The solitude of Beautiful Book Covers

New Coralie Bickford Smith covers

Coralie Bickford-Smith's second clothbound series
of classics for Penguin UK.

The first series was recently release here in the U.S., so I expect these to be available by fall. They are currently available in the UK through Waterstone's booksellers.

what the cost, the pace of progress?

I haven't read this, but it looks intriguing...

Izaak VanGaalen, reviewing the book on Amazon writes:

"Siegel opens his discussion with a scene in Starbucks where everyone is sitting speechless - if not on cellphone - in front of their laptops. Everyone is trying to achieve "connectivity" with the World Wide Web. What Siegel sees is disconnectedness and isolation. Social-networking sites, for example, are a contradiction in terms. They are asocial and atomizing. How can members of Facebook and MySpace have thousands of "friends." What are the consequences for real friendships? Siegel asks all the pertinent questions, even though he doesn't have all the answers."

Naked Lunch at 50

Naked Lunch 50th anniersary edition

From Grove Press:

Fifty years ago, Olympia Press in Paris issued a book that redefined not just American literature, but American culture. Naked Lunch, the U.S. edition of which soon followed from Grove Press, is one of the most important and influential novels of the twentieth century. An unnerving tale of an addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, Naked Lunch’s formal innovation, formerly taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution has exerted its influence on the works of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media in general.

On the fiftieth anniversary of its first publication, Grove Press is proud to issue a special slipcased hardcover edition featuring the restored text, faithful to Burroughs’s original composition, as well as an insightful afterword by David Ulin, book editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Handmade books: Pictorial Webster's

Pictorial Webster's by John M. Carrera, Quercus Press letterpress

Link to the Pictorial Webster's book page on Quercus press site.


Here is a video of the process.... Extraordinary!! 
(Thanks to Tom Reichert for forwarding this to me)


Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

Walpurgisnacht approaches

Dracula, First Edition 1897

Actually Walpurgisnacht is in the spring, but in is the same spirit as our All Hallows.

And in celebration of All Hallows I've been thinking about some of my favorites.

Dracula is one of my favorite novels not matter what genre. 
There is an interesting short story that gives a chilling bit of back story. The short story Dracula's Guest was posthumously published. It was, according to most contemporary critics, the deleted first (or second) chapter from the original manuscript. Here is a great excerpt:

"As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet, the farther edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew strong and blew with ever increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The air became icy cold and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. The snow was now falling so thickly and whirling around me in such rapid eddies that I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every now and then the heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning, and in the flashes I could see ahead of me a great mass of trees, chiefly yew and cypress, all heavily coated with snow.
I was soon amongst the shelter of the trees, and there, in comparative silence, I could hear the rush of the wind high overhead. Presently the blackness of the storm had become merged in the darkness of the night. By and by the storm seemed to be passing away: it now only came in fierce puffs or blasts. At such moments the weird sound of the wolf appeared to be echoed by many similar sounds around me.
Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a straggling ray of moonlight, which lit up the expanse and showed me that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while. As I skirted the edge of the copse I found that a low wall encircled it, and following it I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building. Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured the moon and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of shelter and I groped my way blindly on.
I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed and, perhaps in sympathy with nature's silence, my heart seemed to cease to beat. But this was only momentarily, for suddenly the moonlight broke through the clouds, showing me that I was in a graveyard and that the square object before me was a massive tomb of marble, as white as the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a fierce sigh of the storm, which appeared to resume its course with a long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked and felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the heart. Then, while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it was returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination I approached the sepulchre to see what it was and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it and read, over the Doric door, in German:

COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ
IN STYRIA
SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH
1801
On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble — for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone — was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters:

THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST.

There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann's advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Walpurgis Night!"  —Bram Stoker

Read the whole short story here.

Walpurgisnacht
Walpurgisnacht is derived from various pagan spring customs. Bonfires were built to keep away the dead and chaotic spirits that were said to walk among the living then.

Walpurgisnacht gets its name from Saint Walburga (or Walpurga), a woman born in what is now England in 710. Saint Walpurga traveled to Germany and became a nun at the convent of Heidenheim in Württemberg. She was made a saint following her death in 778 (or 779), and May 1 is her saint day.

In Germany the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz Mountains, is considered the focal point of Walpurgisnacht. Witches (Hexen) and devils (Teufel) allegedly gather on the mountain (also called the Blocksberg), which is often shrouded in mist and clouds, lending it a mysterious atmosphere that has contributed to its legendary status. The tradition of the witches gathering on the Brocken was immortalized in Goethe’s Faust: “To the Brocken the witches ride…” (”Die Hexen zu dem Brocken ziehn…“)

In its Christian version, the former pagan festival in May became Walpurgis, a time to drive out evil spirits—usually with loud noises. Bonfires were built to keep away the dead and chaotic spirits that were said to walk among the living then. The bonfires reflect the holiday’s pagan origins and the human desire to drive away the winter cold and welcome spring. This is followed by the return of light and the sun as celebrated during May Day.

Hexen fest

A new sequel to Dracula has been written by his great grandnephew Dacre Stoker and screenwriter Ian Holt titled The Un-Dead. The Un-Dead was Bram Stoker's original intended title for Dracula.

The book is already receiving mixed to negative reviews.

Ghosts of the Salem Witch trails

Original edition of The House of the Seven Gables

A few years back I picked up some cheap paperback classics and Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables was one. 

I was supposed to have read The Scarlet Letter in High school, but I did not actually read it... I remember being bored to tears.... and we were shown a video production of the title from which I was able to glean enough info to pass the assignment without actually doing anything. 

I routinely cheated myself in school like this... but as an adult went back to some of these things to see what I missed. ...Gables seemed more interesting to me as it was supposedly a classic ghost story and so I read that first.

It took me some time to adjust to it. 
The novel is told in great detail and the plot moves at a glacial pace, compared to contemporary work, but this doesn't hurt the story as much as it sets it up. 

We forget the pace of life circa 1851 when the novel was published, and it is impossible to fully appreciate it unless you open yourself up to a good SLOW read... 

Once I got recognized this I started to really appreciate the rich details given to the characters, the layers of the plot aand savored the extraordinary use of language and skill at storytelling.

the challenge of slowing my mind down enough to have patience with a story like this was formidable. I became sharply aware of how much my attention span has eroded. 

For younger readers this book will be almost impenetrable, and insufferable, as with my own Scarlet Letter experience in High School.

I had to keep a good dictionary by my side as I routinely ran in to words that I had never heard before. Half the fun for me was learning so many new and interesting words.

I would read the book out on my front porch in the early evening after work. And really looked forward to sitting out there and getting lost in it.

I found the book a wonderful story, with a glimpse into a lifestyle long vanished and mostly forgotten. It was a wonderful rewarding experience.

Interestingly, wikipedia notes that 
"the novel was an inspiration for horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, who called it "New England's greatest contribution to weird literature" in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. Seven Gables likely influenced Lovecraft's short stories The Picture in the House, The Shunned House and novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward."

Hawthorne himself observed "the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones and... becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief."

In Praise of Slowness

Arianna Huffington has a new book club. 

The first choice is an interesting one: In Praise of Slowness.

 

"The deeper I got into the book, the more I realized that I had had a towering example of the joys and benefits of slowness right in front of me for most of my life: my mother.

As I wrote in a column shortly after her death in 2000, she and I had an unspoken deal: hers would be the rhythm of a timeless world, a child's rhythm; mine was the rhythm of the modern world. While I had the sense every time I looked at my watch that it was later than I thought, she lived in a world where there were no impersonal encounters, and never a need to rush.

"The last time my mother was upset with me," I wrote, "was when she saw me talking with my children and opening my mail at the same time. She despised multi-tasking. She believed it was a way to miss life, to miss the gifts that come only when you give 100 percent of yourself to a task, a relationship, a moment."

Read more here. 

Is Reading a Lost Art?

The Los Angeles Times book editor David L. Ulin explores the shifting tides of how we read and asks is reading a lost art?

"Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time."


"...We live in time; we understand ourselves in relation to it, but in our culture, time collapses into an ever-present now. How do we pause when we must know everything instantly? How do we ruminate when we are constantly expected to respond? How do we immerse in something (an idea, an emotion, a decision) when we are no longer willing to give ourselves the space to reflect?

This is where real reading comes in -- because it demands that space, because by drawing us back from the present, it restores time to us in a fundamental way."

"try to make a place for silence."

What kind of space would you make for reading?

Thoughtful piece.

I always like the idea of making a space for reading... ideally, having a room for it...
a comfortable space filled with books and art, and space where you could allow yourself to slow down and slip out of daily responsibilities and concerns and immerse yourself in a good book.

Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker?

Outfest, Los angeles' annual GLBT film fest is underway.

Our first screening was "Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker". Check out this engaging documentary!

Kathy Acker was a controversial experimental novelist and postmodernist sex-positive feminist writer. Her radical ideas continue to resonate through the culture and inspire artists and writers all over the world.

It was great to see an appreciation of her after all these years. She died of complications of Breast cancer in 1997.

The book that launched her career

Her Last Novel

Collaboration with The Mekons

More links on Kathy and her work including an interview with William S. Burroughs and R.U. Sirius.

Celebrating Allen Ginsberg

I recently finished reading Bill Morgan's Biography of Allen Ginsberg I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg.

Everyone called Jack Kerouac the "King of the Beats," but really it was Allen. None of it would have been possible without Allen Ginsberg. It was he who tireless fought to have his fellow writers published. Without his constant insistence, Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso and others would very likely never have been published, or at least not in such a way as a movement formed around them and Ginsberg.

Ginsberg was at the forefront of so many ideas that came to shape the culture in the decades ahead of his creative critical mass Howl.
Ginsberg fought to have drug use decriminalized, he was among the first to bring Eastern ideas like yoga, meditation and chant from India to the popular culture in a prominent way, he was involved in anti-censorship campaigns and created and funded a foundation dedicated to supporting writers fighting censorship, he was involved in the earliest protests against the escalation of the Vietnam conflict, he work was among the inspiration that ignited other artists of the 60's like Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Using chant he helped to quell a potential riot during the violent conflicts surrounding the 1968 Democratic convention, he participated in the first "summer of love" event, and the list goes on. He was a seminal figure in American letters.

The Allen Ginsberg Project maintains an online archive of his writing along with lots of photography.

“The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.”—Allen Ginsberg

Allen researched and a report titled Smoking typewriters on FBI harassment of the underground press during the 1960s and 1970s published as part of City Lights The Campaign Against the Underground Press: Unamerican Activities. Ginsberg spent years researching his suspicion that the CIA "was deeply involved in drug smuggling and dope dealing." He tried to convince the New York times to investigate, but they didn't believe him. Eventually in 1978 Ginsberg received a letter of apology from NYT publisher C.L. Sulzberger when It was exposed that the CIA had indeed been involved.

Allen had been writing poetry for thirty-five years in the belief that
"only art could serve mankind, only art could justify the sufferings and thoughts of a lifetime. Not Business, not comforts of the body, not construction of skyscrapers, not physical architecture—but only creations of the spectral mind transmitted generation after generation, century after century to ennoble the efforts of the human body."

"He spoke to all people as if they were future Buddhas, honestly and openly, heart to heart. ...in fact, Ginsberg's conversational ability was perhaps his most remarkable quality, aside from his literary talent."

"...many well known figures sat at Allen's kitchen table at one time or another. Every day Allen Scrubbed the table and used it to display his most recent books or his newest photographs. Then he would prepare soup for his guests or wash dishes and talk with friends over a cup of tea."

"Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels."—Allen Ginsberg

A lifetime of reading

A comfortable reading room of ones own.

Since the economy when south I have had a lot more time for reading. I welcome this.
I love to read, and to discuss books and ideas with people.
One day I hope to have a large comfortable reading room (like the one above) to read, relax and host small gatherings for conversation and debate.

I decided to compile a list of great books. A very general list of great works that everyone be aware of and should consider reading or at least grazing through at least once in their lifetime.

When I was younger I had a very difficult time appreciating classic texts. It is much easier now. I have a much more open mind and have infinitely more patience. Both required to fully appreciate a wide range of achievements.

In 1990 I spent a year reading Joyce, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, and Genet. It was a serious challenge but very worth it. I was exhausted at the end of it.
I had to take a long break to absorb all that I had read, and after a long break and then lots of underwhelming new fiction, I started interspersing classics with contemporary works. That was a much better way of approaching it. Much contemporary work pales next to the classics and Gives me a deeper appreciation of those early achievements. When I run across a new work that stands out (and they are everywhere) I can see the influence (direct and abstract) of many works that preceding them woven in in subtle ways.

It's impossible to connect with every book, but every so often I have extraordinary experience. A few years ago I read Nathanial Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. What a revelation! (Not for the impatient, though) I found that I had to keep a dictionary close and on average would run across one to two words every few pages that were fantastic... and that I had never run across. It was a delight to discover new words (useful ones too) in additional to enjoying the wonderfully told story.

I rooted around the internets and compiled a list of my own. It's very incomplete and subjective of course, but a good starting point, and perhaps useful to someone else.

this list includes titles I've read with many more I haven't.
The recent works are all arguable... I wanted to add a ton of others but focused mainly on older established works that continue to engage and provoke.

Please feel free to share with me titles you think should be included.

The list is composed most recent to least.

Thomas Pynchon—Against the Day
Joan Didion—The Year of Magical Thinking
Cornel West—Race Matters, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
Susan Sontag—Regarding the Pain of Others, [collected essays]
JM Coetzee—Disgrace
Vikram Seth—A Suitable Boy
Don DeLillo—Underworld, White Noise
Salman Rushdie—The Satanic Verses
Toni Morrison—Beloved
Alice Walker—The Color Purple
William Gibson—Neuromancer

Thomas Pynchon—Gravity's Rainbow, The Crying lot of 49, Vineland
David Foster Wallace—Infinite Jest
Samuel R. Delany—Dahlgren, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Yukio Mishima—Confessions of a Mask, Runaway Horses
Noam Chomsky—Manufacturing Consent, Understanding Power
Howard Zinn—A Peoples History of the United States
Edited by Ralph Young—Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation
Bertram Gross—Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America
Gabriel Garcia Marquez—One hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera
Philip K. Dick—Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Kurt Vonnegut—Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Sirens of Titan
Frank Herbert—Dune [1-6]
Jack Kerouac—On The Road, Visons of Cody,
J.D. Salinger—The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories
William S. Burroughs—Naked Lunch, Cities of the Red Night
Allen Ginsberg— Howl, Kaddish (Collected Poems)
Malcolm X—The Autobiography of Malcolm X
C.S. Lewis—The Screwtape Letters
J.R.R. Tolkien—The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit
Upton Sinclair—The Jungle
Aldous Huxley— Brave New World, Island, The Doors of Perception
George Orwell— 1984, Animal Farm
Rilke—Poems
Ralph Ellison—The Invisible Man
Herman Hesse—Siddhartha, Steppenwolf
Jean Genet—Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Prisoner of Love
Jean-Paul Sartre: Nausea; No Exit, Being and Nothingness
Max Planck: Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
William Faulkner—Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying


F.Scott Fitzgerald—The Great Gatsby
Naguib Mahfouz—The Cairo Trilogy
T.S. Eliot—The Wasteland, The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock
D.H. Lawrence—Lady Chatterly's Lover, Women in Love
Honore Balzac—Old Giriot
Franz Kafka—Metamorphosis, The Trial
Joesph Conrad—Heart of Darkness, Nostromo
Virginia Woolf—Night and Day, A Room of One's Own
James Joyce—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
Albert Einstein— Relativity
Thomas Mann—Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain


Oscar Wilde—The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Importance of being Earnest, Salome
Bertrand Russell—Problems with Philosophy
Bram Stoker—Dracula
Mary Shelly—Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
Marcel Proust—In Search of Lost Time
Anton Chekov—Uncle Vanya
Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass
Henri Bergson—Intoduction to Metaphysics
Fredric Nietzche—Beyond Good And Evil
Henri Poincare—Science and Hypothesis
William Blake—Song of Innocence, Songs of Experience
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
The Brothers Grimm—The Complete Fairy Tales (Vintage Edition)
George Bernard Shaw—Pygmalion
Henry James—Daisy Miller, Washington Square, Turn of the Screw
William James—Principles of Psychology


Mark Twain—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Leo Tolstoy—Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrections, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Essays, Journal
Henrik Ipsen—A Doll's House, Peer Gynt
Fyodor Dostoevsky—Brothers karamazov, Crime and Punishment
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary; Three Stories

Ludwig Wittgenstein—[collected writings]
Herman Melville—Moby Dick
Nathanial Hawthorne—The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables
Alexis de Tocqueville—Democracy in America
Soren Kierkegaard—The Essential Kierkegaard
Edgar Allen Poe—[collected writings]
Karl Marx—Capital, Value Price, and Profit, The Communist Manifesto
H.D. Thoreau—Civil Disobedience, Walden
Charles Dickens— A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, A Christmas Carol
Charles Darwin—Origin of the Species


John Stuart Mill—On Liberty, A System of Logic
US founding Documents—Declaration of Independence, The Constitution of the U.S.
Jane Austen—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice
Hegel—Philosophy of History
Goethe—Faust, Poems
James Boswell: Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
Edward Gibnon—The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Immanuel Kant—[collected writings]
Jean Jaques Rosseau—Origin of Inequality, Political Economy
David Hume—Concerning Human understanding, History of England


Henry Fielding—Tom Jones
Voltaire—Candide
Montesquieu—Spirit of Laws, Persian Letters
Jonathan Swift—Modest proposal, Gullivers Travels
Isaac Newton—The Principa
Johannes Kepler—The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
Jean Racine—Phaedra
Spinoza—Ethics
John Locke—Concerning Civil Government
Moleire—School for Wives, Tartuffe


John Milton—Paradise Lost
Descartes—Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy
Shakespeare—[collected writings]
Cervantes—Don Quixote
Montaigne— Essays
Machiavelli— Prince
Chaucer—Canterbury Tales


Dante—The Divine Comedy
The Quran
The Bible
The Torah
The Bhagavad Gita
Joesph Campbell—The Power of Myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Ptolemy—Geography
Plutarch—[Tragedies]


Virgil—Aeneid
Lucretius—Nature of things
Euclid—Elements
Aristotle—Complete Works
Plato—The Republic
Cicero—On the Republic, Rhetoric [collected writings]
Aristophanes—Lysistrata
Hippocrates—Ancient Medicine




Thucydides—The Peloponnesian War
Herdotus—History
Euripides—Medea, Trojan Women
Sophocles—Oedipus Rex, Antigone
Aeschylus—Persians, Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound
Homer—Iliad, Odyssey
Beowulf