cosmopolis

We Sleep Tonight: Criticism Stands Guard (1)

The Guardian might still offer one of the best book chat Web sites, but its bloggers display a frightening and cavalier ignorance of anything that happened before blogging began. David Mattin recently celebrated the Paris Review interviews, writing:

"When I first became aware of the Paris Review, back in 2000, the Art of Fiction interviews were not easy to get at. Though a few were (and are) available in full at the website, there was no collection in book form. All that changed, thankfully, with the appointment of Philip Gourevitch in 2005. The new editor – best known for his brilliant writing on the Rwandan genocide – quickly realised the value of the asset he had inherited, and Volume One was published in 2006."

Actually, Viking published at least eight volumes of the interviews in book form from the 1950s through the 1990s, and the paperbacks were found on every would-be writers' desk. I cannt muster the necessary sarcasm here, only sadness.

For sale -- sold (9)

to Myopic with:

Barry Miles, The Beat Hotel (review)
Joseph Conrad, With the Tides (Penguin)
Bernard DeVoto, The Hour (reprint). History of the cocktail, in marginal condition
The Golden Age of Soviet Theatre (Penguin reprint)
Humphrey Carpenter, The Brideshead Generation (review). So-so.
The World Comes to Iowa: The Iowa International Anthology The Simpsons Guide to Springfield David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest. Knopf reprint.
Marilyn Johnson, The Dead Beat. Survey of obituary writing.
Susan Dworkin, The Viking in the Wheat Field. Review copy.
Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel. (Penguin)
Richard Ben Cramer, Joe DiMaggio
Brassai, The Secret Paris of the 1930s (Pantheon). Paperback, second printing
The Iron Skillet Cookbook.

Not making the grade: Joe DiMaggio (a surprise), the Simpsons (ditto), the Devoto, the Iowa anthology, the Dead Beat, the Carpenter. For the other eight I garnered  $22.

Scenes from the Apocalypse

"Being able to read and write, and think about books and talk about culture, is an unwanted skill now. It's an antiquated trade. I may as well be thatching a house or sailing a sail ship."

--Biographer Roger Lewis in the Guardian

I will never see my $75 again

Venice is a place for the young or the old, and so when young I went there as often as I could. The rest of the time I read about the place. Jan Morris' Venice was the best, but William Dean Howells made a strong showing. Nearly a quarter century ago, in January 1987, I bought from my local bookdealer, Quill & Brush, a copy of Howells' Venetian Life, the autograph edition. It was No. 118 of 550 copies, signed by author, illustrator and publisher. The covers were soiled and the labels were worn but it set me back $75, plus I presume the tax. It was a fair amount of change back then, at least for me. Why I bought it I have no idea. If I had thought about it, I would have presumed it was uncommon but in truth I would have had no idea even how to look for a copy. Quill & Brush was the only dealer I knew.

I never read it. It went from shelf to box. I never even looked at the plates. Sigh. I dragged the box to California, then to a second address, then a third, then a fourth, then to Chicago, then to storage in Chicago. The other day, I espied the two volumes again in a forlorn corner of storage. I am now middle-aged, and haven't been to Venice in a long time. While Howells is not in the first rank of 19th century writers, he is firmly in the second rank. Surely time had been kind to my volumes. If I could clear a C-note in unloading them, I would regard it as a victory, and never mind their carbon footprint -- or the fact that, after inflation, I would need $143 just to break even. For that matter, I wanted at least $500 to stop feeling ridiculous.

Time has not been kind. David R. Spivey has a copy online for $80, although he does not seem to realize it is signed by Howells. There is another set for $100, and two for $125, one for $130, one for $250, two for $275, one for $350, one for $388. Ten sets, overall. Looks like I'll be keeping them for another 25 years. By which point, I suspect, there will be 20 online.

If you're looking for something specific and uncommon at the right price, it often isn't on the Web. But it's still astonishing to reflect how much is there, and at what modest prices. I have been reading Cheap Sons of Bitches: Memoirs of the Book Trade, by William Hoffer, published in the anthology Carry on Bumping (1988). Hoffer, who died too young, was the preeminent Canadian dealer of his era. He didn't like the stuff much, which made it easier to sell. He thought that no one else liked it either: "Canadian poetry has always sold so badly that most of it is undistributed rather than actually rare." (Irving Layton was an exception: he attempted to actually distribute his books of verse, "a fact that resulted in the wholesale destruction of most of them.")

A few years before I bought Venetian Life, Hoffer bid on a copy of the signed limited edition of E.J. Pratt's The Iron Door (1927). He got it for $90, and says he was delighted: "If the collective consciousness of this country is of the opinion that a brilliant copy of one of a hundred copies printed on hand-made paper, signed and numbered, of an important collection by the most important Canadian poet of the early part of the 20th century is worth nothing, that country and that consciousness deserve to die." He said he would wait 15 years, if need be, to get a proper price for his book.

And now, 25 years later? You can pick up a reasonable copy of the limited online for $125. If you're a dealer, that's $100. Hoffer would weep, or at least laugh. Before he died, he gave up Canadian literature and moved to Moscow.

For sale -- sold (8)

to Myopic with:

Brian Walker, Hua Hu Ching (Clark City)
Renata Adler, Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker
L. Sprague de Camp, The Honorable Barbarian (review)
David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory (David, I have a whole box of them!)
William Golding, The Paper Men
Scott Rice, ed., It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
Geo. Alec Effinger, Relatives
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages
Naomi Klein, Fences and Windows
Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (Penguin)
de Camp and Pratt, The Complete Compleat Enchanter (Book Club)
Arax and Wartzman, The King of California (advance copy)
Penelope Casas, Discovering Spain (I thus abandon any notion of getting there any time soon)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma (pb)
Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors (pb)
Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace (Pittsburgh pb)
Joysane Savigneau, Carson McCullers: A Life
MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist (clipped endpaper)

11/18 sold. Rejected were, surprisingly, the book on Spain, the de Camp/Pratt, Effinger, King of California (another surprise), Gone, Out of this Furnace, The Paper Men. Net: $22.50

For sale -- sold (7)

to Myopic with:
Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280 (Vintage).
Sarah Katherine Lewis, Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me. Not as good as I had hoped.
Alan and Theresa von Altendorf, Isms: A Compendium of Concepts, Doctrines, Traits and Beliefs. Why I carted this around for years I can't fathom.
Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough. Review.
Isaac Babel, You Must Know Everything. Superseded by my signed review copy.
Derek Jarrett, The Sleep of Reason. Another huge carbon footprint with this one.
Edward Gorey, Ascending Peculiarity: Interviews. I'm in this book, but I don't need a duplicate.
Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. From my long-ago French period.
Luigi Barzini, Memories of Mistresses. From my long-ago Italian period.
Patricia Hampl, A Romantic Education. New afterword.
Carl Elliott, Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream. Paid real money for this, never read it. Sigh.
Flann O'Brien, The Best of Myles. Penguin reprint.
Renata Adler, Canaries in the Mineshaft.
Charles R. Geisst, Wheels of Fortune. From the office.
Coy Ludwig, Maxfield Parrish. Oversize art book, a reprint, from my childhood.

Not a very good day. Only five books -- Thompson, Ladurie, O'Brien, Adler and Gorey -- sold, netting me a grand total of $13. The rest will go to the charity shop, where doubtless someone will buy them and attempt to sell them to Myopic again.

They still think like this

Jeremy Lewis, after being hired by a Scottish politician to "edit" a book:

"Although he was an experienced and combative journalist, Tam seemed to think -- like many others before and since -- that books and compost heaps have much in common, and that his random thoughts on House of Commons notepaper, together with the odd anti-devolutionary article wrenched from the Guardian or the New Statesman, would, if pressed together, somehow mulch down into a finished book by a mysterious process of fermentation; I found it hard to share his optimism, and as the disparate sheets of paper mounted up around me I began to feel symptoms of incipient hysteria."

For sale -- sold (6)

to Myopic:
Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain
James Farrell, Chicago Stories (Illinois paperback)
Thomas Beller, Seduction Theory (review)
Richard Critchfield, Trees, Why Do You Wait? America's Changing Rural Culture (review)
Charles Jones, The Gifting Birds (Dream Garden)
Silvana Paternostro, In the Land of God and Man: Confronting Our Sexual Culture (review)
Cocteau on the Film (Dover)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway's Party (Harvest)
Edith Wharton, Omnibus (Scribners)
Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman (New Directions)
Claudio Magris, Danube (paper)
Alice's Adventures Under Ground (facsimile)
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice (hardcover reprint)
Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation
Andrew Sinclair: Dylan Thomas, No Man More Magical

Result: Only the Boyle and the Amorous Woman failed to make te grade. Total take: $32.50.

Norman Lewis, our hero

from William Dalrymple in the Guardian:

One typical adventure of the nonagenarian Lewis took place on a trip to Kos. On reading a story in the local paper about a police investigation into rumours that "women on the small island of Anirini were disposing of unwanted husbands by throwing them down dry wells", he merrily set off on a boat with three sponge fishermen and a prostitute they had picked up on the Piraeus waterfront ("they spent the crossing sleeping, eating and making love - the last on a strict rota") in search of this barren island populated by homicidal widows. Before long Lewis, then aged 92, had hopped ashore, rented a room from one of the chief suspects, and was soon cheerfully peering down well-heads in search of rotting cadavers.

For sale -- sold (5)

to Myopic: Doris Lessing, Allfred and Emily (slightly defective) John A. Williams, Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light. Inscribed, but with a bookplate and a worn jacket Max Apple, Oranging of America (UK paperback) Brendan Behan, Confessions of an Irish Rebel (UK) Isabel Colegate, A Pelican in the Wilderness (review) Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel (I got another as a gift) Jay Winik, April 1865 The New Gilded Age (New Yorker Anthology) Patricia Hampl, Virgin Time (review) J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (second printing) Ajana Appachana, Listening Now (Indian novel) Raymond Sokolov, Why We Eat What We Eat Literary Journalists (pb anthology, review copy) Cynthia Ozick, Dictation (second printing) Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book (Grove, new edition) Insider's French (bet they reject this) rejected were not the Insider's French, but the Sokolov, Winik, Lessing (surprisingly), the Literary Journalists, Virgin Time, the Behan and Colegate. Net takings: $21.

For sale -- sold (4)

Paul Levy, Out to Lunch (Harper). Food essays which I had been carrying around and not reading since the book was published in 1987. At least it was a review copy.
Terry Tempest Williams, Desert Quartet (Pantheon, 1995). Prose poetry.
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman (Cape, 1969). Third printing, no jacket.
Bill Knott, Becos (Random, 1983). Poetry. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (Weathervane). Illustrated by Rackham. Another childhood treasure departs.
Sartre, Les mots (Folio). Childhood volume.
Roland Barthes, image Music Text (Fontana, 1979). Second fontana printing. Childhood debris.
Lolis Eric Elie, Smokestack Lightning (FSG, 1996). Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country.
Thomas Keller, The French Laundry Cookbook (Artisan, 1999). 18th printing. Gift from an old girlfriend. Never cooked from.
Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe (Doubleday, trade paper). Volumes 1 and 2
Stanley Appelbaum, The Complete 'Masters of the Poster' " (Dover)
James Tiptree Jr., Crown of Stars (Tor, 1988). Secondrate Tiptree. Long past time I kept lugging this around,too.
Cynthia Ozick, Dictation (Houghton, 2008). Flaps glued to boards.

Rejected: Ozick, Levy, Fowles. Others, too, I thought. Net income: $23.

For sale -- sold (3)

to Myopic with:

G. Cabrera Infante, Three Trapped Tigers  (rough jacket, sunned boards)
T.J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (review copy)
Prudence Glynn, Skin to Skin (Oxford). Carried this baby around forever.
Cheeni Rao, In Hanuman's Hands (review copy)
Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access
Oscar Hammerstein II, Carmen Jones (I thought this was a first)
Marjorie Williams, The Woman at the Washington Zoo
Patrick White, The Twyborn Affair (US edition)
Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: A Cultural History (paperback review copy)
Roberto Bolano, 2666. First UK, second printing.
Inventions of the Middle Ages (Folio). Freebie.
Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (paperback review copy)
Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (UK, second printing)

Rejected: The White (surprisingly), the Rifkin (unsurprisingly) and the Jacobs. Net haul was $32 in cash or $38 in trade. I took the cash, a little miffed it wasn't more.

This is what happens when you fire all the copy editors

Copy-editing is a luxury newspapers can no longer afford. Which means you're going to see a lot more stories like one, a feature on Samuel R. Delany in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

-- "Delany's later books deftly apply the dense theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Michel Althusser" ....I think you mean Louis Althusser?

-- "David Hartwell, publisher of the New York Review of Science Fiction and a senior editor at Tor/Forge, a major sci-fi publishing house, says Delany was one of a number of young writers, including Thomas M. Dish..." That would be "Disch."

-- "  'His range of characters was unprecedented,' said Philadelphia sci-fi and fantasy writer Michael Swankier." Sigh. Swanwick, you idiot.

This was harder to check:

"Much of Delany's post-sci-fi output explores gay sexuality - a subject of intense personal interest to Delany, who says he has had "at least 50,000 sexual partners, all of the passing and very casual sort." That's three or four a day, every day of the year, for 40 years. Possible, perhaps, but how did he find the time to write all those books?

Disappearing Bookstores II

On a visit to San Francisco, I stopped at the Great Overland Book Co. branch off Union Street, a store where parking is always difficult but it is generally worth the hunt. Overland is a neighborhood store but a high quality one; I bought a run of Hermann Hesse's there once. This time, uncharacteristically, the stock seemed lackluster. Closer examination showed why: the store is closing next month, leaving only one Overland, in Inner Sunset. 

Kathy at Book Bay told me that Mcdonalds on Turk Street (better known by its self-description as "a dirty, poor-lit place for books") was also closing. Mcdonalds was in the only part of town that has remained determinedly skanky. Even when you got inside, the smell of piss seemed to trail you. I went once, years ago, and never went back. 

Up in Davis, Bogey's Books closed a few months ago when the owner decided he had had enough. An employee wanted to buy it, but was stymied by a rent increase. It was a small but pleasant store full of recent reading copies of serious books.

For sale -- sold (2)

John Prados, Vietnam: The History of an UnWinnable War. Review copy.

Thomas Mann, This Peace. Knopf, 1938. War damage on book and boards.

Amos Oz, Rhyming Life and Death. First UK, slightly damaged.

Anton Chekhov, Forty Stories. Vintage.

Siegred Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Folio reprint.

Paul Stiles, Riding the Bull. Confessions of a Merrill analyst.

Jose Saramago, Seeing. Water damage.

Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions. First deluxe paper edition.

Joseph Epstein, Partial Payments. Norton, review copy.

Mickey Pearlman, Listen to the Voices: Twenty Interviews With Women Who Write.

Ben Greenman, Superbad. McSweeney's.

Anne Carson, Men in the Off hours. Signed. Remainder dot, some rubbing on jacket.

George Seferis, Poems. Little Brown, reprint.

Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh. Sunned spine, water damage.

Lebek: A City of Northern Europe Through the Ages.

Paperbacks: The Silver Stallion, The Hobbit, Lilith

The verdict: All sold to Myopic except the three fantasy paperback, the Epstein (dissing a Chicago writer), the Wall Street book, and the Mickey Pearlmen interviews. They'll all go to the thrift store, the last stop on the food chain. Next take: $46, cash.

Earlier, I went to the Pulp and Paper Convention out in suburban Lombard. Basically, you paid $25 to get into a dealer's room. First table I walk to, first book I see, there it is: Conjure Wife, in the solo Twayne edition. I have been looking for this book for 20 years, ever since I first visited Leiber in San Francisco in the late 1980s. It was $100 and in nice shape, which it never is on the few occasions it shows up. (Three copies online, they all suck.) I figured no one cared, since the dealer's room was in its 10th hour. So I said, as one does, I'll be back. Alas, an hour later it was gone. There's a moral there.

I bought instead a copy of The Farthest Shore, price-clipped but otherwise fine. There's a production flaw on the rear board, but it's still better than my copy (albeit unsigned) and better than any copy online. Cost: $80.

Also, a copy of Whip Hand by Franklin Sanders, otherwise known as Charles Willeford. Published by Fawcett in 1961, it's fine except for an "A" in ink above the title, which will have to be chemically removed. The seller refused to take a check, thinking it might bounce. I gave him $30 in cash. Between the Covers is offering a copy for $400.

Two books at $110, plus $25 admission, minus $46 profit: $89 outlay.

For sale -- sold

Testing out the used books market, I hauled to Myopic Books today the following treasures:

--Best American Travel Writing 2002, review copy

--Katharine Briggs, The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends (a nick or two)

--Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, edited by Pamela Sargent (trade paper)

--Robert Coover, The Public Burning (a nick or two)

--O: The Intimate History of the Female Orgasm (dull)

--Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

--F. Sionil Jose, The Samsons (trade paper)

--Juan Ramon Jimenez, Platero and I (Texas)

--William F. Nolan, ed., The Pseudo-People: Androids in Science Fiction (beautiful, but worth zip)

--Evan Connell, The White Lantern (more nicks)

--Matthew Klein, Con Ed (thriller)

--Michael Martone, ed., A Place of Sense: Essays in the Search of the Midwest (review copy)

--David Leeming, The Oxford Companion to World Mythology (Folio premium)

--Richard Fortey, Life (oversize illustrated book published and given as a premium by the Folio Society)

Later the same day:

They rejected four books: the Connell, the Jose, Women of Wonder and, weirdly, Life. I was offered $32 in cash or $34 in credit. Naturally I took the credit.

Avram Davidson, in memoriam

In our senescence, we revisit our youth. Found in a box my never-published first literary piece, on my hero Avram Davidson, nonpariel short story writer, devout Jew, total fuck-up. It was 1986, and I was trying to launch my career with a Rediscovery for Book World. My chosen venue was "Crimes and Chaos," a volume of nonfiction by Davidson published as a paperback original in 1962 and promptly forgotten, which is not to say anyone noticed it, ever. But the pieces -- about the Triangle fire, the sinking of the General Slocum, the adventures of Jack the Ripper -- were as good as Liebling or Joseph Mitchell. I made my case in the first half, then wrote about how Davidson had destroyed his career, and was now dying in a veterans' home in Washington state. "Too downbeat," my friend and Book World editor Michael Dirda responded. I rewrote it, shortened it, to no avail. The acting editor of Book World, Alice Digilio, had no interest in such a piece, and truthfully, why should she? Weep not for writers. I also note that I said in one of the drafts that I had spent $50 for Crimes and Chaos, the equivalent of perhaps $250 now. There are at least a dozen copies for sale online, most cheaper than what I paid. Alice Digilio became a Metro reporter, left the paper, and disappeared.

Top this, Jim O'Brien.

And then I read ...

A Place of Sense: Essay in Search of the Midwest, edited by Michael Martone (Iowa, 1988).

There's a review slip inside, which must mean I got the book free when published. After a decade or so, I trucked it from Washington to San Francisco, then to another location in San Francisco, then to a third location in San Francisco, then to the East Bay, then to Chicago. The carbon footprint on this sucker is immense. 

Last night, rearranging things, it popped up in a box. Now I live in the Midwest. Was it time to read these essays by Louise Erdrich, Michael Rosen, Michael Martone and four others? The book met its moment. Thirty minutes later, I was done. The most notable essay was David Hamilton's on his unnamed Iowa hometown during his youth in the 1960s. It covers the expected territory, broken down by geography (the teenage club, the school, his family farm) and subject (traffic, Easter, integration). On death: "Wrecked cars were our memento mori." Sloppiness, stupidity, suicide wishes? Unfortunately, he doesn't speculate. 

Other than that, I saw nothing memorable. I think I can finally let this book go. Someone else can carry it around for the next couple of decades.

Disappearing Bookstores I

Bookstores and newspapers are in an unhappy race to see which can disappear first. In Detroit, the newspapers have decided they won't do home delivery on the low-interest, low-ad weekdays. It's the next step on the path to oblivion. Hartford, meanwhile, seems one of the first large cities to go bookstore-free. "The person looking to drift in from the street and get lost in a wonderland of books has nowhere to go, except out of town or online," the Hartford Courant laments. The last survivor is the Jumping Frog bookstore, which has gone down from 100,000 books to 6,000 and now concentrates on non-book gift items. "It's not unlike the story all over America," Steve Fischer, executive director of the New England Independent Booksellers Association, told the paper. "A lot of downtowns haven't — in some instances, for the past 10, 15 years — been able to support a general-interest bookstore."

Now THIS is an inaugural poem

New Year, 2009

Venus in the arc of the young moon
is a boat in the arms of a bay,
the sky clear to infinity
but for the trailing gossamer
of a transatlantic plane. 

The old year and the old era dead,
pushed burning out to sea
bearing the bones of heroes, tyrants,
ideologues, thieves and deceivers
in a smoke of burning money.
 
The dream is over. Glaciers will melt.
Seas will rise to swallow golden islands.
Somewhere a volcano may whelm a city,
earth shake its skin like an old horse,
a hurricane topple a town to rubble.

Yet tonight, under the cold beauty
of the moon and Venus, something like hope begins,
as if times can turn, the world change course,
as if truth can speak, good men come to power, 
and words have meaning again.

Maybe black-hearted boys in love with death
won’t blow themselves and us to smithereens.
Maybe guns will fall silent, the powerful
cease slaughtering the weak, the rich
will not gorge as the poor starve.
 
Hope spoke the word ‘Yes’, the word ‘we’, the word ’can’,
and a thousand British teenagers at Poetry Live*
rose to their feet in a single yell of joy –
black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jew,
faithful and faithless. We are all in this together.
Ie. gallwn ni. **

Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales 2009

 * A day of poetry readings for school students
 ** Yes, we can. Welsh