Art in London didn’t seem quite modern enough and I began to want to study in Paris where the Surrealists were in full cry. Surrealism is no longer considered modern today and almost every village rectory and girl’s school have surrealist pictures hanging on their walls. Even Buckingham Palace has a large reproduction of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in the throne room. Times do change indeed. The Royal Academy recently gave a retrospective expedition of Dada art and they decorated the gallery like a public lavatory. In my day people in London would have been shocked. Today the Lord Mayor opened the exhibition with a long speech about the twentieth-century masters and the Queen Mother hung a wreath of gladiola on a piece of sculpture called “Navel” by Hans Arp.
From Leonora Carrington’s 1976 novel The Hearing Trumpet.
Fish Stall (Detail), c. 1620 by Frans Snyders (1579–1657)
NYRB will have a new edition of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s 1976 novel The Hearing Trumpet out in early January of 2021. I started it this afternoon, and the first 20 or so pages seem to divert in style from the short stories I’ve read by her—definitely chock full of quirky imagery, but also relatively straightforward in their execution. At around the 20 page mark, though, the narrative dips into demented dreamland. Ali Smith’s blurb promises there’s more under the surface:
The Hearing Trumpet . . . reads on its parodic surface like an Agatha Christie domestic mystery, but one melted, dissolved by extreme heat into something unthinkably other, and reconstructed as the casebook of an alchemist. . . . It asks its readers to allow the dark, allow the wild and rethink how power works. It is a work of massive optimism. . . . One of the most original, joyful, satisfying, and quietly visionary novels of the twentieth century.
I also love the blurb from Luis Buñuel:
Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days.
Here’s NYRB’s blurb:
Leonora Carrington, painter, playwright, and novelist, was a surrealist trickster par excellence, and The Hearing Trumpet is the witty, celebratory key to her anarchic and allusive body of work. The novel begins in the bourgeois comfort of a residential corner of a Mexican city and ends with a man-made apocalypse that promises to usher in the earth’s rebirth. In between we are swept off to a most curious old-age home run by a self-improvement cult and drawn several centuries back in time with a cross-dressing Abbess who is on a quest to restore the Holy Grail to its rightful owner, the Goddess Venus. Guiding us is one of the most unexpected heroines in twentieth-century literature, a nonagenarian vegetarian named Marian Leatherby, who, as Olga Tokarczuk writes in her afterword, is “hard of hearing” but “full of life.”
The Tree, c.1938-40 by Thomas Hennell (1903-1945)
Fish Stall (Detail), c. 1620 by Frans Snyders (1579–1657)
…it all comes back, the old pleasant month-long Santy-Claus-store-window Christmas. It wasn’t so bad really, the commercial Christmas, a month of Christmas Eves, stores open every night, everyone feeling good and generous and spending money freely, handsome happy Americans making the cash registers jingle, the nice commercial carols, Holy Night, the soft-eyed pretty girls everywhere—
From Walker Percy’s 1971 dystopian speculative fiction novel Love in the Ruins. The narrator, Dr. Thomas More, a bit drunk, reflects back to the pre-revolutionary days of a commercial Christmas.
Do Electric Sheep Dream of Transgenic Flowers?, 2019 by Clive Smith (b. 1967)
Rauhnächte (Rough Nights), 2020 by Rosa Loy (b. 1958)
Fish Stall (Detail), c. 1620 by Frans Snyders (1579–1657)
December, 1953 by Paul Jacoulet (1896-1960)
Theory of Catastrophe, 2004 by Malcolm Morley (1931-2018)
“House: Some Instructions”
by
Grace Paley
If you have a house
you must think about it all the time
as you reside in the house so
it must be a home in your mind
you must ask yourself (wherever you are)
have I closed the front door
and the back door is often forgotten
not against thieves necessarily
but the wind oh if it blows
either door open then the heat
the heat you’ve carefully nurtured
with layers of dry hardwood
and a couple of opposing green
brought in to slow the fire
as well as the little pilot light
in the convenient gas backup
all of that care will be mocked because
you have not kept the house on your mind
but these may actually be among
the smallest concerns for instance
the house could be settling you may
notice the thin slanting line of light
above the doors you have to think about that
luckily you have been paying attention
the house’s dryness can be humidified
with vaporizers in each room and pots
of water on the woodstove should you leave
for the movies after dinner ask yourself
have I turned down the thermometer
and moved all wood paper away from the stove
the fiery result of excited distraction
could be too horrible to describe
now we should talk especially to Northerners
of the freezing of the pipe this can often
be prevented by pumping water continuously
through the baseboard heating system
allowing the faucet to drip drip continuously
day and night you must think about the drains
separately in fact you should have established
their essential contribution to the ordinary
kitchen and toilet life of the house
digging these drains deep into warm earth
if it hasn’t snowed by mid-December you
must cover them with hay sometimes rugs
and blankets have been used do not be
troubled by their monetary value
as this is a regionally appreciated emergency
you may tell your friends to consider
your house as their own that is
if they do not wear outdoor shoes
when thumping across the gleam of their poly-
urethaned floors they must bring socks or slippers
to your house as well you must think
of your house when you’re in it and
when you’re visiting the superior cabinets
and closets of others when you approach
your house in the late afternoon
in any weather green or white you will catch
sight first of its new aluminum snow-resistant
roof and the reflections in the cracked windows
its need in the last twenty-five years for paint
which has created a lovely design
in russet pink and brown the colors of un-
intentioned neglect you must admire the way it does not
(because of someone’s excellent decision
sixty years ago) stand on the high ridge deforming
the green profile of the hill but rests in the modesty
of late middle age under the brow of the hill with
its back to the dark hemlock forest looking steadily
out for miles toward the cloud refiguring meadows and
mountains of the next state coming up the road
by foot or auto the house can be addressed personally
House! in the excitement of work and travel to
other people’s houses with their interesting improvements
we thought of you often and spoke of your coziness
in winter your courage in wind and fire your small
airy rooms in humid summer how you nestle in spring
into the leaves and flowers of the hawthorn and the sage green
leaves of the Russian olive tree House! you were not forgotten
Interval, 1975 by Zsuzsi Roboz (1939–2012)
Fish Stall (Detail), c. 1620 by Frans Snyders (1579–1657)
Oof she’s a big boy. Jim Gauer’s 2016 novel Novel Explosives showed up at Biblioklept World Headquarters on Sunday (a rare day for acquisitions). The novel has been praised by folks like Michael Silverblatt, Steven Moore, and Matt Bucher, and has been compared to the work of Pynchon, Bolaño, and Gaddis. It’s also pretty damn long. Anyway, Novel Explosives is being reprinted by indie Zerogram; their blurb:
IT’S THE WEEK AFTER EASTER, APRIL 13-20, AN OTHERWISE ORDINARY WEEK IN 2009… LATE in the week, a man wakes up in Guanajuato, Mexico, with his knowledge intact, but with no sense of who he is, or how he came to Guanajuato. EARLY in the week, a venture capital investor sits at his desk in Santa Monica, California, attempting to complete his business memoirs, but troubled by the fact that a recent deal appears to be some sort of money-laundering scheme. IN THE MIDDLE of the week, two gunmen for the Juárez Drug Cartel arrive at a small motel in El Paso, assigned to retrieve a suitcase full of currency, and eliminate the man who brought it to El Paso. THUS BEGINS the three-stranded narrative of Novel Explosives, a search for identity that travels through the worlds of venture capital finance, high-tech money-laundering methods, and the Juárez drug wars, a joyride of a novel with only one catch: the deeper into the book you go, the more dangerous it gets.
Biblioklept 
