Bought some books today, mass-market paperbacks by Barry N. Malzberg and Walter M. Miller, Jr. I don’t need them and honestly my eyes are so bad by now that I probably couldn’t make it through one—I’ll have to find them online probably. But they were so cheap and such a cheap indulgence and so lovely as objects.
I’ve only ever come across two Walter M. Miller Jr. books: A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fantastic post-apocalyptic western theodicy, and its sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, which, for whatever reasons, I’ve chosen to abstain from reading. His 1965 novel The View from the Stars looks fairly generic but I picked it up anyway. I also picked up Barry N. Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple, simply because it looks so goofy. I listened to an audiobook of his 1975 novel Galaxies earlier this year. It wasn’t very good, but it was also fascinating, a metatextual mess dripping with anxiety about/against the “legit” lit of Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon, et al. I found pirated copies of two “erotic” novels he wrote under the pseudonym Gerrold Watkins, 1969’s Southern Comfort and 1970’s A Satyr’s Romance. Both were better than Galaxies, and not nearly as horny as, say, Robert Coover’s pornographies. Southern Comfort is actually a pretty good novel. (I mean it’s also, like, very deeply problematic in many ways, but those are the same ways that maybe makes it so more interesting than so-called “legit” so-called “literary” fiction.)
As a weird bit of chaotic (serendipity is not the right word) coincidence, The Destruction of the Temple features this blurb/description:
The year is 2016, and President Kennedy is being murdered – again and again and again. The director has come to the charred ruins of New York to re-enact a mad dream from the past – the assassination of President Kennedy.
JFK was assassinated 22 Nov. 1963, of course, sixty years ago today.
Biblioklept 