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:

Boris Vian, Foam of the Daze

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 is here.

4. L'Ecume des Jours by Boris Vian (1920 - 1959). English translations:

-- Mood Indigo (Grove 1968, tran. John Sturrock)
-- Froth on the Daydream (Quartet 1967, trans. Stanley Chapman)
-- Foam of the Daze (Tam Tam Books 2004, trans. Brian Harper)

Tosh Berman of Tam Tam Books is publishing new translations of Vian's books. Here's a link to Foam of the Daze.

Two covers of Froth on the Daydream from Wikipedia (I don't own these editions):


Grove's edition (Front photo credited to Shaumiane Production -- get in touch if you know what that means, because Google isn't helping):




While I'm at it, here are scans of more of Vian's books in English translation.

Tom Recchion (who has a new album out on Birdman) designs Tam Tam's covers:




No designer or illustrator listed for this cover:

Two plays published by Grove:



Illustration by Peter Miles on the below book from Quartet:

Rene Crevel, Difficult Death

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 is here.

3. Difficult Death by Rene Crevel (1900-1935, France).

First published in France in 1926 as La Mort Difficile. David Rattray's English translation was published by North Point Press in 1986. Rattray died in 1993 (I need to check out his How I Became One of the Invisible immediately) and he held the copyright, so maybe that is why it hasn't been republished. The North Point edition includes an introduction by Rattray and an 8-page foreword by Salvador Dali, written in 1954.

The photograph of Crevel on the cover is by Thea Sternheim. David Bullen designed the cover.


Another photo of Crevel by Sternheim:

Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus

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 is here.

2. Locus Solus by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933, France).

First published in France in 1914. Rupert Copeland Cuningham's English translation first published in the UK by Calder in 1970 (and then in the US by University of California). Reprinted in 1983 in paperback by Calder and Riverrun. Again reprinted in 2003 by Calder/Riverrun (the edition I scanned). Hopefully we won't have to wait until 2023 for another reprint. Print-on-demand is always an option!***

Read Luc Sante's essay/review "The Scientist of the Fantastic" about Roussel, from the New York Review of Books, 1985. Read some pages from John Ashbery on Roussel.

***Jan.2008 update: I've since learned that John Calder has retired (was there an international day of mourning?), and his line has been purchased by Oneworld. Their statement: "Oneworld Classics is delighted to announce the acquisition of the legendary Calder Publications list – which includes works by Beckett, Céline, Artaud, Duras, Trocchi, Barker, Ionesco and Robbe-Grillet, among many others – and the Calder Bookshop on The Cut, near Waterloo, famous for its eclectic events programme."

Start flooding them with requests for Locus Solus.

Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization

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 is here.

1. Products of the Perfected Civilization: The Selected Writings of Chamfort, translated and with an introduction by W. S. Merwin. [First published by Macmillan in 1969 (send me a scan if you have that edition); this is the 1984 reprint from North Point Press.]

Jacket design: David Bullen
Jacket illustration: anonymous engraving of Robespierre

From the flap: Chamfort is said to have been among the first in storming the Bastille . . . Nietzsche wrote that without Chamfort "the Revolution would have been deprived of its most tragic spirit and its sharpest sting; it would be considered a far more stupid event, and would not exert its present seductive fascination."

Thank you Farley's Bookshop in New Hope PA for keeping this title on the shelf long past its expiration date.

Trip Around My Cranium

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:

Review: Latin American Literature and Arts

My best book collecting score last month (besides the Walser book) was finding 14 issues of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts for $.60 each. I seem to have the complete issues of this quarterly for 1972 and 1973, most issues from 74 & 75, and one each from 76 & 77.

This issue focuses on Jose Lezama Lima's Paradiso, available in a revised translation from the great publisher Dalkey Archive. It features drawings throughout by Leonel Gongora (not much info on the web about him). He drew the cover image.

I plan to post a lot about these gems as I work my way through them.

Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:

Jakob von Gunten

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:

Maya Miller, Notebooks

Drawings by musician Maya Miller (of Religious Knives) published by her Heavy Tapes imprint in a too-limited signed edition of 100 (oh wait, I see she has luckily reprinted so pick one up QUICK).

I think she should produce a coloring book edition, ask readers to submit scribbled-in or watercolored versions, and then publish the full-color results. Ideally, children would participate. Surely some bad parent would potentially damage their toddler's psyche in the name of art? Demand that they stay inside the lines.

The Golden Bomb, Phantastic German Expressionist Stories

[Cover: untitled woodcut by Heinrich Stegemann (1921)]

The Golden Bomb, like Black Letters Unleashed, was edited and translated by Atlas Press editor Malcolm Green. Published in 1993 by Polygon, copies are still available! Find them at the Atlas site.

Press blurb:

The German and Austrian Expressionists of the first two decades of the twentieth century constituted one of the truest and most energetic avant-garde movements of the last hundred years. In little more than fifteen years they brought about lasting and fundamental changes in the fields of dance, drama, painting, film, typography and, all too often overlooked, in writing. Concentrated in the years preceding the First World War, the movement burned like a magnesium flare, short-lived but intense, and very much in keeping with the tempo of modern city life which was its chosen backdrop. Much of the writing, as assembled here for the first time in this anthology, belies the gaunt, grainy, slice-of-life demeanour that is the movement’s traditional image. Instead we find dandyish despair, slapstick horror, and black humour, visionary speculation, linguistic experimentation, the arcane and the capriciously grotesque - in other words, the dreams and dementia that fed into Dada, that served as the true precursor of Surrealism, and inspired the “Vienna Group” in the 1950s.

This anthology, originally put together for Polygon of Edinburgh (then sold at £9.95) and now available exclusively from Atlas Press, incorporates several of the movement’s illustrious forerunners, such as Franz Held, Oskar Panizza, and Paul Scheerbart; a large number of the early Expressionists, whose writings are especially astonishing for their absurdism and archness of tone, such as Albert Ehrenstein, Hans Arp, and Gottfried Benn; and concludes with the early Dada and Surrealistic speculations of Hugo Ball, Wieland Herzfelde, and Kurt Schwitters.

Writers included: Franz Held, Oskar Panizza, Albert Mombert, Paul Scheerbart, Alfred Döblin, Albert Ehrenstein, Carl Einstein, Gustav Meyrink, Georg Heym, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Wassily Kandinsky, Mynona, Hans Arp, Alfred Wolfenstein, Paul Zech, Else Lasker-Schüler, Georg Trakl, Alfred Lichtenstein, Theodor Däubler, Heinrich Nowak, Gottfried Benn, Hans Flesch-Brunningen, Hugo Ball, Conrad Felixmüller, Heinrich Schaefer, Wieland Herzfelde, Kurt Schwitters, Franz Kafka, Iwan Goll, Robert Musil, Hermann Ungar. Plus short biographies of all the writers, and an introductory essay by Malcolm Green.

Black Letters Unleashed, 300 Years of 'Enthused' Writing in German

The 1989 Atlas Press book Black Letters Unleashed: 300 Years of 'Enthused' Writing in German (Atlas Anthology No. 6; Amaz link) has become way too scarce. I used to give away copies of it to friends (to paraphrase Gabriel Zaid "giving a book is like giving an obligation"). Full contents and an excerpt from the intro coming soon.

3/28/2014 update (only 7 years late), the Contents:

Malcolm Green - Foreword

Johannes Fischart - Introduction

Quirinus Kuhlmann - The Kiss of Love

Gottfried Burger - The Magnetic Mountain Range

G. C. Lichtenberg - Inventory of a Collection of Appliances

Jean Paul - The Dead Christ's Address from On High on the Non-existence of God

Novalis - The Apprentice

E. T. A. Hoffmann - Sister Monika

Franz Grillparzer - The Wild Hunter

Johann Nepomuk Nestroy - Tratschmiedl's Dream

Max Stirner -  I've Based My Affairs on Nothing

Arthur Schopenhauer - Conversation Anno 33

Friedrich Nietzsche - Letter to Jakob Burckhardt

Karl Marx - Digression on Productive Labour

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch  -  Drama-Dscheuti

Oskar Panizza - The Immaculate Conception of Popes

Stanislaw Przybyszewski - The Mass of the Dead

Franz Held - The Golden Bomb

Paul Scheerbart - The Stupid Ass

Gustav Meyrink - Just What Purpose Do White Dog Stools Actually Serve

Adolf Wolfli -  New York

Georg Heym - Sketches

Elsa Lasker-Schuler - Artists

Jakob von Hoddis - Doctor Hacker's End

Franz Jung - The Telepaths

Heinrich Schaefer - Creative Extension out of Darkness

Georg Trakl - Transmutation of the Evil One — Revelation and Decline

Erna Kroner - 2 Poems

Ferdinand Hardekopf - Winter Garden

Albert Ehrenstein - Kimargouel

Wieland Herzefelde - The Soviet Cloud

Kurt Schwitters - A Gulp for the Whole of Life — Horizontal  Story

Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando - The Masked Ball of the Genii

Alfred Doblin - Incomprehensible  Stories

Hans Henny Jahnn - Kebad Kenya

Ilse Aichinger - Ajax

Gerhard Ruhm - The Grotto

Unica Zurn - In Ambush

Paul Celan - 6 Poems from The No-One's Rose

Wolfgang Bauer - 3 Microdramas

H. C. Artmann - Lord Lister's Afternoon Letters

Imtraud Morgner - The Hotel

Christoph Meckel - Instructions to the House Guests

Gunter Brus - Jack O'Lantern

Peter Pongratz - Sunset

Oskar Pastior - 12 Poempoems

Ror Wolf - The Danger of the Great Plains

Ingomar Kieseritsky - The Fermail Method, or the Abolition of Music

Monica Tornow - Body Demons

Jean Paul Jacobs - Miss Lazybones

Gerhard Roth - Between Heaven and Earth

Heiner Muller - Description of a Picture

Gunter Brus - The Crystal Cistern

Notes, Biographies, Sources

Translators: Malcolm Green, Derk Wynand, Shaun Whiteside, James Kirkup, Max Paddison, Rosemarie Waldrop, Carl Weber

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Ian Nagoski, Black Mirror

A scan of Black Mirror by Daumal associate Roger Gilbert-Lecomte.



Adding this is really an excuse to plug an upcoming cd curated by Ian Nagoski. Here's the press blurb:

Black Mirror: Reflections in Global Musics 1918 - ca. 1955
On the Dust-to-Digital label. Contact Ian's Baltimore record store The True Vine.

24 recordings from the first half of the 20th century of music from Syria, Bali, Scotland, Thailand, Ukraine, China, Camaroon, India, Turkey, Germany, Spain, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Japan, Poland, Greece, Java, Portugal, Laos, Sweden and Burma, all newly transfered and mastered from 78 rpm discs, at least 18 of which never issued before on CD.
Each performance is a gorgeous manifestation of outrageous virtuosity, religious devotion, heart-stopping ebullience and/or worshipful ache, just as they reflect a moment in the personal trajectories of the individual performers and their now generations-past historical contexts, elucidated to a great degree by record collector and compiler Ian Nagoski's notes.
Drawn from the best of Nagoski's vernacular 78 collecting, Black Mirror began two years ago as a high-falutin meditation on love, death, social class and divinity. In its finished form, it's one of far too few overviews of peak human music from the period when the performance was the record and that was that.

Track list:
1. Naim Karakand - Kamanagah Syrian
2. Thewaprasit Ensemble - Phleeng Khuk Phaat, pt. 2 Thai
3. Gong Belaloewana Bali - Kebyar Ding, I Balinese
4. Pipe Major Forsyth - Malorca Northumbrian
5. Thiruvazhimilalai Subramanian Bros. & Needamangalam Meenakshisundaram Pillai - Manasa Sri Ramachandra South Indian
6. Paul Pendja Ensemble - Ngo Mebou Melane Camerounian
7. Cyganska Orchestra Stefana - Cyganske Vesilia, pt. 4 Lemko-Hungarian
8. Zhehongyi with Nendi Zhaoguan - Mother's Uproar Fouzhou-Chinese
9. Patrick J. Touhey - Drowsy Maggie Irish
10. Hutzl Ukrainian Ensemble - Welsisni Melodyi Hutzl-Ukrainian
11. Neriman Altindag - Soyledi Yok Yok Turkish
12. Lata Mangeshkar - Aayega Aanewaala Indian
13. M. Nguyen van Minh-Con - Nam Nhi-tu Vietnamese
14. Edwin Fischer - Handel's Chaconne, Teil I. Swiss / German
15. Marika Papagika - Smyrneiko Minore Greek
16. Petar Perunovic-Perun - Narodne Saljive Pjesme Serbian
17. Nji R. Hadji Djoeaehn - Tjimploengan Sundanese
18. Niño de Priego - Envidia yo no Tengo Nadie Spanish
19. Prof. Lucas Junot - Fado de Passarinhos Portuguese
20. Sathoukhru Lukkhamkeow - Nakhone Prayer Laotian
21. Christer Falkenstrom - Baklandets Vackra Maja Swedish
22. Representatives of the Democratic Youth of Indonesia - Djanger Balinese
23. Sinkou Son & Kouran Kin - Songs in Grief Japanese
24. untraced Burmese muscians - Yein Pwe Burmese

Angela de Foligno, The Saint of the Double Abyss

This post now resides on my other site 50 Watts:

Jean Painleve, the surrealist Jacques Cousteau

Jean Painleve is the surrealist Jacques Cousteau. He was literally associated with the first wave of French surrealists before embarking on his career as a documentary filmmaker. In the age of dvd, youtube, and the Discovery Channel, I cannot figure out why he hasn't been properly introduced to America. He could even be marketed as the "Jacques Cousteau for Stoners"! Yo La Tengo did their part by playing music live behind his films.

Here's a scan of the book Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painleve, released by Brico / MIT Press a few years ago. I don't know why there's a book about him in English, but no DVD available for sale in America.



Here's a postcard for the book:

October 07 update: you can now purchase a DVD set of his movies in the UK. Here's a link. (The set is "region 2," so check that your dvd player can handle it.) A US version is hopefully in the works from Kino or a similar dvd company. The UK set seems to be a compilation of the two French dvds which were produced over the past few years.

Henri Michaux, Light Through Darkness, Major Ordeals

Someone asked in a comment about the good drug books by Henri Michaux.

Here are two. I'll write about them soon. I always loved the title: The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.

These are out-of-print so snatch them up if you ever see them. They are both hardcovers. Major Ordeals definitely came out in paperback too, in a 70s Harcourt Psychology series (!) if I remember correctly.