Category: Avram Davidson

recent reading : late september 2024

— Kasper van Ommen. “The Einstein of the sixteenth century”, in : Books That Made History. 26 Books from Leiden That Changed the World. Edited by Kasper van Ommen and Geert Verhoeven. [Translated by Claire and Mike Wilkinson]. Brill, 2022.
Excellent essay on J. J. Scaliger (1540-1609), polyglot scholar of classical and near eastern languages, whose Opus de emendatione temporum (1598) integrated astronomy and history from Jewish, Babylonian, Persian and Egyptian sources as well as Greek and Roman works ; “he also incorporated the latest astronomical understandings of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Tycho Brahe (1546-1601)”. Scaliger came to Leiden University with his library in 1593; it soon grew, and has been kept there ever since. Your correspondent is the lowest amateur polyglot in  the presence of such erudition; there were some remarkable books on view during a visit last week (including a presentation inscribed from Brahe to Scaliger).
A summary note on Scaliger’s career by van Ommen on the University website (Dutch for ‘grouch’ is brompot), Josephus Scaliger : famous scholar and grouch

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— Janwillem van de Wetering. Hard Rain [1986]. Soho paperback, [1997].
Had to pick this one up again, an old favorite by an old friend, for a re-read now that I have been to Amsterdam, and have walked and bicycled along the canals and into the Amsterdamse Bos. It was a Depression-era landscaping project around the Olympic rowing basin of 1928 and is now a mature city forest and a green lung in the midst of a densely populated zone.

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— Heather Swan. Where the Grass Still Signs. Stories of Insects and Interconnection. Pennsylvania State University Press, [2024].
Memoir and travelogue on insects and landscapes from the rural midwest to Colombia and Ecuador, richly illustrated with works by contemporary artists. Seen in the window of Architectura & Natura, an inviting bookshop on Leliegracht in Amsterdam.

— Christian de Pange. Le Bréviare du Quintivir. Une enquête bibliographique en Franche-Comté. [Lusove: Imprimerie de Bacchus] Pour la Société des Bibliophiles Francois, 2022.
Bibliographical account of a private social club in Vesoul in rural France at the turn of the nineteenth century, and their festive book, printed circa 1813 for the five members. The bibliographer has traced three copies to the present day; a fourth copy was last seen in 1896. Edition of 100 copies, from the author.

— Choosing Vincent. From family collection to Van Gogh Museum. Lisa Smith and Hans Luijten (eds.). Van Gogh Museum / Thoth Publishers, [2023].

— Emile Schriver and Heide Warncke. 18 highlights from Ets Haim, the oldest Jewish library in the world. Walburg Pers, [2016].
Illustrated selection of books and manuscripts from the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (founded 1616).

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— Avram Davidson and Grania Davis. A Goat for Azazel. [Afterword by Michael Swanwick]. Dragonstairs Press, forthcoming 5 September 2024. Edition of 80 copies, stitched in mourning lacework paper wrappers, signed by Swanwick.
Reproduces the text of a proposal for an  Eszterhazy “ghost novel” (circa 1993 or 1994), with a note by Michael Swanwick, whose friendship back then encouraged my researches and the formation of the Avram Davidson website.

— Nancy Isenberg. White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. [With a new preface to the paperback edition]. Penguin, [2017].
The persistence of early modern English hierarchies and economic structures from the earliest beginnings of the enterprise. Dispossession, servitude, and the upward concentration of wealth.

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The Wrong Girl by Angela Slatter

‘unstringing my rage with quick fingers’

The Wrong Girl by Angela Slatter (cover image)

— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023 : POD 8 January 2024].

Angela Slatter’s work is now well known. She won the World Fantasy award for The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (Tartarus, 2014), and has picked up several several others along the way. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings demonstrates a range of tones and geographies and narrative structures, among them a dark Sherlock Holmes incident interrogative of late Victorian assumptions and preoccupations, tales set in the town of Mercy’s Brook that seem almost cozy until the sharp steel appears, and a Miltonian settling of scores with a hypocrite priest. The title story is really something, a deft, wrenching account of the entangled lives of two sisters. Slatter sets this one up concisely and beautifully, the artist narrator and her improvident, carefree sister : “the butterfly departing on a whim, taking my favourite jeans and earrings, and leaving roughly the same devastation in its wake as a tornado”. When the butterfly image recurs a few pages later, it is the opening of the final act.

“The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne” is a ghost tale firmly anchored in a rural Welsh setting where the weight of past deeds erupts into the present. Slatter’s American locations are sometimes a bit generic but the struggle against ambient misogyny is real enough. This is a collection worth reading.

The last three stories are brief, previously unpublished retellings of classical motifs, with something of the same intensity found in the work of another Angela, Angela Carter ; and the same upending of the received versions. “Pomegranates” is Persephone’s tale retold ; “Lyre, Lyre” is Eurydice’s account, in which the artistic temper tantrums of Orpheus are noted. The last one, “Loom”, is best of all. Penelope’s terse review of the twenty years’ separation, and her knowledge of errant Odysseus (“all the things the birds left out”), just plain sings ! And then there is this swift phrase at the hinge of the story : “unstringing my rage with quick fingers”! My friend Michael Swanwick agrees with me : “This brilliant burst of fury makes the story”.

“Loom” is Slatter’s Homer : all the Odyssey in the span of a couple of pages and a worthy counterpoint to Avram  Davidson’s Homer, the yarn of Odysseus in 1970s American vernacular, found in the pages of Peregrine : Primus.

Temporary Culture at 35


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).

the cover of the first issue, light blue, was a rubbing of a coal chute cover in front of a house on Van Voorst Park in Jersey City

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]

commonplace book — late spring 2023

“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)

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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)

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“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)

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“But I knew that I always enjoyed looking back on things more than actually doing them.”

— George Sims, The Terrible Door (1964)

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Hazelnut cake for the Avram Davidson Centenary Garden Party

The Avram Davidson Centenary

Sunday 23 April 2023 is the centenary of the birth of Avram Davidson.

On this occasion, worthy of celebration wherever the readers of this website may find themselves, it is worth looking back at origins. I count myself fortunate to have discovered the work of Avram Davidson, when in late 1992 I first read a battered but intact copy of The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy paperback. I was surprised, again and again. The rambling sentences and digressions impressed me, but most of all it was the way in which Davidson integrated obscure and bizarre knowledge into these stories: knowledge that in anyone else’s hands would be dusty and uninteresting or an info-dump that strangled or squashed the flow of language. Davidson was genuinely learned, as even a single sentence taken at random will reveal. There is a healthy measure of irreverence to temper this erudition, too, so that a reader is never oppressed by the weight of information imparted. I know that I was re-reading the Enquiries in late April or early May 1993, for when I decided to order the two books then in print and called up George Scithers, publisher of the Owlswick Press (and Weird Tales), in King of Prussia*, Penna., he answered my inquiry with the statement, “Avram Davidson died last week.”

portrait of Avram Davidson (1923-1993), American science fiction author and essayist

Over the next several months and years, the quest for other works by Davidson, at first to read them, but soon I began preparing lists in an attempt to understand the range of his work. I corresponded with or met folks in and out of science fiction, many of whom I still count as friends. The rest is history, some of it chronicled in back issues of The Nutmeg Point District Mail newsletter and in the archives of the Avram Davidson website. From small seeds and many friendships, the Avram Davidson Society (largely imaginary but important for all that) has fostered interest in the writings of Avram Davidson.

In recent months, I have been re-reading lots and lots of Avram Davidson with great pleasure, the Eszterhazy stories (a perennial favorite), but also “Lord of Central Park” and El Vilvoy de las Islas (if Naples is the most elegant book I have published with the imprint of the Nutmeg Point District Mail, El Vilvoy is the most important). And then there is The Avram Davidson Treasury (1998), the great triumph of Grania Davis and her efforts in the first wave of posthumous publications. And if the Treasury unaccountably omitted three essential stories, “Lord of Central Park”, “The Dragon Skin Drum”, and El Vilvoy de las Islas, well, all three appeared in collections within the next few years, in The Investigations of Avram Davidson and The Other Nineteenth Century. And Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven gathered together material relating to Avram Davidson as an American Jewish writer; the biographical essay by Eileen Gunn remains the most important survey of Davidson’s life and work. These are solid foundations upon which all else has built.

And now, for the Avram Davidson Centenary year, there will be a century of stories, AD 100. 100 Years of Avram Davidson. 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories, a two volume collection assembled by Seth Davis and forthcoming in 2023 from  Or All the Seas with Oysters, the publishing arm of the Estate of Avram Davidson. Your correspondent had an early look at the table of contents and it is a fascinating assembly: early writings, some of which I have never seen, and stories published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies — within and without the genres— many of them ephemeral, fleeting, and extinct. Once upon a time, dear reader, it took fantastical amounts of luck and patience and effort and, above all, TIME to trace these stories, simply for the pleasure of reading them. Now, this pleasure will be yours, as you peruse two thick volumes. I look forward to doing so myself.

The preparation of AD100 is a colossal accomplishment and a landmark in the posthumous career of Avram Davidson as significant as publication of The Avram Davidson Treasury in 1998. Here’s to the next twenty-five years!

On the occasion of the Centenary, I acknowledge, in memoriam, a short list friends and correspondents who were instrumental in promoting the legacy of Avram Davidson: Grania Davis, Guy Davenport, Reno W. Odlin, George Scithers, and David G. Hartwell.

* King of Prussia, named for an eighteenth-century crossroads tavern, is the wonderfully named town near where I spent much of my youth. I suspect Avram Davidson took a certain amount of pleasure in the unusual name of the town where his friend and long-time editorial champion George Scithers (1929-2010) lived for many years.

[This essay appeared in slightly different form as part of The Nutmeg Point District Mail, vol. XXI, no. 1, archived at http://avramdavidson.org/nutmeg48.htm.]

Naples by Avram Davidson

just published : NAPLES by Avram Davidson

NAPLES is a fine press edition of one of Avram Davidson’s darkest tales, originally published in the first Shadows anthology edited by Charles L. Grant. NAPLES won the World Fantasy award for short fiction in 1979, the same year Jorge Luis Borges was named the recipient of the World Fantasy Life Achievement award ; Davidson received that award in 1986.

Publications of the Avram Davidson Society, number six.
Edition of 160 copies, designed by Jerry Kelly and printed by hand at the Kelly-Winterton Press from Hermann Zapf’s Aldus type. Stitched in yellow Hahnemühle wrappers printed in burnt siena. [16] pp. 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches.

Ten copies, numbered i to x, were reserved for presentation; 125 copies for distribution to members of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie (AIB), on the occasion of the congress in Napoli, September 2022. Twenty-five copies are available for members and friends of the Avram Davidson Society.

Published in Napoli on 11 September 2022.

Details and subscription price at the order page :
https://temporary-culture.com/books/naples-avram-davidson/

Beer! Beer! Beer! by Avram Davidson

— Avram Davidson. Beer! Beer! Beer! [Novato, California : Or All the Seas with Oysters Publishing, 2021]. [xiv], 218 pp. Pictorial wrappers with a cover drawing by Avi Katz. https://avramdavidson.com/avram-davidson-beer-beer-beer/

Beer! Beer! Beer! is the first printed book by Avram Davidson to be issued by Seth Davis and Or All the Seas with Oysters Publishing: last year he began commissioning audio versions of Davidson’s works and producing the monthly series of interview podcasts, The Avram Davidson Universe.
Beer! is a tale of the intrusion of bootlegging into the Hudson river town of Yokums, New Jersey, a looking glass idealization of Yonkers, where Avram was born and where, incidentally, gangster and prince of bootleggers Dutch Schultz was based. If you want a brisk account of the facts, you may read “Beer Like Water” in Crimes and Chaos (1962). Beer! gives a broad cross section of daily life in the riverside town during the late phase of Prohibition, with some recognizable Davidsonian types: newspaperman Bill Bomberg has something of the questing energy of Bob Rosen in “The Sources of the Nile”, and Captain Clack of the packet boat Sadie Howell is stamped from several Avramish patterns. Beer! includes a wealth of digression — on Dutch settlements in the Hudson, newspaper publishing, and a catalogue of urban life in Depression America through the eyes of a young boy — and numerous interesting minor characters (always one of the charms of Davidson’s work). The corruption generated by the beer trade pervades the town, and the narrative ambles from City Hall to the office of the Fourth Ward Glagolitic-Slovatchko-Ukrainian Improvement Association, from the sewers to the packet boat wharf on the Hudson waterfront, and from to the National Cereal Company to the mansions along Upper Bluffs Avenue. There are some fine comic moments and the book progresses to a choreographed and convulsive ending.

It is, however, in looking at the principal clues to the dating of the manuscript that the real significance of this book emerges. Among the town’s principal ethnic minorities are the “Slovatchkos, whose homeland, sundered by the break-up of the Scythian-Pannonian-Transbalkanian Empire, was now divided between two other — and larger — nations” (32). This allusion to the setting of The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy (1975) clearly situates the composition of the manuscript in the late 1970s and points to one of the great themes of Davidson’s work, immigrant life in America (and what Michael Swanwick has identified as “the loss of ethnicity”).

The source of this previously unpublished novel is a typescript of some 240 pages, known variously as Beer  . . . That Makes You Want to Cheer or The Day Beer Flowed like Water (one copy of this typescript is preserved in the Avram Davidson Collection at Texas A&M University). Beer! Beer! Beer! is Davidson’s preferred title and comes from his correspondence. The text is manifestly an early or even first draft manuscript, presented here with a very light edit and not altering the invented phonetics with which Davidson sought to capture the hard, distinctive Yonkers accent of his childhood. As with the selective use of profanity to create a heightened reality rather than the bludgeoning repetition of real life, it is a question of balance. Davidson would later write in “El Vilvoy de las Islas”, “In the opinion of some people (in fact, lots), a little of such style goes a long way.” And at the same time he ensured that “some more of the original from time to time seeps through.” This is a print on demand book (your correspondent saw an uncorrected proof printed in Columbia, South Carolina, on 2 November 2021).

Beer! stands between Davidson’s miniature, “The Last Wizard” (published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Mystery Magazine for December 1972) and his long masterpiece “The Slovo Stove” (1985), and one can trace turns of phrase from Beer! to later works. A passage in Beer! where Bill Bomberg reminiscences about his love life (177) is a trial run for a key incident when Jack Limekiller discovers evidence of Bathsheba’s inconstancy in “There beneath the Silky-Trees and Whelmed in Deeper Gulphs Than Me” (published in 1980). By that time Davidson must have understood that Beer! was going nowhere, and so he reused a good phrase to greater effect. Yokums has something of the feel the town of Parlour’s Ferry in “The Slovo Stove”, a story with none of the rosy nostalgia or Depression-era clichés of Beer! The effect is not unlike reading one of the “mainstream” novels Phil Dick wrote in the 1950s in the vain hope of leaving the science fiction treadmill of the paperback original market (think Confessions of a Crap Artist and its parallels to Time out of Joint, for example). Davidson had attempted to do this himself in the 1960s, with Dragons in the Trees, a non-fiction account of his travels in British Honduras, material he would later transmute into the Limekiller stories. Aspects of life in Yonkers rose up again while Davidson composed his zigzag plotted Adventures in Autobiography in the 1990s. In addition to the many pleasures of the story, Davidson’s Beer! is notable as an intermediate station on the road to “The Slovo Stove”.     [HWW]

First published in The Nutmeg Point District Mail,  vol. XX no. 1, for 12 December 2021.