more on Susan

"We live in a culture in which intelligence is denied relevance altogether, in a search for radical innocence, or is defended as an instrument of authority and repression. In my view, the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical, skeptical, desimplifying." quoted by Steve Wasserman in his obituary.

Quotes, interviews and excerpts are available at wood s lot.

"be serious, be passionate, wake up!"

Susan Sontag - novelist, critic, public intellectual and watchdog for the oppressed - passed this morning, after a long, second bout with cancer.

In the summer of 2000, I had an opportunity to meet and spend some time in the orbit of Sontag, as I was cataloguing for the company performing an appraisal of her personal archive and library, (which was eventually purchased by UCLA). For nearly six weeks, I spent my days in Sontag's office or home, quietly cataloguing, while around me her life whirled. Alfred Brendel would like to have dinner; Chinese writer Gao Xingjian was arriving from Boston on the Chinatown bus; new books piled up by the dozens (many were immediately donated to her assistants or others); Nadine Gordimer was on the phone... And all this time she was sick with cancer. She was a gracious host, inviting me to join her for lunch which she often shared with them in the kitchen. She was also disarmingly human for someone I had come to think of as an intellectual superhero (especially given that most of the other superheros seemed to be missing). My life at the time was not an easy one. I was entering the divorce process at the time, and I remember Susan giving me a grandmotherly hug the day she found out why I was uncharacteristically sullen.

My time spent with her archive and library, which documented her intellectual pursuits from a very young age, and the living example she lived in front of me was enough for me to recommit to the life of the mind, even as a simple bookseller.

sidewalk Socrates

The NYTimes Magazine includes Sidney Morgenbesser in it round up of year-end obits.

"Not since Socrates has a philosopher gained such a reputation for greatness while publishing so little of note. Certainly no one else shaped so many seminal thinkers while leaving behind almost nothing in the way of major doctrines or ideas. ''Moses published one book,'' Morgenbesser pleaded in his own defense. ''What did he do after that?'' "

shredded reputation, worst sex, scrupulous blurb...

Thanks to Jessa at Bookslut for the link to the John Dugdale's Literary Awards of the Year at the London Times. Anthony Powell wins the "Most shredded reputation" award:

Most thoroughly shredded reputation"As a novelist, Anthony Powell had to contend with obvious disadvantages. He had no ideas. He was incapable of conveying deep feeling. He knew about only a tiny upper stratum of English society. He was Waugh minus the wit, the poison, the torment and the genius . . . Powell was a colossal snob and not very bright. The fact that his snobbishness was a cry for help did not make its manifestations any more winning." John Carey reviews Michael Barber's Anthony Powell: A Life, The Sunday Times

a thank you

It's about time I thanked some of the bloggers out there who have been sources of information, and more often, inspiration to keep on doing this. My first expereince with a blog was The Morning News - I know, not technically a blog, but it provided a portal to many of the those which became my daily reading. My daily reading consists, on and off, of The Elegant Variation, Blog of a Bookslut, Language Hat, and Pepys Diary. Other frequent dips were made into The Millions, Anthem Book Blog, Eternal Recurrence,

My favorite gardening blog is Horticultural, where you can find a link to the timely Mistletoe Blog. My vote for food blog must go to my wife Samantha's Slouching Toward Ganache which records her travails as a career changer entering the world of pastry. I'm also partial to SauteWednesday, Megnut, Chocolate & Zuchini and The Daily Olive.

a home universal library

In today's NYTimes' Week in Review, Alberto Manguel places new efforts of Google in the context of the quest for 'universal knowledge'. People who know me through my bookselling, think of the avant-gardes as the core of my collecting (or selling) interests, but a few friends know my own library, which lives in an apartment carved out of an old post-and-beam barn in Maine, is really my humble attempt to establish a Library of Alexandria for myself. It's the antithesis of my avant-garde inventory; scholarly editions of the works of thinkers from cave painting to modern Portuguese poetry, with major sections of classical philosophy, medieval history, early technology and odd books on small facets of human activity like bee keeping, automatons, or monks and viniculture. For years this library has grown in fits and starts, usually dependent upon my proximity to a great general shop. Powell's in Chicago (Hyde Park), The Brattle in Boston and the Strand have contributed to it greatly at various times. I have yet to assemble the whole library in one location, and look forward to doing so one day, perhaps after we move to the Hudson Valley this coming year. The library remains beyond my ability to read in the time remaining on my life clock, and there are numerous books in languages I have no plan to learn, so why have it at all?

There's been an awful lot of handwringing going on at the booksellers' newsgroups lately about Google's plans to place online books from the collections of major research libraries. Some think this is the last straw for reading culture as we know it, and expect their trade to dry up as well, which is ridiculous. Art is not what it used to be, and yet the trade in art from previous centuries is more brisk than ever. And as we saw the daily use of low-brow booze and tobacco products wane in the last two decades, the demand for quality wine, liquor and cigars has grown exponentially.

Mann's Magic Mountain shuts its doors

The Valbella clinic is closing its doors, the last of the once numerous clinics in the Swiss Alpine resort town of Davos, built to treat the victims of Tuberculosis. Thomas Mann's Hans Castorp found refuge here, deciding to stay although he had only come as a visitor.

Jackson Mac Low dies at 82

Fluxus founder, poet, performance artist and composer Jackson MacLow has passed at 82. With LaMonte Young, MacLow was the editor of the wonderful Fluxus Anthology (1963).

renunciation

AS Byatt discusses Goethe in the Guardian. The bit that really got me was this one:

"The Wanderjahre, or (literally) journeyman years, follow the fate of Wilhelm, who in Goethe's earlier narratives, Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Mission and the revised Wilhelm Meister's Apprentice Years, was concerned with self-discovery through the theatre, and also with the theatre as a means of moral and social cultivation. The theatre, in the world of the young hero, is the place where the bourgeois, who is normally only concerned with getting and spending, can acquire the aristocratic possibilities of "being" and "appearing". "

Do we have a mechanism today which serves that same purpose? Which can at least momentarily raise the bourgeois above the concerns of "getting" and "spending"? What could that be?

Byatt also draws the connection between Goethe and Sebald's masterwork, The Emigrants.

French winemakers protest

French wine consumption is less than half of what it was in the 1960's, and coupled with falling exports levels, competition from Latin America and Australia, and high levels of production, the situation is dire. Protesters are blaming the government (a French pastime), and targeting the national anti-drinking and driving campaign.

a year-end miscellany

I'm currently offering a catalogue of year-end miscellany. The list includes art, literature, ideas and photography. Over 150 items, offered at 25% off the price listed. Download the entire catalogue here. Thanks for looking.

"... a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity"

Hilton Kramer reviews the Adolph Gottlieb show at Pace Wildenstein, and reminds us of the indebtedness of the Abstract Expressionists to the literary modernists who came before them. These modernists, Joyce and Eliot particularly, had themselves turned to the ancient Greeks, and it was this interest in the mythical which shows itself in the work of Gottlieb.

textbook warning labels

While I'm normally repulsed by any use of stickers on/in books, this one ain't half bad. Colin Purrington, Assoc. Professor at Swarthmore, has created a handy, printable set of warning stickers to be placed on scientific textbooks. Collect 'em all! Protect your neighbors!

yhe view from up North

Thanks to the ArtsJournal for the link to Vinay Menon's excellent screed in the Toronto Star. Menon attacks the prudishness which is enveloping our country, and the mighty corporations we thought invincible which are now folding under the pressure of a crackpot minority.

Elaine Showalter on Wolfe

"true to form, Wolfe's latest novel is bitchy, status-seeking, and dissecting -- and this time, unfortunately, numbingly juvenile."

Elaine Showalter, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, taking to task Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons. Showalter includes some interesting comparative criticism of various forms of the "campus" novel.

Holderlin once again revised

Should the world listen more to the great Romantic poets? Michael Hoffman, in his Guardian review of the new 4th edition of Michael Hamburger's translation of Friedrich Holderlin's poetry seems to think so. At least the themes seem necessary today:

"youth, love, friendship, generation conflict, sibling relationships, world- and self-intoxication (to coin a couple of rather Germanic-sounding notions), a revitalised appreciation of the classics, idealist philosophy, revolution, spirituality and the death of religion, a volatile interest in the inner and outer world (all sorts of fads and "isms"), a proclivity for associations, amalgamations, movements, new magazines, publishing ventures and experiments in social living."

Holderlin has been a favorite of mine since the early 1980's, when I discovered one of Hamburger's previous editions of Poems and Fragments. As a college student, I was drawn, of course, to the tragic life of the poet; a sad youth, failed loves, mental illness, and finally 36 years of solitude spent writing in the tower of a supporter. While my friends read Rilke, I read Holderlin, only later finding Rilke for myself. Many years hence, following a divorce and a move to relative solitude in Maine, I stumbled across a first edition of Hamburger's translation, and began rereading. Poems and Fragments, alongside Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, became a clear stream I could dip into when necessary, and has remained so since.

more delays

More than a month has passed since my last post; an inexcusable length of time in the blogosphere, so I apologize for the delay to anyone who might care. I spent six weeks fighting an unnamed (until late in the game) ailment which was eventually diagnosed as Lyme. Now Lyme had never been something I took very seriously, having grown up around dogs and horses and the ever present threat of ticks. I also know scores of people who have contracted Lyme and only exhibited minor symptoms. Not me. The symptoms were many and disabling, at least temporarily. So I now return, a bit lost as to where I should start.

First, a thank you to Jay at Anthem Book Blog for posting a link to his book blog. I'm still struggling with the html with creating a links bar on casa malaprop, and promise to reciprocate as soon as I figure it out.

I should at least offer a small bit of thanks to the internet, which allowed me to continue to do some business while laid up in bed or on the couch for so long. I managed to sell a handful of titles, including some signed firsts of Jacques Derrida (after his passing), my inscribed copy of Hans Helm's Fa : m' Ahniesgwow, an experimental music and text piece from 1959 based in part on Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Some lesser sales rounded off a month of just barely getting by.

My first foray back into the bookselling world was a day at Sotheby's, attending the second part part of the Maury Neville sale of Modern Literature (I skipped the late afternoon session of Modern Detective Fiction - not my thing). The highlights, in terms of money, were predictably Hemingway items, including the For Whom the Bell Tolls, inscribed by H. to his wife, and a large group of letters, both fetching over $300k each including the buyer's premiums. Not surprisingly, most of the aggressively priced Kerouacs failed to sell, and some authors saw their stars dim further, notably James Jones. Friends of mine picked up some quality sleepers, including an inscribed, limited first of Del Miño al Bidasoa by Nobelist Jose Camillo Cela, and an inscribed copy of Sartre's Huis Clos, both purchased for reasonable prices.

Unfortunately, a death in my extended family is keeping me from the Boston Book Fair, which I had intended to visit, hoping to do a bit of business on the side and perhaps to find some unusual items for purchase. Oh well.

pardon the delay

There's nothing like a book fair to take the vinegar out of me. The Autumn New York Antiquarian Fair was this past weekend, and between preparations, the fair itself and a required time to deal with the necessarily ensuing depression, I've missed opportunities to post on the Nobel Prize, Jacques Derrida's passing, the National Book Awards nominees and the fair itself. Also missed John Banville's review of Jose Saramago's 'The Double' in the NYTBR, which itself should have been cause for at least two posts, being that they are two of my favorite living writers. Methinks it better to move on and not look back.

The book fair itself was a rather grey affair, which has been all to frequently the case of late. The customers are pretty much the same faces we always see, the flurry of dealer buying and selling which used to precede the shows (and which, for some dealers, made up the bulk of their sales) has given way as a dearth of sales leads to a lack of desire for new stock. There are many, many reasons for the decline in the market for most rare books, and sometime soon I'll tackle that question here, but for the time being let's just blame the internet, a declining level of literacy, price inflation in some segments of the market, a treasure hunt mentality of the general populace fed by eBay and the Antiques Roadshow, and once again, the internet.

Nobel speculation

The Times' Alan Riding mulls over some possible contenders for this years Nobel Prize in literature. Some names include Philip Roth, Milan Kundera, Margaret Atwood and Mario Vargas Llosa, who have been on the short list for a while, as well as Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates and Assia Djebar, who are possible contenders because of a perceived interest in more representation for women.

In contrast to the expectation and excitement which can be found in the British media surrounding the Booker Prize, the Times wonders if the Nobel really means anything as many winners (especially recent ones) remain in obscurity. Shouldn't the blame be laid at the feet of the American publishers, who do a less than miserable job of bringing us the works of foreign authors?

is nothing sacred?

Madonna will be taking a degree in literature at Oxford?
Thanks to bookslut for the link.