Aragon Black Swan

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Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, Taedium Vitae - Farewell Notes of Japanese Literary Suicides

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Pill Fire

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Alfred Jarry's Mental Mechanism

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Jean Paul, Speech of the Dead Christ

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Robert Walser scrapbook

A Journey Round My Skull is now 50 Watts
http://50watts.com/

See the expanded Walser scrapbook on 50 Watts:

Alfred Lichtenstein and Mynona

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Robert Walser, The Assistant

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Richard Aeschlimann, Le Regard Géologue

I picked up this oddity at a used bookstore a few years ago.

Le Regard Géologue (1973, L'Age d'Homme) includes drawings from 1969 to 1972 by the Swiss artist Richard Aeschlimann. L'Age d'Homme seems like a damn fine publisher (with many books by Aeschlimann), though I haven't yet found a good place to purchase their books without being killed on international shipping.

I know Roland Topor is a fan of Aeschlimann (but I don't know much about either of them). Look at Topor's own artwork to The Tenant and you can see the similarity in their artwork. [The Tenant, a 1964 novel, was recently reprinted by Millipede Press with an intro by short-story master Thomas Ligotti. Millipede seems to have fine taste so I will check out this book and their other publications. At their site I learned that the image that haunted me as a kid is by the artist Don Brautigam.]

Here are some samples from Le Regard Geologue.

I keep meaning to post about the great Polish writer and artist Witkacy:


This one is Gorey-esque but disturbing in its own way:


Many of the images feature naked body parts (usually separated from the body!):



Self-portrait from the book's back cover:

The Black Spider, Jeremias Gotthelf

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The Devil to Pay in the Backlands

Looking at this object I can tell Joao Guimaraes Rosa (excuse the lack of accents) was obviously well-loved by Alfred Knopf. Knopf himself is credited with the author photo, and check out the gorgeous decorations on the spine and front of the book. The whole package is just stunning -- publishing done right!

Robert Nedelkoff mentions in the comments on the Neglected Books site post that New Directions has plans to reprint The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Please God do it.

If you are searching for this book, I'd suggest waiting for the reprint. This edition goes for hundreds of dollars at the moment. As far as I know, it was never available in paperback.

This post (along with the post below about A Life Full of Holes etc.) completes my scans of titles on "the list." My standard spiel about the list: Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000 (a list which helped me get a job in publishing). He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them). The permanent link for the list on Neglected Books. View all my posts about the list here.



The spine under the dustjacket:
Decoration from front panel:



Jaguar and Other Stories

Robert Walser drawings by Guy Davenport

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Hans Henny Jahnn

***Feb2008: I moved the Jahnn translation stuff over here.

When asked by PEN America "What great books have never been translated into English?" Tim Crouse (journalist and author of Boys on the Bus) responded:

"Two great peaks, one of fiction, the other of poetry, are still invisible to the English-speaking world, but it seems to me that once translations scatter the mist, the literary landscape will never look the same. (1) The novels of Hans Henny Jahnn (German, 1894-1959). So far as I know, only the first volume of his great "Fluss Ohne Ufer" trilogy has found its way into English: Das Holzschiff (The Ship, trans. Catherine Hutter, Scribners, 1961). That leaves the other two volumes still to go, plus Perrudja, Ugrino und Ingrabanien, and 13 Nicht Geheren Geschichten (Thirteen Unreassuring Stories)--all treasures. [Ed note: The last title mentioned by Crouse was indeed translated into English as Thirteen Uncanny Stories, though it seems to be out of print at the moment; see the rest of this post.] I know them from the French versions. (2) The poems of David Rosenmann-Taub (Chilean, b. 1927). Cortejo y Epinicio (Cortege and Epinicion), Los despojos del sol (The Spoils of the Sun), and El cielo en la fuente (The Sky in the Fountain) are among the most original, profound, and wrenching books of poetry I've read."

I have never encountered Rosenmann-Taub, but Hans Henny Jahnn is one of my favorite authors. To read the rest of PEN America's list, go here.

From Gerda Jordan's introduction to her translation of Thirteen Uncanny Stories by Hans Henny Jahnn (published by Peter Lang):

"'He was a writer of Baroque sexuality, of fleshiness and macabre desperation [...]. The reader continuously stumbles over coffins and tombs, witnesses deeds of horror, awesome fear of death and the performance of the necessities of metabolism....'

"Thus wrote Werner Helwig to his close friend Hans Henny Jahnn. It was not Helwig's own criticism of Jahnn, but that of a critic he had invented in order to show Jahnn what the public thought of his work. No invented critic was needed, however; Jahnn is known as 'the writer who uncovered the hells of the flesh and drives, the abyss of demoniacal passions and sinister licentiousness,' his writings are described as 'materialism of pure faith in the body,' his reader is 'numbed by the eternal drone of the hormone organ.' Polite euphemism calls him the 'uncomfortable' writer.

"The object of this and similar criticism, Hans Henny Jahnn, novelist and dramatist, misunderstood in his life time and since his death, is little known in his own country, not to mention the outside world..."


***

The ship







































The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn: Criticism and the Literary Outsider (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

Hans Henny Jahnn, The Ship

***2008 Update: I started a separate blog for Hans Henny Jahnn here: http://kebadkenya.blogspot.com/

Brad, the editor of the great Neglected Books site [neglectedbooks.com], posted an annotated list of 20 out-of-print books I made in June of 2000. He added links to all the book titles. I'm going to post images of the books discussed (if I still have them).

The permanent link for the list.

10. The Ship by Hans Henny Jahnn (1894 - 1959)

This book is devastating. Even in the fairly rough English translation, it lodged in my brain and I consider it one of the more powerful and disturbing works of the twentieth century. I first encountered Jahnn in the collection Black Letters Unleashed -- an excerpt from The Ship called "Kebad Kenya," which can be read as a stand-alone story. "Kebad Kenya" is also contained in Thirteen Uncanny Stories. Try to find and read this story! I'll post some of it here soon.

Atlas Press published a translation of Jahnn's 1962 novella The Night of Lead. They say that it "shows Jahnn at his darkest: man is portrayed as the toy of supernatural powers, where his only certainty is a bodily existence which, in turn, is blindly bound to the laws of growth, death and decay and procreation - the major themes of Jahnn’s writing." This description can also apply to The Ship. Even after reading Lovecraft and Thomas Bernhard, I'm tempted to think of Jahnn as the most terrifying author. Bernhard can make me feel a little crazy (finishing Correction was one of the more masochistic things I've ever done, and I grew up on gore movies), but he's often hilarious. Jahnn isn't very funny. He's bleak and unrelenting bizarre.





Back cover of Thirteen Uncanny Stories:




***

The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn: Criticism and the Literary Outsider (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)
The ship

Thomas Bernhard

Three photos of Thomas Bernhard from the book Thomas Bernhard und seine Lebensmenschen. The first photo was taken in 1956. The second photo of Thomas and his mother Herta is from 1933. (A few years later his hair seemed to turn blond.) The third photo is from 1943 and shows Bernhard with his grandfather Johannes Freumbichler.






***

Boris Vian

A photo of Boris Vian for my author photo archive. This image comes from the back cover of the Rapp & Whiting edition of Vian's Heartsnatcher (1968; French title: L'arrrache-coeur).

Dalkey Archive recently published an edition of Heartsnatcher.

Jacket design by Lawrence Edwards. Here's the front cover:

Luc Sante on Lovecraft

(I don't know if it's a joke, but the website Worldroots features this image of Lovecraft as a child with his parents.)

Here is Luc Sante's hilarious list of things that frightened Lovecraft:

"He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list."

I'm looking forward to Luc Sante's book Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005 which will be published in September by the excellent Yeti (part of a book series presented with Verse Chorus Press).

This quote comes from Sante's essay The Heroic Nerd in NYRB.

I thank my friend for pointing out my unfortunate similarity to Lovecraft, which caused me to finally read him.

Harold Pinter, A Wake For Sam, BBC TV 1990

Another find from my library browsing.

Harold Pinter, A Wake For Sam, BBC TV, 1990
Printed in Pinter's Various Voices.

"I first met Samuel Beckett in 1961 in Paris when my play, The Caretaker, was being produced. He came into the hotel walking very quickly indeed. He had a sharp stride and quick handshake. He was extremely friendly. I'd known his work for many years of course but it hadn't led me to believe he'd be such a very fast driver. He drove his little Citroen from bar to bar throughout the whole evening, very quickly indeed. We finally ended up in a place in Les Halles eating onion soup at about 4 in the morning and I was by this time overcome -- through, I think, alcohol, tobacco and excitement -- with indigestion and heartburn, so I lay my head down on the table. When I looked up he was gone. I had no idea where he'd gone and I thought, 'Perhaps this has all been a dream.' I think I went to sleep on the table and about forty-five minutes later the table jolted and there he was and he had a package in his hand, a bag. And he said, 'I've been across the whole of Paris to find this. I finally found it.' And he opened the bag and gave me a tin of bicarbonate of soda, which indeed worked wonders."

I'm glad I found this section for the fascinating tidbits about Beckett, but more importantly because my life is overwhelmed with heartburn and indigestion, and I'm going to find myself a tin of bicarbonate of soda.

[october update: the alka-seltzer works]

Raymond Roussel postcard

I'm glad I wound up with this postcard for Mark Ford's book Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (foreword by John Ashbery / Cornell University Press). The book has apparently been remaindered, because it's selling for $5 on Amazon (I think I paid $30 a few years ago). I imagine this will scare publishers off from making more books like it.

Jean Cocteau, from Testament of Orpheus and The Imposter

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