— Rosalie Parker. Dream Fox and Other Strange Stories. [vi], 239 pp. Tartarus Press, [2023]. Pictorial boards, dust jacket.
A new collection of 18 stories from this talented author, presenting a variety of modes and settings, plus a fabulous book-within-a-book, “Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences”. The stories also display a remarkable range of voices and a change of register from one story to the next, the oppressive tone of “Home Comforts”is followed by the quiet austerity and sense of the inescapable at the heart of “The Decision”. “Pebble” is a dark fable of modern slavery; it takes a sudden, darker turn that speaks of liberation.
The first story, “Beguiled”, starts as a glimpse of an aristocratic young lady’s privilege and confinement in Imperial Russia, with a flavor of some of the tales of Saki. The narrative moves with concision and perfect pitch to an icy conclusion and a devastating last line. The effect is breathtaking ! and all in eight pages of the most lucid prose.
The title story, “Dream Fox”, a variation on the Reynard tales, is deeply subversive of the patriarchy and the county landholding class. It is the rebellious imagination of the adolescent girl that powers the transformation. The outcome is utterly that of “Kitty” by Paul Bowles.
“Mary Belgrove’s Book of Unusual Experiences” is a collection of nine stories of ghosts and uncanny experiences in contemporary Britain, a book “chanced upon in a remainder outlet or a charity shop, rather than a bona fide bookstore”, published by a vanity press for “the crazy old woman who own all those millions in the National Lottery” and who wants to share her belief in the paranormal. The frame story is told in an introduction and the headnotes to each account. It is hilarious (is it a cameo self-portrait of the author?): in “The Dating Game”, Mary Belgrove tells Scott, “Perhaps we need to recognise that in this case ‘Alive’ and ‘Dead’ may be relative terms.” The experiences (each narrated in a distinct voice) are dislocating and defy reductive explanation.
a few pamphlets that have come across the desk of the Endless Bookshelf in recent months :
Old apple tree, old apple tree
Keep the secrets that you see
— Cardinal Cox. The Folk Show 3 : Fan Mail for a Film [Cover title]. [16] pp. [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2023]. Edition of 100 copies, (to be given away at the 2023 Whittlesea Straw Bear festival*). Self-wrappers.
——. From the Hercynian Forest [Cover title]. [16] pp. [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2019]. Edition of 100 copies. Self-wrappers.
——. London Particular [Cover title]. [16] pp. [Peterborough: Starburker Publication, 2019]. Edition of 100 copies. Self-wrappers.
These three chapbooks of poems and vignettes of English folklore draw from deep wells, mixing gritty observation of daily life with literary allusion, wit, and punk pop culture tricksters. Cox, who invokes the name of John Clare more than any other living writer, I suspect, was poet-in-residence for the Dracula Society, and seems to share a fascination with The Wicker Man. These resulted in a good old fashioned ’zine exchange (I sent alonga couple of the productions of Temporary Culture).
* Plough Monday in January, “between Christmas and fen-skate party”, is the traditional date of the Straw Bear festival, one learns from an aside in From the Hercynian Forest. This reminds me of the excellent exhibition of modern British folk art at the Barbican in May 2005, and the accompanying book, Folk Archive. Contemporary Popular Art from the UK, by Jeremy Delter and Alan Kane (Book Works, 2005), which I lent to a friend or otherwise I would do more than wonder if I can bring back some photos from the dark age and a cheap plastic cell phone, such as this label (the photograph of the object described won’t migrate) :
— — —
— [Bernadette Mayer]. Midwinter Marie. [16] pp. [James Walsh, 2023]. Second edition, one of 25 copies. Wrappers.
Selections by James Walsh from Midwinter Day (1982).
— — —
— Meghan Constantinou. The Daniel Press. Pioneer of the Private Press Movement. Illustrated. 26, [2] pp. The Grolier Club, 2021. Card covers, printed grey wrapper. Design by Kerry Kelly.
Catalogue of an exhibition of the Daniel Press, the print shop of Charles Henry Olive Dance (1836-1919), who printed some 50 books (chiefly poetry) between 1874 and 1906, and revived an early type face (the catalogue is set in the Fell type). Daniel is described by Colin Franklin as “an independent figure, outside fashionable taste and movements”. The books are generally small and handsome, and the press “has had a rich afterlife in multiple sense of the term”.
— — —
three black cats
— Christopher Barker. Plagiarism & Pederasty : Skeletons in the Jamesian Closet. In which the source for ‘The Ash-tree’ by Montague Rhodes James is identified. By Christopher Barker. Together with The Three Black Cats. By the Rev. A.D. Croke. Illustration of a George Cruikshank plate. Unpaginated, [28] pp. The Haunted River, 2003. Edition of 100 copies. Printed wrappers.
“The Three Black Cats” is a short antiquarian tale of horror published in 1888 in a collection of stories by A.D. Croke. Barker notes very strong similarities between the nucleus of Croke’s tale and “The Ash-tree”, which appeared in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), and takes James to task for plagiarism and hypocrisy and more..
It is sometimes fruitful to knock two ideas together to see if something new arises. Not in this instance, however. I know nothing of Barker, but this little book seethes with such resentment and outrage at the “honeyed images of the man as presented by Jamesian scholars” that a moderately interesting insight drowns under a bubbling hostility.
— — —
— Timothy d’Arch Smith. Montague Summers. A Talk. 25, [2] pp. The Tragara Press, 1984. One of 25 copies (edition of 110).
Talk presented to the Society on Montague Summers as bibliophile and aesthete.
— Joanne McNeil. Wrong Way. [x], 272, [3] pp. MCD x FSG Originals [forthcoming, November 2023]. “Preview edition”.
/ so psyched to receive this (long anticipated) book for review ; I loved McNeil’s Lurking (2020) and can’t wait to read this ! Nice cover design (by Abby Kagan?). Review TK
— — —
— An Appointment with the Wicker Man. The 50th Anniversary May Day, 2023. Compiled by Adam Newell. Frontispiece by Sharon Gosling, illustrated throughout. [20] pp. The Avellenau Press, 2023. Edition of 100.
Visual record of a May Day bonfire at Burrow Head in Scotland and the burning of a new Wicker Man created by local artist Amanda Sunderland ; with a beautiful Lallans poem, The Borrowing Days, by Amy Rafferty
‘bold an rowdy as whittericks’
/ file under : British Folk Art
/ learned of this via Mark Valentine’s Wormwoodiana, and acted promptly to order ; it has since sold out
/ let us agree that The Wicker Man is one of those films which may serve as a litmus test . . . of something
Temporary Culture announces new editions of Wendy Walker’s beautiful and dangerous book SEXUAL STEALING, now also available as a full color paperback, printed digitally to the highest standard with all the original illustrations (distributed by Levellers Press), and in a DRM-free e-book (pdf) that retains all the power and beauty of Jerry Kelly’s design for the print editions (distributed by Weightless Books).
I have been a champion of the work of Wendy Walker work since Temporary Culture was a photocopy ’zine and I reviewed The Secret Service; in 2011 I published her book My Man and other Critical Fictions. SEXUAL STEALING is the most important book that Temporary Culture has published. The new editions are available for immediate fulfilment. Please have a look. [HWW]
Very happy to have attended this year’s Readercon, held 13-16 July in Quincy, Mass. I arrived on the Thursday evening after a research visit to the American Antiquarian Society, and during the course of the weekend saw many old friends and acquaintances (including a couple of unexpected surprises), met a couple of people whom I had only known from correspondence, and made a few new friends. I am
one who found the convention masking policy (generally observed inside the con areas) and ventilation precautions most reassuring. I ate my meals out of doors (or went down into Quincy to eat al fresco). The hotel patio was a good place to sit down and see who showed up, and the weather was warm but clement until a deluge began on Sunday morning.
I was much encouraged by the decision to include the panel on Arthur Machen in the twenty-first century, Machen’s Legacy in Modern Horror & Fantasy, which I had proposed on a dark winter evening. It was very well attended and with such a knowledgeable group of panelists the conversation was so lively we ran out of time before there was any space for questions.
Arthur Machen panel at Readercon 32. Photo by Paul Witcover. From left : Michael Dirda, The Joey Zone, Michael Cisco, Elizabeth Hand, Henry Wessells (moderator)
Chris Brown’s Field Notes from the End of the World was an illustrated talk on nature writing in dystopian fiction, a good glimpse of some of my friend’s predilections and wild thinking, firmly grounded in the concerns of his Field Notes newsletter. Who else but Chris would consider Neuromancer from this perspective? I attended the interviews with the guests of honor: Jeff Vandermeer in conversation with his wife Ann, and Justina Ireland interviewed by Arley Sorg, lots of intelligent fun. I had not known of Justina Ireland before coming to Readercon, and found the panel on the author’s works to be exemplary in its mix of fact, interpretation, and enthusiasm. The panel in memory of Maureen Kincaid Spiller, a conversation between Graham Sleight and Romie Stott of Strange Horizons, was also very good. Of course there were time conflicts on panels & readings that I had to miss, testimony to rich multistream programming.
The book room felt a bit of a ghost town, with few antiquarian or older books, but I bought six new books (a few of them shown above) including one by Ireland (Rust in the Root) on the basis of the panel, and one by a member of a panel I moderated.
I have reached the age of insouciance, knowing that I am much older than many of the attendees and that our interests often diverge, but I had fun and will plan to attend next year. [HWW]
I’ll be there in Quincy, Mass., Friday through Sunday 14-16 July, and if you are there you will see me wandering about, and occasionally at fixed locations, according to the following schedule.
Friday 14 July 2023
7:30p.m. (Blue Hills) : Reading (new work)
Saturday 15 July 2023
11:00 a.m. (Salon B) : Arthur Machen’s Legacy in Modern Horror & Fantasy (moderator)
2:00 p.m. (Salon A) : The Enduring Legacy of Jules Verne (moderator)
Sunday 16 July 2023
11:00 a.m. (Salon A) : Speculative Memoir (moderator)
Copies of The Private Life of Books and other publications of Temporary Culture will be on hand. Come say hello if you see me.
current reading :
— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue (1925) & Le temps retrouvé (1927). À la recherche du temps perdu IV. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
— M. John Harrison. Wish I Was Here. An Anti-Memoir. [Serpent’s Tail, 2023]. Signed by the author 23 May 2023. [Gift of MLV].
— — —
recent reading :
— S. Barkworth. The Nijmegen Proof. Holmes Publishing Co., 1988.
— George Sims. The Terrible Door. The Bodley Head, [1964].
— —. The Last Best Friend [1967]. Carroll & Graf pbk., [1988].
— —. Hunters Point. Gollancz, 1973.
— —. The End of the Web. Gollancz, 1976.
— —. The Keys of Death. Macmillan, [1982].
George Sims (1923-1999) was an antiquarian bookseller, specialist in literature and literary manuscripts, and author of The Rare Book Game (1985), a memoir in the form of essays, and its several sequels. His crime novels are full of the most granular detail of the byways of London in the early 1960s, and Hunters Point is partly set in a San Francisco observed with similar care. Sims was a long-time friend of Julian Symons (I have his Death’s Darkest Face inscribed to Sims), which sparked my interest. H. R. F. Keating included The Last Best Friend in his Crime & Mystery The 100 Best Books and noted that the “exactitude of the poet” and “peripheral elaborations” are “simultaneously his triumph and something like his downfall” and mark him as an amateur writer. Sometimes the digressions are the voyage.
— — —
— Robert Sheckley. The Game of X [1965]. Jonathan Cape, [1966]. Excellent send-up of the espionage genre and a love letter to the city of Venice, with Sheckley’s characteristic wit bubbling up at odd moments and with perfect timing.
— —. Crompton Divided. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, [1978]. Scent and memory and an interplanetary question for personal integration made literal. Expanded from an early novella, “Join Now” or “The Humors”, with a cock-eyed nod to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.
— — —
— Julian Symons. The Man Who Killed Himself. The Crime Club, Collins, 1967.
— —. The Man Who Lost His Wife. The Crime Club, Collins, 1970.
— —. The Players and the Game. The Crime Club, Collins, 1972
— —. The Detling Murders. Collins, 1982. The Detling Secret. Viking. 1983.
— —. Something like a Love Affair. Macmillan, 1992.
I have long enjoyed the crime novels of Julian Symons which also serve as examinations of middle-class British life. I had read one or two of these a long time ago, and re-reading them was as interesting as charting new territory.
— — —
Dorothy L. Sayers. Clouds of Witness [1927]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Strong Poison [1930]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Gaudy Night. Gollancz, [1936].
— —. Busman’s Honeymoon [1937]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— James Clarke. Sanderson’s Isle. Serpent’s Tail, [2023].
— — —
— Arthur Machen. Far Off Things. Martin Secker, [1922].
— —. The London Adventure. Martin Secker, [1924].
— Iain Sinclair. Agents of Oblivion. Swan River Press, 2023.
Four short stories on Blackwood, Machen, Ballard, Lovecraft.
— Paul McAuley. Fairyland [1995]. Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback.
— Avram Davidson. AD100. 100 years of Avram Davidson. 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories. Volume I [II]. [xii], 635, [9]; [xii], 548, [8] pp. [Or All the Seas With Oysters, 2023].
A monumental collection of tales, for the Avram Davidson centenary!
— Nicola Upson. Nine Lessons [2017]. Faber pbk., [2021]. Crime story rooted in adolescent privilege, with reference to the ghost stories of M. R. James.
— Mark Valentine. The Peacock Escritoire with At Dusk. Tartarus Press, [2024]
— — —
— Herman Melville. Moby-Dick ; or, The Whale. University of California Press, [1981]. Illustrations by Barry Moser. California edition, reproduced from the Arion Press edition.
— Ling Ma. Bliss Montage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2022]. Winner of the Story Prize.
— Janwillem van de Wetering. The Japanese Corpse [1977]. Soho paperback, [1996].
— Michael Swanwick. Transits of Venus. Dragonstairs, 2023.
— — —
— Lord Dunsany. Lost Tales Volume VI. Illustrations by S. H. Sime. [Foreword by Randall, baron Dunsany]. Pegana Press, 2022 [i.e., 2023].
Finely printed collection of 7 stories, including an unpublished Jorkens yarn! Concluding a decade-long project, the first volume of which was the Endless Bookshelf book of the year in 2012.
— John Crowley. Little, Big or, The Fairies’ Parliament. Art by Peter Milton. Afterword by Harold Bloom. Incunabula, 2021 [i.e., 2022].
— Joanna Russ. The Adventures of Alyx. Timescape | Pocket Books, [August, 1983].
Tales from Gavagan’s Bar. Frontispiece by Tim Kirk
— L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt. Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (Expanded Edition). Owlswick, 1978.
“rhymes with ‘pagan’”
— Peter Kafer. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Univ. of Penna Press, [2004, i.e., POD 26 Dec. 2022].
— Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey [pbk, 7th ptg, 2021].
TEMPORARY CULTURE started with a photocopy ’zine at the end of June 1988, The Newsletter of Temporary Culture, the title from a dream-memory, and the form and content being a confluence of available technology and literary urges in the post-industrial not-quite-gentrified Hudson river littoral in Paulus Hoek (five minutes’ walk from downtown Jersey City). With the fifth issue the word newsletter fell away from the title and the seventh issue introduced the sumac logo and marked an end to a rainbow of ’zines (the eighth issue never made it to the copy machine).
And then the world changed.
Temporary Culture evolved with the newly available technology just as my interest in Avram Davidson ripened to the point of publication, and a friend said, you don’t really want a database, let’s make a website. An electronic newsletter followed, but the itch to produce printed things resurfaced before long, first with the publications of the Avram Davidson Society, and then from 2003 a steady series of books, including Another green world, When They Came by Don Webb, Hope-in-the-Mist by Michael Swanwick, and the specially bound copies of A Conversation larger than the Universe. (In retrospect, it would have been cool to accept the hand press and founts of type offered to me in late 1992 or early 1993, but at the time I had nowhere to house them and so a different path was chosen.) The most important book published by Temporary Culture is without a doubt Sexual Stealing by Wendy Walker; the most elegant is the hand printed edition of Naples by Avram Davidson. Of each one of these (and of each of the books of Temporary Culture) I can assert that without my energies these books would not have come into being. A checklist of the publications of Temporary Culture is in preparation. There will probably be a few more books before it’s over. [HWW]
“happy as always in the faculty of finding infinity round the corner of any street, within five minutes of anywhere”
— Arthur Machen, The London Adventure (1924)
— — —
On Defining Genre
The problem with defining a genre — science fiction, for example, or fantasy — is that once you’ve declared what it is, you’ve also declared what it can’t be. And if it can’t be anything but what it has already been, it’s of no interest to any serious artist.
— Michael Swanwick, Brief Essays on Genre (2023)
— — —
“de la doctrine des hommes comme de l’eau, qui n’est iamais plus belle, plus claire & plus nette qu’à sa source”
— Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627)
— — —
“But I knew that I always enjoyed looking back on things more than actually doing them.”
— George Sims, The Terrible Door (1964)
— — —
Hazelnut cake for the Avram Davidson Centenary Garden Party
— Michael Swanwick. Brief Essays on Genre. [Dragonstairs Press, 2023]. [16] pp. Stitched in wrappers. Edition of 75 signed copies.
Michael Swanwick is a trickster and a master of concision. In “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns” (1986)*, he danced his way through a discussion of contemporary science fiction and the apparent divide between the cyberpunks and the humanists, exhibiting familiarity with the work and the writers, all without ever quite planting a foot on either side of the fence. He was a skeptic of movements and manifestos back then; and when Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) seemed to chart a structure and laws, Swanwick set out to write a work that violated all of them and yet was unmistakably fantasy. So he has a playful side. He performed several rigorous, extended virtuoso sequences of short short stories, with Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary for The New York Review of Science Fiction (2000), The Periodic Table of the Elements for Ellen Datlow’s Sci Fiction (2000-2003, collected in 2005), and The Sleep of Reason, riffs on Goya’s Los Caprichos for The Infinite Matrix (2002-2003). His Christmas cards are a blast, short shorts that sometimes wrench your heart.
And now Swanwick has returned to nonfiction, with Brief Essays on Genre, which collects 25 sharp observations on writing and the literature of the fantastic. He knows how to get right to the heart of the matter. There is not a word of excess. The conclusion of the Brief Essay upon literary movements reaffirms his earlier position. “By the time you’ve heard of somebody else’s, it’s over.” If this approaches aphorism, nonetheless it rings true. Of course the difficulty in writing about these essays is that one find oneself in the situation of Avram Davidson writing his editor about “The Last Wizard”, in a letter of explanation as long as the story. I can’t, however, help citing this essay:
On Defining Genre
The problem with defining a genre — science fiction, for example, or fantasy — is that once you’ve declared what it is, you’ve also declared what it can’t be. And if it can’t be anything but what it has already been, it’s of no interest to any serious artist.
This approaches, from a different angle, William S. Wilson’s observation, “Writing within conventions of language, and of genre, is like swimming in society rather than in a pond under a waterfall.” It is often at the edges or boundaries where interesting things happen.
Don’t be fooled by the brevity or levity of Swanwick’s essays, this is a notable book.
Brief Essays on Genre sold out upon publication but you may read the essays as they appeared serially on Flogging Babel, beginning here.
—
* collected, with “In The Tradition” (1994), a cruise through the disputed waters of Fantasy, in The Postmodern Archipelago (1997).
