Judging a book by its cover

Here’s a wonderful book jacket from the 1940s, a satanic thriller which I picked up in our basement stacks the other day. The book is unreadable now, if it ever was, one of sixty churned out by a man Trashfiction.com describes as “a writer of no great talent, [whose] books were clunky, lumpy slabs of indigestible narrative”, but you have to admit, the cover is a classic.

Something I enjoy with the covers of the old books in the basement is reading the blurbs. Unlike today when every book cover boasts two or three hyperbolic quotes from well-known authors pushed into service by their publishers, the old covers are sort of like long ago Olympic games when athletes were amateurs and wore long pants; they offer quaint phrases like

“I have no hesitation in pressing this delightful story on you” 

That's the Daily Dispatch reviewer on a book by a man named John Symonds, noted for having had Dylan Thomas’s wife Caitlin attack him with a knife at a party.

Then there are those ambiguous lines like this one which Anthony Burgess composed for an Irish writer named Paul Smith,
 
“When every drunken Dublin writer is a genius I don’t feel like committing myself to the word; but I am sorely tempted.”


It's close to “Damning with faint praise” territory, which I always thought of as an English tradition until I spied this quote on another cover, from James Finn in The New York TImes:

"What Terrarossa attempts is limited but it offers the very real satisfaction of a work that achieves its purpose exactly.”

As for the cover designs themselves, it never ceases to amaze me how, within the hundred years or so that they have existed, book jackets have always had this trait of perfectly evoking a moment in history. I suppose all objects of design do this, but at least for me, the difference between book covers and say, coffeemakers, is that with book covers every period is fantastic, bar none.

Anyone out there love Penguin Classics? The man who came up with the idea of putting photographs of paintings on the covers of the Penguin classics was an Italian named Germano Facetti, who had been deported to Mauthausen during the war for anti-fascist activity, aged only 17, met a Milanese architect there and joined his studio for a while when they got out, and then moved on, Paris, London, Penguin Books.

When my in-laws (who knew him) told me about him I thought that his job consisted of looking through art books all day or visiting museums, picking out paintings to match to various great books. It seemed like the dreamiest dream job ever and I expect I can blame hearing about it for another couple of years of arrested development with regard to thinking seriously about a career.

Now that I work in a library which has the fine history of Penguin Books, Penguin by Design, in its collection, I know that while Facetti did indeed personally pick out many of the paintings, he also invented the grid, chose the font (Helvetica) and did many other ground-breaking things. There's a forum on the Typophile website where book world denizens talk about him, with a link to a gallery of his covers.

Two other books for book cover aficionados are By its cover: Modern American Book Cover Design which pointed out to me that book covers are a form of “communication art” and proceeds designer by designer with a fair amount of depth, and Front Cover: Great Book Jacket and Cover Design which is a bit more slapdash in that a spread can be an author (eg Agatha Christie), a designer (eg Jeff Fisher, creator of the extraordinarily successful dark dark blue Captain Corelli’s Mandolin cover), a time period (eg “the beat generation”) or a publisher (eg Harvill Press, who did the beautiful edition we have in our basement of The Leopard with the calligraphic writing and the curtain pulled aside to reveal the rampant Leopard -- they date the cover as 1960 so it might be the very first English version).

Websites are of course wonderful places to browse book covers. Coverbrowser.com offers you the chance to browse over 1000 Greatest Book Covers with another gallery of the covers of the greatest novels of all time. Check out the period On the Road with its Natalie Wood-inspired female labelled "Wild and unrestrained", or perhaps they mean the story. There are also sundry jazz musicians, but no sign of Old Dean Moriarty.

Bookcoverarchive.com has thousands of covers which can be viewed by titles, authors, designers, photographers, publication date, etc. There are links to the portfolio sites of about twenty of the designers. I clicked on Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich because the name was so improbable, and guess what! It turned out to be the very name I can put to all my least favourite covers in the entire library, particularly these two books that without ever having opened them I can assure you I will never, ever, read because yes, I judge them by these:

Doing the Dante test

And going public with my results in the interest of literature

The Dante's Inferno test by 4degreez.com is slightly different from the usual personality test: you answer questions about your sins and are told your fate (slightly similar, too, actually). Here's where I'll end up for eternity, and how I stacked up overall:

“Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Sixth Level of Hell - The City of Dis! You approach Satan's wretched city where you behold a wide plain surrounded by iron walls. Burning tombs are littered about the landscape. Inside these flaming sepulchers suffer the heretics. You will join the wicked that lie here, and will be offered no respite.”

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Low
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	Very High
Level 7 (Violent)	Moderate
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	Moderate

If I’d just scored a bit higher in lust, I would have ended up in the second circle, fierce winds driving me about in darkness together with the great queens Dido, Cleopatra, and Helen of Troy. As it is, I will be in the company of Farinata degli Uberti, the Ghibelline commander who rises up out of his fiery tomb “as if he had great scorn for hell” to talk to Dante when he hears his Tuscan accent. When I asked my husband, who is Florentine -- baptised in fact in the same beautiful Baptistery where Dante was baptised  -- who his favourite Dante character was, I  expected he’d  have to think, or have half-a-dozen, but he chose Farinata right off, reciting a few of his lines.

Did anyone notice how the village plumber, bricklayer, real-estate agent etc. who appears at some point, quoting Dante, in all the Anglo-Saxon-goes-to-live-in-old-farmhouse-in-Italy memoirs, has now advanced to title position with Bill Buford’s Anglo-Saxon-goes-to-Italy-to-learn-culinary-elementals variant, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

I haven’t read the book, but it’s very good according to “a passionate foodie” on Amazon, which I misread as “a passionate noodle” while casting a quick eye over the reviews to see if anyone remarked on just what parts of Dante the butcher quoted. They hadn't, but I’m thinking maybe the seventh circle, where Virgil says to Dante “Behold, the river of blood approaches” or words to that effect.

What these people don’t seem to realise is that everyone in Italy quotes Dante, for two reasons. First of all, Italians start studying Dante in intermediate school and continue throughout their entire school career. Second but just as important, the Divine Comedy is such a great story. All those unforgettable images, like Count Ugolino chewing on the head of the man who locked him up to die of hunger, pausing in mid-gnaw to look up at Dante as he passes, and the power of that poetry with which Dante compresses entire, terrible stories into a bare handful of lines.

"Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma.”

Remember me, I am Pia,
Siena made me, Maremma undid me.

Pia de' Tolomei by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

This is the shade of beautiful Pia de’ Tolomei speaking. From a noble family of Siena, she was married off to a Lord from the Maremma region who murdered her after his cousin falsely accused her of infidelity because she wouldn't be seduced by him. It's one of the two Dante verses I can recite, well, three, if you count "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here". (I'd also like to steal the line which the TLS reported some editor had posted above her door: "Abandon all hopefullys, ye who enter here").

Roberto Benigni, who quoted Dante when he won his Oscar and has been touring the US this year with a one-man “TuttoDante” show, said it perfectly in an interview in The New York Times:

"Really this is the most daring, bold poetry ever. In 2,000 years of Christian poetry they never surpassed this. They never produced such a scandal of beauty. Never, never, nobody.”

Guy P. Raffa is a professor at the University of Texas who thinks that if Dante were alive today, and had a Mac, “perhaps” he would have designed a website to tell his allegorical tale. Since he isn’t, Prof. Raffa has done it for him. The result is Danteworlds, an ”integrated multimedia journey combining artistic images, textual commentary, and audio recordings”. It’s won all kinds of prizes and is worth visiting.

I wonder if Prof. Raffa knows the song my father used to sing:

Some folks live in Texas
Some folks live in hell
If I had my choice between 'em
I'd go down below to dwell.

Take the Dante Inferno Hell Test

And get the fantastic Everyman's edition of The divine comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, with an introduction by another great Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, illustrated with drawings by Botticelli, at the library.

Quoth the raven "Halloa Old Girl"

From the FAQs of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Number 7:

"What literary landmark can be found at the Parkway Central Library at 1901 Vine Street?"

Answer:

 "The Rare Book Department houses “Grip,” Charles Dickens' pet Raven -- now stuffed and mounted -- which inspired Edgar Allan Poe to write one of the most famous poems in American literary history, “The Raven.” Grip was donated to the Free Library by Col. Richard Gimbel in 1971."

The Curious Expeditions blog has a lengthy piece on Grip - one of their expeditions having been to see him at the Free Library. They supply a photograph of him in his shadow box, standing on a log in a ferny, Carboniferous sort of habitat – a surprise to my post-Poe sensibilities (I thought he would at least be perched, even if not on a bust of Pallas), but perhaps not to Dickens’s Victorian romanticism.

There's also a description of Grip's last moments from a letter Dickens wrote to his friend Daniel Maclise:

"You will be greatly shocked and grieved to hear that the Raven is no more. On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly agitated, but he soon recovered, walked twice or thrice along the coach house, stopped to bark, staggered, exclaimed `Halloa old girl!' (his favorite expression) and died."

Just in case you thought his favourite expression was "Nevermore". How does the saying go? If the nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been changed. Poe claimed that "Nevermore" popped into his mind immediately, once he decided his poem would need a moody refrain with a long "o", that being the most "sonorous" vowel, and an "r", the letter most suited to being drawn out. He didn't even have the story, the famous "death of a young girl", at that point. It makes you wonder, hmm, no first thoughts of "Chankly Bore"? I think we have to say it was genius and leave it at that.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the great Edgar Allan Poe’s birth. Baltimore has been hosting a year-long bicentennial celebration replete with blog, where you can read about the monumental funeral ceremony which was held this month, on the anniversary of Poe's death, as redress for the miserable service his city gave him 160 years ago. That one lasted all of three minutes, after which seven people accompanied him to the family plot, where he was laid in an unmarked grave. Under pressure from Poe’s mother-in-law, his cousin did eventually have a headstone made, but it never made it onto the grave as a train ran off the rails which bordered the stonecutters’ yard and crashed right into it.

This time around, 700 people attended the ceremony. There was also a day-long open casket viewing at the Poe House, featuring a Poe replica made by a special effects artist named Eric Supensky (not, unfortunately, Suspensky). I can't believe they didn't get a real person to lie in the coffin and suddenly groan, or sit up. I don't think it was a question of being serious, considering they put on a "Cask of Amontillado" wine tasting event.

Speaking of premature burial, you can read Premature Burial on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore. The Poe Society has been working for over ten years now on a project to provide Poe's complete works in e-texts, in authoritative transcriptions from the original sources. The website has barely any graphics, old-looking fonts and especially no ads for improving your abs. It's kind of nice to see the contents of the old newspapers available now for free, considering how their editors ripped Poe off during his lifetime, the publishers of Grahams paying him $800 for stories from which they earned $25,000.

You can view digital images of the originals on the Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection which the Harry Ransom Center launched to accompany their exhibition “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe" which opened in September. Besides the newspapers, the Archive also contains letters, manuscripts and books by Poe, some of these annotated by him, like a copy of The Raven and other Poems which is really fun to look at, it has a "page turn” mode with a surprise.

You can also see memorabilia like Poe’s writing desk (Martin Gardner would have loved to include this coincidence in the Annotated Alice in Wonderland where he discusses the Mad Hatter's famous riddle, “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”) and cigarette cards featuring Poe, including one from a series called “Histories of Poor Boys Who have become Rich and Other Famous People series”, Poe presumably being one of the "other famous people". There's also a competition for the best parody of "The Raven".

To finish, two books:

Mystery Writers of America presents In the shadow of the master : classic tales by Edgar Allan Poe
"This compulsively readable collection, commemorating the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe's birth, unites some of Poe's best short works (including The Black Cat, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher) with commentary by a slew of Edgar Award winners and nominees… Opining on The Tell-Tale Heart, Stephen King doesn't miss a beat. Poe foresaw the darkness of generations far beyond his own, he writes. Ours, for instance." (Allison Block, Booklist).

and

Japanese tales of mystery and imagination by the mysterious Edagawa Rampo

What I'm reading: offbeat biographies

Harbingers of summer, the bumblebees are back in my Scotch broom whirring, foraging and pollinating their little heads off. Is it just a coincidence that I am in an exceptionally fertile book pillaging moment? In particular, I’m having a lucky run of biographies, always a favourite read since my childhood library introduced me to the genre with the “little orange biographies” series of famous Americans, noted for always opening with a foretoken of future greatness: “Ben, where are you?" called Mrs. Franklin. “That boy,” she sighed."Always with his head in the clouds, him and his kite."

Here are three offbeat biographies (actually memoirs) I've been reading:

1. Found by chance: Stuart, a life backwards by Alexander Masters
 
While snooping in the mending shelf at Parnell Library, my eye was caught by a book cover with a drawing of a man in a big blue armchair, half-consumed cigarette dangling from his fingers, and a spine label saying it was the biography of someone whose last name started with SHO. I picked it up and skimmed the last few pages as I usually do when considering a book. Someone named Stuart was hit and killed by the 11:15 PM London to Kings Lynn train. I read, “Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man”.

Who was this remarkable man Stuart Sho----- (a quick flip through the pages revealed no mention of a last name) and why was some Alexander Masters writing about him in terms like that? A journalist? A literary agent? Carol, the Parnell Community Librarian and invariably up-to-date reader, was as mystified as I was. We were off to a meeting but not before I made her promise to release the book to me as soon as the bandages came off.

When it duly arrived and I started reading it, I realized that I had actually seen this book reviewed. Stuart is an ex-homeless, ex-junkie, still a “chaotic" as they call it, often funny and at times psychopathic person, and the book is both a narrative by Alexander Masters of how he and Stuart meet and become friends, and a working back through Stuart’s past, prompted by Masters, who is trying to find out where it all went so wrong for him. Stuart isn’t. He wants to be in a Tom Clancy-type novel and he worries that it will be a boring book. It's not, Stuart!

2. By a friend’s orders: Manhattan, when I was young by Mary Cantwell
 
When Julian Dashper told me, soon after we met, that I had to read this book, I thought that in that way in which people, when they are at an impressionable age, fall in love with a certain place or time through its books, or art, or music, that for Julian it would have been New York in the glory days of the 50s and 60s when Mary Cantwell was clicking through mid-town Manhattan in shoes called pumps on her way to her job writing smart copy for Mademoiselle magazine, living in Greenwich Village, drinking espresso at the Peacock Café.

I did get it out then, but I never finished it, although it was, well, sweet. Then when Julian died I was struck by the urge to go back and read the whole thing. It was checked out to another friend of Julian’s. “I didn’t finish it”, she said when I saw her at his funeral. “But it was sweet.”

Now that I’ve read the whole thing I think that what Julian liked, as much as the descriptions of place, was the feeling which pervades the book of what it’s like when you’re young and romantic and you want something so much it’s palpable. “I look like New York.” Mary Cantwell would say to herself in her giddy teenage moments, checking out her face in the mirror, and that’s where she went, with her “suitcase full of unsuitable clothes”. And what happened afterwards, which as it turns out was not all sweet by any means, she counted a fair bargain.

3. Reserved online after spotting review: The afterlife by Donald Antrim
 
My grandmother had red hair and “the lovely high cheekbones for arrogance”, as Hemingway said of his first wife Hadley. I’m sure they served her well when she swept all the French perfumes off the counter at Saks Fifth Avenue to shatter on the floor, after the snooty saleswoman insulted her husband who had undergone a laryngectomy for esophageal cancer. In her youth she had studied with the Ballets Russes -- "just long enough to justify a Grand Tour" she confided -- and earned herself the newspaper headline “Student of Russian Ballet Master Enlivens Rather Dull Evening at Nice by Executing Original Steps Before Municipal Casino Crowd”.

She was also an alcoholic, which meant rambling late night phone calls which my father would try to foist off on us kids suddenly unanimously overwhelmed by homework, and in-person appearances and then sudden disappearances as dictated by the quarrel or grudge of the moment, but also funny letters about things like what it smells like if you put out your cigarette in a tube of airplane glue. Donald Antrim’s mother was also an alcoholic, and this is the book he wrote – not so much about what it was like for him, as trying to figure out what he thinks about what it was like. I’m about half-way through. Whatever else happens, just the description of her bizarre “artistic” fashion creation kimono will have made this book worth the read, bringing back so vividly as it does all the feelings, including love, these fantastic and troubling people inspire.

Viva Neruda!

Gracias Roberto Bolaño, for so ranting about Pablo Neruda that you have spurred me to read him again. 
 
Yes, because I still have the first book of Neruda's poetry I bought, Residence on Earth. I must have been very young, judging from the prettiness of my signature on the flyleaf and the $3.75 (American) price. It contains the beautiful Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca, the one that says "Así es la vida, Federico", "That's the way life is, Federico". I've just gone and looked it up. It says "What are verses for if not for that night / in which a bitter dagger finds us out". Lorca was killed by Franco's nationalists the next year.

Some years later I bought the other book I have of Neruda ("$5" is pencilled on the flyleaf of this one), a second-hand copy of Cien sonetos de Amor, the 100 love sonnets which he wrote for his beloved wife Matilde Urrutia. This is the book I got down from the shelf today when I needed a break from the frustrating prose of The Savage Detectives.

Pablo Neruda was in his fifties when he wrote these poems. For years I have remembered a line in a book without being able to remember the name of the book (perhaps someone out there can?) The line is : "He understood that lyric poetry was virtually impossible for the old, for how can an old man say he will die of unrequited love when he knew he didn't?"

Here's how:

XLV
No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.
No te vayas por una hora porque entonces
en esa hora se juntan las gotas del desvelo
y tal vez todo el humo que anda buscando casa
venga a matar aún mi corazón perdido.
Ay que no se quebrante tu silueta en la arena,
ay que no vuelen tus párpados en la ausencia:
no te vayas por un minuto, bienamada,
porque en ese minuto te habrás ido tan lejos
que yo cruzaré toda la tierra preguntando
si volverás o si me dejarás muriendo.

Don't go away from me even for a day, because just as,
because, I don’t know how to say it, the day is long
and I'll be waiting for you as in stations
when the trains are all off some place, sleeping.
Don't go even for an hour, for then
in that hour the drops of sleeplessness will run together
and all the smoke that's out there looking for a home
might come and kill even my lost heart.
Oh, may your silhouette never break up on the sand,
oh, may your eyelids never flutter into absence:
Don’t leave me even for a minute, my beloved,
because in that minute you’ll have gone so far
that I'll wander across the whole world asking
If you are coming back or leaving me to die.

"I have made a pact with beauty" Neruda said before he died.

If you like this poem, translated by Ana la Española and myself, as literally as possible while still keeping it readable (Read the poem out loud in Spanish to get the full experience! Go on!) get The poetry of Pablo Neruda, the most comprehensive collection of Neruda's poems in English. It contains 600 poems translated by top translators, with the major works given also in the original Spanish.

Bukowski's Christmas present

A 'Report from the Bibliographic Bunker' on Realitystudio.org this month begins: “On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program. By January 18 of the next year, the computer was up and running and so, after a brief period of fumbling and stumbling, was Bukowski.”

How amazing is that! Two hours away down the California coast, I too was receiving a Mac for Christmas! Well, maybe two years and two hours away, I’m not really sure, it might have been 1988, but what are a couple of years in the cosmic scheme of things? I had it up and running the same day. It wasn’t hard, you just read the little book – what was it called again, oh yes, the manual - which came with it, and then you could put the manual on your rug and use it as a mouse pad for your one-click mouse.

The old Macs were so cool. I don't think anything else as cool was ever invented during my lifetime, or at least that portion of my lifetime since I've known about cool. I can think of handy things like suitcases with wheels or cell phones, even notably crazy things like the Concorde, but nothing as cool as the Mac. The two major coolnesses were 1) the way they looked and 2) they were absolutely incompatible with Windows which, having just been purchased by IBM, was pretty clearly going to be the industry standard, so if you chose the Mac you were happy to be completely cut off from mainstream America. I’m sure Linda was on to that.

Despite the fact - a bit mysterious - that it took 24 days to get Bukowski’s Mac up and running, it appears that he took happily to the new technology, writing a poem to the Intel chip (it’s reprinted in the Report) and musing that “There is something about seeing your words on a screen before you that makes you send the word with a better bite, sighted in closer to the target. I know a computer can’t make a writer but I think it makes a writer better. Simplicity in writing and simplicity in getting it down, hot and real.”

This is just the opposite of what I’d always assumed, which was that computers were to blame for the way some authors of the last 20 years have driven me crazy recently by including in their books what appears to be every single thing that passes through their heads. That would be Rick Moody (everything after The Ice Storm, a very good book rife with exhiliration and pain), Dave Eggers (everything), and Jonathan Franzen (I only ever tried The Corrections and when the daughter’s second or third long story started up I had to fast forward to the end, which made me cry -- the ending, not the fast-forwarding). Maybe I’m wrong, and this lack of discrimination is about temperament, and not operational at all.

The 'Report from the BB' goes on to contrast Bukowski’s interest in new technology with William S. Burroughs’s point of view, expressed in an interview in 1987, that you know, it just didn’t seem worth the trouble to figure out how to use a computer, although apparently he had one in the house. This inspired someone named Egil (a real name?) to comment that in his old age Burroughs may have preferred “something reliable like a gun.” I mentally shrieked. Egil, are you sure that “reliable” is the right choice of word? You mean like that thing made of steel which if you’re not careful you can kill someone with? What, he did?

Now, for a genius take on the problems of adjusting to new technology, watch this gem from the show "Øystein og jeg" on Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK), "The Medieval Help Desk". Don't worry, it's subtitled!

Library Quiz

"For the winter's rains and ruins are over
And all the season of snow and sins..."
 -- Swinburne

Yes, it's Spring, and with Spring comes the Library Quiz. My team picked “Authors” for its double-points round. This had seemed a good choice for our group of inveterate readers, but we hadn’t reckoned with just how much information is contained in the fine mind of Iain Sharp, esteemed man of letters and composer of the Authors round questions, and furthermore, we carelessly neglected to consider the factor of the Gaelic impishness. We managed half. See how you do:

1. This woman was Sir Edmund Hillary’s favourite author. She is also mentioned in Maurice Gee’s new novel, Access Road. Who is she?

2. The cousin of which renowned novelist was among the victims of English serial killers Fred and Rose West?

3. The soundtrack for the Wim Wenders film “The Million Dollar Hotel” features a song by U2 with lyrics credited to which Booker Prize-winning author?

4. There’s no prize for knowing that Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austen, but which renowned novelist helped write the script for the 1940 movie version starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier?

 5. This oil painting by William Frith is part of Auckland Art Gallery’s permanent collection. The little man anxiously biting his nails is 18th-century poet Alexander Pope. Who is the woman – herself a distinguished travel writer – laughing heartily at his marriage proposal?





6. Which three early 19th-century authors did Douglas Walton, Elsa Lanchester and Gavin Gordon portray in a 1935 film classic?


Answers
1. Georgette Heyer
2. Martin Amis
3. Salman Rushdie
4.  Aldous Huxley
5.  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
6.  Respectively, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron. The film was James Whale’s camp classic The Bride of Frankenstein.

Strange language

From our guest blogger, Nick:

This from the New York Times, via Ed Park’s blog, via Jenny Davidson’s blog, via probably someone else: 

“It’s hard to say why I like walking backwards,” said Yang De Fu, 60, who does it for an hour in the morning and again in the evening. “It can exercise muscles you don’t use when you walk forward. And it just makes me comfortable. I’ve been doing it 20 years.”  He explained that walking backward forces the tummy in and the back straight. Then he walked away, backward. He did not have to turn around to wave. 

This scenario is a concrete example of the concept I always heard at art school of “making the familiar unfamiliar”. Experiencing something you think you know in an unexpected way is something that art, literature, physical activity, funnily allows. It sometimes happens when English is used by people for whom it is not their first language, like when Javier Bardem likens John Malkovich to a big Pizza Hut (favourably). 

In an article about quitting a habit, David Sedaris has written this:  

When it came to verb conjugation, she was beyond reproach, but every so often she’d get a word wrong. The effect was not a loss of meaning but a heightening of it. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has . . . finished with his smoking.” 

And here is a story by Lydia Davis, from her collection Samuel Johnson is indignant: 

Happiest Moment 

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

Naked Lunch's anniversary

I’ve been carrying Naked Lunch around with me for at least a month and I think it’s time to realise that I am just not going to read more than the approximately 50 scattered pages I read during the first 36 hrs after I picked it up: about 25% of it, more or less the same amount as I read the first time I encountered it. That was in the guise of Il pasto nudo, in Italy, at some point in my twenties, at the house of a friend who had once seen William S. Burroughs at JFK Airport, I seem to recall. Or maybe he had made a pilgrimage to Burroughs’s house, and it was Cousin Joe (also very old and very cool, but a bluesman) that he stood in line behind at JFK?

Never mind. I think it’s right in the spirit of Burroughs to just read bits and pieces, my own personal cut-up, you might say. The official caretaker of the Burroughs house in Lawrence, Kansas cheerfully admits to never having gotten through Naked Lunch either. In fact, I could even have read less of it, and still appreciated it just as much. These lines alone, just at the start, when he has run into the subway fleeing from a narc and is racing for the train, would have sufficed for me to unreservedly call it a great book:

"Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character. You know the type: comes on with bartenders and cab drivers, talking about right hooks and the Dodgers, calls the counterman in Nedick’s by his first name. A real asshole."

How do I know the track record of the official caretaker of the Burroughs house? Because it’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of Naked Lunch this year, and that intrigues me, so I've been reading up. Of the many, the one I liked the best was the one Duncan Fallowell wrote in the New Statesman in July. He had some interesting things to say about Naked Lunch. First he amazed me by calling it the last of the landmark modern novels. What? It’s revolutionary. How can it be the last of something?

So I asked myself, well, what does Fallowell probably think the first modern novel is? And I realised it would probably be Ulysses. And then it made sense. I had a sudden vision of all these grand old men of modernity, in those black and white photos we see of them, aged, ravaged, intense: Joyce, Beckett, Orwell. W.H. Auden. Ezra Pound. Burroughs. It’s like The Wild Bunch, and he is definitely one of them, and yeah, probably the last.

At the end, this stabbing observation: 'His essential message – escape the machine – could well be more relevant, and difficult to emulate, than ever.'

You can read the article online.

When Burroughs died in 1997, salon.com phoned J.G.Ballard and asked him what Burroughs had meant to him. Absolute honesty, he said:

"Burroughs called his greatest novel "Naked Lunch," by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine."

You can read all the interview on salon.com. It's good to remember J.G. Ballard, who departed from this world he believed so strongly in seeing and writing about from "both sides of my retina", as he used to say, earlier this year.

Some other things I found:
 
A website with the covers of all of Burroughs’s novels, and their translations, through the years. Really fun to look at. Syringes of all shapes and sizes of course, but also serious attempts to depict a hallucinating eye, and even a naked… woman for the Yugoslavs. I see that the French translator, rather than Dejeuner Nu, which would have seemed the obvious choice, with its echo of Dejeuner sur l’herbe -- what more naked lunch than that? some say it was Burroughs’s inspiration -- chose Festin Nu, or Naked Banquet, as in Cezanne’s great painting Le Festin, the Banquet, quite energetically Nu itself.

On Nakedlunch.org you can read about the anniversary celebrations around the world. I quote from the Parisian symposium programme “The session before lunch makes connections between Burroughs, French culture, and traditions of drug-taking through three very different approaches". No mention of what happens at lunch. Aperitif hour, however, offers “Fiona Paton focuses on the spiritual dimension in Naked Lunch by focusing on recurrent imagery of ectoplasm”.

Lawrence Kansas was the one I liked the most, for the photo of Burroughs they chose, for having a show of WSB’s art called “Naked leftovers”, for putting on the program (have to spell it this way) an accordion serenade and “some of the Old Man’s favorite songs on the iPod”.

Lawrence Kansas reminds me of a good book: Driving Mr. Albert by Michael Paterniti – it’s actually Albert Einstein’s brain which he is driving across the US (it's a true story), together with the pathologist who had kept it after the autopsy. This pathologist happened to have lived next door to WSB in Lawrence and they stop in to visit him. I drove through Kansas once and I am sure we stopped in Lawrence for either the world’s deepest well, or the world’s best catfish. Unfortunately it wasn’t when Burroughs was living there. I checked. What do I remember about Kansas? The wind, the cowboy boots, and the way the natives threw around names like "Dodge City", as in "There's a great shopping mall up in Dodge City."

Other things that 1959 brought the world besides Naked Lunch:
 
1. Picasso was working on the sketches for his "Dejeuner sur l’herbe". He didn’t actually put his brush to the canvas until 1960 but I had to put this in anyway. The Musee d’Orsay had an exhibition this year on the Picasso- Manet Dejeuners.
2. Asterix
3. The first Barbie doll
4. The first Mini
5. The first Aluminum Beer Can
6. The Historic Monkey flight, ie the first time a living being (actually 2) went into space and came back alive. You just know this had to have influenced Burroughs.

Two recommended online reads
 

William Burroughs Interview by Paris Review, 1965 Beats In Kansas: The Beat Generation in the Heartland

 
And a book to get from the library:
Last words : the final journals of William S. Burroughs

Best books about boxing

When I was growing up I always thought of my father as someone who looked down on sports, but later I realised that it was just team sports he didn’t like. He loved top performers. He watched Wimbledon. He watched the Olympic divers and sprinters and skiers. And he watched boxing. He saw Sonny Liston lose the heavyweight championship of the world to Cassius Clay, and I remember overhearing him say that Sonny Liston had thrown the fight. I wanted to know what it meant, and I guess once I knew that I asked why. Never one to underestimate children, he would not only have mentioned organised crime, but probably attempted an exposition of the Faustian bargain as well.

Well, it was a fascinating riddle to me and it must have lodged itself inside my brain, so that last week, when I was looking up a biography of Jerry Lee Lewis by Nick Tosches on the library catalogue and discovered that he had written a book about Sonny Liston, I found myself rushing upstairs to grab it off the shelf, like the brainwashed agents in that old Charles Bronson spy movie who twenty years later are reawakened by a line of poetry and compelled to go and blow up missile sites.

Nick Tosches is a writer I’ve always liked. In the first photo I saw of him he looked a bit like John Cassavetes (though he doesn’t really) and the first book of his I picked up had a great dedication, with lines like “to those who broke and entered with me / into the cathedral of the heart, / to those who took my back / in right and in wrong.” That’s what his prose is like, Little Italy tough-guy with moments of sentiment but not sentimentalism, and an echo of Dante, except that Dante was never brutal, and he rhymed.

The book is called Night train, after the song Liston liked to work out to, and I read it in two nights. I would have read it in one if I hadn't had to go to work the next day. It’s dark and disturbing, like Sonny Liston, who turns out to have been the archetype of “bad”. I didn't know. The book quotes Liston comparing boxing to a cowboy movie, with the good guys and the bad guys. “’The bad guys are supposed to lose. I change that,’ he had said. ‘I win’.” But Tosches's take is, “He rode a fast dark train from nowhere, and it dumped him at that falling-off place at the end of the line.”

On the lighter side, this book was directly responsible for me watching the DVD of Fight Club last night. I had never wanted to see it because I had imagined it as something World Wrestling Federation types watched, not to mention the problem of pretentious Brad Pitt, but it was proposed to me, and after Night train, men beating each other up didn't sound so shallow after all, so I watched it. Once I would have cried “foul” about the scene where the narrator pounds the guy’s face into pulp, but not any more. Now I’m looking forward to the book, my first Chuck Palahniuk novel ever. I see a whole new world opening up here.

Vice versa, here’s a book I've read which everyone should read: The fight, the book Norman Mailer wrote about the Rumble in the Jungle -- the famous match held in Zaire with which Muhammad Ali won his world championship back from George Foreman. Boxing fans have deemed it the best book ever about boxing, but I just love it for how convulsively funny it is, not to mention exceedingly sharp, and, just often enough, from-the-heart eloquent. It's Mailer totally in command. Here he is on George Foreman:

"He came out from the elevator dressed in embroidered bib overalls and dungaree jacket and entered the lobby of the Inter-Continental flanked by a Black on either side. He did not look like a man so much as a lion standing just as erectly as a man. He appeared sleepy but in the way of a lion digesting a carcass."

And lastly, there's Hemingway’s classic, great story about the shadowy world of boxing and the mob, “The killers”, which you can now read online -- hard to believe, if you are acquainted with the Hemingway family’s possessiveness with regard to their precious “brand”, including their attempt to stop the Hemingway look-alike contest in Key West from proceeding as not being respectful enough (or not having paid them enough).

This from the family that had the bad taste to bring us the Ernest Hemingway line of rifles! I saw the advertisement in an U.S. magazine with my own eyes.

Read "The Killers"

And get from the library

Night train by Nick Tosches

Fight club (DVD)

Fight club (the novel)

The fight by Norman Mailer

Dedications, again

Happy Anniversary!
 
Books in the City made its debut one year ago with a post called “Dedicated to the one I love”, honouring the well-written book dedication. Since then I’ve run into a few more good ones and here they are, in celebration of a year in which I’ve really enjoyed the blog! and hope all of you out there reading have too.

1. To Leanora: WE ARE MY FAVORITE STORY 

A book called 20th century ghosts caught my eye because the author was named Joe Hill, as in “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night”, an old song my father used to sing (as did Joan Baez) about the ghost of a slain union organizer. I flipped through the first pages to see if maybe it was a pen name – and found instead this dedication.

For the pen name, I still don’t know, but think probably so:  our very knowledgeable fiction selector told me he is Stephen King’s son. I’m tempted to read the whole book, or at least the story “Pop Art” which Christopher Golden in his introduction says is his favourite, and which opens with these lines: “My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don't remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective."


2. To Remington Portable No. NC69411

Cornell Woolrich, author of Rear window, father of noir fiction, alcoholic recluse and tortured soul, dedicated The Bride Wore Black to his typewriter.









3. Tad Williams, "To my father..."

Tad Williams dedicated the four volumes of his “Otherland” science fiction series like this:

Book 1: "This Book is dedicated to my father Joseph Hill Evans with love. Actually Dad doesn’t read fiction, so if someone doesn’t tell him about this, he’ll never know."

Book 2: "This Book is dedicated to my father Joseph Hill Evans with love. As I said before, Dad doesn’t read fiction. He still hasn’t noticed that this thing is dedicated to him. This is Volume Two – let’s see how many more until he catches on."

Book 3: "This is still dedicated to you-know-who, even if he doesn’t. Maybe we can keep this a secret all the way to the final volume."

Book 4: "My father still hasn't actually cracked any of the books – so, no, he still hasn't noticed. I think I’m just going to have to tell him. Maybe I should break it to him gently. 'Everyone here who hasn't had a book dedicated to them, take three steps forward. Whoops, Dad, hang on there for a second...' "


4. For C.K. Stead who, like execution, concentrates the mind.

-- Michael King, in Tread softly for you tread on my life.

Thanks to Steve Braunias for this one.








5. For H. Rider Haggard fan Kelly (my dedication):

The Faithful but Unpretending Record of A Remarkable Adventure is Hereby Respectfully Dedicated by the Narrator ALLAN QUATERMAIN to All The Big and Little Boys Who Read It

-- H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s mines.

Stephenie's choice

Chalk one up for New Zealand, even if she didn’t know it! From the August 17th entry on the website of Stephenie Meyer, yes, the Stephenie Meyer, the only author to merit her own voice on Auckland City Libraries’ book-buying budget for 2009-2010:

"I didn't have a ton of time to read this summer, but I did discover one really wonderful two-book series. Dreamhunter and Dreamquake by Elizabeth Knox. It is like nothing else I've ever read. The characters are so real, you'll feel like you know exactly what they look like and how their voices sound and what they would say or do in any given situation. More than that, you'll want to hang out with them. Then the world is so amazing and unique. You will want to go there. You will want to walk into "the Place." And you will want to sleep in a dream opera."

I was surprised that with all that gush she wasn’t struck at all by the uncommon New Zealand component, whether of the author or the place. It’s not yelled about, in fact on the first book the publishers didn’t see fit to mention it, but the back cover flap of number 2, Dreamquake, definitely states that Elizabeth Knox lives in Wellington, New Zealand. And as for the setting, an island republic called Southland, settled by the English, with a capital city called Founderston, where there are “bush bees” buzzing around, mossy forests and waterfalls, well, you can see why Wikipedia’s entry for Elizabeth Knox calls it an”alternate New Zealand-like republic”, expanded in the entry on Dreamhunter to “an alternate universe Edwardian version of a New Zealand or Tasmania-like island republic” (I'm guessing that would be the Dream component).

But when we move to the teens, somehow, New Zealand disappears: Teenreads.com unquestioningly declares that Dreamhunter is "set in the beginning of 20th-century Australia”. I’ll refrain from being pedantic about the syntax, but I can’t help wondering if this teen reviewer learned geography at that superb piece of Americana which is the International House of Pancakes restaurant chain (International = 100 American pancake-types plus Swedish pancakes), at one of which a few years back I overheard a vacationing Kiwi family commenting on how New Zealand had been left off the colour-in map of the world on the back of the kiddie menu.

Or was it from one of the many boardgames included in the list “Oh my god, we have fallen off the map OR New Zealand, the amazing disappearing country” on “boardgamegeek.com” which was started by an Aucklander (I am loathe to give the name as I am sure I will do something uncool like think it’s his name when it is actually his cyber persona) noticing that there’s no New Zealand on the Risk gameboard.

I think I only played Risk once or twice in my life, we didn't have it in our house as my parents didn’t see the point of buying any board game more modern than Scrabble, but the little girl next door did, just one of many typical Southern California things she had and we didn’t, come to think of it, such as toy ponies, Dr. Suess books, a television and divorced parents. I didn’t show any talent for it anyway, so thought it a better investment to spend my time lobbying for a Clue game. However Risk appears to have been so popular as to have inspired many more world-map games, involving also timely things like pandemics and historical things like exploration, all bearing the gene for No-New Zealandness, including, ironically, one about 18th century exploration called Endeavour.

Is this the other side of the coin of that comment by someone named Eric Korn in the TLS, who, reviewing the book Spike and Co, related how he had learned with horror that the BBC had inadvertently wiped eighty of the first hundred Goon shows:

“The Saga of the HMS Aldgate, Operation Bagpipes, and The Building of Britain’s First Atomic Cannon, all gone into the dark, unless some Goonophile in Wellington or Ouagadougou has a tape.” (TLS, Feb. 23 2007)

Now what do Wellington and Ouagadougou have in common, you might ask? All I found, in a quick browse of traveler feedback on the internet, is no noted tourist traps.