Unread Books
Last year, I wrote a post about books I had on my reading table that were at that point only partially read. I’m not sure why I wrote that post except perhaps as a way of goading myself to finish reading those books. The books were The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks, Crossroads, The Milinda Panha, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Texas the Great Theft, and Time Zone J. I finished most of them, but still have a couple to go.
Today I want to mention my most recent pile of unfinished books. I am making progress daily on each. Reading several books at once is probably not the best way to read, but it is how I read now for some reason. I still have wonderful memories of getting lost in a text that I’m reading, reading for many hours uninterrupted. Perhaps its my age, or perhaps it is the world of interruptions in which we currently live. Now I read in dribs and drabs. No more reading straight through the night for me.
I’m reading The Greek Alexander Romance after reading about it in Richard Stoneman’s book The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks. Stoneman compiled and translated this edition of this bizarre anonymous story of Alexander the Great. This highly fictionalized account of Alexander’s life was written over the course of centuries by different authors in different countries and in different languages. The first manuscript is from the 3rd century CE in Greek, but later versions are in Latin and Armenian. There is no definitive version, but what Stonemen has done is to stitch together all the versions into a cohesive whole. He makes a point of letting the reader know that The Alexander Romance is no a work of great literature like the Iliad or Odyssey—it is an adventure story that people in the Classical and Medieval worlds told about Alexander.
Back when I lived in Seattle, we had an intern who had worked as an intern for W.H. Norton, and he had a bunch of printed galleys that he gave away. One of these was My Idea of Fun by Will Self. He hadn’t liked it, but I loved it. Since then I’ve read various Will Self books with pleasure. Self had a hard young life, becoming a heroin addict at age 18. But his extreme bookishness won out. His novels usually involve at least one fantastic element—My Idea of Fun featured a Satan-like individual called the Fat Controller, Great Apes was set in a world where chimpanzees evolved into the lead primate species, creating a world much like ours but overlaid with champanzee behavior, and The Book of Dave takes place in a future England where civilization has collapsed and the country’s main religion is based on the writings of a present day man named Dave (the novel alternates between Dave’s life and the lives of some of the future inhabitants of “Ing”). But Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021 is a collection of his essays and journalism, including an essay about the function of shelves—a piece of furniture perfect for books, but which predates the first book by thousands of years.
When I first became aware of the art that was currently being produced was the 1980s. I knew there were artists before then, but I didn’t have any idea of what they were doing. But I graduated high school in 1981 and the growing prominence of neoexpressionist painting couldn’t be ignored. And as I started reading books and magazines about art, a whole story about the revival of painting entered my consciousness. A famous essay in Artforum from 1981, “Last Exit: Painting” by Thomas Lawson made an argument for the medium while calling out a group of the young neoexpressionist painters who would help define the early 80s. Thomas McEvilley wrote a whole book on the subject, The Exile’s Return. In retrospect, the idea that painting had died out in the 60s and 70s was a hugely overblown notion, but it made for a good story.
But that 40 years ago. The 1980s and its art scene are art history now. The revival of painting is a part of the historical record. In Painting in the 1980s: Reimagining the Medium, Rosemary Cohane Erpf (“Erpf” is a name—indeed a combination of letters—that I have never encountered. When I looked it up online, I mostly got acronyms. But it apparently meant “brown” in Old German) writes about the revival methodically, starting with “New Image Painting” and Susan Rothenberg, who is quoted, “Things rush into empty places, and minimalism had become an empty place.” I’m reading about all these strains of painting from the 80s with deep pleasure and nostalgia.
Anke Feuchtenberger and Katrin de Vries met shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Feuchetnberger lived in the East and de Vries in the West. De Vries saw some of Feuchtenberger’s art in a magazine, contacted her through the magazine, and the two collaborated on three books of extremely strange comics together: Die Hure H., Die Hure H. zieht ihre Bahnen, and Die Hure H. wirft den Handschuh. In the early 2000s, two were translated into English and published by a Belgian micro-press called Bries, which is where I first saw them.
The three books have been collected into one thick volume. W the Whore, by New York Review Comics, translated by Mark Nevins. What I loved and still love about Feuchtenberger’s artwork is that you see the work. Comics are stuff—graphite and ink, etc.—on paper. The physicality of this medium has mostly been neglected by cartoonists. All the pencil smears, eraser marks, initial sketches, are carefully not reproduced to create a sleek finished product. Feuchtenberger leaves all that stuff in and it is beautiful to look at.
Kathy Acker was an experimental writer who got her start in the 1970s but achieved prominence in the 1980s. I’m sure she crossed paths with some of the protagonists of Painting in the 1980s: Reimagining the Medium. They are good books to read simultaneously. In 2020, my old friend Larry Reid published a book called Kathy Acker in Seattle, about Acker’s connections to Seattle’s art, literary and punk rock scenes. I made a video about it. One might wonder how many biographies this writer of unpopular literature needs, and Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker is apparently the second. The first was After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography by Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick. The question is whether the McBride biography is the better one, but I’m committed. It’s the one I’ll read.
FLATS is a photography organization here in Houston that does classes, hosts a community darkroom, puts on exhibitions, and publishes a magazine, FLAT Files. The third issue was just released. It looks beautiful, as usual. This issue features articles and interviews with Diana C. Patin, Sandy Carson, Kristina Knipe, and Bucky Miller, as well as a fascinating piece by the team of Project B. I wrote about FLATS last year—they are a vital and exciting part of the Houston art scene.
Snow by Orhan Pamuk has been sitting on my shelves for a long time, unread. Time to correct that oversight.
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