Cats in the Valley, by Alice Rahon (1904–1987)
Last Friday afternoon I stalked about my favorite used bookstore for a spare hours, first looking for a copy of Joseph Tabbi’s literary biography of William Gaddis, Nobody Grew but the Business. I’ve been reading snatches of Tabbi’s Gaddis bio on Google Books (yergh) and I’d like to like really read it. I didn’t find it in the biography section, and then I didn’t find it in the literary criticism fiction, but I did find a copy of Leslie Fiedler’s No! In Thunder. I’ve been wanting to read this for awhile. In the absence of a blurb, let me cite the original Kirkus review:
His title is from a letter of Melville’s to Hawthorne and Fiedler has adapted it to emphasize his belief that to fulfill its essential moral obligation successful art must perform a negative critical function. It is, in fact, due to its ultimate No! that serious fiction has been, initially, unacceptable. In the section on The Artist there are essays on Dante, illusion in Shakespeare, Whitman, the moral duality in Stevenson, Peretz, Kafka and Malamud, Faulkner — the Highbrow’s Lowbrow, Robert Penn Warren and Cesare Pavese.
I also picked up a copy of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s seminal 1921 utopian/dystopian novel We, which I haven’t read in like 20 something years. I ended up getting Clarence Brown’s 1993 translation, which seemed a bit zippier zappier and weirder than the others I browsed (I skimmed the first few chapters of each). I also just like those Penguin Classic editions, as well as the cover photograph by Georgii Petrusov.
I’ll pick through the Fiedler slowly, but We might be the next novel I read after I finish up Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which I’m really digging.
Hideout, 2014 by Michèle Fenniak
My review of Paul Kirchner’s latest collection Hieronymus & Bosch is up at The Comics Journal. Here is the first paragraph of the review:
Paul Kirchner’s Hieronymus & Bosch collects over eighty comic strips that riff on the afterlife of a “shameless ne’er-do-well named Hieronymus” and his faithful wooden toy duck, Bosch. The hapless pair are trapped in Hell, the primary setting for most of the strips (although we do get a bit of heaven and earth thrown in here and there). Kirchner’s Hell is a paradise of goofy gags. The one-pagers in Hieronymus & Bosch cackle with burlesque energy, propelled by a simple plot: our hero Hieronymus tries to escape, fails, and tries again.
Steam Boiler with Bat, 1928 by Carl Grossberg (1894–1940)
“David Swan”
by
Nathaniel Hawthorne
from Twice-Told Tales
We can be but partially acquainted even with the events which actually influence our course through life and our final destiny. There are innumerable other events, if such they may be called, which come close upon us, yet pass away without actual results or even betraying their near approach by the reflection of any light or shadow across our minds. Could we know all the vicissitudes of our fortunes, life would be too full of hope and fear, exultation or disappointment, to afford us a single hour of true serenity. This idea may be illustrated by a page from the secret history of David Swan.
We have nothing to do with David until we find him, at the age of twenty, on the high road from his native place to the city of Boston, where his uncle, a small dealer in the grocery line, was to take him behind the counter. Be it enough to say that he was a native of New Hampshire, born of respectable parents, and had received an ordinary school education with a classic finish by a year at Gilmanton Academy. After journeying on foot from sunrise till nearly noon of a summer’s day, his weariness and the increasing heat determined him to sit down in the first convenient shade and await the coming up of the stage-coach. As if planted on purpose for him, there soon appeared a little tuft of maples with a delightful recess in the midst, and such a fresh bubbling spring that it seemed never to have sparkled for any wayfarer but David Swan. Virgin or not, he kissed it with his thirsty lips and then flung himself along the brink, pillowing his head upon some shirts and a pair of pantaloons tied up in a striped cotton handkerchief. The sunbeams could not reach him; the dust did not yet rise from the road after the heavy rain of yesterday, and his grassy lair suited the young man better than a bed of down. The spring murmured drowsily beside him; the branches waved dreamily across the blue sky overhead, and a deep sleep, perchance hiding dreams within its depths, fell upon David Swan. But we are to relate events which he did not dream of. Continue reading ““David Swan,” a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne”
Penumbra, 2017 by Lukifer Aurelius
In Search of Lost Time, 2012 by Xiao Guo Hui (b. 1969)
I neglected to do one of these dumb books acquired post for the books I got for xmas this year. I don’t really get a lot of books, believe it or not. One of my aunts gave me a gift certificate to Barnes & Noble. I used their (horrible, difficult-to-use) website to order three books:
Letters, Dreams & Other Writings by Remedios Varo (translated by Margaret Carson),
The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Four Novels by Christine Brooke-Rose, and
Evening in Paradise by Lucia Berlin.
I already wrote about these books a bit in a post on New Year’s Day. I’ve been trying to go through the Varo slowly, picking through a letter or dream a day or every other day. I started the “new” Berlin the other day, reading, or really rereading, the first track, “The Musical Vanity Boxes.” I had initially read the story in my copy of Homesick (Black Sparrow Press, 1991). You can read it here online, too. I still haven’t really done more than skim over the Brooke-Rose omnibus.
The most thoughtful book I received was from my wife’s parents, although really I guess it’s basically from my wife, who got it when she saw me slavering over it in a really cool bookstore on a recent trip to Asheville. It’s a first edition of The Ice-Shirt, signed by William T. Vollmann. This was the first Vollmann book I read, and although it might not be his best it remains my favorite.
My parents gave me a Dungeons & Dragons coffee table book called Art & Arcana that has been a fun nostalgia trip. I recovered it from my son—who it seems it really belongs to, I guess, long enough to photograph it—and this pic below of Jeff Easley’s cover art for Unearthed Arcana, which was included in advertisements for the book in like every comic book I remember buying during the mideighties. Art & Arcana is a fun visual history of D&D—from what I can tell anyway. It turns out that it’s the boy’s, not mine. 
Hematophagus, 2014 by Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967)
Exhibit One: I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE
The legs of a woman, raised and open as if ready to admit a lover, formed a curvilinear triumphal arch. The feet were decorated with spike-heeled, black leather pumps. This anatomical section, composed of pinkish wax dimpled at the knee, did not admit the possibility of the existence of a torso. A bristling pubic growth rose to form a kind of coat of arms above the circular proscenium it contained at either side but, although the hairs had been inserted one by one in order to achieve the maximal degree of verisimilitude, the overall effect was one of stunning artifice. The dark red and purple crenellations surrounding the vagina acted as a frame for a perfectly round hole through which the viewer glimpsed the moist, luxuriant landscape of the interior.
Here endlessly receded before one’s eyes a miniature but irresistible vista of semi-tropical forest where amazing fruits hung on the trees, while from the dappled and variegated chalices of enormous flowers the size of millstones, perfumes of such extraordinary potency that they had become visible to the eye exuded as soft, purple dew. Small, brilliant birds trilled silently on the branches; animals of exquisite shapes and colours, among them unicorns, giraffes and herbivorous lions, cropped up buttercups and daisies from the impossibly green grass; butterflies, dragonflies and innumerable jewelled insects fluttered, darted or scurried among the verdure so all was in constant movement and besides the very vegetation was continually transforming itself. As I watched, the pent-up force of the sweet juice within it burst open a persimmon and the split skin let out a flight of orange tawny singing birds. An elongated bud on the point of opening must have changed its mind for it turned into a strawberry instead of a waterlily. A fish sprang out of the river, became a white rabbit and bounded away.
It seemed that winter and rough winds would never touch these bright, oblivious regions or ripple the surface of the lucid river which wound a tranquil course down the central valley. The eye of the beholder followed the course of this river upwards towards the source, and so it saw, for the first time, after some moments of delighted looking, the misty battlements of a castle. The longer one looked at the dim outlines of this castle, the more sinister it grew, as though its granite viscera housed as many torture chambers as the Château of Silling.
From Angela Carter’s 1972 novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman.
Black Forest Tree, 2015 by Susanne Kühn (b. 1969)
Two Japanese Wrestlers by a Sink, 1987 by Lucian Freud (1922-2011)
The Policeman’s Daughter, 1987 by Paula Rego (b. 1935)
From Enter the Void, 2009. Directed by Gaspar Noé with cinematography by Benoît Debie. Via Screenmusings.
The Bibliophile, 2017 by Jansson Stegner (b. 1972)
Biblioklept 