy; look, Biblioklept, the internet’s seams are burstin’ with other, more interesting folks’ thoughts and memories on Prince, you don’t need to—Well I know but I need to. I loved Prince—I loved his music, sure, 1999 and Purple Rain in particular, every song of those records grooved into my mental ear, I can call them up at will—but I loved Prince as an artist, as the Artist, as an aesthetic—which is what I think we, the Big We, all mourn when we mourn Prince. I could go through litany of personal anecdotes about Prince—tell you in detail about first seeing the video for “When Doves Cry” as a child and just totally losing my shit; I could tell you about buying the Batman soundtrack on tape (one of my first album purchases); I could tell you about the summer and fall of 1991, when I was an impressionable twelve years strong, when MTV dared to air Prince’s video for “Gett Off”—I could tell you about how that video accelerated my puberty (I see you plug your ears, reader); I could tell you about discovering that Prince and I shared the same birthday (we are Gemini!) and I could tell you that I always thought about Prince on our birthday, even after I learned that he didn’t celebrate his birthday; I could tell you that my high school band made an album and we named it Prince (it sounded nothing like Prince; nothing sounded like Prince); I could tell you about the year 1999, when I was a junior in college, and how we wore the apocalyptic vinyl thin; I could tell you about djing at a small coffee shop and playing “I Would Die 4 U” five times in one night because I fucking love that song; I could tell you about pulling over the car, late at night, to cry while I listened to “Purple Rain”; I could tell you about dancing to Prince songs at my wedding, at other weddings; I could tell you about how sad I now feel that I never got to go to a Prince concert but how happy I am that I got to see a few on TV, got to see him play and dance and sing; I could tell you I could tell you I could tell you…but I won’t tell you. Maybe you know—maybe you have your own details, your own I could tell yous (forgive me my rhetorical conceits; sometimes it seems that they are all that licenses me to write)—I think you know, I think you have your own I could tell yous. Prince was a fucking genius and he shared that with us (sometimes he shared his genius with us by withholding it from us). Prince was his own genre, his own aesthetic, his own art. How wonderful to have lived on the planet at the same time that he did.
Biblioklept 