Category: Art

Books acquired, almost for their covers alone, 4.25.2016 (Elkin, Fine, Michaux)

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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.

Three (Purple) Books

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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.

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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.

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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.

Illustration for Oscar Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul” — James Hill

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James Hill’s illustration for “The Fisherman and His Soul” by Oscar Wilde. From The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde, Heritage Press, 1968. 

“The Fisherman and His Soul”

by

Oscar Wilde

Every evening the young Fisherman went out upon the sea, and threw his nets into the water.

When the wind blew from the land he caught nothing, or but little at best, for it was a bitter and black-winged wind, and rough waves rose up to meet it.  But when the wind blew to the shore, the fish came in from the deep, and swam into the meshes of his nets, and he took them to the market-place and sold them.

Every evening he went out upon the sea, and one evening the net was so heavy that hardly could he draw it into the boat.  And he laughed, and said to himself, ‘Surely I have caught all the fish that swim, or snared some dull monster that will be a marvel to men, or some thing of horror that the great Queen will desire,’ and putting forth all his strength, he tugged at the coarse ropes till, like lines of blue enamel round a vase of bronze, the long veins rose up on his arms.  He tugged at the thin ropes, and nearer and nearer came the circle of flat corks, and the net rose at last to the top of the water.

But no fish at all was in it, nor any monster or thing of horror, but only a little Mermaid lying fast asleep.

Her hair was as a wet fleece of gold, and each separate hair as a thread of fine gold in a cup of glass.  Her body was as white ivory, and her tail was of silver and pearl.  Silver and pearl was her tail, and the green weeds of the sea coiled round it; and like sea-shells were her ears, and her lips were like sea-coral.  The cold waves dashed over her cold breasts, and the salt glistened upon her eyelids.

So beautiful was she that when the young Fisherman saw her he was filled with wonder, and he put out his hand and drew the net close to him, and leaning over the side he clasped her in his arms.  And when he touched her, she gave a cry like a startled sea-gull, and woke, and looked at him in terror with her mauve-amethyst eyes, and struggled that she might escape.  But he held her tightly to him, and would not suffer her to depart.

And when she saw that she could in no way escape from him, she began to weep, and said, ‘I pray thee let me go, for I am the only daughter of a King, and my father is aged and alone.’

But the young Fisherman answered, ‘I will not let thee go save thou makest me a promise that whenever I call thee, thou wilt come and sing to me, for the fish delight to listen to the song of the Sea-folk, and so shall my nets be full.’

‘Wilt thou in very truth let me go, if I promise thee this?’ cried the Mermaid.

‘In very truth I will let thee go,’ said the young Fisherman.

So she made him the promise he desired, and sware it by the oath of the Sea-folk.  And he loosened his arms from about her, and she sank down into the water, trembling with a strange fear.

Read the rest of Wilde’s “The Fisherman and His Soul” at Project Gutenberg.

Three Books

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Mitsou by Balthus. Preface by Rainer Maria Rilke (English translation by Richard Miller).  Small first edition hardback published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1984. Design credited to Peter Oldenburg; the cover illustration is by Balthus. Mitsou is Balthus’s story of loving (and losing) his titular pet cat. He was thirteen when he composed the story in 40 ink drawings (the drawings resemble woodblock prints, but aren’t). He gave the illustrations to his mother’s lover, Rainer Maria Rilke, who got them published. My wife gave me this book as a gift before we were married, and I love it. It’s sad.

Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston. First edition hardback by J.B. Lippincott, 1939. No illustrator or designer credited, by my edition is missing the original jacket. A retelling of the Exodus story.

 Man after Man by Dougal Dixon with illustrations by Philip Hood. First edition hardback from St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Book design by Ben Cracknell; cover art by Philip Hood. It’s Hood’s illustrations that make Dixon’s “future anthropology” of the human race so fascinating. A discursive sci-fi novel of sorts, posing as a textbook.