Postcard from Armadillocon 46

A fun trip down to Austin to see old friends, attend Armadillocon, make new friends, eat good vegan food, and, as usual, look at books. (This is one of those postcards that gets mailed after leaving the place.) I hadn’t been to Austin or Armadillocon for several years, so it was good to be back. A curator friend recommended a vegan sushi place Nori. I headed there after our meeting and was impressed by the Katana-ya (deep-fried nori roll with avocado, cucumber, kanpyo, shoga, surimi mix; topped with wasabi mayo, unagi, ponzu green salad, jalapeño, red onion, and cilantro).  The convention was in the same hotel as before, an odd, anonymous late 1970s exurban architectural mode that could have been at the edge of Anywhere, USA. Inside, though, it was all Armadillocon, a small friendly convention with a good mix of panels and readings (even sometimes forcing one to make hard choices).

One of the reasons I went was to show up at the Howard Waldrop celebration, a panel moderated by Scott A. Cupp and also including Sanford Allen, Robert Taylor, and Don Webb: all friends who knew Howard for decades. I hadn’t been able to attend the Waldrop Memorial in June; I was glad to attend this gathering.  Towards the end of the allotted hour (the anecdotes and yarns could have gone on for hours), when the floor was open for comments, I stood up and said something like this:

My name is Henry Wessells and I’m from New Jersey, where we also esteem Howard Waldrop. He excelled at integrating incompatible ideas into improbable fictions that suddenly reveal truths about life, literature, and America; and the stories equally suddenly show themselves to be inevitable and essential parts of American literature. If “The Ugly Chickens” is often mentioned as Howard’s best known story, for me his masterpiece is “Heart of Whitenesse”, where the ambitious conceit is executed with perfect skill. Not a word out of place, and the madcap humor is controlled in the service of the tale.
I have it from a reliable source that as an angler Howard practiced catch and release, and thus understood the impossibility of clinging to things. And so we now mark his departure; the stories, and the ideas, remain.

I went to several interesting panels and readings by a variety of writers. And of course there were many pleasant conversations along the way. I came back with a few books:

— Christopher Brown. Field Notes. September 2024. [Austin, 7 September 2024]. Gift of the author, inscribed, one of the first copies out of the box. Two essays, two reading lists, and twelve photos. Newsletter for advance orders to his new book.
——. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Timber Press, [September 2024]. Advance copy, inscribed.

—. Live to Build a Better World. Despair, Survival, and Hope in Science Fiction’s Response to Environmental Change. [Introduction by Jeremy Brett]. Texas A&M University Libraries, 2021. Illustrated catalogue for the exhibition at the Cushing Memorial Library (January to June 2021). An interesting selection of mostly twenty-first century books and films, with the earliest titles being The Lorax (1971), by Dr. Seuss, Brunner’s The Sheep Look up and Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (both 1972), and Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower (1993).

— Avram Davidson. The Avram Davidson Treasury. Tor, [1998]. Book club edition which I hadn’t known existed. The copyright page is altered, the dust jacket carries no price and has a number slug on the back panel, and the black boards are smooth.

— Delilah S. Dawson. Bloom. Titan, [2023].

— Joe R. Lansdale. Things Get Ugly. The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. [Introduction by S. A. Cosby]. Tachyon, [2023].

— Josh Rountree. Death Aesthetic. Underwood, [2024].
——. The Legend of Charlie Fish. Tachyon, [2023].

— John Varley. The Persistence of Vision. [Introduction by Algis Budrys] [1978]. Dell [Quantum Paperback], [1979]. Varley was the first Armadillocon guest of honor.

— Howard Waldrop. Howard Who?. Stories [1986]. Peapod Classics. [Small Beer Press, third printing, 30 March 2024] [replacement copy].

A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon

the next book from Temporary Culture is now ready :

A Melville Census. John Marr & Timoleon. With a note by Henry Wessells.

Edition of 52 copies, designed and printed by hand by Jerry Kelly.

To be published 8 January 2025. Subscription details available here.

This is just what it sounds like : a report on the location of all known copies of Herman Melville’s John Marr (1888) and Timoleon (1891), the two last books of poems (each printed in editions of 25 copies), with a note about Maurice Sendak, Bill Reese, and others. Of the 52 copies printed, 26 lettered copies are for presentation (one copy for the author, printed on blue paper, can be glimpsed at left above).

Postcard from Onion creek

YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN HERE YESTERDAY.

Went out for an early morning walk for a little time away from the air conditioned hotel. Down to Onion creek, a greenbelt park in the floodplain, crossed by two pipelines buried under a cut across the steep sedimentary banks. It is a heavily used park, with some folks living out of their cars along the access road. Along the creek there are signs of deer, dogs, dog walkers, egrets wading or in flight, fishermen (one midstream in waders, and the chairs set up for absent anglers), tree climbers, and above all the waters: all through the trails and scrub there are signs of past flooding, water-tossed logs, a mulch of branches, twigs, and man-made detritus large and small.

SEDIMENTARY GEOLOGY OF ONION CREEK

I came upon two forest giants, bald cypress trees on opposite banks of the creek that must have been — even a century ago — too big to extract. A knotted rope dangled from the giant of the north bank, the ladder of some ascended sentinel of the creek.

Climb on up, the view is unequalled.

commonplace book : early September 2024

Your correspondent will be attending  Armadillocon in Austin this weekend (6-9 September). I will be at the Howard Waldrop memorial on Saturday afternoon, and at other events. Say hello if you see me.

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Tartarus Press have announced publication of a fifth collection of essays by Mark Valentine, The Thunderstorm Collectors, 29 recent pieces, some previously unpublished, on authors of the supernatural, book collecting, and some lesser-known byways of English life and letters. I look forward to seeing it.

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“Melville’s Billy Budd at 100”, a new exhibition, opens next week at the Grolier Club in New York City. It will be worth a look.

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A singular interview with Christopher Brown

Mossback

I have known Chris Brown for many years, first through reading his essays in the pages of The New York Review of Science Fiction and other publications, and then in person at Readercon and in a few larger cities. We share an interest in the ragged edges of the planet and in science fiction, and we’ve walked together to one or two of the green worlds you can find just a few steps from the usual paths. His novel Tropic of Kansas  was an Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year, “dark, nimble, hilarious, deeply alarming, truly American”, and he was a good person to talk to when I was writing A Conversation larger than the Universe. His Field Notes newsletters are always interesting and fun.  Disqualified by such ties of friendship from writing a review of A Natural History of Empty Lots, a book that grew from his years of walking and thinking around in his neighborhood, I asked him the only question that needs asking, and his answer in this singular interview (from A Natural History) is elegant and definitive.

Henry Wessells  : Have you ever seen a chupacabra ?

Christopher Brown : Almost a decade after I went on the Bigfoot watch, I had a close encounter with a chupacabra. It was May 2015, on the Sunday night before Memorial Day. We were in Marfa, Texas, where we had taken our visiting friends, Henry Wessells and Mary Jo Duffy, native Philadelphians who live in New Jersey and work in New York. After dinner on our last night, we headed east on Highway 90 to check out the Marfa Lights. It was around 9 p.m. The radio was tuned to the local public radio station, which was playing its “Space Music” show-ambient instrumentals that suited the mood. About two-thirds into the nine-mile drive, a ghostly creature crossed our path, walking right across the road, rather slowly.

Slow enough that we got a long look as it passed through the beams of our headlights. Four-legged, definitely not a deer, a figure of ethereal white. Bigger than a dog, different than a coyote — even though that’s probably what it was. They say most chupacabra sightings are really just coyotes with mange. We all saw it, were similarly baffled, and agreed that it was both something that had a rational explanation that the brevity and circumstances of our sighting would not let us figure out, and that we also had just experienced an encounter that had an authentically paranormal frisson. It was definitely a chupacabra, we understood, as we also understood that a chupacabra is simply a creature you encounter that does not follow the taxonomic indicators of its species, looking so strange, in the moment you see it, as to provide you an experience of the alien and a welcome excuse to make up your own legend.

Tree Portal

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Chris Brown’s new book, A Natural History of Empty Lots

— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places, forthcoming 17 September 2024 from Timber Press.

link : https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/christopher-brown/a-natural-history-of-empty-lots/9781643263366/?lens=timber-press

Copyright © 2024 by Christopher Brown. Reprinted by permission.

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From Elfland to private property

There are two Elflands for me, the one that I can walk to, and the other one.

I prefer the Elfland that I can walk to. To paraphrase Wittgenstein and turn him upside down, Elfland is a labyrinth of paths. You approach from one side and no longer know your way about; you approach the same place from another side and you know your way about.

One follows a path that escaped notice when walking in the other direction. One, two, three steps, into the forest, up the hill, across a creek, or simply from sunlight to shade, and the border has been crossed. One breathes more easily, even if climbing a steep hill, and the main concerns are to look and listen. For others, I am sure the sense of smell is involved, but I have to rely on memory and other cues. I do remember, once, deep in the forest of Big Sur, the rich moist fragrance of the sequoias and all the leafwrack washing over me. The green of the moss, the play of leaf and shadow. One is there, for a few minutes, a sense of expectation but there is no goal, alertness the only aim.

There are even maintained trails in Elfland, perhaps not so new, but steps and other buffers to erosion are sometimes seen along the way. The track of a buck in the center of the path, a rain dappled pad of a coyote in sand, and further up, fresher scat, also in the center of the path.

To walk and climb is enough. If the hill is steep, the switchbacks are frequent. A moment’s pause along the way, and that peculiar striated nut-like brown shape is in fact a compact slug. One moves on, up and up, turn and turn again.

This morning’s walk to Elfland was a sudden glimpse of a path between trees on the return leg of an amble at low tide. I walked and climbed for fifteen minutes, up a trail to a sudden and well-tended wooden staircase and that most American sign, Private Property No Trespassing.

It does kinda change the moment. When I was a child, we were taught to sing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”, but not even at the Quaker woodland camp were we taught the verse about the relief office or this one:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
This land is your land, this land is my land,

This morning, constrained by time and tide, I did not walk up the staircase out of Elfland and into a different adventure (I can usually talk my way into and out of all sorts of places). So I turned back, and walked down through Elfland on a beautiful forest hillside, and returned to the fields we know.

There, at the other fork in the path, I turned and climbed up a broader path to trespass into a large levelled clearing in the high woods, an oval 150 paces in length overlooking the sound, a building site that never happened, perhaps, but now an informal dump or something. The other end of the American dream.

Arthur Machen, Eleusinia, 1881

Arthur Machen’s first book, Eleusinia, by a former member of H. C. S., is a sequence of poems celebrating pre-Christian mysteries in the Athens of the young author’s imagination. The pamphlet was printed in Hereford in 1881, and is known from one copy preserved at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. The copy is from the collection of Charles Parsons (Yale class of 1912), who was one of the lenders to the Harry Marks exhibition in 1923.  Eleusinia was not, however, exhibited in 1923, for at the time it was still in the author’s possession. But by 1926 his circumstances had changed, and when it happened that one of the American collectors with whom Machen had been corresponding was visiting London, Machen agreed to receive him and to sell his copy of Eleusinia. The picture above shows the pastedown with the Charles Parsons ’12 gift bookplate, and above it  is the signature of Arthur Machen’s father John Edward Jones Machen, M.A., Llanthewy Rectory, 1881. Machen’s father paid for the printing of the book, and in his copy he pasted a clipping, a tactful, encouraging press notice, identified as by “Lewis Sergeant Esqre in Hereford Times”.  Lewis Sergeant (1841-1902) was a journalist and author  and a close friend of the Machen family ; Machen stayed in his house in Turnham Green when he first came up to London. On the flyleaf opposite is the author the inscription at the time of the sale, “For Charles Parsons from Arthur Machen, Melina Place, London, June 26th 1926”. Parsons saved his correspondence with Machen, and the receipt (shown below) is preserved in the files at Beinecke (Gen MSS 256, Box 1 folder 3).

Eleusinia is fully digitized and available here : https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10516628
Nearly a hundred years on, the copy at Beinecke is still the only known copy of the book : a typescript at Brigham Young and a manuscript at HRC are fair copies prepared at the behest of Fytton Armstrong ; Princeton and Stanford appear to have photostats or photocopies of the Yale copy. I am very pleased to have been able to examine this book, and acknowledge the courtesies extended to me on my visit.

 

 

recent reading : may to july 2024

— Mark Valentine. Lost Estates. Swan River Press, 2024. [From the author].
Collection of a dozen stories, four unpublished, including the excellent title story

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— John O’Donoghue. The Servants and other strange stories. Tartarus Press, [2024]. Edition of 300.
Collection of nine stories and novellas ; including “The Irish Short Story That Never Ends” : though its title reveals how it must end, this is pitch perfect and evocative and finely executed. Michael Swanwick —himself a master of concise, brilliant short stories — notes, “John O’Donoghue knocks it out of the park . . . I’m Irish, so this goes to the heart of a lifetime of reading for me.”

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— John Buchan. The Three Hostages. Houghton Mifflin, 1924.
Re-read this for the first time in more than forty years, for an essay appearing in Wormwoodiana on the centenary (1 August).

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— Anthony Powell. A Question of Upbringing (1951) ; A Buyer’s Market (1952) ; The Acceptance World (1955) ; At Lady Molly’s (1957) ; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960) ; The Kindly Ones (1962) ; The Valley of Bones (1964) ; The Soldier’s Art (1966) ; The Military Philosophers (1968) ; Books Do Furnish a Room (1971) ; Temporary Kings (1973) ; Hearing Secret Harmonies (1975).

I have been working at the ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ over the past several months, mostly reading the dozen novels out of sequence, which seems a reasonable enough approach, since the narratives flit and somersault across time and the parade of characters is intermittent and recurring by design. The humor is dry and Powell’s principal strategy, “the discipline of infinite obliquity”, will not be to every reader’s taste, but things do happen, often as sudden surprises punctuating a circumspect, even evasive, chronicle. And of course the sentences and paragraphs sometimes turn in midstream to undermine or contradict the initial idea or perspective expressed. Or how about this : “She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech.”
Powell’s cycle was described by several of his contemporaries as an English Proust but  that now seems to me to be a reductive statement : there is attention to art, music, and aesthetics, and a complex, intertwined cast of artists, hacks, critics, businessmen, elegant and not-so-elegant family members, and even Venice makes an appearance, but Nicholas Jenkins is, by temperament, energy, and accomplishment, about as far from the “Marcel” narrator as can be and so is the overall tone. I like The Military Philosophers (which does have a direct nod to Proust) and At Lady Molly’s most of all, but this is maybe saying  “poached” or “over easy”.  Certainly the outcomes of Hearing Secret Harmonies are a long way from the schoolboy memories of 1921 in the first volume.

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— (MELVILLE, HERMAN). Melville’s Billy Budd at 100. A Centennial Exhibition at the Grolier Club and Oberlin College Libraries. Introduction and Descriptions by William Palmer Johnston. Frontispiece portrait of Melville by Barry Moser, color plates. The Grolier Club, 2024. Edition of 375 copies printed by Bradley Hutchinson in Austin, Texas. [Gift of the author].
Advance copy of this concise, elegant catalogue for the show (12 September to 9 November  in NYC) : 49 entries, 1843-2024, including some legendary Melville rarities and new work by an American master. A symposium on Billy Budd will be held at the Club on 9 October in connection with the exhibition.
The catalogue is distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

— (MELVILLE, HERMAN) Bound to Vary. A Guild of Book Workers exhibition of unique fine bindings on the Married Mettle Press limited edition of Billy Budd, Sailor. New York: Guild of Book Workers, 1988.
A superb copy of this edition of Billy Budd (one of the unique bindings) will be on view at the Grolier.
/ file under : chronicle of an obsession

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— Michael Swanwick. The War with the Zylv. Cover illustration by Ariel Cinii. Dragonstairs Press, 2024. Edition of 100.

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— Anuj Bahri and Aanchal Malhotra. Bahrisons. Chronicle of a Bookshop. [New Delhi :] Tara India Research Press, [2024].
Seventieth anniversary memoir and keepsake from this New Delhi bookshop established by an enterprising young refugee couple displaced during Partition : ‘we were not just in the business of selling books, but rather, building relationships’.

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— Bob Rosenthal. Fifth Avenue Overhead. Edge Books, [May, 2024].
“Stories of Poetic Survival” by the author of Cleaning Up New York. This is a fun book!

— Arthur Machen. A Reader of Curious Books. [Edited by Christopher Tompkins]. Darkly Bright Press, [2024].
Expanded second edition (originally issued in 2020) of this annotated compendium of early work by Machen, reviews and literary miscellanies from the pages of Walford’s Antiquarian in 1887 [cf. Goldstone & Sweetser, pp. 141-3], some using the pseudonym Leolinus, and often containing in miniature some of the author’s later interests and motifs.

— John Masefield. Sard Harker. Heinemann, 1924.
For a forthcoming essay.

— Matthew Needle, Bookscout. An Appreciation by His Friends. Cambridge, Mass.: Charles Wood, Bookseller, 2012.
Reminiscences by Gregory Gibson, Adrian Harrington, Robert Rubin, Marcus McCorison, Roger Stoddard, Charles Wood, Stephen Weissman.

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— Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Yellow Wall-Paper. Afterword by Alice Walker. Illustrations by Chris Daunt. Suntup Editions, 2024. Edition of 376 copies, signed by Walker and Daunt.

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— Francis Spufford. Cahokia Jazz [2023]. Scribners, [2024].
A Prohibition novel, a jazz novel, and an excellent novel of an alternate America, a narrative organically rooted in language and anthropology. I really liked this one.

forthcoming: Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots

in today’s mail

— Christopher Brown. A Natural History of Empty Lots. Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places.
Forthcoming from Timber Press, September, 2024.

So excited to have this to read, from an excellent writer (and friend!) whose explorations forming the core of this book have been chronicled in his Field Notes, and whose Tropic of Kansas was an Endless Bookshelf Book of the Year, “dark, nimble, hilarious, deeply alarming, truly American”. That’s it for now. There will be more about this book.

Readercon 33, July 2024

It’s July, so that means Readercon! Once again!

I’ll be there in Quincy, Mass., Friday through Sunday 12-14 July, and if you are there you will see me wandering about, and occasionally at fixed locations, according to the following schedule.

Friday 12 July 2024
6:00 p.m. (Salon B) The King of Elfland’s Daughter at 100 (moderator)
8:00 p.m. (Salon B) Book Club : Elizabeth Hand’s Winterlong trilogy

Saturday 13 July 2024
6:30 p.m. (Blue Hills) Reading : “John Z. Delorean, Drycleaner to the Queen of Elfland” (new work)

Sunday 14 July 2024
12:00 p.m. (Salon A) The Manuscripts of Arthur Machen (talk)

Copies of The Private Life of Books, A Conversation larger than the Universe, and other publications of Temporary Culture will be on hand. Come say hello if you see me.