Cradle to Grave by Eleanor Kuhns. Publisher’s blurb:
Will Rees is adjusting to life on his Maine farm in 1797, but he’s already hungering for the freedom of the road, and his chance to travel comes sooner than he expects. Lydia has just received a letter from her old friend Mouse, a soft-spoken and gentle woman who now lives in the Shaker community in Mount Unity, New York. To Lydia and Rees’s astonishment, she’s in trouble with the law. She’s kidnapped five children, claiming that their mother, Maggie Whitney, is unfit to care for them.
Despite the wintry weather and icy roads, Rees and Lydia set out for New York, where they sadly conclude that Mouse is probably right and the children would be better off with her. There’s nothing they can do for Mouse legally, though, and they reluctantly set out for home. But before they’ve travelled very far, they receive more startling news: Maggie Whitney has been found murdered, and Mouse is the prime suspect.
In Cradle to Grave, Eleanor Kuhns returns with the clever plotting, atmospheric historical detail, and complexly drawn characters that have delighted fans and critics in her previous books.
“Books in the West”
from
Morely Roberts’s A Tramp’s Notebook
Since taking to writing as a profession I have lost most of the interest I had in literature as literature pure and simple. That interest gradually faded and “Art for Art’s sake,” in the sense the simple in studios are wont to dilate upon, touches me no more, or very, very rarely. The books I love now are those which teach me something actual about the living world; and it troubles me not at all if any of them betray no sense of beauty and lack immortal words. Their artistry is nothing, what they say is everything. So on the shelf to which I mostly resort is a book on the Himalayas; a Lloyd’s Shipping Register; a little work on seamanship that every would-be second mate knows; Brown’s Nautical Almanacs; a Channel Pilot; a Continental Bradshaw; many Baedekers; a Directory to the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; a big folding map of the United States; some books dealing with strategy, and some touching on medical knowledge, but principally pathology, and especially the pathology of the mind.
Yet in spite of this utilitarian bent of my thoughts there are very many books I know and love and sometimes look into because of their associations. As I cannot understand (through some mental kink which my friends are wont to jeer at) how anyone can return again and again to a book for its own sake, I do not read what I know. As soon would I go back when it is my purpose to go forward. A book should serve its turn, do its work, and become a memory. To love books for their own sake is to be crystallised before old age comes on. Only the old are entitled to love the past. The work of the young lies in the present and the future. Continue reading ““Books in the West” — Morely Roberts”
Bob Schofield’s The Inevitable June continues theNewerYork Press’s dedication to beautiful weirdness. They’ve billed The Inevitable June as “words and art,” which is truth in advertising, yes, but is also a way of avoiding putting a label on this strange little book.
Is it a comic? A novella? A thought experiment? A prose-poem? A flip-book? Something entirely new? Yes.
But entirely new is wrong too, because, as the billing states, what we’ve got here are those ancient raw elements of storytelling, words and pictures, resynthesized into something that, in its strangeness, evokes newness and surpasses novelty.
An initial simplicity of form, both in written and drawn line, allows the reader’s consciousness to slip into the strangeness of June. We begin with a simple black-on-white square (emblem of a page or a screen? (or hey man it’s just a square?)) which turns into a cube, or a box rather, one side open (a door; a window) its interior obscured. Should the reader stick his head in? Yes. The book seems to take place in this box, an imaginative dream-machine that we might recall from a childhood or two.
What follows is an almanac of tragicomic weirdness, each entry logging the events of a new morning in an eternal June.
The clarity and concreteness of Schofield’s prose jars against its symantic expression, evoking a dream-nightmare world of continual creation and destruction. Every morning the world begins—and ends—anew, complete with new metaphors which crumble or dissolve or give way under the strain of the next morning’s creation.
The Inevitable June echoes with images of oceans and fires, glass airplanes and invisible pilots, octopuses and yetis, angels and demons. Its transmutations both challenge and invite the reader to play a game where the rules have not been, cannot be, verbalized.
Is the game consciousness?
A version of consciousness anyway, a metaphor for consciousness—a collection of words and art, black and white lines, inky abysses and blank fields of possibility. If The Inevitable June attests that imaginative power can transform, it also underscores the costs and conditions of that transformation—the edges, the borders, the limits—the constraints of time, the days on a calendar. Interposed, our protagonist travels, falls, rises, dreams, and performs his various identities.
I read Schofield’s book a few times (it’s short) in different formats—on a laptop, a tablet, and then the physical book. Oh, and on my iPhone. I reread that thing on an iPhone waiting in my car to pick up my son from school. It was a different read each time, offering new strangenesses, new pathways, pratfalls, and pitfalls. The Inevitable June is not for all readers, obviously, but it gave me some joy in its puzzles and prose. Recommended.
Biblioklept 