A Krazy Kat strip by George Herriman. The scan is from Krazy Kat by George Herriman, Henry Holt and Company, 1946.
My wife’s grandmother recently passed away and my wife took a bunch of her old photos and papers, including this DOD pamphlet from 1966. The scan above is the back cover/front cover. Here’s the first inside page, with a cheerful note from LBJ:
Here’s my favorite section:
I the Father which wert in heaven conjure and command thee
O Legba master of the crossroads to connect this cowboy’s circuit to Guinea and summon forth:
Cousin Zaka who will parch their fields and slaughter their livestock and make their herd winding up the Chisholm stumble into a Twilight Zone
O Gu rust their fire firearms and cause their horseshoes to slip off the animals’ hooves
O Judas Iscariot who ratted on the Ghoul give me the treachery to turn this town upside down and spill evil from all its pockets
O Jack Johnson give me the power to rise for the bell until Yellow Back Radio is down for the count
O Doc John, Doc Yah Yah and Zozo Labrique Marie Laveau the Grand Improvisers if I am not performing these rites correctly send the Loa anyway and allow my imagination to fill the gaps
O Mack Hopson blood of my blood teach me the secret of the 12 rabbits and the cheesecake
O Baron-La-Croix grip Drag Gibson so that every other day last rites will be requested
O Johnny of the delicate feet
Red-Eyed Ezili
Marinette of the dry arm send the dead swiftly to make my vengeance so complete and artsy craftsy that I though an amateur will be admired by houngans the world over
O General Dig, bury Drag Gibson in the stomach of swines next to George allace
O Black Hawk American Indian houngan of Hoo-Doo please do open up some of these prissy orthodox minds so that they will no longer call Black People’s American experience “corrupt” “perverse” and “decadent.” Please show them that Booker T and MG’s, Etta James, Johnny Ace and Bojangle tapdancing is just as beautiful as anything that happened anywhere else in the world. Teach them that anywhere people go they have experience and that all experience is art.
A hoo doo spell/curse/prayer from Ishmael Reed’s 1969 novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.
I picked up this handsome hardback collection of early Ursula K. LeGuin stories last Friday when I went to my local used bookshop. I was there looking for something else.
I wasn’t looking for stories by Walter Abish (and I can’t remember how or why I picked this up, but I read part of it in the store…I mean I can’t recall why I was in the “A’s” for Atwood or Abish):
And I wasn’t looking for essays by Jerry Farber (this weird mass market paperback was crammed into a completely wrong section—misshelved as if someone was trying to hide it. The font on the spine prompted me to pull it out, and I knew that the guy had written “The Student as Nigger”….I started reading “Why People Love Capitalism” and decided to pick it up):
What I was looking for was Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky, which is prominent on my to-read list after devouring The Stories of Paul Bowles. But I simply couldn’t come to terms with these covers:
I mean, look, I know I shouldn’t care about the cover, but these are dreadful, and it this point if I’m going to own a paper book, it needs to have some aesthetic merit. Aesthetic merit like the cover for this collection:
(I didn’t pick it up because the seven stories are in The Stories of Paul Bowles).
A last thought on covers:
Caleb Crain reviews George Saunders’s first novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
First paragraph:
George Saunders’s new novel—his first, after four collections of short stories and a novella—takes place in the afterlife. Or rather, it takes place in the “bardo,” a term that Saunders has borrowed from Buddhism for what might be called the “justafterlife”—the interval between a ghost’s separation from its body and its departure for whatever comes next. As in The Sixth Sense and other movies and television shows, the ghosts imagined by Saunders linger in our world because they either don’t know they’re dead or aren’t yet resigned to leaving. “You are a wave that has crashed upon the shore,” they are told by browbeating angels who visit intermittently, but they refuse to listen.
Crain doesn’t exactly eviscerate Lincoln in the Bardo in his review (which also situates the novel in context with Saunders’s previous stories and essays), but he does make a strong case for passing on it.
Biblioklept 