LIBRARY SHELVES VOL. I
Bonne journée! Welcome back to my little corner of the electric mainline. I’ll begin this by repeating a sentiment that you may have heard me say before but over the past year I have significantly dialed back my online presence. Between our abhorrent political climate and the ubiquity of AI videos proliferating my instagram feed, I’ve learned that my brain just can’t handle it. I’m happier and still just as informed staying clear of the slop. That doesn’t mean that I’m burying my head in the sand or disappearing from those spaces all together. I just don’t find these places to be nearly as interesting or as useful as I used to. I know lots of my friends feel this way. A really inspiring book about this subject that I read a couple of years ago is Jenny Odell’s “How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy.” I cannot recommend it enough.
But while I do have your attention here lol I wanted to take a moment to share cool some editions of books from my library. Ellen and I recently moved back to Los Angeles and in the process of unpacking our stuff I kept on being reminded of how many neat old paperbacks I possess which sit on shelves or in boxes and rarely get to be seen or shared. I love going to peoples’ homes and looking through their books. So I’ll share some of mine with occasional anecdotes here. I have a lot of books so I will eventually write more of these. Hope you enjoy!
I picked up this edition of Stranger In A Strange Land in 2019 at a half price books in Greenfield, Wisconsin during what turned out to be the last ever Chromatics US tour. I’ve always wanted to read this but still haven’t gotten around to it. I tried a couple years ago but just wasn’t in the right headspace. I grew impatient and put it back on the shelves. Have any of you out there read this one before? Is it really as essential as many purport it to be? Is Robert Heinlein really “the dean of American science fiction writers.” Is Kamala really brat? I would love to hear if someone thinks this is worth giving it another try.
I’ve long been a Sontag hag. Especially love her essays. One of these days I will reread The Volcano Lover.
When I was in my early 20’s, I got deeply into Jerzy Kosinski from reading his first novel The Painted Bird, which Mark Burden, one of Glass Candy’s early drummers had recommended to me in autumn 1999. From The Painted Bird I ended up reading all of Kosinski’s books. I’ll admit they can be entertaining especially for the cold war espionage elements but a few years ago out of curiosity I reread his novel Blind Date and was appalled by much of it. I would file much of Kosinski’s work under the category of very insecure man/narcissistic trash literature. So much of it is written from the perspective of a character who is constantly bragging about how he outsmarted so and so or got revenge for this this or that indignity done to him 20 years ago. A character whom the author clearly wishes he was. My great aunt the artist Elise Asher knew him personally as she and Kosinski were both figures in the mid century NYC art & literature community. Her words on Kosinski, “he always seemed like he was hiding something.” You can find a lot of interesting discourse and theories about Kosinski online. It’s now commonly accepted that he was an untruthful person who seemingly faked his way into some high status positions. But I don’t judge him for choosing to live a lie. He was a holocaust refugee and clearly a highly traumatized human being. He was likely just doing what he thought he needed to do or say to survive. All of that information aside though, these 70’s paperback editions with the trippy psychosexual illustrated covers are really neat.
About ten years ago, after decades of searching, I was finally able to track down a beat up copy of Marc Bolan’s book of poetry “The Warlock Of Love” online. It reads like you might think it would. Lots of hippy dippy Tolkien-esque poems and prose of mystic journeys and fairies and wizards. This was very in vogue at the time. I kinda love it just because I’m a lover of all things Marc Bolan. His music and words possess this odd quality where they always just put me in a good mood. I heard that after years of being out of print, this book was recently reprinted. If you manage to track down a copy don’t go into it expecting Robert Frost but it’s still a fun piece of history.
This original hardback of Our Lady Of The Flowers was my great aunt Lou’s copy. Lou had a huge collection of books which I loved to peruse at her home in Westwood (a neighborhood in Los Angeles for you non-LA people). When Lou passed away about 10 years ago, the family kindly let me take a lot of her books. I still have never read this one. My friend Eric once told me that it takes awhile to get into it because Genet’s writing is so unique but once you lock in with it, it’s an incredible read. One day I will get there. Until that moment arrives I have Lou’s beautiful old hardback edition of Our Lady Of The Flowers on my shelves waiting for me.
I read this a couple times in my early 20’s. It’s dense but at the time I loved it. Though I wonder how I would feel about it today. I remember picking up this edition at a flea market in Oakland on an early Chromatics tour in 2001/2002. That’s Candice Bergen on the cover in a still from the film adaptation, which also starred Anna Karina and Michael Caine and notably is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life. Actually I couldn’t even finish watching it because it was unwatchable. One day I will reread The Magus again. I’m curious if I will end up feeling similar to the way I did upon rereading Jerzy Kosinski.
This screenplay of the film I Am Curious (Yellow) in paperback form is notable to me because it is one of my earliest memories of seeing nudity printed in a book. At the time, as a young child, this simultaneously confused and mesmerized me. This was on our family’s bookshelves for years. I believe it belonged to my second cousin Sam who tragically passed away in a hit and run accident a few years after I was born. So really I have Sam’s taste in literature (and music because I am in possession of many of his records) to thank for helping to make me a weirdo. Thank you Sam! More than the few stark, random black and white stills of what today would likely be considered PG level nudity… the cover of this paperback blows me away. The photograph, the subdued colors, the text layout. I think it’s a masterpiece in design.
I read this when I was the desk clerk at the City Center Travelodge in Portland 2007-2010. My favorite part about that job was all the downtime I had sitting at the reception desk. This meant that I got a lot of reading done and that I also got to watch endless reruns of the Andy Griffith Show and nearly every episode of Oprah each afternoon on the television in the lobby. The biggest downside of the job, having to kick the occasional pimp and methhead hooker out of the hotel. One day when I write my autobiography, the Portland City Center Travelodge will have its own dedicated chapter.
That’s all for now. Thank you for tuning in!
“Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. He perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.” -William Blake
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