During the course of the weekend, I wanted to respond to many of the excellent selections and comments on this thread. Ho'ever, I was preoccupied with recovering from
food poisoning and so remained mumsy and dumbsy. Rather bracing, Sports, to upload shots of my tomes between upchucks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff Wong
scrypt . . . I missed this part of your post yesterday. . . . In any case, that's awesome! I have a 1st of *****, King of the Pirates . . . alas, it is only signed.
|
Kind of you to note one of my many slovenly author anecdotes, Master Wong. I have hundreds of others but didn't want to jack the thread. After all, this isn't my own personal book gallery and b-b-b-blog for stuttering self-aggrandizement.
Poo-see, Queen o' th' Pirates was the book Acker wrote just after moving out of NYC. I recall her calling once to ask what I thought about the Mekons accompanying her on the CD version. I remember telling her it had to be better than her previous effort with Hal Wilner, who's certainly a good musician but didn't quite get her work. At Acker's wake, Wilner remarked that being with her was "exactly like stepping into a Ren and Stimpy cartoon." In my experience, her persona was far more complex than that.
While she resided on University Place, Acker and I talked every other night for about two years. I had ample time to consider her work and aesthetic, neither of which reminded me of Ren and Stimpy. Perhaps Wilner confused her hairdo for her mind.
Someone mentioned Harlan Ellison before. I've always found him amusing. I used to spar with him verbally, since (i) my best friend was enrolled in Ellison's workshop when I was a spoiled fifteen-year-old and (ii) Ellison himself had the ego of a spoiled fifteen-year-old.
Adam: Re
Neuromancer: Somewhere obscured by the clutter in my apartment hides Gibson's typewritten manuscript for "Johnny Mnemonic."
I second Adam Will's endorsement of
Pale Fire, which might be my favorite novel by Nabokov. However, I wouldn't place
Lolita behind it objectively in terms of quality. Both use unreliable narrators and feature similarly hapless protagonists; both employ the strangely adolescent device of revealing, through his own oblivious account of their behavior, other characters' contempt for the main character. It seems to have been important to Nabokov that the reader join the author in dismissing his protagonists as fools.
The prose in both books is gorgeous and so chiseled as to seem stanza'd; in
Pale Fire, the verse follows suit. Consider the opening lines:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -- and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! . . .
§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§
I'm tempted to upload shots of other books but will refrain until further books are posted by others (like Jeff Wong). I do have a few books to post with Redshifter and Jahn specifically in mind.
Rsaavedra: Your thoughtful responses were very much appreciated.
Strange -- I don't consider Leopardi to be more "depressing" or "miserable" than Dante himself. I suppose I'd use the word
saturnine to describe L's perfect sonnets; for the most familiar description of dejection, I'd defer to
Paradiso: "There is no greater pain than, in misery, to remember happy times."
Generally, I don't think Beddoes's morbidity would make him unpopular in our present age. It would, however, make mainstream critics less likely to take him seriously, as the conventional are quick to confuse mere descriptions of carnage with lapses of literary taste. Any twit can omit details tastefully while managing to say nothing of distinction. It takes a poet of Beddoes's caliber to unearth and perfect a cemetery's-worth of gruesome jewels.
