in the doldrums

July and August aren't really so bad. By then we've grown to expect that sales will be slow and business all but non-existent. It's May and July that catch me by surprise every year. Once the April New York ABAA fair comes and goes, the calls and emails just drop away. Fortunately, there are appraisals and the occassional insitutional sale, encouraged by the annual institutional budget cycle, which for many begins anew in July.

May brought me a great appraisal, one of those which really gets me thinking again about my own reading and intellectual pursuits. I can't talk about it much here, but what impressed me about this archive was the slow accumulation of knowledge and insight over a 40 or so year period. Consistency and the dogged pursuit of information from very possible source is the name of the game.

spring reading list:

Recent reading: John Banville's Prague Pictures, Lester Bangs' Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Tastes. Also read the new translation of the fragments of Heraclitus by Brooks Haxton which, unfortunately, has to be one of the worst books I've read in a long time. Particularly awful is the foreward by James Hillman, an artless blend of postmodern mush and new age babble. Tne pile next the bed remains way too tall...