Tag: Books

Mass-market Monday | Eco-Fiction

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Eco-Fiction, 1971, ed. John Stadler. Pocket Books (1971). No cover artist or designer credited. 206 pages.

The cover art is by Michael Eagle (you can see his signature in the illustration).

In addition to the names listed on the back cover, this collection also features stories by J.G. Ballard, Frank Herbert, J.F. Powers and more.

The vignette “The Turtle” condenses all of The Grapes of Wrath–and most of Steinbeck’s themes in general–into four paragraphs.

“The Turtle”

by

John Steinbeck

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for animals or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.

The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding restlessly on many tender feet. And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass: His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along. The barley beards slid off his shell, and the clover burrs fell on him and rolled to the ground. His horny beak was partly opened, and his fierce, humorous eyes, under brows like fingernails, stared straight ahead. He came over the grass leaving a beaten trail behind him, and the hill, which was the highway embankment, reared up ahead of him. For a moment he stopped, his head held high. He blinked and looked up and down. At last he started to climb the embankment. Front clawed feet reached forward but did not touch. The hind feet kicked his shell along, and it scraped on the grass, and on the gravel. As the embankment grew steeper and steeper, the more frantic were the efforts of the land turtle. Pushing hind legs strained and slipped, boosting the shell along, and the horny head protruded as far as the neck could stretch. Little by little the shell slid up the embankment until at last a parapet cut straight across its line of march, the shoulder of the road, a concrete wall four inches high. As though they worked independently the hind legs pushed the shell against the wall. The head upraised and peered over the wall to the broad smooth plain of cement. Now the hands, braced on top of the wall, strained and lifted, and the shell came slowly up and rested its front end on the wall. For a moment the turtle rested. A red ant ran into the shell, into the soft skin inside the shell, and suddenly head and legs snapped in, and the armored tail clampled in sideways. The red ant was crushed between body and legs. And one head of wild oats was clamped into the shell by a front leg. For a long moment the turtle lay still, and then the neck crept out and the old humorous frowning eyes looked about and the legs and tail came out. The back legs went to work, straining like elephant legs, and the shell tipped to an angle so that the front legs could not reach the level cement plain. But higher and higher the hind legs boosted it, until at last the center of balance was reached,  the front tipped down, the front legs scratched at the pavement, ad it was up. But the head of wild oats was held by its stem around the front legs.

Now the going was easy, and all the legs worked, and the shell boosted along, waggling from side to side. A sedan driven by a forty-year-old woman approached, She saw the turtle and swung to the right, off the highway, the wheels screamed and a cloud of dust boiled up. Two wheels lifted for a moment and then settled. The car skidded back onto the road, and went on, but more slowly. The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot.

And now a light truck approached, and as it came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway. The truck went back to its course along the right side. Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time. But at last its legs waved in the air, reaching for something to pull it over. Its front foot caught a piece of quartz and little by little the shell pulled over and flopped upright. The wild oat head fell out and three of the spearhead seeds stuck in the ground. And as the turtle crawled on down the embankment, its shell dragged dirt over the seeds. The turtle entered a dust road and jerked itself along, drawing a wavy shallow trench in the dust with its shell. The old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust.

And another Moby-Dick

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Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is probably my favorite book.

***

Years ago at an awful dinner party a man I didn’t know asked me What do you do?, by which he meant how I made money to live, or, maybe charitably, if I had a specific profession. When I told him it had something to do with literature and college students he followed up with a question no stranger should aim at another stranger-

-So what’s your favorite book then?

-Moby-Dick is my favorite book, I offered, this being my somewhat standard answer then.

-Oh no, I mean, what’s your real favorite book—not just the one you say to impress people?

–Okay Gravity’s Rainbow is my favorite book.

-I haven’t read that one yet but I like Tom Clancy too. 

***

A dear friend at our house this weekend, under truly awful circumstances, circumstances that have no bearing on this riff, claimed to have counted “eighteen copies” of Moby-Dick around the house. As far as I could tell, there are only about thirteen, including a children’s pop up version and three comic book adaptations (I don’t know how he would’ve found the comic adaptations, as they are slim and I think in drawer or box). He asked for one; I offered him the UC Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser, the one I’d used the last time I reread Moby-Dick. He opted instead for the most recent Norton Critical Edition, which a rep sent me a few years ago.

***

The last time I reread Moby-Dick I used the UC Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser. This was in 2021. I ended up writing forty riffs on the novel, likely trying the patience of any regular readers of this blog.

***

If you’re not up for forty riffs, I wrote a very short riff on this very long book back in 2013.

***

The two preceding notes are my way of saying: Moby-Dick is probably my favorite novel; it’s fantastic and I’ve written about it in both short and long form, and I think anyone can read it and should–it’s funny, sad, thrilling, captivating, meditative, beguiling, baffling–a thing larger than its own frame, certainly larger than its author and his era. And so now–

***

I have another Moby-Dick. This one is designed and illustrated by Dmitry Samarov. It’s about 650 pages, and is a pleasing, squarish shape that rests easy in the hands (a contrast to the coffin-shaped Norton Critical Editions). The pages are not too bright (I hate bright white pages) nor too crisp; the spine is not so rigid that one seeks to break it before setting about the business of checking into the Spouter Inn. It is a very readable copy — relaxed, not too heavy and not too cramped, no precious footnotes. And there are Samarov’s sketches.

***

***

Rifling (or is it riffling? I can never remember) through this edition today, reading a few passages aloud even, just to feel myself go a little crazy and then get a small relief from that craze, the dominant sense I got from Samarov’s accompanying sketches is something like this: Someone riffing along to Ishmael’s ghost-voice, not competing with it nor trying to turn the mechanics of its verbs and nouns and adjectives into a mimetic representation of action or thought. I think the drawings, as a body, rather approximate something like an aesthetic ear tuned to Ishmael’s wail: scratchy ink lines tangle into and out of shapes in a discourse with the narrative. Others tuned to the voice might on any given page jot down a note or circle a phrase or even, dare, dream of a crowded footnote; Samarov offers a sketch. His love for the novel comes through.

***

If you haven’t read Moby-Dick, you should. Samarov’s edition is a worthy entry into the fold. Check it out.

 

Mass-Market Monday | Donald Barthelme’s Sadness

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Sadness, 1972, Donald Barthelme. Kangaroo Pocket Books (1980). No cover artist or designer credited. 159 pages.

Here is the fifth section of “Departures,” a series of vignettes. It stands alone as its own short story–

My grandfather once fell in love with a dryad—a wood nymph who lives in trees and to whom trees are sacred and who dances around trees clad in fine leaf-green tutu and who carries a great silver-shining axe to whack anybody who does any kind of thing inimical to the well-being and mental health of trees. My grandfather was at that time in the lumber business.

It was during the Great War. He’d got an order for a million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality, to make barracks out of for the soldiers. The specifications called for the dark red sap to be running off it in buckets and for the warp on it to be like the tops of waves in a distressed sea and for the knotholes in it to be the size of an intelligent man’s head for the cold wind to whistle through and toughen up the (as they were then called) doughboys.

My grandfather headed for East Texas. He had the timber rights to ten thousand acres there, Southern yellow pine of the loblolly family. It was third-growth scrub and slash and shoddy—just the thing for soldiers. Couldn’t be beat. So he and his men set up operations and first crack out of the box they were surrounded by threescore of lovely dryads and hamadryads all clad in fine leaf-green tutus and waving great silver-shining axes.

“Well now,” my grandfather said to the head dryad, “wait a while, wait a while, somebody could get hurt.”

“That is for sure,” says the girl, and she shifts her axe from her left hand to her right hand.

“I thought you dryads were indigenous to oak,” says my grandfather, “this here is pine.”

“Some like the ancient tall-standing many-branched oak,” says the girl, “and some the white-slim birch, and some take what they can get, and you will look mighty funny without any legs on you.”

“Can we negotiate,” says my grandfather, “it’s for the War, and you are the loveliest thing I ever did see, and what is your name?”

“Megwind,” says the girl, “and also Sophie. I am Sophie in the night and Megwind in the day and I make fine whistling axe-music night or day and without legs for walking your life’s journey will be a pitiable one.”

“Well Sophie,” says my grandfather, “let us sit down under this tree here and open a bottle of this fine rotgut here and talk the thing over like reasonable human beings.”

“Do not use my night-name in the light of day,” says the girl, “and I am not a human being and there is nothing to talk over and what type of rotgut is it that you have there?”

“It is Teamster’s Early Grave,” says my grandfather, “and you’ll cover many a mile before you find the beat of it.”

“I will have one cupful,” says the girl, “and my sisters will have each one cupful, and then we will dance around this tree while you still have legs for dancing and then you will go away and your men also.”

“Drink up,” says my grandfather, “and know that of all the women I have interfered with in my time you are the absolute top woman.”

“I am not a woman,” says Megwind, “I am a spirit, although the form of the thing is misleading I will admit.”

“Wait a while,” says my grandfather, “you mean that no type of mutual interference between us of a physical nature is possible?”

“That is a thing I could do,” says the girl, “if I chose.”

“Do you choose?” asks my grandfather, “and have another wallop.”

“That is a thing I will do,” says the girl, and she had another wallop.

“And a kiss,” says my grandfather, “would that be possible do you think?”

“That is a thing I could do,” says the dryad, “you are not the least prepossessing of men and men have been scarce in these parts in these years, the trees being as you see mostly scrub, slash and shoddy.”

“Megwind,” says my grandfather, “you are beautiful.”

“You are taken with my form which I admit is beautiful,” says the girl, “but know that this form you see is not necessary but contingent, sometimes I am a fine brown-speckled egg and sometimes I am an escape of steam from a hole in the ground and sometimes I am an armadillo.”

“That is amazing,” says my grandfather, “a shape-shifter are you.”

“That is a thing I can do,” says Megwind, “if I choose.”

“Tell me,” says my grandfather, “could you change yourself into one million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality neatly stacked in railroad cars on a siding outside of Fort Riley, Kansas?”

“That is a thing I could do,” says the girl, “but I do not see the beauty of it.”

“The beauty of it,” says my grandfather, “is two cents a board foot.”

“What is the quid pro quo?” asks the girl.

“You mean spirits engage in haggle?” asks my grandfather.

“Nothing from nothing, nothing for nothing, that is a law of life,” says the girl.

“The quid pro quo,” says my grandfather, “is that me and my men will leave this here scrub, slash and shoddy standing. All you have to do is to be made into barracks for the soldiers and after the War you will be torn down and can fly away home.”

“Agreed,” says the dryad, “but what about this interference of a physical nature you mentioned earlier? for the sun is falling down and soon I will be Sophie and human men have been scarce in these parts for ever so damn long.”

“Sophie,” says my grandfather, “you are as lovely as light and let me just fetch another bottle from the truck and I will be at your service.”

This is not really how it went. I am fantasizing. Actually, he just plain cut down the trees.

Riff on some Friends of the Library Sale acquisitions

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My move over the last few years when I go to a Friends of the Library Sale is to fill the ten dollar paper bag with a handful of pristine trade paperbacks I think will recoup the ten bucks in trade at my local used bookstore. I then pick through for titles to bolster my children’s growing personal libraries and for books that I might want to give away to friends, family, and students. And maybe I might get lucky with some overlooked gem — a first edition, a rarity, an oddity.

Most of what I picked up today was for my son to pick through. He took the Camus, Vonnegut, O’Connor, Palahniuk, and McCarthy. My daughter had zero interest in any of the haul.

I wound up with several of the exact same editions of titles I already own (Camus’ Exile and Kingdom; Faulkner’s A Light in August; William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch) and lots of books we already have in other editions, most of which I’ll give away or trade. But I’ll be happy to trade out the cheap mass markets of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse I’ve had forever in favor of these HBJ Woolfs (Wolves?):

My two favorite finds today were cummings’ six nonlectures (the midcentury cover is lovely) and a Gwendolyn Brooks chapbook, The Near-Johannesburg Boy:

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized the Brooks’ chapbook was signed:

I had actually found two signed Brooks’ books at my favorite local used shop, also both inscribed to “Marilyn” (one was Blacks; I can’t remember the other one; they were both priced a bit beyond my casual range).

But maybe my favorite find was this Kmart bookmark:

The Kmart bookmark was tucked into a trade paperback University of Illinois Press copy of Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow. I doubt the collection of Ozark folktales was originally purchased at Kmart. But who knows.

Pissing in the Snow was one of the first books I wrote about on this blog, nearly twenty years ago. I look forward to passing it on to a student sooner or later.

 

In which Robert Coover admits to shoplifting William Gaddis’s The Recognitions

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It was the grad-school summer of ’60, I was lingering in Chicago past quarter’s end to edit the university calendar, earn some pennies to help pay the obstetrician who would deliver our firstborn in August, subletting a friend’s basement flat, and using the down time to do a lot of reading, which that summer of occasional light fingered forays into bookstores (I have done penance through the years since, buying more than I can possibly read) included, simultaneously, two big fat novels: Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March (Bellow was already a Chicago legend and I was a fan of Dangling Man and Victim) and William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (he was unknown to me, recommended by some forgotten person), with the immediate consequence that I found Bellow’s Chicago saga of Augie humping the old fellow to the local whorehouses a boisterous treat, a tale I felt as if my own (just look out the window, there they go), whereas the Gaddis book was difficult to get into (all that talk, I kept losing my place); but as the month wore on, Augie’s tale paled even as it moved south into the sun and soon the book got tossed in disappointment across the room, while in Gaddis’s great universal satire the characters behind the voices (all that talk!) had come vividly alive, and the likes of Basil Valentine and Esther and Wyatt, Stanley, Esme and Otto, and Recktall Brown (Recktall Brown!) and Agnes Deigh and the Town Carpenter had moved into the basement flat with me, companions for life, far from noble though they mostly were and failing even to last the book out, their lives eclipsed by chatter’s echoey art.

From “William Gaddis: A Portfolio,” published in Conjunctions no. 41 (2003).

Reading is a means of listening | Ursula K. Le Guin

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Reading is a means of listening.

Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.

I know no reason why our media could not create a similar community of the imagination, as theater has often done in societies of the past, but they’re mostly not doing it. They are so controlled by advertising and profiteering that the best people who work in them, the real artists, if they resist the pressure to sell out, get drowned out by the endless rush for novelty, by the greed of the entrepreneurs.

Much of literature remains free of such co-optation, in part because a lot of books were written by dead people, who by definition are not greedy. And many living poets and novelists, though their publishers may be crawling abjectly after bestsellers, continue to be motivated less by the desire for gain than by the wish to do what they’d probably do for nothing if they could afford it, that is, practice their art—make something well, get something right. Literature remains comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable.

Books may not be “books,” of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

From “The Operating Instructions,” a talk given by Ursula K. Le Guin at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts in 2002, as reproduced in Words Are My Matter.

Briana Loewinsohn’s graphic novel Raised by Ghosts turns absence into haunting art

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A decade ago I finally tossed out most of the contents of an old shoebox crammed with high-school nostalgia. Notes from ex-girlfriends, summer postcards, flyers from local shows, a handful of choice mixtapes. Some Polaroids. Our stupid band’s stupid lyrics, which we usually forgot or simply abandoned live. There was even a pair of fat shoelaces. The pain of return always hits me hard at such times, and I got dizzy. That box was crammed the scraps of an older life.

The preceding paragraph is an unfair opening to a review of Briana Loewinsohn’s excellent graphic memoir Raised by Ghosts. Reading Raised by Ghosts felt like opening that old shoebox: painful, dizzying, beautiful. Loewinsohn is one of us, one of us to borrow a chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks. “Sometimes I feel like I am an alien at this school…But there are other aliens here,” protagonist Briana writes in her diary.

Raised by Ghosts covers Briana’s seven rough years through middle and high school. These are the gay nineties. The narrator, like Loewinsohn herself, is about my age, which makes reading Raised by Ghosts an eerie act of self-recognition. It’s not a conventional memoir—it doesn’t hold your hand or deliver a clean, linear narrative. Instead, it moves like memory does: in flashes, in vignettes, in small sensory moments that coalesce into something greater than the sum of their parts. Everything here feels true. We have here the relics of a teenage moondream, those little ghosts of the past that flicker through memory like frayed photos freed from the rubberbanded bundle in an old Converse box. Briana’s adolescence unfurls as an ebb and flow of loneliness and acceptance among fellow weirdos. She finds her people, but never quite makes the scene; she dances at the live show but finds as much fun in playing cards in the back.

Loewinsohn’s art conveys Raised by Ghosts’ emotional weight. Soft, muted tones in drab olive and rust hues fill square panels that often resemble fading Polaroids. Candids and close-ups capture the messiness of high school. Briana is a sympathetic and endearing character, her sensitivity registering in ways she cannot understand herself, as when she skips out on a living-room VHS double feature. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers would be way too much after the tragedy of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Loewinsohn includes full handwritten pages to accompany the traditional comic strips in Raised by Ghosts. These handwritten pages serve as a kind of diary, but often take on subtle visual changes that suggest other media. Often, the handwritten pages mimic the form of the long notes bored Briana composes in class to pass to friends. A passage composed on graph paper praises the note-writing skills of a particular friend; the technique suggests this friend prefers squares to lines. A passage on a brown paper lunch bag reflects on how Briana’s father always takes the time to write her name in detailed, expressive lettering. The variations of handwritten pages enrich the narrative and subtly inform us of Briana’s artistic development.

My favorite of the handwritten passages though is simply a list of bands scrawled on lined paper. When I got to that page, about a third of the way into Raised by Ghosts, I was already persuaded by the book–but the page of band names seemed so utterly true, so beautiful and banal. We used to do that, I thought, and: Why did we used to do that? knowing the answer has no good intellectual answer.

But let’s get to the ghosts. Loewinsohn never “shows” us Briana’s parents, yet the picture we get of them is hardly incomplete: a distant, detached mother and a father in arrested development. “I would say I was raised in an AA meeting,” Briana remarks of her mother, noting that it’s often hard for single mothers to find childcare. Of her father’s abode: “My pop’s house is a combination of Indiana Jones’ office, Pee Wee’s playhouse, and an opium den. I am kinda like a roommate here.”

Briana’s parents exist in Raised by Ghosts the way memories of the absent often do—fragmented, elusive, more felt than seen. Loewinsohn never lets them fully materialize, yet their presence, or lack thereof, shapes Briana’s interactions with her world. Neither parent offers Briana guidance. She’s a latchkey kid left to cobble her own sense of belonging among friends, music, and the small rituals of adolescence. In the absence of stability, she builds meaning from mixtapes, handwritten notes, and fleeting moments of connection.

And art. The memoir climaxes in a moment of transformation—an act of self-possession and, ultimately, self-creation. Throughout Raised by Ghosts, Briana moves through a world shaped by absence, by the ghosts of parents who are physically present but emotionally distant. Yet, in the book’s remarkable penultimate sequence, she steps beyond that absence, beyond memory’s hazy grip, into a space that is entirely her own. The panels swirl into a dreamscape of shifting lines—formless and chaotic at first—until Briana gathers them together, lassoing meaning from the void. It is a moment of artistic alchemy, where creation becomes a form of agency, a way to shape her own narrative rather than just mimic one. When she carries those lines from dream to waking life, the transition is profound: she is no longer just a kid collecting relics of meaning from the world around her—she is an artist, making meaning herself.

Publisher Fantagraphics labels Raised by Ghosts as a “young adult graphic novel,” and teenagers will likely identify with Briana’s story—the loneliness, the search for belonging, the quiet acts of self-definition. They may also feel a strange twinge of envy for a world that no longer exists. Being a latchkey kid could be lonely, but it was not without its freedoms. Those of us who were teenage weirdos in the nineties will see in Loewinsohn’s memoir not a young adult novel, but rather a reflective elegy composed by a mature artist in control of her talent. Raised by Ghosts lingers like the echo of an old song in your dim memory — you know the one, right? It’s a memoir about growing up in the margins, about finding meaning in scraps and silence, about turning absence into something tangible. It haunts, in the very best way.

A run-on sentence on Gabriel García Márquez’s delirious novel The Autumn of the Patriarch

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Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t so much a novel as it is a delirium, a swamp fever, a sun-bleached hallucination stretched across centuries, a beast that coils and uncoils, bloated with its own rot, a thing that does not begin or end but only festers, looping back on itself in great, heaving tides of unpunctuated or undepunctuated or mispunctuated thought, García Márquez dragging us under, drowning us in the mind or minds of the titular dictator, a paranoid consciousness so swollen with its own power that it warps reality itself, a man who reigns forever and is always dying, whose past rewrites itself with every breath, whose power is infinite and yet always slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers like the stolen sea, parceled off and shipped to Arizona, because why not, because what is truth if not what he declares it to be, because when you have lived for centuries, when your general is served up at a Thyestean feast, when your nation’s children are disappeared to an island, never to return, when the cattle are branded with your mark, when the very hour itself is subject to your whim, then nothing is real, nothing but the fear, the violence, the rape, the predation, the endless grinding machinery of power that must sustain itself, and so we cycle, we spiral, we convulse through six sections, six deaths, six endless iterations of his reign, six grotesque confirmations that absolute power is an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, devouring itself, erasing itself, until nothing is left but the silence of his ruin, the empty palace where his corpse will be found again and again, where his legacy is nothing but absence, and translator Gregory Rabassa—mad saint, linguistic necromancer—renders it all in English without breaking the spell, his translation a relentless incantation that doesn’t just mimic the novel’s crushing, hypnotic cadence but becomes it, suffocating, pressing, forcing you to inhabit the mind of this eternal, rotting god-tyrant, this cosmic mistake, this doomed and doom-dealing beast whose power, no matter how total, will crumble, will fade, will rot, will vanish into nothing, just like everything else.

Margie Sarsfield’s Beta Vulgaris (Book (and some beet seeds) acquired, 2 Feb. 2025)

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I got a review copy of Margie Sarsfield’s debut novel Beta Vulgaris the other week. It came with a little packet of beet seeds.

Publisher Norton’s blurb:

Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, hoping the paycheck from the sugar beet harvest will cover the rent on their Brooklyn apartment. Amidst the grueling work and familiar anxieties about her finances, Elise starts noticing strange things: threatening phone calls, a mysterious rash, and snatches of an ominous voice coming from the beet pile.

When Tom and other coworkers begin to vanish, Elise is left alone to confront the weight of her past, the horrors of her uncertain future, and the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets. Biting, eerie, and confidently told, Beta Vulgaris harnesses a distinct voice and audacious premise to undermine straightforward narratives of class, trauma, consumption, and redemption.

I missed my window to plant beets here in north Florida.

Mass-market Monday | Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat

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The Glass Teat, Harlan Ellison. Ace Books (1983 reprint). Cover art by Barclay Shaw. 319 pages.

The Other Glass Teat, Harlan Ellison. Ace Books (1983). Cover art by Barclay Shaw. 397 pages.

Part of an ostensible review of the sitcom Happy Days; from Ellison’s column published on 3 July 1970 and reprinted in The Other Glass Teat:

One begins to realize that our national middle-class hunger to return to two decades of Depression, world war, Prohibition, Racism Unadmitted, Covert Fascination with Sex, Deadly Innocence, Isolationism, Provincialism, and Deprivation Remembered as Good Old Days has become a cultural sickness.

The past has always been a rich source for fun and profit. Nostalgia is a good thing. It keeps us from forgetting our roots. Readers of this column know I trip down Memory Lane myself frequently. But it is clearly evident that when an entire nation refuses to accept the responsibilities of its own future, when it seeks release in a morbid fascination with its past, and when it elevates the dusty dead days of the past to a pinnacle position of Olympian grandeur … we are in serious trouble.

Mass-market Monday | Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Compass Rose

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The Compass Rose, Ursula K. Le Guin. Bantam Books (1983). Cover art by Yvonne Gilbert. 271 pages.

A strong collection, containing one of Le Guin’s classic stories, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” which I wrote about a few years ago. From that riff:

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1982 short story “Schrödinger’s Cat” is a tale about living in radical uncertainty. The story is perhaps one of the finest examples of postmodern literature I’ve ever read. Playful, funny, surreal, philosophical, and a bit terrifying, the story is initially frustrating and ultimately rewarding.

While I think “Schrödinger’s Cat” has a thesis that will present itself to anyone who reads it more than just once or twice, the genius of the story is in Le Guin’s rhetorical construction of her central idea. She gives us a story about radical uncertainty by creating radical uncertainty in her reader, who will likely find the story’s trajectory baffling on first reading. Le Guin doesn’t so much eschew as utterly disrupt the traditional form of a short story in “Schrödinger’s Cat”: setting, characters, and plot are all presented in a terribly uncertain way.

Mass-market Monday | Charles Wright’s The Messenger

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The Messenger, Charles Wright. Manor Books (1974). No cover artist or designer credited. 217 pages.

Charles Wright (not to be confused with Charles Wright or Charles Wright) published three novels between 1963 and 1973. His second novel, The Wig (1966) is an under-read, underappreciated gem—a tragicomic satire employing sharp distortions and cartoony edges. Wright’s first novel, The Messenger, is perhaps a bit too beholden to Richard Wright (to whom it is dedicated (along with Billie Holiday))—but many readers may prefer its raw realism to The Wig’s zany (and often crushing) zigs and zags. His last published novel, Absolutely Nothing to Get Alarmed About, is the most accomplished and singular of the trio—fragmentary, polyglossic, kaleidoscopic, messy. The trio remains in print as an omnibus with an introduction by Ishmael Reed. Read Reed on reading Wright.

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant (Book acquired, 2 Jan. 2025)

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The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant publishes later this month from NYRB. And oof is she a big boy! NYRB’s blurb:

Mavis Gallant’s extraordinary mastery of the short story remains insufficiently recognized. She may be the best writer of stories since the early-1950s prime of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor, and even in such august company, her work is sui generis. Gallant’s short fiction refines the art of the story even as it expands the boundaries of what a story can be. Above and beyond that, however, it constitutes a striking, almost avant-garde reduction. To read her is to discover something about the very nature of story: how for better or worse life is caught up in it, and how on the page that common predicament can come to life.

The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant includes more than thirty stories never before gathered into one volume, including “The Accident” and “His Mother” and “An Autobiography” and “Dédé.” With the publication of this book, finally all of this modern master’s fiction will be in print.

Small dents, big books (tl;dr)

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I usually finish reading a novel if I stick with it for, say thirty-to-fifty pages. However, as is the case with many readers, I suspect, very long novels foil me; or, rather, time foils me. Obligations intercede. Here are some long novels that I had to put aside for another time. From the top:

Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante (775 pages)

If the bookmark I left in Jenny McPhee’s translation Lies and Sorcery is not lying (or ensorcelled), I got seventy pages into it before getting sidetracked with something else. I remember liking what I was reading but also that the book seemed very heavy over my head at night.

The Strudlhof Steps, Heimito von Doderer (840 pages)

I’ve really enjoyed the first fifty pages of Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps (in translation by Vincent Kling). I’ve enjoyed them so much that I’ve read them at least four times over the past three years. The longest I’ve waded into the Steps was to page 99. Again, a slimmer model comes round and I lose my focus—but of the four novels I’ve listed here, von Doderer’s is the one that’s made the biggest impression on me. My bites may have been shallow but I keep going in for seconds.

A Bended Circuity, Robert S. Stickley (637 pages)

Although it’s the shortest novel on this list, my edition of RSS’s ABC feels cramped and constrained. I think the novel would like a bigger home. The pages are too bright, the font too small, the margins too narrow. It’s a cramped reading experience. I suppose I could break down and buy the Corona\Samizdat edition, which may be easier to ease into. Or an e-book? RSS, please agree to an e-book! Some of us have aging eyes. Oh, I got to page 48.

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young (1321 pages)

I cracked into Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling twice this year; once in the Spring and once in the Fall. Maybe I’ll try again in the Winter. I stalled out 78 pages in, at the end of chapter 3.

Mass-market Monday | Matt Bucher’s The Belan Deck

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The Belan Deck, Matt Bucher. SSMG Press (2023; second printing). Cover design by David Jensen. 119 pages.

My review of The Belan Deck.

“The Story of a Stick (With Some Additional Comments by Mrs. Campbell),” a chapter from Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante

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“The Story of a Stick (With Some Additional Comments by Mrs. Campbell)”

a chapter from Three Trapped Tigers

by G. Cabrera Infante

translated by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with collaboration by Infante

The Story

We arrived in Havana one Friday around three in the afternoon. The heat was oppressive. There was a low ceiling of dense gray, or blackish, clouds. As the boat entered the harbor the breeze that had cooled us off during the crossing suddenly died down. My leg was bothering me again and it was very painful going down the gangplank. Mrs. Campbell followed behind me talking the whole damned time and she found everything, but everything, enchanting: the enchanting little city, the enchanting bay, the enchanting avenue facing the enchanting dock. All I knew was that there was a humidity of 90 or 95 percent and that I was sure my leg was going to bother me the whole weekend. It was, of course, Mrs. Campbell’s brilliant idea to come to such a hot and humid island. I told her so as soon as I was on deck and saw the ceiling of rain clouds over the city. She protested, saying they had sworn to her in the travel agency that it was always, but always, spring in Cuba. Spring my aching foot! We were in the Torrid Zone. That’s what I told her and she answered, “Honey, this is the tropics!”

On the edge of the dock there was this group of enchanting natives playing a guitar and rattling some gourds and shouting infernal noises, the sort of thing that passes for music here. In the background, behind this aboriginal orchestra, there was an open-air tent where they sold the many fruits of the tropical tree of tourism: castanets, brightly painted fans, wooden rattlers, musical sticks, shell necklaces, earthenware pots, hats made of a brittle yellow straw and stuff like that. Mrs. Campbell bought one or two articles of every kind. She was simply enchanted. I told her she should wait till the day we left before making purchases. “Honey,” she said, “they are souvenirs.” She didn’t understand that souvenirs are what you buy when you leave a country. Nor was there any point in explaining. Luckily they were very quick in Customs, which was surprising. They were also very friendly, although they did lay it on a bit thick, if you know what I mean.

I regretted not bringing the car. What’s the point of going by ferry if you don’t take a car? But Mrs. Campbell thought we would waste too much time learning foreign traffic regulations. Actually she was afraid we would have another accident. Now there was one more argument she could throw in for good measure. “Honey, with your leg in this state you simply cannot drive,” she said. “Let’s get a cab.”

We waved down a taxi and a group of natives—more than we needed—helped us with our suitcases. Mrs. Campbell was enchanted by the proverbial Latin courtesy. It was useless to tell her that it was a courtesy you also pay for through your proverbial nose. She would always find them wonderful, even before we landed she knew everything would be just wonderful. When all our baggage and the thousand and one other things Mrs. Campbell had just bought were in the taxi, I helped her in, closed the door in keen competition with the driver and went around to the o
ther door because I could get in there more easily. As a rule I get in first and then Mrs. Campbell gets in, because it’s easier for her that way, but this impractical gesture of courtesy which delighted Mrs. Campbell and which she found “very Latin” gave me the chance to make a mistake I will never forget. It was then that I saw the walking stick.

It wasn’t an ordinary walking stick and this alone should have convinced me not to buy it. It was flashy, meticulously carved and expensive. It’s true that it was made of a rare wood that looked like ebony or something of that sort and that it had been worked with lavish care—exquisite, Mrs. Campbell called it—and translated into dollars it wasn’t really that expensive. All around it there were grotesque carvings of nothing in particular. The stick had a handle shaped like the head of a Negro, male or female—you can never tell with artists—with very ugly features. The whole effect was repulsive. However, I was tempted by it even though I have no taste for knickknacks and I think I would have bought it even if my leg hadn’t been hurting. (Perhaps Mrs. Campbell, when she noticed my curiosity, would have pushed me into buying it.) Needless to say Mrs. Campbell found it beautiful and original and—I have to take a deep breath before I say it—exciting. Women, good God!

We got to the hotel and checked in, congratulating ourselves that our reservations were in order, and went up to our room and took a shower. Ordered a snack from room service and lay down to take a siesta—when in Rome, etc. . . . No, it’s just that it was too hot and there was too much sun and noise outside, and our room was very clean and comfortable and cool, almost cold, with the air-conditioning. It was a good hotel. It’s true it was expensive, but it was worth it. If the Cubans have learned something from us it’s a feeling for comfort and the Nacional is a very comfortable hotel, and what’s even better, it’s efficient. When we woke up it was already dark and we went out to tour the neighborhood.

Outside the hotel we found a cab driver who offered to be our guide. He said his name was Raymond something and showed us a faded and dirty ID card to prove it. Then he took us around that stretch of street Cubans call La Rampa, with its shops and neon signs and people walking every which way. It wasn’t too bad. We wanted to see the Tropicana, which is advertised everywhere as “the most fabulous cabaret in the world,” and Mrs. Campbell had made the journey almost especially to go there. To kill time we went to see a movie we wanted to see in Miami and missed. The theater was near the hotel and it was new and air-conditioned.

We went back to the hotel and changed. Mrs. Campbell insisted I wear my tuxedo. She was going to put on an evening gown. As we were leaving, my leg started hurting again—probably because of the cold air in the theater and the hotel—and I took my walking stick. Mrs. Campbell made no objection. On the contrary, she seemed to find it funny.

The Tropicana is in a place on the outskirts of town. It is a cabaret almost in the jungle. It has gardens full of trees and climbing plants and fountains and colored lights along all the road leading to it. The cabaret has every right to advertise itself as fabulous physically, but the show consists—like all Latin cabarets, I guess—of half-naked women dancing rumbas and singers shouting their stupid songs and crooners in the style of Bing Crosby, but in Spanish. The national drink of Cuba is the daiquiri, a sort of cocktail with ice and rum, which is very good because it is so hot in Cuba—in the street I mean, because the cabaret had the “typical Cuban air-conditioning” as they call it, which means the North Pole encapsuled in a tropical saloon. There’s a twin cabaret in the open air but it wasn’t functioning that night because they were expecting rain. The Cubans proved good meteorologists. We’d only just begun to eat one of those meals they call international cuisine in Cuba, which consist of things that are too salty or full of fat or fried in oil which they follow with a dessert that is much too sweet, when a shower started pouring down with a greater noise than one of those typical bands at full blast. I say this to give some idea of the violence of the rainfall as there are very few things that make more noise than a Cuban band. For Mrs. Campbell this was the high point of sophisticated savagery: the rain, the music, the food, and she was simply enchanted. Everything would have been fine—or at any rate passable; when we switched to drinking whiskey and soda I began to feel almost at home—but for the fact that this stupid maricón of an emcee of the cabaret, not content with introducing the show to the public, started introducing the public to the show, and it even occurred to this fellow to ask our names—I mean all the Americans who were there—and he started introducing us in some godawful travesty of the English language. Not only did he mix me up with the soup people, which is a common enough mistake and one that doesn’t bother me anymore, but he also introduced me as an international playboy. Mrs. Campbell, of course, was on the verge of ecstasy! Continue reading ““The Story of a Stick (With Some Additional Comments by Mrs. Campbell),” a chapter from Three Trapped Tigers by G. Cabrera Infante” →

On Tove Jansson’s odd and touching illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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This fall–just in time for the holiday season–the NYRB Kids imprint has published an edition of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by the Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson. Jansson is most famous for her Moomin books, which remain an influential cult favorite with kids and adults alike. She illustrated Carroll’s Alice in 1966 for a Finnish audience; this NRYB edition is the first English-language version of the book. There are illustrations on almost every page of the book; most are black and white sketches — doodles, portraits, marginalia — but there are also many full-color full-pagers, like this odd image about a dozen pages in:

Here we have Alice and her cat Dinah, transformed into a shadowy, even sinister figure, large, bipedal. Bats float in the background, echoing Goya’s famous print El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The image accompanies Alice’s initial descent into her underland wonderland:  “Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again,” addressing Dinah, who will “miss me very much to-night, I should think!” Wonderlanding if Dinah might catch a bat, which is something like a mouse, maybe, “Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?; for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it.” Jansson’s red flowers suggest poppies, contributing to the scene’s slightly-menacing yet dreamlike vibe. The image ultimately echoes the myth of Hades and Persephone.

All the classic characters are here, of course, rendered in Jansson’s sensitive ink. Consider this infamous trio —

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head.

I love Jansson’s take on the Hatter; he’s not the outright clown we often see in post-Disneyfied takes on the character, but rather a creature rendered in subtle pathos. The March Hare is smug; the Dormouse is miserable.

And you’ll want a glimpse of the famous Cheshire cat who appears (and disappears) during the Queen’s croquet match:

Jansson’s figures here remind one of the surrealist Remedios Varo’s strange, even ominous characters. Like Varo and fellow surrealist Leonora Carrington, Jansson’s art treads a thin line between whimsical and sinister — a perfect reflection of Carroll’s Alice, which we might remember fondly as a story of magical adventures, when really it is much closer to a horror story, a tale of being sucked into an underworld devoid of reason and logic, ruled by menacing, capricious, and ultimately invisible forces. It is, in short, a true reflection of childhood,m. Great stuff.