— 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.
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— 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).
The work of Jorge Luis Borges has always been a touchstone for me: the concision and entanglement of his fictions and artifices and inquisitions are a source of great pleasure and inspiration. I am pleased to report that James Cummins Bookseller catalogue 145, Jorge Luis Borges, is ready, describing more than 400 items from the private collection of Gary Oleson, proprietor with Franny Ness of Waiting for Godot Books in Hadley, Massachusetts. Waiting for Godot were long- time specialists in twentieth century literature (among many other fields), including Latin American authors, and Oleson began buying Borges material in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The collection includes books owned by Borges, manuscripts of essays and stories, autograph notes, photographs, inscribed books, and a comprehensive group of books, periodical appearances, ephemera, and secondary literature. The cover illustrates a book by Capt. Marryat, signed by Borges at age 11, 25, 33, and 42, and with the ownership signature of his English-born great aunt, who taught him English
As with the writings of Borges, patterns and connections reveal themselves across the pages of the catalogue, which is published on the occasion of a Borges centenary, the hundredth anniversary of the publication of his first book of poems, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923). [HWW]
