library tag from 1890

Lord Jim

"Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb—the revolt of his young life—the black end."

Joseph Conrad was everything they say he was: Victorian, racist, German, English, arrogant but also brilliant Lord Jim was first published in 1899, and has not been diminished by time. It's a bit flowery compared to modern writing but still compelling. It mystifies me that this followed Heart of darkness and I read only now that he co-wrote not one but three books with For Maddox Ford.. who's prose I find dull.

Roosevelt

A quote over 100 years old and still funny.

President Theodore Roosevelt was possibly the best writer among all our elected leaders. He was a naturalist and a historian, and he couldn't write about one without mentioning the other. Seeing as most of his works were first published in the 1890s they are all in the public domain now. Hell, some of this is so old, his biographies are public domain too.

This one comes from "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman." Mine is the Statesman Edition printed in 1904, part of a sizable set. For the price of the set I could have bought an ebook reader and downloaded them all for free. Damn my obstinacy. Luddites pay a premium.

"We rested a couple of hours as noon for lunch, and the afternoon's sport was simply a repetition of the morning's except that we had but one dog to work with; for shortly after mid-day the stub-tail pointer, for his sins, encountered a skunk, with which he waged prompt and vailant battle-thereby rendering himself useless as a servant and highly offensive as a companion."

Since it's public domain you can download it here.

But there are other fine works:
Outdoor pastimes of an American hunter
Lassoing wild animals in Africa
Life-histories of African game animals
Hunting the Grisly
Hunting in many lands
Animal life in Africa
Hunting Trips on the prairie and on the mountains
African Game Trails

And Archive.org has a lovely collection of free ebooks here.

Those Other People

Mary King O'Donnell, I know nothing of her. I know she was a Texan, born in Houston who moved to San Francisco in 1943. Her first husband died, and her second husband was a Communist. the details don't connect at all and paint no cohesive picture. Her writing, what I've seen of it, is simple and spare but she seems to stumble into the true picture of things- fixating on small background details like Hemingway often did.

"The young negro man in the pink shirt had bought a watermelon. He was splitting it open with his clasp-knife. Squatted on his haunches on the sidewalk, he was cutting the red heart out of the green skin, lifting the heart on the point of his knife in the sunlight. Aloft on the knife blade, the red heart quivered and blazed...Across the street, the colored ban in the pink shirt still squatted beside the watermelon. He had eaten the heart , and now he was scraping the last of the pink meat away from the rind. the last bite poised on his knife blade and disappeared into his mouth... The man stood up and wiped the knife blade on his leg. He shoved the rind into the gutter with his foot, put the knife in his pocket and walked away."

I splice together the character's three brief appearances there. The image is vivid, but bitter-sweet. O'Donnell was a Southerner 6 decades ago. She was probably a bigot. Today the image of black man + watermelon is a classic bigoted caricature. the paragraphs tell me as much about the story as the writer.

Martha Furnace Diary

This is a transcript from a diary kept at Martha Furnace in Martha N.J. recording daily events covering a period from March 30, 1808 to the end of April 1815. It was written , presumably by a series of clerks in the Martha Forge office The original diary is lost. After being discovered in an office safe it was destroyed in a fire in 1910. but not before two copies of it were made. More here. These early copies have survived. The Hagley Museum and Library has been disseminating the diary in part and in whole. Here I collect what I beleive to be the whole diary, formatted for what I think is best readability as a pdf.. These early copies have survived. The Hagley Museum and Library has been disseminating the diary in part and in whole. Here I collect what I beleive to be the whole diary, formatted for what I think is best readability as a pdf.

You can get all 94 pages if you

DOWNLOAD HERE

Up Stream

Ludwig Lewisohn is largely forgotten. He was a novelist, and an occasional writer of schlock when it came time to pay the bills. (hence the image) In this autobiographical work he cleaves the gap between the two. He was one of the founders of Brandeis University. This work Up Steam, feels somewhat dated with it's ornate Victorian language. But in certain places he compels his feelings with great clarity.

Specifically, I like the way he breaks up the times of his work shift; spelling out his hours both before and after his lunch break. It just emphasizes his discomfort in just being there. It says that he is literally counting the hours without resorting to the idiom. Being there pains him, everything there is ugly to him, the job repulses him. Outstanding.

"I can, at least, see the sun and think my own thoughts. And there arises in me the memory of that large, scientifically clean building filled with the hum of the engine that drove the monotype machine and with the acrid odor of fresh print. A sharp electric light burned over my desk from eight-thirty to twelve-thirty and from one-thirty to five-thirty, and next to me stood all day a long, loose fellow whose small, pointed head seemed fairly to dangle and tremble, like an ugly and noxious flower, at the end of his scrawny neck."

When he wanted to he could drop the flowery language. In 1933, he said that "...the entire Nazi movement is in fact and by certain aspects of its avowed ideology drenched through and through with homo-erotic feeling and practice."

Authors We Enjoyed

1000 Acres

It won the damn Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1991. It's King Lear for a new epoch.

"So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you cant stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That's my sole, solitary lonely accomplishment."

I am not worthy.

Wartime Printing

This was news to me.This is from a book printed in 1943. The printer is Simon and Schuster. It seemed to be a part of the general wartime rationing efforts then I read this:

"Prior to the outbreak of the first World War, at least 90% of dyestuffs were obtained from abroad, mainly from Germany. After the outbreak of hostilities this source was no longer available and problems of supply soon arose."

Well that changes things. It was much more specific to printing. More here. Under President Truman, the Graphic Arts Victory Committee even printed the "Guide to Essential Wartime Printing and Lithography." The book is a bit hard to find, but one catalog describes it as follows:

"...printing in the service of rationing, scrap drives, civilian defense, savings bond drives, moral boosting, etc. etc., with tips on how these themes can be worked into conventional product advertising."

Bookmarks

According to Wikipedia:

"A bookmark is a thin marker, commonly made of paper or card, used to keep one's place in a book and so be able to return to it with ease. Other frequently used materials for bookmarks are leather, metals like silver and brass, silk, wood and fabrics. Many bookmarks can be clipped on a page with the aid of a page-flap."

Like any heavy reader, I accumulate book marks. I've never bought a book mark, at least never one that wasn't already inside a book. (I find odd things inside books) Some are from book stores, or for other book marketing like National Library Week. That pink one above is from a book store in San Bernadino, Beers in Sacramento, the Reading Well somewhere in Canada,another here is the Paperback Trader, a small New England chain of used book stores that no longer exists...


Then things get odd: train tickets, garage parking tags, photo negatives and a strip of birch bark I clearly recall peeling off a log on a beach for lack of any other material.. I do not recall later cutting it square but there it is, clearly so.

Darwin & Gaylord Simpson

Naturalists and anthropologists have a certain view on nature. It's a tad dramatic but also elegant. Darwin usually stayed on topic and on message. He was offering up the greatest idea since science had been founded. Simpson rides that tide, but expresses the same wonderment.

The connection is greater than their shared wonder and academic specialty. In 1983 Simpson wrote The Book of Darwin, expounding on the implications of the then 124 year old Origin of the Species. Here I quote Attending Marvels by Simpson and the Origin of the Species by the master himself.

"It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have been produced by the laws acting around us."

"As we came home the sun went out suddenly and the whole world turned a sinister gray, dark and light but without a spot of clor. Streaked vicious clouds poured over us like a flood from the west. the moon rose yellow through the last band of clear sky. Rain began to patter, then to pour. Surf is roaring again on the shores of the lake. beyond this element-tormented spot lies vast, desolate patagonia. Beyond Patagonia lies the world of the seas and plains and mountains for complacent thousands of miles. Beyond the world wheels the dusty universe."

The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West could really write. His first novel Miss Lonely Hears was not great. Some printings pair it with his last novel which aside from both being short.. having nothing in common. Most of his output was in the form of screen plays, and if it didn't lend a visual quality to his prose then the inverse must be true.

The Day of the Locust was his most autobiographical work and it shows. Sadly his screen plays mostly became B-movies while his fiction became classics.

"Earle caught the birds one at a time and pulled their heads off before dropping them into his sacks. Then he started back. As he walked along, he held the sack under his left arm. he lifted the birds out with his right hand and plucked them one at a time. Their feathers fell to the ground, point first, weighted down by the tiny drop of blood that trembled on the tips of their quills."

Mezz Mezzrow

The best works suspend disbelief just as film can. Much of that is language, the new-age types will call it "the authentic voice" in other words: to write honestly and in the language you speak. Mezz was a man who genuinely wanted to be black. He was born Jewish but was madly in love with Hot Jazz, and the people that created it played it and the culture that surrounded it. In the early 1940s he wrote a book about early jazz music, and all in the slang of the era. For him it was a life of poverty, crime, incarceration, and mad, mad love for music.

He writes pages upon pages to describe performances. I'll quote a long passage that exudes his adoration:

"He started to blow his chorus, tearing his heart out, and the tones that came vibrating out of those poor agonized lips of his sounded like a weary soul plodding down the lonesome road, the weight of the world's woe on his bent shoulders, crying for relief to all his people. He was fighting all the way, aiming to see it through and to be understood by all, right down to the last heartrending wail of his plea. All the lament and heartache of life, of the colored man's life, came throbbing out through that horn. That wasn't any horn blowing that night. It was the conscience of the whole aching world, shouting damnation at sins and evil...
...Louis began that tortuous climb up to high F, the notes all agonized and strangled, each one dripping blood. He was like the prodigal son who finally sights his home, sick and weary of a lifetime or roaming, determined to get back there before his heart stops beating. He was fighting and sweating blood all the way, and what came out of his horn sounded less like music than the terrible wild shrieking of the lost and damned...
...And then, with the last breath of life left in him, like a man in death convulsions, heaving with his heart and soul lacerated guts for the last time, Louis clutched and crawled and made that high F on his hands and knees, just barely made it, at the last nerve-slashing second. A shock and a shiver ran through the theater. The whole house shuddered, then rocked with applause. Louis stood there holding his horn and panting, his mangled lip oozing blood that he licked away, and he managed a bow and smile again, making pretty for the people."

Lo lo, lo lo — Lomax

Alan Lomax writes a bit like a hipster. When writing about jazz it's entirely appropriate, and in 1950 possibly unavoidable. He was a jazz fan, a blues fan , a folklorist and an archivist.

"...Morton and the boys in the band tell the story their own way. Sometimes they brag; sometimes they remember exactly what was said or how things looked; sometimes they remember is the way they wished it; but somehow out of the crossing of misty memories comes truth— comes a hint at great secrets— how music grows— how artists can be pimps when they have to be and still set the world dancing with fiery notes."

Did he say pimps?
Yes he did.

It gets better. He writes elsewhere in sleepy broken sentences expressing the pace of his own real experience. it's cleverly executed and shows he's no mere librarian. The ellipses are all his below.

". . . A gravel voice melting at the edges, not talking, but spinning out a life something close to a song . . . each sentence almost a stanza of a slow blues . . . each stanza flowing out of the last like the eddies of a big sleepy Southern river where the power hides below the quiet brown surface."

Go

It's called the first "Beat" novel. As a monument to that it does properly use the word "beat" and maintains a mostly plot-less narrative to youth and to that era. Holmes doesn't get the credit that Cassady, Kerouac Burroughs and Ginsberg do. Unlike many others, author John Clellon Holmes, like Kesey outlived the era. So they were able to produce later better works for which to be renowned.

"Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"
Just that snarling curse, shouted over and over again, at every-thing: the cars, the buildings, the deaf night itself; those two crude words, full of outrage and horror, thrown into the streets like crashing bottles.
"Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"

-John Clellon Holmes

John A. Woodworth

To me this demonstrated a masterful use of em dash, comma and semi colon to string a narrative. To write a run-on sentence is simple... to employ proper punctuation or even improper punctuation so that it makes sense is a challenge. Writing like that is a reason to subscribe.From his article Beating Scriptures from Fish in the Appalachia Journal Winter 1984:

"Chengtu is a melange of offensive odors, a din, a welter of confused discordant sounds, a clangor of traffic, a noisy, dusty, dirty place of milling pedestrians of every age and description — half-clad children with half-shaved heads playing in the street; old men with long, drooping, thin mustaches and sparse, pointed beards; young men in modern dress; old women hobbling painfully on tiny, bound feet, victims of a social custom now forbidden by government decree; men wildly running an dodging through the crowds pulling swaying rickshaws; soldiers in yellow cotton uniforms; officers carrying sabers; a rare automobile, klaxon blaring, crowding everyone off the street; geese and ducks swimming in puddles; hens pecking their way in and out of doorways; peddlers of eels holding their slimy catch aloft for a buyers critical scrutiny; bakers compounding strange pastries on tiny stoves; large, open-sided teahouses, crammed with people and humming with conversation; knots of curious bystanders watching a G.I. bargain over a souvenir, throngs of theatergoers pouring out of a puppet shadow play; policemen in black uniforms that look like crepe paper, wearing black helmets and an air of authority in the glint of their spectacles; craftsmen at their shops, metal workers, silversmiths, cabinet makers, and tailors."

-John A Woodworth

Jim Jarmusch

Source: Movie Maker magazine 01/22/04. He wrote it himself of course.

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to."

-Jim Jarmusch

New York Howl

Every band has a story an image a brand and a one-sheet. Rarely is it well written, rarely is it well-conceived or even vaguely interesting. The New York Howl however... what a great line. Who wrote it? Who knows.

"The New York Howl is an explosive punk, blues, rock n roll, psychedelic, soul family band living in Brooklyn, New York. We share a dream. We endeavor to hold the crackling, livid, blinding, screaming, fleeting, weightless truth in the palm of our hands, in the muscle of our hearts, and in the wet of our mouths. You will see us breathe bright waterfalls of fire and you will hear the sounds of children playing with electricity."

Roth

"The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away—and the nightmare of the blackest blackness beneath the frenzy of the water—made him want to run from the menace of oblivion in their cozy, lighted, underfurnished house."

Philip Roth is still alive, and while his book "Everyman" is in my view his best since Portnoys Complaint his persistence gives hope he will better it yet. It's been half a century since he began writing and still no one else grasps that arena of queasy emotionality. He discussed it on NPR back in 2006.

Black Market Surgery

Matthew Good was probably fabricating everything. But he wrote an online journal of sorts. For a short period of time he was on Atlantic Records, and they for some reason printed them in two editions with identical covers but including journals of slightly different eras. the writing was disjointed, non-linear almost reflective of the Burroughs cut-up experiments. But ultimately, the words are not shuffled, only the strange mind of Mr. Good.

"Tomorrow everything will be the same as it was yesterday. Today is just another two minutes on the news. That picture in your wallet, salvation, they won't bring that up. Will they? There's a million different ways to say I love you."