INTERVIEWER
Then you consider your novel a purely literary work as opposed to one in the tradition of social protest.
ELLISON
Now, mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
1.4. Things which aren’t books but are often met with in libraries
Photographs in gilded brass frames, small engravings, pen and ink drawings, dried flowers in stemmed glasses, matchbox-holders containing, or not, chemical matches (dangerous), lead soldiers, a photograph of Ernest Renan in his study at the College de France, postcards, dolls’ eyes, tins, packets of salt, pepper and mustard from Lufthansa, letter-scales, picture hooks, marbles, pipe-cleaners, scale models of vintage cars, multicoloured pebbles and gravel, ex-votos, springs.
—From Georges Perec’s essay “The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books”
Book shelves series #20, twentieth Sunday of 2012: In Which I Try to Prove I Am Not Just Phoning It In
Last week I was accused of “going through the motions” with this project, which accusation may or may not be true. I was out of town on vacation, and last week’s post was composed a few days ahead of time in a harried rush of end-of-the-semester grading + summer semester planning + packing + bad bad writer’s block.
The shelf featured last week is the top shelf in the shot above.
Here is a detail of the shelf below, which clearly features things which are not books:
My wife and I—not actually married at the time, kids really—bought these kokeshi dolls when we were living in Japan. We lived in Tokyo, but I’m almost positive we bought these on a vacation in Kyoto. (Or maybe it was in Kamakura. Or I suppose it could have been in Tokyo).
The screen in the background was a gift from a student, as was the screen in the shot below, a shelf that twins this one (if anyone cares at all, the shelf would be sequenced between shelves 10 and 11).
The good people at Contra Mundum Press are putting out the first English language translation of Romanian surrealist Ghérasim Luca’s Self-Shadowing Prey. Mary Ann Caws translates. Here’s the first poem in the book:
at the edge of a forest
whose trees are slender ideas
and each leaf a thought at bay
the vegetal reveals to us
the damned depths of an animal sect
or more precisely
an old insect anguish
waking up as man
the only way
the only basic weapon
to animate a mental state
that I hurry to write mantil
like a mantis
if only to mark
with a dry warning laugh
the devouring word
Entity and antithesis of the bush
a sort of wild and organic brush
grows in the head of that man
ravaged
by the heresy of parks and greenhouses
like the orgasm of a key
a lovely door
So the legendary passivity
the famous and ample passivity of plants
changes here to idle hate
to mad rage
to sex brawl and dare
luring by sap blood lava . . .
as rapid as the passage of woman
to beast
she empties us of a foul ancestral
wound
which in a spurt relieves us
of these fixed plaints
and these false death rattles plumbing us
our calm gestures of the interred
Now only terror
is still able to insert
in the tropism of body and of guilty
spirit
this prism as doubled echo
where brains and senses capture
the violent innocence
of a flora and a fauna
whose marriage is a long seizure
and a rape as slow as gold
in the implacable lead
And it’s around the mental equator
in the space delimited by the tropics
of a head
at the angle of the eye and what surrounds it
that the myth of a kind of utopian
jungle surges into the world
As virgin as the unknowable
or the other “face” of the moon
and never in the reach of a gun
or an axe
its prey is the snow
sand ball hip if not the trap
that the diffuse breath of a dream
lights up
For tangled
soldered to massive corkscrew keys
the vines
the branches stoves and rituals
fuse
around the forms placed
as if by miracle
at the crossroads of dryads
of druids and of man
So many points to aim at
all these yes and nos that
outside outside of time
of space and weight
select a sort of coupled oasis
and hamlet
to descend in these gods
from before the ages
the gods-place-beast-island-ash-fire
come forth as from the coupling of bird
and branch
and those exiled from the center
and from the shade of a golden foliage
will adore one day
between the walls of their somber cities
From Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin by H.L. Stephens, 1865.
Hand-colored engraved map of St. Augustine by Baptista Boazio, 1589.
Biblioklept 