Gluttony and the New York Review of Books

It's funny, as writers and readers, that we don't talk about publishers more, at least in terms of the books we like. We might wail on the SOBs a lot, but we don't talk about publishers much in terms of our favourites, in terms of the books we love to read. Maybe this is because most publishers don't have much of a throughline of taste, and the selection is sometimes haphazard.

But there are publishers I like. Maybe it's the former bookstore owner in me, but I'm always curious about who publishes a book. And there are always publishers who seem to publish interesting books. The Dalkey Archive, Vintage International, etc. One of my favourites, though, is the New York Review of Books. They tend to publish great works of fiction and non-fiction, and they tend to publish either books in translation or great books that weren't recognized the way they should have been when they were first published (or, at least, have since been forgotten).

Looking through the nyrb lists is a little like going on a literary excavation, finding the voices that I should have heard, but never did.

And, as it happens, I have recently picked up a bushel of books by the nyrb, and I'm going to splurge on them. A massive reading fest! I have 12 in my little pile as we speak (though this could always rise, due to compulsive purchasing). They are beautiful books, and that's one reason I like the nyrb - they make fine books, in the sense of books as objects. I like the covers, the series design, the paper, the softe matte finish. Paper junkie heaven.

Okay, so here they are! I may not get through all of them in a row. In fact, the chance of failure is like 99.93578%. But I shall have a wonderful splurge, regardless.

The Road, Vasily Grossman

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Troubles, J.G. Farrell

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Warlock, Oakley Hall

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Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household

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Chess Story, Stefan Zweig

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Clandestine in Chile, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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Fatale, Jean-Patrick Manchette

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Butcher's Crossing, John Williams

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Unforgiving Years, Victor Serge

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The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons

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Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Daniel Paul Schreber

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A Savage War of Peace, Alistair Horne

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What about you? Do you pay attention to publishers? Do you have favourites? Does it mean more to have certain publishers on the spine?

Secret Garden

I'd have this in my backyard, if I could.

A walled plateau maze garden at El Escorial, outside Madrid. Photo by me.

Secret Doors

I'm listening to Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden on audiobook with my daughter right now, a book I've wanted to read for a while. And one of the things I realize that I'm fascinated with (much like many with my bent of thinking, I'd guess) is secret places. I have a love of secret doors, secrete passageways, secret gardens - secret worlds.

It's a large reason why I have this picture as my avatar pic:

This is one of my photographs, something I took on my honeymoon. It's from the gardens of the Alhambra palace, outside Granada, Spain. A secret door in a secret garden...

My love of photography and my love of writing are connected, I think, through this idea - secrets. A secret way to view something, a new way to see it, a twisted angle - a secret window on something new.

I think a lot of people have a strong urge in this regard. Portal fantasies are a sort of symbol of this, a representation of the desire to see through the mundane to the secret mysteries beyond, to peel back the plain and find the strange, the wondrous, the surreal.

This crops up in my stories, I think, and it definitely crops up in my photos. I'm hoping to show a few of these in the next while. A chance to step through a wardrobe or fall down a rabbit hole...

I'll be back. Okay, I already am.

Back from vacation! Apparently the Internet didn't even notice I was gone. Not so monogamous, is the ol' Internet. Anyway, I took the family to Niagara Falls for watery fun on the Maid of the Mist and in Marine Land. No pictures, as I forgot my digital camera. Which is maybe good; I tend to get overly focused on pursuing interesting angles for interesting pictures and, you know, lose all my children.

"Oh, you know, it's not that big a city. I'm sure we'll find them. I mean, they're on foot. I'm sure they couldn't have made it more than three or four miles."

So! We all returned alive! And I survived almost a week entirely unplugged! I didn't have a cellphone! No computer or laptop or other multi-brained electronic devices! This was sort of nice. Now, I wouldn't want to do it forever, as I'd miss my online friends. But for a little while?

There's something nice about avoiding the digital world, about not having to check something all the time, get constant updates. There may have to be more of this in the future.

What say you? Do you like the unplugging? Or, if the Apocalypse comes, is a world without iPhones a strong inducement for suicide?

Yes, this just could be what the world is like after the Apocalypse and the ruin of technology...

Four Short Walls #11

Dread

There are times when the very air seems to tingle with fear. A denseness, an emotional humidity - a hot sense of weight, a feeling of smothering.

A moment of existential dread that permeates the air.

This isn't an acute fear: Oh no, a rabid dog! This is a subtler feeling, worse for its invisibility.

I've never been much prone to it, but I feel it more now as a parent. It's easier to handle the risks of the world for yourself, but for small children?

The news, lately, has been full of triggers. Anders Behring Breivik. A man sets off a bomb, and then, as if killing a bunch of people with a bomb wasn't enough, he walked into a camp of young people, mostly teens, and started a massacre. What struck me about this (aside from the fact that, when online, Mr. Breivik used emoticons - :P - after making jokes about exterminating people, which, if nothing else, is a flashing sign of the coming Internet Apocalypse) was just the faces of the victims. It's interesting to see pictures. A brief news account will have numbers, with whole lives lost between digits. How many memories might be hiding between 7 and 6?

Most of them were very young. One was 14, just a boy. They went off to camp, full of excitement. They walked out their front doors, same as always, and yet they would never come back. Their parents will be waiting forever.

The parents hadn't done anything wrong. And there was nothing they could do. Helpless hands; part of their lives stripped away.

Dread.

And then there's the Berry story, about a family in a car accident. There's a beautiful part to this story, with the internet campaign that suddenly flashed everywhere to raise money for support of the children (Internet Redemption). But this was only needed because of the sheer suddenness of an accident. A car, an impact, and the parents were dead. The girl, the youngest of the three children, had a number of broken bones. The two boys were both paralyzed. Paralyzed and orphaned.

Dread.

The parents have left, though not by choice. And yet there's a terrible fear in this for me. That somehow, just when my kids need me most, I won't be there for them. So strange. As a child, I probably had moments of fear: What if I become lost? What if Mommy and Daddy leave? But now I fear that somehow I will be the one to leave, I will be the one who's not there, swallowed by life or death.

Dread.

My littlest is eighteen months. He's also a handful. Oh, he's a jolly, friendly little guy. But he's hell on wheels, running and climbing everywhere. I call him Evel Knievel for his escape tendencies. And the other day, while heads were briefly turned, he climbed into our car after a door was left open. He happily sat and played while a search went on around him.

But there is, in that moment, a dread. The looming up of the unknown, of chance, of the simple unknowingness of life. With my son it was nothing. Little Evel playing a trick, unknowing himself of what that trick might mean. But life can turn on a moment. The sudden impact of a car; a man walking onto an island with a rifle.

Random and merciless events of the indecipherable present.

And yet we have no choice but to live, to face that unknowingness. There's no way to hide. You need to gather yourself, to tell yourself a story of faith--to convince yourself. We hold to something: a faith in God, a faith in fate, a faith in ourselves, or a faith in the simple probability of hope. We hold to something. A faith in the mathematics of life, that hope divided by despair and dread will somehow equal a positive number.

Little Evel is climbing everywhere these days. I found him the other day, sitting calmly in the middle of the kitchen table, playing, having monkeyed his way up there (rappeling gear, perhaps?). You worry about a fall, you stay alert, you do everything you can - yet sometimes you simply have to trust in their balance.

Four Short Walls #10