Books are what I do : Write (very slowly), Read (rapidly or at leisure), Re-read (for pleasure or reference), Buy and Sell (my livelihood), Catalogue and Describe (ditto), Edit, Publish, Review (for The New York Review of Science Fiction and others), Recommend or Give away, Receive, and — unavoidably and repeatedly — Lift (whether singly or in boxes). I concede a fondness for private eye novels, equalled by my interest in the quirky, erudite, or obscure, and surpassed only by my love of the literature of the fantastic.
— Henry Wessells
marginal glosses
(via twitter)
21-25 March 2014
links
The Private Life of Books
Temporary Culture is pleased to announce a new book, to be published in September :
— The Private Life of Books. Poems by Henry Wessells. Photographs by Paul Schütze. With eight plates after photographs by Paul Schütze. Temporary Culture (forthcoming in September, 2014). Edition of 100 copies. Design by Jerry Kelly. Details of subscription upon request. Preliminary sketch of the front cover above (photograph by Paul Schütze).
— — — —
current reading
— Marcel Theroux. Strange Bodies. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2014].
Read with great pleasure, while thinking about Doctor Johnson, literary
forgery ;
re-reading “ The Court of Tartary ” by T.P. Caravan (Magazine of
Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1963, collected in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series,
edited by Avram Davidson, 1965) ; and also thinking about “ The Robot Who Looked Like Me ” by Robert Sheckley (1973),
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick (1982),
and Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (1992). Certain notions of the identity of book and person
in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore seem relevant. An immediate and candid review note below :
The saddest story I have ever heard
I did not detect any explicit traces of Ford Madox Ford in Strange Bodies, yet from the opening pages the tone is one of disruption and loss. Understanding
how utter and irreversible the loss proves to be is the substance of the novel.
The epigraphs from Ovid, references to Milton, and the imitation of Doctor Johnson,
are very literary signposts, but this path leads to the coeur complèxe of the science fiction mode. Strange Bodies is a novel that engages with elements of the “ core complex ” of the science fiction tradition, from Mary Shelley’s explorations of the ethics of technological advances and the creation of monsters
to the novels and stories noted above. Strange Bodies is also the best zombie novel ever : from the perspective of the zombie (Avram Davidson’s “There Beneath the Silky-Tree and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me” is the best account of one who has seen the zombie and lived to tell the tale,
an entirely different matter).
‘The Cham of Tartary is a fool’ *
I thought I had written elsewhere about “The Court of Tartary” by T.P. Caravan (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1963 ; and collected in The Best from Fantasy and
Science Fiction, Fourteenth Series, edited by Avram Davidson, 1965) but I can
find no record of it in my files or in the archives of The Nutmeg Point District
Mail. Like Strange Bodies, “The Court of Tartary” has a Johnsonian touchstone ; and Professor Dunbar’s fate is even darker.
He was an intelligent man, and he knew how to think directly to the point of a problem. "Sir, if a man find himself set down in the court of Tartary, he can make himself understood, if but his mind be put in order." He reminded himself of this comfortable eighteenth century doctrine as he snorted up the thick Texas dust, forgetting the reply to this dogmatic statement: “The Cham of Tartary is a fool, Sir, and passes his days conglobulated with concubines. Sir, no gentleman will ever make himself understood to a Tartar, a North Briton, or any other gaudy barbarian.”
[I have a copy on my shelf, but if you do not :
http://www.scribd.com/doc/144988259/The-Court-of-Tartary
the link is given though I am dubious about the issues of citation there]
“ . . . but I can’t tell whether it’s a thought or a quotation.”
Theroux has solved Raymond Chandler’s paradox that the sort of person who would be “ a man fit for adventure ” is commonly not articulate enough to record the adventure. In Strange Bodies,
the narrative voice is inseparable from the story. There are several close parallels
with Shelley’s novel : just as the monster does not speak until the middle of the second volume
of Frankenstein, a long interval ensues between the “ Procedure ” and the return of speech to narrator of Strange Bodies ; the consequences of
a chance encounter with the monster suggest the outcome of the
confrontation
with
Hunter
Gould.
The most provocative sentence in the book is one that suggests just how tricky
the narration really is :
He had no understanding of how profoundly I feel that, far from being a copy, I am an enhancement.
‘Malevin père said a hundred thousand words was the minimum to reconstitute
a core complex’
There are many tasty sentences that fuel tensions between the play of memory
and
careful
observation
of the narrator’s present. “ His kindness to me seemed almost without limit ” is rain on parched soil.
“ It glittered prettily where the light struck it, magnifying the weak October
sun into deep yellow and blue flashes. ” This is as fine a definition of personality as any, and the klyuchka is a beautiful and deeply satisfying artefact in a field rich in the signs of
imagined
technologies.
The
narrator’s gesture at the black hillside tarn, and the choices he and Vera made that brought
him there, are in a direct line with Lisette’s renunciation of her jewel in The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt. Forget the zombies, and be very afraid : Strange Bodies is the most lucid account from the subject of an
evil,
totalitarian
medical procedure
since Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch (1968).
Theroux has written a remarkable book.
———
* a good sentence sometimes still presents as a unicum :
— — — —
parlor games
— The Ghosts of My Friends Arranged by Cecil Henland. Frederick A. Stokes, [n.d., printed by Dow & Lester in London ca. 1908].
Two copies, one partly accomplished with signatures dated 1908 to 1918, the other blank. All ghosts now. Do you have a full pen of ink handy ?
— — — —
recent reading
— [J.J. Abrams & Doug Dorst. S.] [wrapper title]. Ship of Theseus by V.M. Straka. Winged Shoes, 1949 [i.e. : Little, Brown, 2013]. A playful, tricky simulation of an old book with a cover design after Lustig and layers of annotation.
— — — —
that hue : the average orange book
‘ I shall be glad to be cured of my unbecoming propensity to laugh whenever I hear of a lecturing lord ’
— Thomas Love Peacock. Gryll Grange (1861), in an orange Penguin paperback, 1949.
Peacock is pretty thoroughly grumpy about modernity, nonetheless his satire explodes the Whig fallacy of history and his female characters have great self-possession and good lines : “ You travel round the world by a hand-book, as you do round an exhibition-room by a catalogue. ”
— — — —
— James Bieri. Percy Bysshe Shelley. A Biography. Youth’s Unextinguished Fire, 1792-1816 [and:] Exile of Unfilfilled Renown, 1816-1822. University of Delaware Press, [2004]. Tracked to the source : clarification of Shelley’s vegetarianism and his relations with John Newton, author of The Return to Nature, 1811.
— — — —
Language and more language, as without words we cannot think, without a knowledge of words we cannot, save confusedly, express our hearts.
— C.M. Doughty, cited by Herbert Davis in his Bergen Lecture, 1943
— C. M. Doughty. The Cliffs. Duckworth, 1909. Aerial invasion and elf-drama : conscription in the village, Oberon and a faery wedding, an English ghost army (with divine bowman !), and infant sacrifice ; the vicar militant, and war ! The richest, weirdest, crunchiest word-hoard your correspondent has seen in many years.
Hearken, whilst I call over our elf-mote.
Young Gam and Wern and Olp and Dru and Knop ;
Trippe, Ban and Bolt, and Clum and Pust and Tarpe
— Barker Fairley. Charles M. Doughty. A Critical Study. Jonathan Cape, [1927]. On Doughty’s profound study of languages, his long-term poetic aims, and “ the wealth of fuller knowledge not given ”. Doughty’s elf-lore was so thoroughly rooted in scholarship of Norse literature that “ even his airiest inventions are as true to tradition as if they were the tradition itself. ”
Dedication page of The Cliffs, inscribed to his editor, Edward Garnett. Photos courtesy of Dan Visel.
— — — —
— Avram Davidson. The Phoenix and the Mirror [; or, The Enigmatic Speculum (1969)]. [Introduction by Adam Roberts]. [Gollancz, 2013]. Fantasy Masterworks
series.
Go read it : Joanna Russ did, http://avramdavidson.org/russ.html.
Read The Phoenix and the Mirror for the sentences, the
wild imagery, the episodic plot, the walk-on parts, the blossoming apple tree,
its color and erudition and its geography, and all the intricacies of the world
of Davidson’s Vergil. Adam Roberts read the book closely and the introduction is the fruit
of his reading, with some notable insights into the cadences of Davidson’s prose. When Vergil visits the eunuch Sylvian, Chief Priest of Cyprus, he employs “ the device called a pembert, of which only Vergil himself and one other had the
art ”. Davidson’s pembert, its tiny lens-lamp and tinier mirror and distortion of shadow fully as remarkable
as the speculum major or Big Mirror that is the principal matter of the novel, is summoned for use
and then dismissed, all in the space of a couple of pages. A lesser writer
might have written a ten-page infodump on “ the device ”. It was also a delight to
see Vergil wield his letters of state, a precursor of the Provót entrusted to Doctor Estzerhazy in “ The Crown Jewels of Jerusalem, or The Tell-Tale Head ”. Re-reading the book, its flaws (noted by Russ) are there, but they
are the visible knots in a handmade tapestry : to re-read The Phoenix and the Mirror (for the first time in nearly a decade) was sheer delight. (See below for the perils of re-reading
Chesterton.)
One brief aside : what is it with publishers and subtitles ? Doubleday, publishers of the original edition, had a policy against subtitles
in fiction and the Ace paperback restored it, sort of : under the author’s name. Davidson had a couple of subtitles for Vergil in Averno ; Doubleday printed neither. And yet how many publishers slap the helpful subtitle A Novel onto a title page ?
— George Pelecanos. The Double. A Novel. Little, Brown, [2013].
— Peter Crowther. Jewels in the Dust. Subterranean Press, 2013. Stories old and new : “ The Fairy Trap ”, etc.
— Steve Katz. Florry of Washington Heights. A Novel. Sun & Moon, [1987]. [re-reading].
— John Buchan. Castle Gay (1930) [re-reading : back in the land of Dickson McCunn and the Gorbals Die-hards].
— — — —
“ . . . that the world is both deterministic and overflowing with endless surprise ”
— Rudy Rucker. Turing & Burroughs. A Beatnik SF Novel. Transreal Books,
[2012]. History unwound : Alan Turing in Tangier and America . . .
— — — —
— Craig Graham. Phantom Pain. Poems. Vagabond Books, [2014]
[. . .]
each summer again
another spell
of invention
on the ragged edge
of nothing
— — — —
— Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days. Translated by Geo. M. Towle. Phila. : Porter & Coates, [n.d.]. “ I will jump — mathematically ”.
— — — —
— L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (Expanded Edition). Owlswick, 1978. [re-reading]
— John Buchan. The Three Hostages, 1924 [re-read after an interval of perhaps 30 years, noting technique, conservatism of the narrative tone, observations of chaos].
— James Meek. The People’s Act of Love (2005). “ ‘ . . . a revolution happens when it happens in here. ’ [Samarin] tapped his head. ”
— Ian Donaldson. Ben Jonson. A Life. Oxford University Press, [2011.]
— Joseph Conrad. The Shadow-Line. A Confession [and:] Within the Tides. Tales [Works, vol. 16]. “ . . . the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes ”
— — — —
‘ Humphrey Pump had a talent for friendship and understood his old friend.’
— G.K. Chesterton. The Flying Inn. Methuen, [1914]. Red cloth, titled in gilt. Name and pencil date, January 1914, on front flyleaf. Re-read on the occasion of the centenary of its publication. What a very long century since Chesterton wrote, “ For a peace was being given to Europe. ” Some thoughts on the novel follow.
The books one reads unquestioningly as a teenager warrant close scrutiny as an adult : Chesterton, Buchan, Tolkien. I think I have adequately interrogated the works of Lovecraft while observing the apotheosis that began with the first appearance of Joshi’s Life and the edition of stories presented by Joyce Carol Oates. I read Slan by A.E. van Vogt in French translation, at age 14, and that was the golden age ; I have quailed each time I have looked the opening paragraphs of English texts, and closed the book. I have so far resisted an embassy to Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I suspect that someday I will have a look at the Doc Savage reprints that I read as a child and teenager (there is a box in the attic). Tolkien I re-read aloud some years ago, and the steady walking pace of the prose epic was sufficient to make me marvel at the concision of certain deeply memorable passages, and at how Éowyn was the only woman in the book possessed of a character. But this is not about Tolkien, and I will get to Chesterton.
Earlier this year I re-read a book by Richard Usborne, Clubland Heroes. A nostalgic study of some recurrent characters in the romantic fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper (second edition, Barrie & Jenkins, 1974). I never read Yates or Sapper, but there was lots of Buchan in the boarding school library and on other shelves. Usborne was a good skeptical re-reader of Buchan, noting the recurring principle of “ regenerative exhaustion [. . .] the honourable exhaustion of the spirit, curable only by honourable exhaustion, in the open air, of the body. ” Or this :
This type of man-of-the-world, know-it-all passage, clever trick that is effective if infrequently offered, occurs several times in Greenmantle and once or twice in each of Mr Standfast and The Three Hostages. On second readings and second thoughts you will probably agree that this style of thing is Buchan pulling high-quality wool over his readers’ eyes.
Usborne identified “ The Loathly Opposite ” in The Runagates Club as one of the earliest stories of radio intercepts and code-breaking, “ And here is John Buchan giving the gist of it in World War I and, as usual, taking the heat and hate out of it . . . ” Usborne was also pretty good at the laconic statement, “ On the other hand, is weather, however divinely glimpsed, the essential stuff of thrillers ? ” The Thirty-Nine Steps is a headlong race against time, and its narrator, Richard Hannay, is still an outsider to the corridors of power into which he blunders. By the time of The Three Hostages, Hannay is as thoroughly a member of the establishment as Buchan was, and the narrative tone has altered. In re-reading Castle Gay (1930), I could see Jaikie Galt being given the treatment, and it grated (Huntingtower and The House of the Four Winds retain their charms for me).
And so we come to The Flying Inn. Chesterton is a brilliant writer with a gift for a memorable turn of phrase : the quotation at the head of this essay is the source for one I have used for a decade, though it has been thirty years or more since I read the book *. The Flying Inn is kinetic, madcap Chesterton : Patrick Dalroy and Humphrey Pump are truly memorable characters, and Lord Ivywood’s Nietzschean downfall is deftly achieved. I remembered the humor and common sense of Dalroy and Pump, the main arc of the plot, and many of the core images : Chesterton is really good at crowd scenes. What I had utterly forgotten was a thread visible in an (almost) blameless first paragraph. Even more than Buchan, Chesterton’s off-hand, inner-circle narrative mode is a chummy, tainted ‘ we ’ inseparable from the book. This is a perfect exemplar of the magic of class. It is not the brilliant caricatures and The Flying Inn that are appalling : it is that the narration makes the reader complicit in an architecture of unquestioned privilege and received prejudice. Despite a zany plot, sometimes the experience of reading The Fying Inn is of swimming in a polluted river ; but, oh, the Songs of the Car Club ! and the dazzling sentences that are the river unpolluted. (See above for the delights of re-reading Avram Davidson.)
———
* Chesterton’s satirical coinage, Chrislam, persisted in memory :
The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage 86 (1995) : Islamdancing (map and words by Henry Wessells)
http://www.avramdavidson.org/subtle2.htm
— — — —
William S. Burroughs. Naked Lunch. [Tenth printing, lacking dust jacket, shelfworn, ex-library with marks. Inscribed.]
— — — —
Commonplace Book :
The purpose of writing is to make it happen.
— Wm. S. Burroughs. The Adding Machine
“ . . . it’s that I don’t necessarily have all the interim sentences. Those words are the two words I have”
— M.K. Wilmers
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/09/london-review-books-lrb-best-magazines-world-mary-kay-wilmers
“It is like the flowing of a river : it is always different water, but you do not see the difference”
— Peacock, Gryll Grange
“Whenever I read this kind of thing, it tells me the writer is not sensitive to the full value of the idea of comparison”
— Lydia Davis
— — — —
The New York Antiquarian Book Fair
The New York Antiquarian Book Fair opens on Friday 4 April at the Park Avenue Armory (preview Thursday evening). Your correspondent will be in booth E1. Come say hello. Let me know if you would like a pass.
— — — —
before world war one ; and after
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers in the Great War : http://fantastic-writers-and-the-great-war.com
A fascinating compendium of biographical information, edited
by Edward James. Have a look at the entry for Hugh Lofting, for example ; or Stella Benson.
mailbag roulette, late February
cats 5, dogs 2 ; horses 6, receding [and too much sugar . . .]
— — — —
— — — —
17 & 30 December 2013
That Time of Year : Best Book of 2013
— Greer Gilman. Cry Murder! in a Small Voice. Small Beer Press, [2013]. vi, 53, [5] pp. Jacobean crime tale in dazzling prose style. The Best Book of 2013.
The tale is swiftly told : a rich peer — evil and depraved, if words still have meaning — took his pleasure in killing little boys ; a drunken poet, grieving, went down these mean alleys to end this wrong, with the help of a boy who knew one of the victims. But this is not all, this is almost nothing : for Gilman’s gesture and language — the dance of paper figures, and an orange offered in winter — are magic. Read carefully, taste the words upon the tongue. Not everything is what it seems.
What is a story but the dance of words ? Greer Gilman’s language is always demanding : even short declarative sentences resonate with layers of meaning. The longer cadences are nimble, tricky on the tongue and in that place in the brain where deliberate allusions * float like wisps of smoke on a winter morning or snap as flags in a furious gale. It is hugely ambitious to encode so much of the Elizabethan theater into a murder mystery staged upon the hinge of the modern world. That Gilman accomplishes this tale within the space of fifty-two pages is brilliant, contrarian, and wholly admirable.
From the rafters, bright-leaved as a wood in fall, unfallen, hung a company of players, masque and anti-masque. In little : mere idolatries, no greater than his hand. A puppet show. Some cut from ballad sheets ; some drawn by a childish hand ; all painted : knights, gods, shepherds, witches ; bears and dragons, Mab and Merlin and the rapt Prosperina. Fantastical, this meddled work — aye, Willfully — to graft such hedgerow Englishry on ancient stock, imp out the laurel with the hawtree. Scene : a wood near Athens. Crinkum-crankum. He would have mocked them as a pack of cards ; but in the drowning light, they seemed like spirits. Shades of — Bah ! a cheat of fantasy. Bad glass, as green as standing water, and an ill-fit frame, no more a wind in here. But whispering, they stirred.
That paragraph is as beautiful as the opening of chapter six in The Blue Star , “ Night and Day ; The Place of Masks ”, when Rodvard and Lalette enter the costume-maker’s loft, or any other passage from any book you may choose : inseparable from the narrative threads of Cry Murder ! , not a word out of place. It is also rather intricately bound to the entire fabric of English literature. Vast libraries are filled with literary responses to Shakespeare : Johnson, Browning, Kipling, Bloom, and others, in a long procession of authors, critics, scholars. Greer Gilman gives us a taste of how Shakespeare played in his own time, and how his words rang to one who loved him well. Gilman’s Ben Jonson is a delightful creation : flawed, fond of drink, and mourning the death of his son, but not so long retired as a soldier that he has forgotten action. Gilman’s Jonson is a figure to counter the poet’s self-portrait in his last years, “ a tardie, cold / Unprofitable Chattell, fat and old, / Laden with Bellie ”. James Joyce read deeply of Jonson ; so has Greer Gilman, and we are infinitely richer for it.
The Best Book of 2013.
——
* I suspect an entire concordance or glossary of citation could be compiled, larger than Cry Murder ! Let it be from some one else’s pen.
— — — —
current reading
— Norman Rush. Subtle Bodies. Knopf, 2013.
— Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Edited by David G. Hartwell and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Tor, 2013. Gift of [LZ].
— — — —
Tenacious clinging to the right of private judgement is an English trait, that a mere grammarian may not presume to deprecate . . .
H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926
— — — —
— Mark Valentine. Seventeen Stories. Swan River Press, 2013.
Books are dangerous things in the writings of Mark Valentine. Seventeen Stories demonstrates the wide range of his considerable talents. He is attentive to place and to the power of obsession, but one of his true gifts is an ability to suggest modes of artistic expression. That these new media would likely be impossible to accomplish in the ordinary world in which we dwell is nothing. In his stories, as one reads of cataloguing dreams, searching for an elusive culinary ingredient, or attending an unusual musical performance, Valentine makes the spark of recognition leap from the page to the reader. It is useful to cite Joanna Russ here :
[. . .] James Blish’s dictum that ideas alone are worthless, what counts is ideas about ideas. Sex, like all primary experiences, can be named directly but not described directly; one can only describe its effect on people, its experiential dimension, so to speak. In the newness of taboo-breaking, many writers forget this [. . .]. What matters is not organ grinding but the explosions sex produces in the head.
How tiresome it is, sometimes, to read endless tales of writers struggling to perfect their art. Valentine has evolved a resilient and infinitely mutable solution, though : his stories of peculiar quests and arcane lore get their protagonists out from behind a desk and into country houses (“ An Incomplete Apocalypse ”), isolated Yorkshire graveyards (“ The Tontine of Thirteen ”), and the salt pans of the French coastline.
Valentine’s other notable gift (inseparable from this talent for evoking new forms of expression) is the literary exploration of friendship. On the last page of my copy of The Collected Connoisseur by Mark Valentine & John Howard (Tartarus Press, [2010]), I have written a list of the literary record of artistic creations the book embodies : architecture, cartographies of ice and silence and mist, celestial bodies, cemeteries, cigarettes, cinemas, clouds, countries and enclaves of preserved history, dance music, drowned kingdoms, etchings, liturgies, manuscripts, matchboxes, ornamental stonework, poetry, photographs, postage stamps, rocking horses, scientific instruments, sculptures and cubist furniture, tableaux vivants, and membership societies.
The Collected Connoisseur is, fundamentally, a book about friendship. Seventeen Stories contains several stories that evoke this vocabulary : how shared aesthetic experience builds solid foundations of friendship. Valentine understands that it is not only in spoken professions of affinity but in silence and space that friendship grows. In Seventeen Stories as in other works by Valentine, the revelations are often to be classed under the heading of quiet observations, but several of these tales have a sharp edge to them that I have not seen in earlier stories. “ Without Instruments ” (2012) is one of the strongest stories in the book. In addition to being a delightful examination of “ the wilful admirers of the obscure ”, it is a superb, truly haunting tale : “ The Kerastion ” by Ursula K. Le Guin is the only story I have read that is even remotely similar ; but where Le Guin’s jeu d’esprit is a funeral ritual, the lost work of John Ruthven in “ Without Instruments ” is “ a living composition ” and a signpost to a new way of seeing.
There are three detective stories here : two are deft pastiches of Conan Doyle and M.P. Shiel, and the third something more. In “ The Return of Kala Persad ”, Valentine creates a deftly balanced and fully autonomous voice for the eponymous vegetarian Hindu sleuth in Edwardian London whose earlier adventures were narrated by a pukka sahib in The Divinations of Kala Persad and Other Stories by Headon Hill (1895). To a twenty-first century reader, the original series reveals all too clearly the prejudices and ignorances of the day. Valentine’s liberation of Kala Persad is a careful tightrope act, offering unmediated Anglo-Indian cadences while avoiding twee constructions. Perhaps there will be more.
A number of the stories collected here (including “ The Axholme Toll” and “ The Other Salt” ) have seen publication only in books with exotic imprints (and very narrow circulation). Swan River Press has a good distribution record and Seventeen Stories will make Valentine’s work more widely available : a good place to start.
— — — —
recent reading
— William Zachs. ‘ Breathes There the Man ’ Sir Walter Scott 200 Years since Waverley. An Inaugural Exhibition. Edinburgh, 2014 [i.e., November 2013]. Illustrated catalogue.
— Nathaniel Philbrick. Why Read Moby Dick ? [2011]. An exemplary short book on a vast subject : revelling in the text, and, as in the case of the correspondence of Melville and Hawthorne, suggesting (with citations) where to go to enrich one’s own understanding of the book and its context.
— Ishmael Reed. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down [1969]. Alison & Busby, [1971].
— Donna Tartt. The Goldfinch. Little, Brown and Company, [2013]. At the point where the protagonist declared, “ All I wanted was to scrape by ” (page 412), your correspondent flinched, but persevered. The narrative structure and tone (of deadened entitlement) closely resemble those of The Magicians by Lev Grossman (2009) ; with opiate addiction and the margins of the criminal underworld in place of magic and an alternate reality.
— — — —
alphabetical list of a few good books read in 2013
— Kingsley Amis. The Green Man [1969]. Introduction by Michael Dirda. New York Review Books, [2013].
— Paolo Bacigalupi. The Windup Girl [2009]. Night Shade Books paperback, [2012].
— Max Beerbohm. The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson or an Oxford Love Story [1911] with 80 illustrations by the author. Yale University Press, 1985.
— Susannah Clapp. A Card from Angela Carter. Bloomsbury, [2012].
— Avram Davidson. The Wailing of the Gaulish Dead. Preface by Eileen Gunn. The Nutmeg Point District Mail, 2013.
— Graham Joyce. Some Kind of Fairy Tale. A Novel. Doubleday, [2012].
— Charles Robert Maturin. Melmoth the Wanderer [1820].
— [Lady Morgan]. The Wild Irish Girl. A National Tale. By Miss Owenson. In three volumes. The third edition. London, 1807. Note here.
— Jeremy Norman. Scientist, Scholar & Scoundrel. A Bibliographical Investigation of the Life and Exploits of Count Guglielmo Libri . . . . The Grolier Club, 2013.
— Flann O’Brien. The Poor Mouth. A Bad Story About the Hard Life [1941]. Translated from the original Irish by Patrick C. Power. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. [1973]. Dalkey Archive Press paperback, [2008].
— — — —
— William B. Helmreich. The New York Nobody Knows. Walking 6,000 Miles in the City. Illustrated with maps, photographs. [xxiv], 449 pp. Princeton University Press, [2013].
Walking is critical to the task because it gets you out there and lets you get to know the city up close. However, you cannot merely walk through a city to know it. You have to stop long enough to absorb what’s going on around you.
Fascinating survey of the ethnography and social history of contemporary New York City, richly documented in anecdote and fact. Helmreich ranges throughout the five boroughs and across class and ethnic barriers with the affability of an older guy who knows how to get people talking : “ What is amazing to me is that this individual can meet me, a stranger whose language he doesn’t speak, invite me into his apartment . . . ” And we’re off on another adventure among immigrants, in a gentrifying hotspots, and in areas known only to residents. If at times, Helmreich seems almost pollyannaish in his view of the city’s success and resilience, he comes right back down to earth with statement such as this, on gentrification : “ I’ve concluded that most gentrifiers do not really mix with the natives, often preferring people who, like them, are new to an area instead. ” He is alert to the homogenizing effect of gentrifying neighborhoods, “ as the overall cost of living makes it possible for only the well-off to remain there ”, and notes the difficulty in tracking those who have left for economic reasons. While Helmreich occasional looks at the porous border between Queens and Long Island, Hoboken and Jersey City are curiously invisible in his search to understand what makes the city function. The consideration of homelessness is inadequate (unlike Helmreich’s explicit recognition that the large industrial areas of the city have not been studied).
The strength of the book, and its chief pleasure for the reader, is in the specificity of Helmreich’s encounters with residents, politicians, and community leaders. The notes are as rich in story as the main text. The New York Nobody Knows is an invitation to walk.
— — — —
Useful Words
— Robert Andrew Parker. Yiddish Lexicon. Volume One. Words that have practically entered the English Language. Ink Inc., 2013. Edition of 100 copies signed by the artist. Collection of thirty-six hand-colored prints : visual definitions of words that are essential to living English usage. The style is a little reminiscent of William Nicholson’s Alphabet, London Types, or An Almanac of Twelve Sports from the late 1890s ; the Lexicon gives a bold interpretation of chutzpah.
— — — —
Be Very Afraid
— Michael Swanwick. Solstice Fire. Dragonstairs Press, 2013. [13] pp. Edition of 100 signed copies. Collection of three very short stories, “ Bone-Fire Time ”, “ Interview with a Salamander ”, and a chilling, memorable whimsy : “ Mice Discover Fire ”.
— — — —
Unlike T.E. Lawrence, who once sent round a card stating that he would write very few letters, your correspondent, who will return to this space toward the end of January, pledges to write more letters in 2014 (N.B. the postal address is below, send a letter and I will write back).
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Wander in the Archives
The Archives of the Endless Bookshelf have been swept and tidied and a guide has been prepared to assist wanderers. Index would be too strong a term : the headwords tend to be suggestive rather than directive. Start here. Have fun.
This creaking and constantly evolving website of the endless bookshelf : I expect that some entries will be brief, others will take the form of more elaborate essays, and eventually I will become adept at incorporating comments or interactivity. Right now you’ll have to send links to me, dear readers. [HWW]
electronym : wessells
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Henry
Wessells and individual contributors.
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