The Book Blinders by John Clute
Faber (which is to say Eliot) clearly thought it sagacious to wrap in sheep’s clothing the already notorious Ezra Pound’s new publication with its incendiary title: a ticking bomb that needed no bush. But the underlying message cannot be missed: Pound’s title, a modernist wake-up slogan he’d been using offhandedly since 1928, is manifestly inflammatory, once grasped; a challenge to his various enemies who (he maintains) clog the literature pews: an up-yours bombination clearly audible through the enfant-sauvage mask Pound wore until it was too late. This bomb needed to slip through the gates before exploding.
or Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948), Tom Eliot again; or Lawrence Leonard, The Horn of Mortal Danger (1980); or London Tales (1983), edited by Julian Evans. Clute’s selections are fascinating testimony to the breadth of his reading and collecting and his critical range; the text sparkles with his crunchy and apt vocabulary. It seems almost a homoeopathic distillation: “I’d reckon that out of every 8,000 or so books to arrive at the British Library complete with dust-jacket, I’ve commented here on a maximum of one”. (Excessive candor moment: John Clute is a friend of more than twenty-five years; I am the source for the images of the only jacket not from his own collection.) This is an important book.
commonplace book : April 2024
Bookselling and, for that matter, book collecting, are in my blood. Soon after I joined my father at Bertram Rota Ltd. we came across a sophisticated copy of a modern first edition (in fact, first edition sheets removed from a soiled binding and put into an immaculate binding case from a slightly later printing in a crude and misguided attempt to increase the value). Even now, thirty-seven years later, I still remember the intensity of my father’s anger as he explained to me what had happened and why. Speaking perhaps of private rather than institutional collecting, he said that we booksellers made the rules and also acted as referees. If we cheated, everything became meaningless.
— Anthony Rota, on The Texas Forgeries, in : Forged Documents (1990)
— — —
I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those for whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
— Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (1964)
The Story Prize, 2024
— Paul Yoon. The Hive and the Honey. Stories. Marysue Rucci Books, [2024].
Just back from the twentieth annual Story Prize award ceremony honoring the author of a short story collection published in the U.S. in the receding year. It was an excellent literary evening of readings by the three finalists with interviews by director Larry Dark. The winner of the Story Prize this year is Paul Yoon, for The Hive and the Honey. Stories (Marysue Rucci Books, 2023). The other two finalists were Yiyun Li, for Wednesday’s Child. Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); and Bennett Sims, for Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio, 2023).
recent reading : late march 2024
Comicosmics : Dragonstairs Press
— Michael Swanwick. Comicosmics. Philadelphia: [Forthcoming from] Dragonstairs Press, 2024. Edition of 50, signed by the author. Stitched in gilt celestial decorative wrappers.
Michael Swanwick is the trickiest and most prolific of writers, egged on by the binder and publisher of Dragonstairs Press; and I am the luckiest of readers, regularly granted an earliest glimpse of the productions of Dragonstairs Press. Discerning readers of the Endless Bookshelf will have noticed the sly hommagio to Italo Calvino in this title. The book is an entire intergalactic philosophical novel within the compass of near infinity, and six printed pages. It is one of the several things that Michael Swanwick does best. You saw it here first.
Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic
“Moby-Dick and American Literature of the Fantastic; or, Bound for the South Seas”, an essay by your correspondent, “a crackpot theory with a kernel of truth”, appears in Exacting Clam 12 (Spring 2024).
Also of note in the issue is a matched pair by Richard Kostelanetz, “Two Single-Sentence Stories”.
https://www.exactingclam.com/issues/no-12-spring-2024/
The Wrong Girl by Angela Slatter
‘unstringing my rage with quick fingers’
— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023 : POD 8 January 2024].
Angela Slatter’s work is now well known. She won the World Fantasy award for The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings (Tartarus, 2014), and has picked up several several others along the way. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings demonstrates a range of tones and geographies and narrative structures, among them a dark Sherlock Holmes incident interrogative of late Victorian assumptions and preoccupations, tales set in the town of Mercy’s Brook that seem almost cozy until the sharp steel appears, and a Miltonian settling of scores with a hypocrite priest. The title story is really something, a deft, wrenching account of the entangled lives of two sisters. Slatter sets this one up concisely and beautifully, the artist narrator and her improvident, carefree sister : “the butterfly departing on a whim, taking my favourite jeans and earrings, and leaving roughly the same devastation in its wake as a tornado”. When the butterfly image recurs a few pages later, it is the opening of the final act.
“The Three Burdens of Nest Wynne” is a ghost tale firmly anchored in a rural Welsh setting where the weight of past deeds erupts into the present. Slatter’s American locations are sometimes a bit generic but the struggle against ambient misogyny is real enough. This is a collection worth reading.
The last three stories are brief, previously unpublished retellings of classical motifs, with something of the same intensity found in the work of another Angela, Angela Carter ; and the same upending of the received versions. “Pomegranates” is Persephone’s tale retold ; “Lyre, Lyre” is Eurydice’s account, in which the artistic temper tantrums of Orpheus are noted. The last one, “Loom”, is best of all. Penelope’s terse review of the twenty years’ separation, and her knowledge of errant Odysseus (“all the things the birds left out”), just plain sings ! And then there is this swift phrase at the hinge of the story : “unstringing my rage with quick fingers”! My friend Michael Swanwick agrees with me : “This brilliant burst of fury makes the story”.
“Loom” is Slatter’s Homer : all the Odyssey in the span of a couple of pages and a worthy counterpoint to Avram Davidson’s Homer, the yarn of Odysseus in 1970s American vernacular, found in the pages of Peregrine : Primus.
recent reading : february 2024
Surtees at the End of the World
— White, T. H. Gone to Ground Or The Sporting Decameron [Cover title]. London: Collins, 1935. A remarkable book in a stylish pictorial dust jacket by J. Z. Atkinson.
Nominally a sequel to White’s Earth Stopped (1934), this collection of linked stories is indeed a Sporting Decameron as the dust jacket announces above a graceful line drawing of a fox descending. There are further allusions to the book as a Sporting Decameron throughout the text, but the title page reads simply : Gone to Ground. A Novel.
White briskly and offhandedly charts a descent into global war. Just like that! A small party of foxhunters (with a gardener and an old Etonian tramp) takes refuge in a well-appointed bomb shelter, built by the suspicioously wealthy and long-lived Soapy Sponge and Facey Romford, who had absquatulated to Australia and formed a bank. Members of the party tell a succession of fantastical tales of foxhunting and fishing, channelling Surtees and Norman Douglas and M. R. James, with nods to Buchan and Dunsany and jeers at Kenneth Grahame. Gone to Ground voices many of the predilections and literary preoccupations that would occupy White throughout his career (from The Sword in Stone to The Book of Merlyn). The world outside the storytelling party is left behind.
— — —
— Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire [1962]. Vintage pbk.
— John Clute. The Book Blinders. Annals of Vandalism at the British Library: A Necrology. Illustrated throughout. Norstrilia Press, [forthcoming 2024]. [Seen in proof state].
— Kingsley Amis. Every Day Drinking. Illustrated by Merrily Harpur. Hutchinson, [1983]. Collected columns from the Daily Express, by a past master and a fun chronicler of his thirsts.
— Mark Tewfik. Gelatine Joe. Privately Printed, Lantern Rouge Press, 2024. Vignette of combat in Afghanistan, a “tissue culture” from a longer work in progress.
— Howard Waldrop. Flying Saucer Rock and Roll. Cheap Street, [2002].
— Angela Slatter. The Wrong Girl & Other Warnings. [Brain Jar Press, 2023, but POD 8 January 2024].
— Ron Weighell. The White Road. Illustrations by Nick Maloret. Ghost Story Press, 1997.
— Gary Phillips. Perdition, U.S.A. John Brown Books, [1996]. Intense, hard boiled L.A. novel, a close third person narrative of the adventures of Ivan Monk, Black businessman and private eye.
seventeen years of the Endless Bookshelf
Today marks seventeen years of reports of messing about in books under the sign of the Endless Bookshelf. I’m still at it, and glad to be reading and thinking about books, and occasionally writing or publishing them. What a delight to discover new books and writers or to find that a book published a century ago is fresh and nimble. I have a few essays in the works, either scheduled for publication or due this spring, and other things in progress. To my few readers, it is always a delight to hear from you, keep sending me your news.
— — —
current reading :
— Marcel Proust. Le temps retrouvé [1927].
— Herman Melville. Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces. Constable, 1924. This was Melville’s last book, unpublished at the time of his death and closely connected to his book of verse, John Marr and other sailors (1888). Billy Budd grew out of a note to “Billy in the Darbies”, the poem that concludes the book. The manuscript re-emerged in the early 1920s and first published by Constable as vol. 13 in the Standard Edition of the Works, a landmark in the rediscovery of Melville. There will be an exhibition on Billy Budd and Melville at the Grolier Club in September and I am celebrating the centenary by reading the book. For now:
In this matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main path, some by-paths have an enticement not readily to be withstood. Beckoned by the genius of Nelson I am going to err into such a by-path. If the reader will keep me company I shall be glad.
— — —
[In September 2023, I left Twitter after nearly 15 years of marginal glosses and other ephemeral notes. I don’t miss it for an instant, though I do remember the days when it was a fun mode of quick communication. I post occasional announcements at @endlessbookshelf@mastodon.iriseden.eu and send out semi-annual newsletters.]
— — —
recent reading :
— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue [1925].
— Michael Swanwick. Phases of the Sun [bound with:] Phases of the Moon. Dragonstairs Press, 2020 [i.e., 2024]. Text printed dos à dos, leporello binding of yellow and blue boards. Edition of 19. Swanwick at his bleakest and most romantic in these two sequences of short short stories about writing and love.
— Howard Waldrop. The Ugly Chickens. [Old Earth Books, 2009].
— Ron Weighell. The Mark of Andreas Germer. Quire 13. The Last Press, 2022. Edition of 100. Original short yarn from the estate of Ron Weighell (1950-2020), moving nimbly from a thoughtful citation of Milton to the tale of a book with a dreadful effect upon its reader.
— Arthur Machen. The Three Impostors or the Transmutations [1895], in The House of Souls. Tartarus Press, [2021].
— Samantha Harvey. Orbital. A Novel. Grove, [December 2023].
— — —
I am looking forward to receiving the Conway Miscellany, a collection of four books by John Crowley from Ninepin Press in varying formats, comprising: The Sixties, A Forged Diary; Seventy-Nine Dreams; Two Talks on Writing; and Two Chapters in a Family Chronicle.