Strugatsky Brothers – Biblioklept

Blog about some books acquired

August 5, 2019 Biblioklept10 Comments

My family and I spent a wonderful week in Oregon at the end of July. We visited friends who live in Portland, where we based our stay, and we drove to the coast, to Mount Hood, and to all kinds of beautiful places. It was really fucking lovely.

Among all the gardens and forests and breweries and record shops, we managed to fit in some bookstores too, of course.

The first was Melville Books, right off of Alberta Street, tucked away just a bit. Our rental house was a block from Alberta, and we got there early in the afternoon and took a stroll. Melville Books is pretty new. The owner-proprietor was making a wooden “Open” sign while he chatted with me about his stock and his experiences scouting and buying used books. He was really friendly, and the small store was very well curated.

I picked up Charles Portis’s first novel Norwood there on something of a whim. I’ve never read Portis, but I know his fans love his stuff, and I couldn’t pass up the Vintage Contemporaries cover. There was also a hardback copy of True Grit in stock at Melville that I now regret not having picked up. Norwood is hilarious, and has evoked in me a need to read more Portis.

I actually went to my local used book store today to get some stuff for my kids (and maybe just to get out of the house), but the only copy of True Grit they had in stock was a Coen Brothers film adaptation tie in. I did pick up copies of Masters of Atlantis (in hardback) and The Dog of the South though.

We also visited Powell’s, of course. I wasn’t expecting it to be as big as it was. Powell’s is a very well-stocked general bookstore, but I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t find more weird or rare stuff there (I think my local place, Chamblin Bookmine, has spoiled me).

I picked up a first-edition hardback of Donald Barthelme’s “nonfiction” collection Guilty Pleasures for just a few bucks.

It includes one of my favorite Barthelme pieces, “Eugenie Grandet.” It also includes quite a bit of his collage work.

I also picked up a hardback copy of Barry Hannah’s High Lonesome. I’ve read a lot of the stories in here (collected in Long Lost Happy), but some are unfamiliar. Also, the cover is by the photorealist painter Glennray Tutor, a Southern contemporary of Hannah’s. Tutor did the covers for several other Hannah volumes.

Over in the sci-fi section of Powell’s I found some books by the Strugatsky brothers, which I’ve been into lately. I’ve heard Monday Starts on Saturday is good, but the cover for this edition is so godawful bad that I couldn’t go for it. That’s what library e-books are for, I guess. (Really though, a blank white cover would have been better.)

I ended up picking up The Doomed City instead, which I might try to squeeze in before the end of summer.

I was impressed with the art books collection at Powell’s but also disappointed not to find anything by Remedios Varo or Leonora Carrington, other than recent editions of their fiction—no real art books though. I was happy though to see a shelf recommendation for Margaret Carson’s recent translation of Varo’s Letters, Dreams & Other Writings though. I sent a pic to Margaret, who was really generous to me with her time in recent interview about her translation.

I visited a few other bookshops, not so much as destinations, but rather in happy accidents in the neighborhoods we visited—but I restrained myself from picking anything else up. (And no, I didn’t make it to Mother Foucault’s, unfortunately, although many folks told me to. Next time.)

We visited Floating World Comics the same day as Powell’s, where I picked up a copy of Kilian Eng’s Object 10. I’ve been a fan of Eng’s for years, sharing his images on the blog and following him on Instagram. I hadn’t realized though that Floating World was his publisher. Object 10 is lovely.

I also picked up a pack of 1993 Moebius trading cards there for a dollar. I haven’t opened them yet though. Saving it for a treat later. It was neat to see copies of Anders Nilsen’s Tongues in the wild, too. I had reviewed the title awhile back for The Comics Journal, but I hadn’t realized that Nilsen lived in Portland. We also checked out Bridge City Comics on Mississippi, which had a nice selection of dollar comics that I indulged my kids in.

Portland was fantastic in general. The only real disappointment came when we visited the Portland Art Museum expecting to see a major Frida Kahlo exhibit. Unfortunately, we misread the dates—the show starts next summer. The museum has a nice collection though. Just a few pics of some pieces I liked:

Rip Van Winkle (1945) by William Gropper:

The Fair Captive (1948) by Rene Magritte

and The Femminiello (1740-60) by Giuseppe Bonito.

Here’s the museum’s description of this unusual painting:

Owing to widespread social prejudice, cross-dressing was rarely depicted in European art until the modern era. This recently discovered painting from the mid-eighteenth century is a testament to the exceptional and long-standing acceptance of cross-dressers known as femminielli in the great Italian city of Naples. The term, which might be translated “little female-men,” is not derogatory, but rather an expression of endearment. Femminielli come from impoverished neighborhoods, as is evidenced by this individual’s missing tooth and goiter, a common condition among the poor in the Neapolitan region. Although femminiellicross-dress from an early age, they do not try to conceal their birth sex completely. Rather than being stigmatized, they are deemed special and are accepted as a “third sex” that combines the strengths of both males and females. In particular, femminielli are thought to bring good luck, so Neapolitans often take newborn babies to them to hold. Femminielli are also popular companions for an evening of gambling. This association is represented by the necklace of red coral, which is similarly thought to bring good fortune. Neapolitan genre paintings (images of everyday life) frequently feature a grinning figure to engage the viewer. Here, we are invited to consider the artist’s playful inversion of traditional views of gender, which contrasts the pretty young male with the more masculine femminiello.

Maybe we’ll get back to the Pacific Northwest next summer and see the Kahlo then.

Anyway so well—

Like I said, I went to the bookstore today, not looking for myself (promise!) except that I did stop and browse Portis briefly, picking up the aforementioned copies. When I got home, I had a package from NYRB containing The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. It immediately interested me when I flicked through it—seems like a weird one. NYRB’s blurb below; more to come.

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

Strugatsky brothers/Mutis/Pynchon (Books acquired, 8 May 2019)

May 13, 2019 Biblioklept1 Comment

I went to the bookstore on Pynchon in Public Day, 2019 to pick up the only Thomas Pynchon novel I don’t own, Bleeding Edge. I’ve given the book a shot or three, checking it out from the library, but it’s never quite clicked for me. I’m reading Vineland right now though, the other Pynchon novel I haven’t previously read, and finally really digging it. So maybe I’ll read Bleeding Edge after (although I think I’ll probably immediately reread Vineland after reading Vineland).

I have a little mental list of books and authors I look for while browsing, including the Australian writer Gerald Murnane whom I did not find a scrap by—but I did unexpectedly find The Mansion, a collection of early short stories and fragments by Colombian author Álvaro Mutis. Here’s one of those little sections (in translation by Beatriz Hausner):

I also like to scan the massmarket scifi paperbacks at this particular used bookstore for original US editions of works by the Strugatsky Brothers. I’ve been a bit lucky lately, finding Hard to Be a God and The Final Circle of Paradise—and I was thrilled to find the Pocket edition of Roadside Picnic/Tale of the Troika. I read Olena Bormashenko’s 2012 translation of this book a few years ago, and loved it (I also really dug her translation of the Strugatsky’s superweird novel The Snail on the Slope). This translation is by Antonina W. Bouis, and includes an introduction by Theodore Sturgeon. I haven’t read Tale of the Troika, but Sturgeon describes it as a satire that evokes “Kafkaesque horror.” Sounds delightful.

Blog about giving books away and buying books for a friend and acquiring some books for myself

April 5, 2019 Biblioklept4 Comments

This morning my dean told me that I needed to pack up my office over the summer as the building I’m in will be undergoing a renovation. Even though I knew this was coming, the prospect hit me as a series of big anxiety waves. My walls are covered with masks, art, pictures. I have file drawers of student work going back over a decade. And books. Lots and lots of books. Books and art and stuff that I don’t really have room for anywhere else, even for a season.

Three shelves in my office are doublestacked with old mass market paperbacks from my youth—-Vonnegut, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Hemingway, Jack London, Philip K. Dick, Richard Adams, Stephen Crane, etc. Shabby books, well worn, glue splitting. Over the years I’ve acquired nicer versions of the ones I want to reread, but my sentimental attachment to this small library of paperbacks doesn’t quite fade. When I taught high school, they were the bulk of my classroom library. I insisted on their return, and was always disappointed in students who seemed interested in certain novels but never quite managed to steal them. I was always thrilled when a student would ask to borrow one “over the summer” and then forget to return it.

This sorry shabby mass-market library has been depleted over my past decade teaching community college. Every semester, a few students ask if they can borrow something they see on the shelves when they stop by to chat. It is the most wonderful feeling to give a young person a copy of Brave New World (“I’ve heard it’s good”) or Cat’s Cradle (“Is it as good as Slaughterhouse Five?”) of Studies in Classic American Literature and then insist that they keep it and not worry about returning it.

This morning, a young man approached me after class and told me he’d noticed I had a copy of Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? in my office—could he maybe borrow it? He made a point of calling it Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? and not Blade Runner, despite the fact that it’s a movie tie-in. He seemed so happy when I repeated that the book was his now.

Earlier that morning I gave another student my copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He’s taken a couple of classes with me, and based on our conversations and his writing, I thought he could us the book more than I could. Again—young kid so happy to get a book, to think that someone thought he should read a particular book—I recall the feeling so vividly, from the other side. I love watching the old library dwindle away. Maybe I can give away more before I have to pack it up again.

After classes and office hours I swung by my beloved bookstore. I do this a lot on Fridays, in the spare hour that I have between work and picking up kids. I had a little mission this time—buying some books for a great old friend who turns forty this weekend. He loves hiking and camping and poetry—more than I love those things, I think—so I asked twitter to throw out some recommendations, which they did. I had fun browsing the “Nature” section. I ended up getting three: Tom Clark’s Fractured Karma (a favorite of mine), Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island (I had never heard of it until today), and Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Walk (I dug a few of the short essays I read in the store). I enjoyed buying books for my friend. I am almost 100% he never reads this blog so I’m sure my posting this will not spoil his present, and, if not, Happy Birthday.

While browsing the “Nature” section, I resisted Shelters Shacks and Shanties—for now. Apologies to D.C. Beard, whose hut diagrams are exquisite:

I of course selfishly picked up books for myself, although I didn’t browse for myself. I keep a silly geeky list of names to check in on, including Robert Coover. Even though I’m slogging my way through his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, I still have a desire to read its sequel, The Brunist Day of Wrath. No wrath, but I picked up Plume editions of Pricksongs & Descants (which I’ve read but didn’t own) and Gerald’s Party (which I haven’t read and now own). The editions match the copy of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. I picked last summer (and no I have not read goddamn it).

I was also thrilled to pick up a 1974 Daw Paper edition of Wendayne Ackerman’s translation of Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky’s Hard to Be a God. I read Olena Bormashenko’s translation as an e-book a few years ago, after seeing Aleksei German’s film adaptation. (I loved Bormashenko’s translation of Snail on the Slope, by the way).

This copy of Hard to Be a God, blurbed by Ursula K. Le Guin, will end up in a stack on my shelf of massmarket paperbacks, cheap pulp editions with colorful, zany, vibrant covers. Lovely unroughed, somehow pristine copies of Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem and Ishmael Reed and Ursual K. Le Guin and J.G. Ballard and etcetera that’s been building up over the years, a private collection—but another library I’m sure I’ll eventually end up giving away.

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