Category: book acquired

Rainer J. Hanshe’s Dionysos Speed (Book acquired, 4 March 2024)

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Rainer J. Hanshe’s Dionysos Speed is out next month from Contra Mundum. Their description:

As the digitization of every aspect of existence grows more pervasive and absolute, from the monitoring of thought to the tracking even of genitals, the central nervous system of the human body has been completely rewired. In the mapping of space-time, the species has moved into a state of total possession, of the enslavement of its drives, imagination, and will. Through this virtualization of life, the society of the spectacle has reached a point of unparalleled monstrosity, with the simulacrum usurping reality itself. The species is divided between the digitalists who see the technologization of the human as its natural evolutionary development, and those who stand against them.

At this epochal crux, an enigmatic faction of anonymous figures engages in coordinated global poetic acts of destruction and creation, ludic and radical capers, dismantling machines of control and surveillance. The society of the spectacle is thereby short-circuited, scrambled, cut-up via skirmishes, détournements, and other subversive acts of havoc wreaking, interruption, and sabotage. Can these dice throws overturn all the mediums of control and enslavement? As time grows more and more constricted, the serendipities and transfigurations of human life suffer swift evisceration. In the midst of this, the anonymous clowns of revolt seek to resurrect the moments and marvels when great forces open up the boundless and the limitless, creating combustion engines of play so as to generate new hemispheres of possibility.

Written as a burst of epigrammatic sequences, like Molotov cocktails arriving from elsewhere, Dionysos Speed is a series of erupting geysers, comets flashing thru space and dispersing new forces. Akin to a Heraclitean fire machine, this book is an act meant to give birth once again to dissonant desire through the powers of the dice throw, a machine forged to release by way of its ludic freedom the vital forces of the cosmos.

Christine Brooke-Rose/Miguel de Unamuno (Books acquired, 23 Feb. 2024)

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Picked up Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1984 postmodern novel Amalgamemnon and the Grove Press collection of Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Unamuno the other day. Those three exemplary novels are Marquis of Lubria; Two Mothers; and Nothing Less Than a Man, in translation by Angel Flores. It’s an older edition; Grove Press’s contemporary copy offers the following:

In Two Mothers, the demonic will of a woman runs amok in a whirlwind of maternal power, and in The Marquis of Lumbria, another unforgettable heroine steers a violent course through the dense sea of tradition. By contrast, Nothing Less Than a Man, Unamuno’s most forceful piece of writing, focuses on a truly Nietzchean hero, a man who embodies human will deprived of spiritual strength.

And here’s a bit on Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon from Susie E. Hawkins’ essay “Innovation/History/Politics: Reading Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon” from the Spring 1991 issue of Contemporary Literature:

While the title signals possible mythic revisions of Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, such anticipations on the reader’s part prove to be utterly unfounded. To begin with, there is no “story” as such, there are no “characters,” no “plot,” no “conflict,” and certainly no “climax.” In addition, the fiction is cast entirely in the future and conditional tenses with a few imperatives and subjunctives thrown in. Although Amalgamemnon exhibits few remnants of a traditional narrative desire for unity, presence, psychological accuracy, closure, and so forth, it does do what most innovative writing should do: it challenges the audience in terms of accustomed modes of perception, interpretation, and reading strategies – in short, challenges readerly ideology. In part, this text enacts such a challenge by performing itself, by “being about” language, by being a performance. The text becomes a space in which a cacophony of voices, or discursive amplifications, or babble, or little stories – whichever term best suits — enact their own sounding.

Tomoé Hill’s Songs for Olympia (Book acquired, 16 Feb. 2024)

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So I started in on Tomoé Hill’s Songs for Olympia last night—poetic, critical, personal, strange in the right ways. Here’s publisher Sagging Meniscus’ blurb:

In the twilight of life, a black ribbon emerges from a frame and coils itself inside the mind of one of the great French chroniclers of the internal. Across the world, a young girl stares at an image in a book: a woman, naked but for slippers, jewels, and the same ribbon which so captivates the writer. At opposite poles of experience, one follows the ribbon as it winds its way round longings, regrets, and contemplations; the other, at the beginning of development and yet to discover the world, traces the ribbon with a finger, not realising how it will imprint itself upon her.

Years later, the girl—now woman—encounters the ribbon face to face and on the page. Manet’s Olympia and the words of Michel Leiris come together, and an imaginary conversation ensues. It will be a collision and collaboration of sensorial memories and observations on everything from desire and illness to writing and grief. These frames are used to examine both interlocutors; simultaneously, a frame of another sort is removed from Olympia and her artistic kin. Everything from her flowers, Louise Bourgeois’s Sainte Sébastienne, and Francis Bacon’s Henrietta Moraes are reimagined and given new regard.

Songs for Olympia, written in the form of a response to Michel Leiris’s The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat, itself a highly personal response to Manet’s painting, is an ode to the both the ribbon and the memory: what leads us to constantly rediscover ourselves and a world so easily assumed as viewed through a single frame.

Patrick Langley’s The Variations (Book acquired, early Feb. 2024)

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Patrick Langley’s novel The Variations is new from NYRB. Their blurb:

Selda Heddle, a famously reclusive composer, is found dead in a snowy field near her Cornish home. She was educated at Agnes’s Hospice for Acoustically Gifted Children, which for centuries has offered its young wards a grounding in the gift—an inherited ability to tune into the voices and sounds of the past.

When she dies, Selda’s gift passes down to her grandson Wolf, who must make sense of her legacy, and learn to live with the newly unleashed voices in his head. Ambitious and exhilarating, The Variations is a novel of startling originality about music and the difficulty—or impossibility—of living with the past.

Red Pyramid, Blue Lard | Two from Vladimir Sorokin (Books acquired 5 Feb. 2024)

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Last week I got physical copies of two forthcoming Vladimir Sorokin books, both translated by Max Lawton and both published by NYRB.

Sorokin’s 1999 novel Blue Lard is one of the strangest and most daring books I’ve ever read—simultaneously compelling and repulsive, confounding and rewarding, a novel that twists from scenario to scenario, occasionally looking back at its reader to holler, Hey, catch up! Its English-language translator Max Lawton was kind enough to share his manuscript for Blue Lard with me during a long and enjoyable interview we undertook in the summer of 2022 (around the time of the publication of his translation of Sorokin’s 2014 novel Telluria). While Max was, on one hand, trying to help me better understand Sorokin in context by sharing Blue Lard with me, on the other, I think he was mostly trying to share a really fucking great book with someone who might like it—which is the kind of love one could only hope for from a translator. From our first interview:

BIBLIOKLEPT: Blue Lard might benefit from a brief introduction, so I’ll offer my unasked-for services: “This shit is wild. Just go for it. Don’t try to make it do what you think a novel should be doing. Just go with it.”

ML: BLUE LARD is about that state of confusion—ontological and linguistic—as it unfurls. To introduce the text beyond something like your pithy statement above might be a disservice to the book. The reader should be confused and it should hurt—then feel fucking good ….when reading Sorokin, we’re fucking nostrils with forked dicks (or—getting our nostrils fucked by the same).

The book’s real introduction is the Nietzsche quote at the beginning.

Does FINNEGANS WAKE need an introduction? Is one even possible?

I loved BLUE LARD when I first read it precisely because I had no point of reference for understanding it

Hey but so well guess what! I have another interview with Max on deck! Here’s a bit of a teaser from that interview, again on Blue Lard:

Like TELLURIA, BLUE LARD is all about textures: literary, historical, ideological… However, unlike TELLURIA, BLUE LARD has a telos to it—an endpoint. I am firmly of the belief that BLUE LARD is Vladimir’s best novel. He had taken a long break from prose (about 7 years) before writing it, so this text simply burst forth from him and ended up as a neat showcase of all of his aesthetic preoccupations, but lorded over by an edifice that has proportions none too short of classically harmonious. What should readers expect… hmm.. the first section is rather challenging. One needs to surf its wave and not expect full comprehension. There is a glossary of Chinese words and neologisms at the back of the book, but I’m not sure it’s worth consulting in the expectation of further understanding. The middle section of the book—characterized by a faux-archaic language—is also terribly strange, but with fewer neologisms. The last section of the book—an alternate iteration of Post-WWII Europe—is formally very smooth, but insanely transgressive in terms of content. And I haven’t even mentioned the rather unorthodox parodies of Russian classics in the novel’s first section! What should readers expect? In short: to have their minds blown!

Red Pyramid offers an overview of Sorokin’s development as a writer, collecting stories composed between 1981 and 2018. From Will Self’s introduction:

Fundamental to the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin is not the pornography his detractors accuse him of producing but the paradoxical topologies his carefully spun tales evoke. Each of his stories is a sort of mutant Möbius strip, in which to follow the narrative is to experience the real and the fantastic as simultaneously opposed and coextensive. There comes a point—it may be early on; it may be comparatively late-when the strictures of orthodox plotting seem to overwhelm its author, such that idiom and plain speech converge even as events spiral ineluctably out of human control.

And here’s Joy Williams’ blurb:

Extravagant, remarkable, politically and socially devastating, the tone and style without precedent, the parables merciless, the nightmares beyond outrance, the violence unparalleled, these stories, translated with fearless agility by Max Lawton, showcase the great novelist Vladimir Sorokin at his divinely disturbing best.

(Williams deploys the word outrance here, which was new to me, and I think it fits.)

Elberto Muller’s Graffiti on Low or No Dollars (Book subtitled “An alternative guide to aesthetics and grifting throughout the United States and Canada,” Feb. 2024)

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Digging Elberto Muller’s Graffiti on Low or No Dollars. Mast Books’ blurb—

Muller cut his teeth riding freights across America, doing graffiti, creating zines, molding three-dimensional graffiti mosaics and has recently finished his novel: Graffiti on Low or No Dollars. His Huck Finn approach and penchant for freedom from an ordinary life is translated through his art. The work is incredibly honest and reminiscent of Daniel Johnston at times with some of the subjects being tackled a painful reflection of our society today. In the same breath his art can make you smile with all of its crassness and glory.

Blog about some recent books acquired, other stuff

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I read Will Oldham’s book On Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy almost a decade and it therefore doesn’t belong in a stack of recent acquisitions, but it’s there—I pulled it off the shelf last week and thumbed through it in anticipation of seeing Oldham play this past Thursday. I even brought the book to the venue, thinking maybe I’d ask him to sign it. But I left it in the car and simply enjoyed Oldham and his pal run through a set of covers and originals. His voice is more resonant, richer, bolder than the last time I saw him live, and even if I didn’t know half of the songs, I enjoyed the gentle chill music on a cold Florida Thursday night. (I suspect Oldham’s short “tour” of Florida is an excuse to get out of the midwestern cold—although he complained it was “fuckin’ cold” here.)

Other books in the stack above are a composite of three or maybe four book store visits. The most memorable visit was to Aeon Bookstore in the Lower East Side of NYC.

Aeon is a small, cozy shop, well-curated with art, philosophy, anthropology, and literature books, as well as an excellent selection of jazz records. The clerk let me handle some first editions of Williams Burroughs and Gaddis, as well as Ishmael Reed and others.

I resisted The Recognitions and The Hearing Trumpet and picked up first editions of Donald Barthelme’s City Life and Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star.

Over two or possibly three visits to my local bookshop over the last month, I picked up copies of Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man, Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, and Carole Maso’s Ava. I also picked up Anthony Kerrigan’s translation of Miguel de Unamuno stories, Abel Sanchez and Other Stories.

I also snagged an advance copy of Percival Everett’s James. Blurb:

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

 

Debbie Urbanski’s After World (Book acquired, Dec. 2023)

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I plan to start into Debbie Urbanski’s debut After World this weekend. Here’s publisher Simon & Schuster’s blurb:

Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.

[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.

As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.

Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses/Max Blecher’s Transparent Body (Books acquired 11 Jan. 2024)

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I was quite excited earlier this week to get a pair of books in new English translations from the Czech publisher Twisted Spoon Press.

I started in on Gerhard Rühm’s Cake & Prostheses (translated from the German by Alexander Booth) late last night and kept reading and reading, greedily consuming the surreal, poetic “mini dramas” as thought experiments played out in my head. Here’s an early example of one:

practiced biblical saying

catechist : love thy neighbor as thyself.

exegete: i hate myself! (gives the former a hard hook to the chin tho crumples him to the floor).

I’ll admit I didn’t know of Gerhard Rühm, but I’m enjoying Cake & Prostheses and hope to muster a review in the next week or so. Here’s Twisted Spoon’s blurb:

An inveterate experimenter with image and text and music, Gerhard Rühm is truly one of the major figures of the postwar European avant-garde. Yet reprehensibly little of his work has appeared in English. This edition brings together a selection of his work spanning the past seven decades, displaying a wide thematic range (as he has remarked, “there is nothing that cannot become part of one’s poetic universe”) and ingenious combinations of music, pornography, banality, humor, and mythology. The first section comprises “mini dramas,” the text often combined with images and musical notation to create sensorial episodes, the expression of a singular aesthetic perception. The second section is a wry deconstruction of Grillparzer’s play Hero and Leander that juxtaposes original passages with images from a swimming manual and with a more contemporary erotic retelling of the mythological tale. The final section presents 24 short prose pieces: 12 from the early 1950s and 12 from the past few years.

I had heard of the surrealist Romanian poet Max Blecher, but am still largely unfamiliar with his work. Twisted Spoon is publishing his 1934 collection Transparent Body along with some, uh, other texts, in a translation by Gabi Reigh. Blurb:

Blecher’s very first book, the poetry collection Transparent Body, appeared in 1934, in a limited edition for bibliophiles. Yet general recognition as one of the most inventive European writers of his day came only with the publication of two of his three “novels” a few years later. And then he died, at the age of twenty-eight. But since 1930 Blecher had been publishing his poetry, short prose, essays, critiques, and other texts in the leading Romanian periodicals, some even appearing in important French publications, such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. In addition, the past half century has seen the posthumous first publication of many texts in a variety of Romanian editions.

Transparent Body & Other Texts brings together Blecher’s entire output of poetry and short prose, from the earliest texts published during his lifetime to those appearing for the first time only recently. They range from stories in the vein of his fantastical, hallucinatory longer work to aphorisms, reportage, and notebook fragments. The volume also includes a selection of his correspondence with such major figures of Romanian interwar modernism as Geo Bogza, Ilarie Voronca, and Saşa Pană to give a fuller picture of Blecher’s engagement with the avant-garde and literary life even as his health was progressively deteriorating over the course of the 1930s.

Have a weird Xmas (Blog about books acquired in Dec. 2023)

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Maybe an hour ago, browsing in a used bookstore, I opened a worn and some might say dirty copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass. The very first page of this old book was inscribed with the following:

Have a weird Xmas ’90

                 John

This copy of Iain Banks’s 1985 novel Walking on Glass—a 1990 Abacus trade paperback printed in London, the embossing on its cover yellowed by wear on its cover and back near its spine—this particular copy was addressed to no named person, its inscription signed by a name so anonymous we apply it to unidentified cadavers and prostitute clients.

I take myself to be the unidentified person being addressed by the identified generic John, wishing me weird wellness, a ghost of Xmas past.

Earlier this year I made the tragic mistake of not pulling the trigger on first-edition hardbacks of Banks’s first two novels, The Wasp Factory and Walking on Glass. I hadn’t read Banks at that point, and my familiarity with his work came almost entirely of his proximity to the J.G. Ballard titles I routinely perused. I ended up reading and loving The Wasp Factory this summer (reviewed it here), and the blurb on the back of Walking on Glass promising further perversions intrigues me too, of course.

Today, I also came across a first-edition, first-U.S.-printing of Roberto Bolaño’s opus 2666. It was marked at a third of the original cover price and has never been read. I could not leave it behind.

I actually traded some books in today, including my trade paperback of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things. I had recently reread the novel in anticipation of Yorgos Lanthimos’ film adaptation, and, during that reread, oddly came across an inexpensive pristine first edition of the novel while browsing for something else. Maybe a week or two after finding that hardback of Poor Things, I found a hardback first edition of Gray’s 1990 novel Something Leather. Unlike Poor Things, which features lots of art and typographic adventures, Something Leather is pretty standard (apart from a few chapter heading illustrations)—but it does have a lovely cover under its cover:

Maybe a week after that, I was browsing with my son, who wanted a collection of Harlan Ellison short stories. I was shocked that we couldn’t find any—I had given away two mass market collections to some students maybe seven or eight years ago in a purge. Apparently a lot of it is out of print, but a “greatest hits” collection is coming out this spring. Anyway, I ended up finding hardback editions of Robert Coover’s Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Denis Johnson’s novel Fiskadaro. 

The Johnson is a British edition, Chatto & Windus, and while it’s hardly my favorite novel by him, I found its form too attractive to pass (and it was, like, cheaper than a beer in the same bookstore). I also picked up a book by Lewis Nordan, a slim collection of short stories called Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. I picked it up because I love those horrid lovely wonderful gross stylish Vintage Contemporaries editions, and then acquired it based on the blurb, which compared it to Flannery O’Connor, Ellen Gilchrist, and Harry Crews. Here it is next to my Vintage Contemporaries copy of Denis Johnson’ Fiskadaro:

I hope you have a weird Xmas. And I hope that John, wherever they are, has a weird Xmas too.

Robert S. Stickley’s A Bended Circuity (Book acquired, 27 Nov. 2023)

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After hearing some positive murmurs praising its erudite maximalism and general zaniness, I caved and bought a copy of Robert S. Stickley’s 2020 novel A Bended Circuity. My copy arrived with a ballpoint flower and the front page signed with a scrawled “R S S.” I can’t really find anything about Big Box Publishing, the purported publisher of this edition, but I do know that the copies of the European reprint at Corona Samizdat sold out pretty quickly. (They have a second printing under way).

Here is the copy from the back of my edition:

There are screams in the night. Interlopers are afoot, have taken hold. Wildfires are burning the countryside and the gentry are running for cover. Fortunes are at stake. The South will not sleep.

A Bended Circuity opens on a midsummer’s afternoon with preparations being made for a soirée at the glamorous Hobcaw Barony. But not all goes according to plan. We soon find Charleston abruptly aroused from her slumber by the playful first smites of an unknown enemy waging a heinous prank war.

Calling his confederates to arms, one Bradley Pinçnit — heir to Marigold Manor and writer for revived southern mouthpiece, The Mercury — afternoon with preparations being made for a soirée at the glamorous Hobcaw Barony. But not all goes according to plan. We soon find Charleston abruptly aroused from her slumber by the playful first smites of an unknown enemy waging a heinous prank war.

Calling his confederates to arms, one Bradley Pinçnit — heir to Marigold Manor and writer for revived southern mouthpiece, The Mercury – organizes and helms a “Junto of Condign Men” then drives them to action. Offsetting her husband’s violent movement is Gabuirdine Lee, a housewife struggling to find her voice as the din of war encompasses her.

Ciphered into everything — the new roadways, the scars of the people, the tracts torn through ravaged plantations — there emerges one clear symbol: The Red Radical. Following the hints offered up by this cryptic motif, an army is mustered and pointed toward north so as to seek justice for the pernicious acts being committed upon an old way of life. But the army will first have to get out of its own way if it is to stand a chance of making it out of the South.

Read the W.A.S.T.E. Mailing List review of A Bended Circuity if you like.

 

Blog about some books acquired, mid-November 2023

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Top to bottom:

I am a huge fan of Atticus Lish’s 2014 novel Preparation for the Next Life, and I’m a fan of indie Tyrant Books, but I’d never heard of his 2011 collection of doodles, Life Is With People. The book wasn’t even shelved properly yet, and I was initially attracted to its strange pink and black cover. It turned out the bookseller who checked out my purchases that day (the Lish and some books for my son) had brought the Lish in; his interest in it was in Lish-as-son-of-Lish. We chatted about Barry Hannah a bit and I recommended he read Hob Broun, which I recommend to anyone who expresses admiration for Hannah or Father Lish.

Here is one of the cartoons from Lish’s collection:

This particular cartoon is probably my favorite in the collection, as I find it the most relatable.

In a lovely bit of serendipity, I happened upon a first edition hardback copy of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things. The previous day, I had pulled out my paperback copy to reread it in anticipation of Yorgos Lanthimos film adaptation. I ended up reading the old paperback copy, already somewhat battered, highlighted (not mine!) and dogeared (mine…), and had initially planned to trade it in toward future hardback editions of books I already own, which seems like my mission these days, but my son expressed his desire to read the novel, so it’s his I guess.

The book sans jacket is gorgeous too:

I finished Poor Things before Thanksgiving, and should have Something on it on this blog in the next week or so.

I’ve brought my son up a few times in my riff—most of these November bookstore trips were in his company; twice because he showed his art at one of the bookstore’s location, and once (the most recent, the Gray acquisition) because he’s reading like a maniac. I’m frankly jealous of how he’s reading right now—fast, somewhat indiscriminately, but with designs on reading what he calls “You know, the classics.” Initially he was reading old mass market paperbacks of mine — Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, John Gardner — but he wanted his own copies (“I need to start my own little library, right?”).

I couldn’t pass up the first editions of Gass’s Middle C or Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations. I knew that I no longer had a paperback copy of The Gold Bug Variations, having loaned it to a colleague years ago who moved to Norway in the middle of a semester, leaving her history department scrambling to cover classes. Maybe it’s in Norway. I did think I had a copy of Gass’s Middle C, but I must’ve checked it out from the library or lost it, or maybe it’s shelved behind other books. I’ll shelve it by The Tunnel, a reminder that I need to take one more shot at that beast. And if that one shot is not sufficient, another shot I will take…

Thurston Moore’s memoir Sonic Life (Book acquired, 27 Oct. 2023)

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I picked up Thurston Moore’s mammoth memoir Sonic Life yesterday afternoon, started reading it, and kept reading it. I was a huge Sonic Youth fan in my youth, introduced to the band in 1991 via a decent soundtrack to a mediocre film called Pump Up the Volume. Throughout the nineties and early 2000s, I bought all the Sonic Youth records I could get my hands on, and repeatedly watched their 1991 tour diary film The Year Punk Broke more times than I could count. Thurston Moore was a goofy avant hipster, ebullient, verbose, annoying, and endearing, the nexus of a band that were themselves a nexus of nascent bands and artists. (In his chapter on Sonic Youth in his 2001 history Our Band Could Be Your Life, Michael Azerrad repeatedly argues that DGC Records signed the band so that they would reel in the indie groups that majors wanted so badly after Nirvana et al. exploded.) When Thurston Moore and his wife and bandmate Kim Gordon separated in 2011, essentially ending Sonic Youth, I recall being strangely emotionally impacted, like my punk god parents were getting divorced. While I didn’t expect or want dishy answers from Gordon’s 2015 memoir Girl in a Band, I was still disappointed in the book, finding it cold and ultimately dull. So far, Moore’s memoir is richer, denser, sprawls more. It’s written in an electric rapid fire style loaded with phrasing that wouldn’t be out of place in the lyrics of an old SY track. I ended up reading the first 150 or so of the pages last night and this morning, soaking up Moore’s detailed account of the end of the New York punk rock scene and the subsequent birth of  No Wave. Moore’s intense love of music is what comes through most strongly. Chapter titles take their names from song titles or song lyrics, and I’ve started to put together a playlist, which I’ll add to as I read:

 

Gerald Murnane’s Inland (Beautiful book acquired some time last week, like maybe 11 Oct. 2023)

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I love the new And Other Stories covers that just start, and I’m psyched on their edition of Gerald Murnane’s 1988 novel Inland. Their blurb:

Inland is a work which gathers in emotional power as it moves across the grasslands of its narrator’s imagination – from Szolnok County on the great plains of Hungary where a man writes in the library of his manor house, to the Institute of Prairie Studies in Tripp County, South Dakota, where the editor of the journal Hinterland receives his writing, to the narrator’s own native district in Melbourne County, between Moonee Ponds and the Merri, where he recalls the constant displacements of his childhood. ‘No thing in the world is one thing,’ he declares; ‘some places are many more than one place.’ These overlapping worlds are bound by recurring motifs – fish pond, fig-tree, child-woman, the colours white, red and green – and by deep feelings of intimacy and betrayal, which are brought to full expression as the book moves to its close.

My review closer to publication; in the meantime, read an excerpt.

Read one-time Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang on Inland back in 2013.

Books acquired, 13 Oct. 2023

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I couldn’t pass on a used copy of the second edition of Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion even though it ate up most of my trade credit. I used the first edition of the Companion when I reread Gravity’s Rainbow about eight years ago and then gave it to a friend I had been encouraging to read GR. He still hasn’t read it.

I also picked up a hardcover first edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and a pristine 1946 hardback edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ll probably trade in the Gabler edition of Ulysses I have, but I think I’m too sentimental to let go of the copy of The Road I read in the hospital over a few days when my daughter was born.

I’m a big fan of Vintage Contemporaries, but I’d never seen Terry McDonell’s California Bloodstock. I pulled it out because of its spine, and found the cover intriguing–it reminded me of these weird paintings that hang in a decrepit hotel in St. Augustine Beach that we stay at for a few nights every year. The blurb from H.S. Thompson didn’t hurt either.

 

I opened it to find that the novel is inscribed:

Anyone know Lou Schultz? Or what SMART might be?

Walter Kempowski’s An Ordinary Youth (Book acquired, 2 Oct. 2023)

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Walter Kempowski’s An Ordinary Youth gets its first published English translation thanks to Michael Lipkin. The book is new in print from NYRB. Their blurb—

An Ordinary Youth is a novel drawn directly from the author’s boyhood in Nazi Germany. Nine-year-old Walter’s family is moving house when the novel opens, but Walter’s main concerns are his tin soldiers and his older brother’s jazz records, his father’s fluctuating moods, and his mother’s ministrations and anxieties. While Walter is absorbed by his private life, the extraordinary accumulation of contemporary idioms that accompany his point of view—dialogue, song, literary quotations, commercials, and political slogans—tell a different story.  Through this echo chamber of voices, Kempowski shows a hugely turbulent and murderously intolerant nation racing toward disaster. An immediate bestseller when it was first published in Germany in 1971 (as Tadellöser & Wolff) and the best known of Kempowski’s novels in Germany, An Ordinary Youth is now available in English for the first time.

Portis’s Gringos, Essays on Pynchon, Elkin’s End (Books acquired, 29 Sept. 2023)

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So two of the three books I picked up today I’d read before, but I couldn’t pass on the editions.

I read Stanley Elkin’s The Living End last summer, checking a digital version out from the library. I wanted something very short and funny at the time, and it worked wonders. I couldn’t pass up this Warner Books edition with design by Gene Light featuring art by Don Ivan Punchatz. I have a few other Elkins in this series and I adore them, even if my eyes are fading to the point that mass market paperbacks cause me to squint.

I also picked up another book I’ve already read, a book I already own a copy of—Charles Portis’s last novel Gringos. But I didn’t own a first edition with this fun, silly cover.

On the last day of 2020, the year I read Gringos, I wrote:

Gringos was the last of Portis’s five novels. I read the other four greedily last year, and pulled them all out when he passed away in February. I started in on Gringos, casually, then just kept reading. Sweet and cynical, spiked with strange heroism, strange grace, and very, very funny, Gringos might just be my favorite Portis novel. But I’d have to read them all again to figure that out.

I also picked up Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, a 1976 collection that seems ahead of its time. From Scott Sanders’ essay “Pynchon’s Paranoid History”: