Book Shelves #36, 9.02.2012

 

 

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Book shelves series #36, thirty-sixth Sunday of 2012

Continuing the corner book shelf in the family room.

The bookends are tschotskes from a ¥100 shop; we bought them years ago in Tokyo.

Not particularly fancy but they have a sentimental value. (The big guy is a tanuki, if you’re unfamiliar).

The tin on the far left is filled with miscellaneous papers, old stickers, other small bricabrac.

 

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Only four books on this shelf—the more-or-less complete works of J.D. Salinger, in gloriously ratty mass paperback editions:

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Not sure if these are my wife’s or mine—probably a mix of both. I stole most of these from my high school.

The Catcher in the Rye was as important to me as any other book, I suppose. I wrote about it here.

Nine Stories contains some of Salinger’s most disciplined stuff.

It took me years to finally find the discipline to read Seymour, which is probably the best thing he wrote.

 

Don Quixote and the Windmills — Salvador Dali

“In the Bedroom” — Gilbert Sorrentino

“In the Bedroom” by Gilbert Sorrentino. From A Strange Commonplace.

The Young Teacher — Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin

Bill Sienkiewicz Profile in 2004 Issue of Vibe

The Lady from Shanghai — Orson Welles

Arion — Albrecht Durer

“A Little Fable” — Franz Kafka

 

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

–Franz Kafka’s “A Little Fable”

 

Don Quixote — Will Eisner

(Via Hey Oscar Wilde!)

“Death Belongs to the Realm of Faith” — Jacques Lacan (Film)

Attorney Reading — Honore Daumier

Night Fighter — Remedios Varo

Fantastic Planet (Full Film)

Stephen Greenblatt on Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things

Still Life with Pygmy Parrot — George Flegel

Malcolm Lowry’s “Big Books,” as Reported by David Markson

 

From “Malcolm Lowry: A Remininiscence,” the final chapter of David Markson’s Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano, a study of Under the Volcano:

His big books, however, would at the moment remain these: Moby-DickBlue Voyage, the Grieg, Madame Bovary, Conrad (particularly The Secret Agent), O’Neill, Kafka, much of Poe, Rimbaud, and of course Joyce and Shakespeare. The Enormous Room is a favorite, as is Nightwood. Kierkegaard and Swedenborg are the philosophers most mentioned, and in another area William James and Ouspensky. Also Strindberg, Gogol, Tolstoy.

Lifting a Maupassant from the shelf (nothing has been said of the man before this): “He is a better writer than you think.”

 

Laughing Gas — Charlie Chaplin