The Falconer, 2011 by Jansson Stegner (b. 1972)
Daniela on David’s Récamière, 1974 by Paul Wunderlich (1927-2010)
Dancer I, 2017 by Natalie Frank (b. 1980)
Germinal, 2013 by Rosa Loy (b. 1958)
Portrait of Signora Vighi, 1930 by Cagnaccio di San Pietro (1897 – 1946)
Selene Thrown Down by Argus, 1886 by Ferdinand Keller (1842–1922)
Keller’s painting depicts the following scene in Georg Ebers’ 1880 novel The Emperor (English translation by Clara Bell):
In order to reach this fountain, Selene had to go along the corridor where lay the rooms occupied by the Emperor and his followers. She only knew that an architect from Rome had taken up his quarters at Lochias, for, some time after midnight, she had been to get out meat and salt for him, but in what rooms the strangers had been lodged no one had told her. But this morning as she followed the path she was accustomed to tread day by day at the same hour, she felt an anxious shiver. She felt as if everything were not quite the same as usual, and just as she had set her foot on the cop step of the flight leading to the corridor, she raised her lamp to discover whence came the sound she thought she could hear, she perceived in the gloom a fearful something which as she approached it resembled a dog, and which was larger—much larger—than a dog should be.
Her blood ran cold with terror; for a few moments she stood as if spellbound, and was only conscious that the growling and snarling that she heard meant mischief and threatening to herself. At last she found strength to turn to fly, but at the same instant a loud and furious bark echoed behind her and she heard the monster’s quick leaps as he flew after her along the stone pavement.
She felt a violent shock, the pitcher flew out of her hand and was shattered into a thousand fragments, and she sank to the ground under the weight of a warm, rough, heavy mass. Her loud cries of alarm resounded from the hard bare walls, and roused the sleepers and brought them to her side.
Three Girls in a Wood, 2018 by Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977)
The Burning of Troy with the Flight of Aeneas, by François de Nomé (1593 – after 1620)
Untitled, 2012 by Jia Aili (b. 1979)
Untitled (Gallery), 2016 by Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955)
February by Michael Sowa (b. 1945)
Repose on the Flight into Egypt, 1922 by Glyn Warren Philpot (1884 – 1937)
Trash and Trashcan, 1970 by Neil Jenney (b. 1945)
The Children, 1924 by Tsuguharu Foujita (1886–1968)
Waiting for a Chance, 1999 — Tetsuya Ishida (1973-2005)
On Friday night we watched the first Hunger Games film with our daughter, who had finished the book this week. The movie isn’t that great, as I argued when I saw it seven years ago in the theater, but she seemed to like it, although she said she would have “done a lot of things differently.” She asked me to pick up the second book for her when I got a chance, and Not at the library, I want to own it, etc. So I figured that I’d use that as an excuse to browse my favorite used bookstore, so conveniently located 1.1 miles away (I swear I didn’t move into this neighborhood because of its proximity).
I went for a walk, got bitten rather viciously by a medium-sized dog, cleaned and dressed the wound, and went to browse books.
There are over two million books in this bookstore, a lot of them not really organized. While I usual mull around general fiction, literary criticism, art and art history, sci-fi, fantasy, and a section called “literary fiction,” I like to mix it up by going into areas I don’t know as well. Strolling through stack after stack in the drama section, an outward-turned collection of plays by Robert Coover caught my eye. I’d never heard of A Theological Position, but the cover and a few minutes browsing the four plays collected here—including one called Rip Awake, about Rip Van Winkle, which especially interested me—sealed the deal. That was before I turned the book over and saw this magnificent author photo, where a young Coover looks a bit like Jacques Derrida, in lieu of a tired blurb—
A column over I spied a copy of Don DeLillo’s play The Day Room, 1986 joint I’d never heard of. The Penguin Plays edition with a black and white cover of a production recalled to me the four years of theater and drama I took in high school—we had plenty of these in the drama room, plays by Eugene O’Neil, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, etc. I was like the only one interested in these; it took me until the end of my sophomore year to realize that most of the drama kids were interested in fucking musicals and not literary drama. I probably belonged with the art kids but whatever.
I went and picked up the second Hunger Games book, and then browsed sci-fi a bit, hoping to find some more by the Strugatsky brothers or David Ohle’s Motorman, but not that day, friends! I also wanted to get a copy of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower—and there were several—but they were all in these ridiculously well-kempt respectable and utterly literary cover editions that I can’t get down with. I’m sure I’ll find something I can live with sometime this year, but in the meantime, turning a corner, I found a massmarket paperback copy of Robert Coover’s novel The Origin of the Brunists, a novel I’ve been meaning to read for almost twenty years now. So.
Biblioklept 