Bookpiles

Currently reading, briefly noted:

Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.

On the ordinariness of manna, and the table manners appropriate for eating with God and neighbor. Many inviting recipes and useful tips throughout. The brief fifth chapter is an astonishingly beautiful prose poem about man, rite, and world, spun out of the children's travel game Animal Vegetable Mineral.

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Boethius: The Poems from the Consolation of Philosophy, Translated out of the Original Latin into Diverse Historical Englishings, Diligently Collaged by Peter Glassgold. Sun & Moon, 1994.

Beautifully typeset. The Latin is left, the Glassgoldian English right. The letter Thorn, my lost love, adorns Glassgold's strange alter-English language which is something like the linguistic life of Anglofonia flashing before its eyes (in the moments before its death?); or like the historically simultaneous self-knowledge -an appropriately Boethian idea- of the Angel of All English. The speech of the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Elizabeth, Spenser, and the broadly modern all fuse into a single dialect striving to evoke all English possibilities, even the lost ones, in the service of an antiphonal echo of the Latin text. I was ready to enjoy the exercise intellectually, but found to my surprise that if you can recite Chaucer, and have a working grasp of the sounds of Old English, Glassgold's renderings recite very nicely: they have a solemn sonority but one happy enough to leap lively with syncopation and quick rhythms. And even those with only a passing familiarity with Old English will find the Glassgoldian intelligible enough: if you can read Finnegan's Wake, you can read this, and the poet appends to the book a helpful glassgoldossary of his Old English usages.

He has done something like this experiment before, in Hwaet! A Little Old English Anthology of Modernist Poetry, but the English here is truly historically diverse, and, as advertised, very diligently collaged: I didn't have a sense of academic pastiche, but rather, had the sense of synthetic, spontaneous improvisation from deep wells of poetic resource, overflowing the bounds of present usage: which is what poetry always is.

Glassgold says he is inspired (bemused?) by Benjamin's idea of the pure language which exists between- and it's important, I think, to say "between" rather than "behind"- an original and the translation. One hears it indirectly in the act of translation, not so much in the original, taken as such, or the product. Did I hear it here? I'm still listening.

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Farel Dalrymple, The Pop Gun War. Dark Horse, 2003.

The tale of a boy who freecycles a disenchanted angel's discarded wings, acquiring the power to fly over his city of homely hierophanies and into and between the stories which play out within it. Shortsighted flying fish, a dapper dwarf, a possibly magical bum beset by the cruel and idle rich, an angry, vaguely Rasputinian wandering ascetic, and, above all (narratively and altitudinally) Sinclair's borrowed wings, barely attached, a bandaged transplant. Home and homelessness, memory and forgetfulness, all the commonplaces of the problem of findings one's bearings. Look for the symbolic juxaposition of bike and wings, and find the sign that this is true fairy tale. Wonderful, magical, beautifully rendered (Dalrymple is a very skilled draftsman, with a sculptural brush which gives remarkable body and weight to his images). Shaping up to be one of my favorite graphic novels.

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Henri Morier, Dictionnaire de Poetique et de Rhetorique. Presses Universitaires de France, 1961.

All the ways of words. For a little love song to this book, look here.

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Satish Chandra Vidybhusana, A History of Indian Logic: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Schools. Motilal Banarsidass, 1988.

Hetu of is/is: Where there is my bookshelf/there are only good books.

This book is on my bookshelf.

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Alex Rose, The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales. The Hotel St George Press 2007.

Improbable parables of problemata scientific, historic, linguistic: but the underlying problem behind them all being the fact that we can imagine ways in which we might know otherwise than we do: the fact of counterfactual forms of knowledge. A problem well worth posing, especially in such a clever, counter-pedantic, and evocative way. The mystery of meaning unmystified (a little) through mystery. Will be inevitably compared to Borges, Calvino, Pavic.