April - June 2019
5 June 2019
Spring is here in New Jersey, and your correspondent is reading and writing.
Not so much on screen, hence the telegraphic style.
Off to London for the Firsts book fair in Battersea, 7 through 9 June (booth D09, Cummins) : come say hello.
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Will be at Readercon 30, 12 through 14 July : see you there.
My schedule will be as follows :
— Friday 12 July 5:30 p.m. Reading : Henry Wessells
— Sunday 14 July 10:00 a.m. Satire, Criticism, and Humility : John Clute, Meg Elison, Victoria Sandbrook, Graham Sleight (moderator), H. Wessells
[Now to finish writing the story, a companion piece to Cleaning up Elfland, which I read a couple of years ago.]
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recent reading :
— Jan Morris. Hav. Comprising Last Letters from Hav [and] Hav of the Myrmidons. Faber and Faber, 2006. Signed copy.
— Bobby Derie. Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos. Hippocampus, [2014: i.e., POD 5 May 2019]. A comprehensive documentary review of biographical sources, primary writings of HPL, critical writings, and secondary/tertiary (derivative) fiction. Almost nothing happens in Lovecraft, but the consequences of the act are everywhere. As Caitlin Kiernan has noted, “Lovecraft who only seems a prude until one realizes how preoccupied so many of his stories are with sex, very weird sex, indeed, no matter what dim view he took”.
An important book.
— Foundation 48:1 (no. 132), 2019. With an essay by Susan Ang on China Miéville’s “fractally begetting” metaphor in the novel The City & The City; an excellent review of two books on C. H. Hinton and the fourth dimension by editor Paul March-Russell; and selections from the correspondence of Ursula K. Le Guin and Robert Philmus, &c., &c.
— Ann McKinstry Micou. A Guide to Fiction Set in the Garden State. [Printed for the author by Newark Trade Typographers, 2019]. This is “illustrative not exhaustive”, with interesting biographical notes and critical summaries. An important book. Available from Watchung Booksellers, http://watchungbooksellers.com.
— Iain Sinclair. The Last London. True Fictions from an Unreal City. Oneworld, [2017].
— R. A. Gilbert. Arthur Machen’s Occult Catalogues. Tartarus Press. Friends of Arthur Machen, [2019].
— Faunus 39. The Journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen. Spring 2019. Ray Russell in the footsteps of Machen, and an interesting account of the years in the wilderness, “In the Days of Dearth — Machen in the Nineteen Eighties”, by Mark Valentine, with a chronology of the Machen revival of the 1980s and 1990s by Iain Smith.
— Ng Yi-Sheng. A Book of Hims. Poems. [Singapore]: Math Paper Press, [2017]. Gift of the author.
— [Samuel L. Clemens]. Mark Twain. The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Oxford Mark Twain. Oxford University Press, 1996. Le Guin was also a great reader: “surely it is their interdependence that is the point. [. . .] Could anybody but Mark Twain have told the story of Adam and Eve without mentioning Jehovah? As a heathen child I was entirely comfortable with his version. I took it for granted that it was the sensible one. As an ancient heathen I still find it sensible, but can better appreciate its originality and courage”.
— Poet of the Body. New York’s Walt Whitman. An exhibition based on the Walt Whitman collection of Susan Jaffe Tane on the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of Whitman’s Birthday. Curated by Susan Jaffe and Karen Karbiener with Julie Carlsen and Gabriel Mckee. The Grolier Club, 2019. [See below].
— Thomas Love Peacock. Crotchet Castle [1831]. Edited by Richard Garnett. London, Dent, 1893. “Peacock at his zenith” (Garnett).
— Thomas Love Peacock. Headlong Hall [1816]. Edited by Richard Garnett. London, Dent, 1899.
— [Donald Westlake]. Richard Stark. The Hunter [Payback, 1962]. A Parker Novel. University of Chicago Press [uniform edition].
— — The Rare Coin Score [1967].With a new foreword by Luc Sante. University of Chicago Press [uniform edition].
— — Comeback [1997]. With a new foreword by Lawrence Block. University of Chicago Press [uniform edition].
— — Breakout [2002]. With a new foreword by Chris Holm. University of Chicago Press [uniform edition].
— — Nobody Runs Forever [2004]. With a new foreword by Duane Swierczynski. University of Chicago Press [uniform edition].
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commonplace book :
[Robert Seymour]. The March of Intellect, [London, 1828-1830]. BM 2003,0531.29.
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“commands not, nor obeys” — Shelley, Queen Mab
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“so advanced, so meta-normal” — Philip K. Dick, 1981
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“a speculative rendering of the post-apocalyptic landscape of the city I live in” — Christopher Brown, “Suburbia Deserta”
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“Make no mention or allusion to them whatever” — Walt Whitman, on classical, Egyptian, and European sources
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rhododendron day
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21 April 2019
‘ the literature of the human imagination ’
— [Jeremy Brett et al]. The Stars Are Ours. Infinite Diversities in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Illustrated. [vii],133 pp. [College Station, Texas]: Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, Texas A&M University Libraries, [2019]. Pictorial wrappers.
Well llustrated catalogue for an exhibition that runs 29 March through 20 September 2019, presenting more than 150 books, manuscripts and proofs, magazines and fanzines, comic books, film posters, and other media from the collections at the Cushing Library. In 2010, the exhibition One Hundred Years Hence charted the histories of science fiction from the origins into the early twenty-first century. The Stars Are Ours includes many landmark works in science fiction and the fantastic, from Frankenstein and Herland to Dune and The Left Hand of Darkness and The Female Man, adopting a thematic approach to science fiction as a literature of ideas while emphasizing ethnic and gender diversity. Chapters include Time Travel, Alternate History, Eco-SF, First Contact / The Other, Futures, Afro-Futurism, Fantasy, Horror, Non-Typical Superheroes, Space Opera, Near Future, Fanzines, and Art & Audio-Visual Media. Three individuals are categories unto themselves with individual chapters: Margaret Brundage, Andre Norton, and Samuel R. Delany. Each chapter includes an introductory passage; entries are illustrated and identify author, title, publisher, date, and edition (with notes on first publication when later editions have been selected). The descriptive paragraphs are succinct and instructive, including some plot summary with minimal biographical details (noting awards and prizes), and function more along the line of exhibition label than essay in miniature. There are a few infelicities of style and a very few odd editorial decisions in descriptive paragraphs (The Female Man seems ill-served, for example), but the book is engaging and stimulates curiosity about the books and their authors. There is no index.
The Stars Are Ours is a truly contemporary exhibition: about two-thirds of the entries were published in 2000 and after, and more than half of the entries are for works produced since 2010. There is a risk to this, of course, since material of current interest and popularity may sometimes prove to be ephemeral, but science fiction has always been an evolving form or even a moving target. The catalogue cites Octavia Butler to good effect, “I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.” By contrast, One Hundred Years Hence included just five post-2000 items, four of them from the George R. R. Martin archive; that exhibition also made a point of addressing the topic of diversity in the field. This emphasis on current writers in The Stars Are Ours should not overshadow a judicious selection of earlier works to demonstrate the deep roots of science fiction as a diverse and transgressive literature. There are translations of books written in Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, and Spanish. Also of note is the diversity of publishers in the selection of recent works: small press, literary mainstream, genre giants, and niche publishers.
An excellent selection of twenty-first century science fiction. And a great reading list!
Details at : http://cushing.library.tamu.edu/programs/current.html
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current reading
— Ursula K. Le Guin. Always Coming Home. Author’s Expanded Edition. Edited by Brian Attebery. Library of America, [2019]. A familiar book and an entirely new book.
— Thomas Love Peacock. Nightmare Abbey [1818]. Edited by Richard Garnett. London, Dent, 1899. There is something very good to be said about book design in the 1890s. I have the complete set of the Garnett edition of Peacock, and will read or re-read my way through it in the coming months.
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recent reading
— Gene Wolfe. Storeys from the Old Hotel. Kerosina Books, 1988.
— John Dickson Carr. The Burning Court [1937]. International Polygonics, [1985].
— Jason Lutes. Berlin. [Illustrated throughout by the author.] Drawn & Quarterly, [2018].
— Ian Rankin. The Impossible Dead. A Reagan Arthur Book. Little, Brown, [2011].
— Robin Sloan. Sourdough. Or, Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market. A Novel [2017]. Picador, [2018].
— Farah Mendlesohn. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. Unbound, [2019].
— Gillian Beer. Alice in Space. The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll. University of Chicago Press, [2016].
— Donald E. Westlake. The Getaway Car. A Donald E. Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany. Edited by Levi Stahl. With a new foreword by Lawrence Block. University of Chicago Press, [2014].
— Douglas Preston. The Lost City of the Monkey God. Head of Zeus, [2017].
— Robert Aickman. The Attempted Rescue [1966]. [Foreword by Jeremy Dyson]. Tartarus Press, [2001].
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— Ursula K. Le Guin. The Last Interview and Other Conversations. Edited and with an introduction by David Streitfeld. Melville House, [2019]. A fascinating group of interviews from throughout Le Guin’s career, well worth reading.
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Tolkien at the Morgan
On another chilly day in January, I went down to the Morgan Library for the opening of the Tolkien exhibition, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, which includes the original map that anchored the evolution of the stories, dust jacket sketches and drawings for The Hobbit (above) and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, and the luminous watercolor drawing of Smaug upon his treasure horde, among many other delights and pleasures. On view through 12 May, and well worth the visit.
— Catherine McIlvaine. Tolkien. Maker of Middle-earth. Bodleian Library, [2018]. Richly illustrated catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Tom Shippey, Catherine McIlvaine, John Garth, Verlyn Flieger, “On Inventing Elvish” by Carl Hofstetter, and “Tolkien’s Visual Art” by Wayne Hammond and Cristina Scull.
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A Conversation larger than the Universe
A Conversation larger than the Universe. Readings in Science Fiction and the Fantastic 1762-2017.
By Henry Wessells
Illustrated collection of essays on science fiction and the fantastic, and the catalogue of the 2018 Grolier Club exhibition.
Copies of the hand bound issue, signed by the authors, are still available from Temporary Culture. The issue in paper covers is distributed by Oak Knoll. Single copies are available from the author.
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The Private Life of Books
The Private Life of Books, poems by H. Wessells, duotone photographs by Paul Schütze.
Copies still available from Temporary Culture.
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Hope & Wreckage
New editions of Michael Swanwick’s legendary monographs Hope-in-the Mist. The Extraordinary Career & Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees (2009) and What Can Be Saved From the Wreckage (2007) are available in all the usual e-booke formats through Weightless Books.
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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.
electronym : wessells
at aol dot com
Copyright © 2007-2018
Henry
Wessells and individual contributors.
Produced by Temporary
Culture, P.O.B. 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043 USA.