This Old Book: 'The New York Trilogy'

I bought this Penguin edition in the mid-1980s at Louie's Bookstore Cafe on Charles Street in Baltimore. The paperback combined Paul Auster's three surreal detective stories about New York. I have not read all of his subsequent novels, but these spoke to me. For some reason, ever since I was a child, I have enjoyed stories about mysterious disappearances. I also enjoy literary twists on genre fiction (mysteries, science fiction, fantasies). I remember the jacket copy for "Ghosts" was particularly intriguing: "Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his window." But a passage in the third book, "The Locked Room," probably sums up how I feel about Auster's work. The narrator finds a notebook belonging to a writer who has vanished:

If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as their their final purpose was to cancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. It is odd, then, that the feeling that survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity. It is as if Fanshawe knew his final work had to subvert every expectation I had for it.

    This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades.

This Old Book: 'The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction'

My parents bought this 1980 collection for me as a present, probably for birthday or Christmas. It is amazingly comprehensive, and I recall reading it many times. The list of authors ould be familiar to any fan of science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Blish, Philip Jose Farmer, John Varley, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Larry Niven, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov , and many more. Most were originally published in pulp magazines or other cheap editions in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. With 754 pages of tiny type, it supplied hours of entertainment. I recall reading it in the cool of the basement on hot summers (we had no air conditioning), in an old raised ranch in a subdivision on the edge of a field in a town that was on the verge of economic collapse. A lawn mower buzzed somewhere. A cat was probably curled at my feet. That house is sold. My parents are long gone. I had not opened this book in decades, until I decided to write this post, but some memory of those days has kept me repacking it into boxes, smoothing his tattered dust cover, from upstate New York to college in Ithaca, to Baltimore, to Pennsylvania to various New York apartments. And here it is, like a time capsule I stashed away for myself in the last days of adolescence.

    This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades.

This Old Book: 'The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog'

I remember that my father had a copy of "The Last Whole Earth Catalog," which came out sometime in the 1970s. This Millennium version was released in 1994 with the tagline " Access to Tools & Ideas for the 21st Century." Its huge size -- about 384 pages, roughly 24 by 12 inches, has made it tough to lug around all this time. It's basically a compendium of cool stuff of the sort that the Web and Internet have made obsolete in print form (though the catalog lives on, I guess, and we still have Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools). This edition of the print catalog includes a foreword by Stewart Brand (mentioned earlier on this blog), one of the creators of the original 1960s era catalog. So now that we are here in the post-Internet 21st century, what remains of value in here? Some of the topics covered: organic food, edible landscaping, lucid dreaming, psychedelics, bicycling science, virtual reality, comix, zines, fringe video, self-defense for kids, meditation, erotic literature, building a sidewalk telescope, do-it-yourself CD-ROM, satellite TV, and "Internet: How to Use it." An excerpt from the latter:

Before you get too excited about Mosaic, remember that image and sound files can be huge. If you're connecting over a phone line using SLIP/PPP, the experience can be like sipping jello through a straw. Mosaic looks good at TI speed, which is commonplace at CERN and NCSA. From home, even at 28,800 bps, those hourly SLIP/PPP charges add up, with most of your connect time spent waiting for images to transfer. The Web is, for better or worse, people's information space of choice as we move into the second half of the 1990s. But using it comfortably requires high bandwidth connections that are currently beyond most home users.

    This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades.

This Old Book: 'The Philosopher's Stone'

This science fiction novel by Colin Wilson is really a novel of ideas, and my teen-age self found it quite compelling, so much so that when I lost my paperback copy I ordered this out of print hardcover first edition. There's an element of fantasy to the book, as it describes the adventures of two scientists trying to find rational explanations for what seem to be nearly mythological forces dating back to the ancient Mayans. The scientists are in pursuit of heightened or cosmic consciousness -- brain operations give them the power to read minds and travel back in time to Shakespeare's era -- and, well, then a bunch of other crazy stuff happens. Wilson said that after he read H.G. Wells at age 11 he wanted to write "the definitive novel about time travel. Time travel is a perpetually alluring idea, but it always sounds so preposterous... The question of how to make it sound plausible is quite a challenge." He pulls it off. 

    This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades.

This Old Book: 'Cosmic Consciousness'

This 1901 book by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., formerly medical superintendent of the asylum for the insane in London, Canada, was reissued as a paperback in 1969, and apparently thousands of copies were sent to the used bookstores of Ithaca, N.Y., where I ran into so many copies of it that I finally broke down and bought one. "A classic investigation of the development of man's mystic relation to the infinite," the book describes something that might sound similar to zen enlightment, or a born-again Christian experience, or various other mystical states. There are charts and footnotes. The best part is the second half that lists a number of people -- some well-known historical figures, others individuals listed only by their initials -- who the doctor believed had attained this state of consciousness. They include: Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Christ, Paul (the saint), Mohammed, Bartolome le Casas, Francis Bacon, Honore de Balzac, Walt Whitman, Spinoza, Pushkin, Tennyson, and Thoreau. Among the anonymous adepts is H.B., who wrote of a realization that came upon him while reading the only copy of Darwin's "Origin of Species" available in his town:

The first real mental illumination I remember to have experienced was when I saw that the universe exists in each of its individual atoms -- that is, the universe is the result of a few simple processes infinitely repeated. When a drop of water has been mathematically measured, every principle will have been used which would be called for in the measurement of hte heavens. All life on the globe is sustaned by digestion and assimilation; when by voluntary and traumatic action these stop death follows. The history of an individual mind is the history of the race. Know one thing in its properties and relations and you will know all things. 

     This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Lost in the Cosmos'

Walker Percy, a physician and practicing Catholic in the American South, wrote a number of interesting novels, the best-known perhaps being "The Moviegoer," winner of the National Book Award in 1962 (or was it?), beating books by Salinger and Heller. But Percy also wrote some oddball nonfiction, including this one, billed as "The Last Self-Help Book." It seems to have been an attempt to puncture some of the astrological, spiritual and pseudo-therapy books on the market in the 1970s. It is a strange and entertaining read (marred, alas, by the casual homophobia of that time, among other flaws). The book is part humor, part spiritual quest, part a treatise on semiotics before that word was in vogue. It is also part self-help quiz, and part riff on Carl Sagan's popular science book "Cosmos," with one of the best arguments you'll ever read against suicide. You'll find that in the chapter entitled, "The Depressed Self: Whether the Self is Depressed because there is something wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World." 

     This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'The Dog Is Us'

Marcelle Clements was a hot writer in the 1980s, with essays in Rolling Stone, Esquire, The Village Voice and other soon-to-be fading beacons of the new journalism. The title essay from Rolling Stone in this book is the lament of an ex-hippie who discovers that grown-up worries and responsibilities do not really mix well with a marijuana habit, as euphoria gives way to paranoia. Your high self used to laugh at the silly dog in the dorm room. Now your life is the dog, and it's no laughing matter. Other topics: the rise of the "mutant elite" (I still don't get that one); the evolution of the meaning of "cool"; why no New Yorker should ever go below 14th Street; the lives of anxious professional women in the big city; and other tropes of what people imagine life was like in Manhattan from about 1981 to 1985, when it was still gritty, and somewhat more affordable, and misery was apparently a pose that could sell magazines. She also has interviews with Klaus Kinski, Sting and a woman turned Sandinista guerrilla. It's quite the dog's breakfast, in other words. From the jacket blurb of this rumpled 1987 paperback: "A born social critic unafraid to feel bad about things, Marcelle Clements goes right to the heart of our post-sixties malaise. In this collection of trenchant, sometimes hilarious pieces, she examines..."  Yadda, yadda. I was a dude in my own 20something malaise, but I pored over this book for clues to what life might be like down the road for an aspiring writer. I keep it now as some sort of artifact of that youth, when baby-boomer Clements was watching 40 approach fast. Whatever happened to her? It appears she eventually ventured below 14th Street (ha!), where she was teaching Proust at N.Y.U. Here's an interview from 2003. 

     This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Shiny Adidas Tracksuits and the Death of Camp'

Remember zines? Before there was McSweeneys, before "A Staggering Work of Hearbreaking Genius," before The Believer, and so many other Dave Eggers projects, there was Might magazine, which could be found in certain obscure zine shops in the East Village (at least, that's where I found it). I still have most of the full run of Might in a box somewhere, but this 1998 paperback collects the best of its snarky Spy Lite vision. Eggers, the editor, was such an unknown at that point that his name appears nowhere on the cover, though there is an essay in here by him about the F word. Getting top billing is an essay by David Foster Wallace that I had completely forgotten until I just looked closely at this for the first time in a dozen years: "Hail the Returning Dragon, Clothed in New Fire," which tries to look on the bright side of AIDS. Yes, really. Also in here: Ted Rall's "College Is for Suckers." A piece by R.U. Sirius and another by the frontman for Soul Coughing, a band I barely remember. It's a strange little time capsule from the eve of the Internet age.

     This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy'

I used to own individual paperback copies of this cult trilogy as a teenager in the 70s, but they were lost along the way. I picked up this omnibus edition sometime in the late 1980s but never got around to re-reading it. A glance at the first few pages makes me think I might not have the patience to revisit it.

Its themes of secret societies and conspiracies, and the absurd or evocative character names (Hagbard Celine, Fission Chips, Mama Sutra), and certain phrases (first line: "It was the year when they finally immanentized the eschaton") remind me of David Foster Wallace, Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon, though the prose is not nearly as good. (It is much better than the writing in its trashier descendant, "The Da Vinci Code.")

The authors, Robert Shea and the strange polymath Robert Anton Wilson,  make the most of it, jumping around in time from the political assassinations of the 60s to Atlantis to John Dillinger and the final words of Dutch Shultz. There is a fair amount of right- and left-wing conspiracy theory about freemasons and the Illuminatti, riffs on Sixties radicalism, drugs and sex, numerology, Aleister Crowley, the Principia Discordia, the mystical properties of the number 23, and more. It's a wackadoodle ride on the dark side of the counterculture, mislabeled a work of science fiction, a perfect cultural artifact of the paranoid style of 1975. 

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com.  The Tumblr is probably more readable, until I get around to repairing the imported posts here. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments attempting to figure out why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur'

Ah, Le Morte D’Arthur. This 1970s paperback has been kicking around my collection since high school. I probably bought it after viewing "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," one of the first movies I was allowed to see in a theater without adult accompaniment.

Needless to say, Malory is not really as entertaining. I'm with Dennis the Constitutional Peasant: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government."

This edition of Malory has a glossary. For example, the questing beast "has the head of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the buttocks of a lion, and the feet of a hart. From its belly issues the sound of thirty pairs of yapping hounds. It is never brought to earth."

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes'

I have a bunch of these Calvin and Hobbes books, purchased when Bill Watterson was still creating the strip for newspapers. Part of me wishes he were still plugging away as a cartoonist, but I respect Watterson for hanging it up while the strip was still a perfect work of art, fresh, funny and not tired, the way so many other strips get in their old age. He is sort of the J.D. Salinger of newspaper comics. Attempts to track him down have become something of a genre. He’s not that hard to find, but I imagine he’s tired of talking about something he did years ago.  At least we have the various collections, including this one from 1990. I re-read them every now and then, and my daughter has recently been absorbed by them. I think it’s cool that she is being entertained by a great and funny work of art that I myself loved and bought a decade before she was born. I do wonder if she’s caught on that I learned most of my parenting style from Calvin’s father.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Ian Shoales' Perfect World'

I fondly remember the National Public Radio of the 1980s, especially "All Things Considered," because it kept me awake on so many long automobile trips in the wilds of Maryland, Pennsylvania and upstate New York. I must have bought this book after hearing a commentary on the show from Ian Shoales, a member of Duck's Breath Mystery Theater. I'm not entirely sure that it was clear to me at first that he was the fictional creation of Merle Kessler. After a blast of cynical commentary, his trademark sign-off was "I gotta go."  In later years, Kessler has written articles, performed on KQED radio, local theater on the West Coast, kept a blog, and even done some recent podcasting. I can't say that this Reagan-Cold War-era book has aged all that well. So much in our culture, world and society was about to change. A lot of the references seem stale or frozen in time. What might have seemed edgy then has been rendered mild in this age of "The Daily Show," Sean Hannity and The Onion. It is a window on a forgotten era.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'The Straight Dope'

Before Snopes and Wikipedia, before the Web itself, there was The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams, a column of “answers to the questions that torment everyone.” Was it true what they said about Catherine the Great and the horse? Why does hair turn gray? How do they get the stripes into toothpaste? How come you never see baby pigeons? Does water go counter-clockwise down the drain in the southern hemisphere? The column started in 1973 in the Chicago Reader, but I’m pretty sure I first came across it in a local weekly in Ithaca (possibly The Grapevine), and later in the Baltimore City Paper. The copyright page on this paperback is dated 1984. As of this post, the column is still published, and is available on the Web, but in an age when any and all trivia is at our fingertips, it feels a bit beside the point. Cecil did have an engaging and combative prose style that was entertaining, though his true identity remains a mystery. Many, including Wikipedia, suspect the writer is the man identified as his “longtime editor,” Ed Zotti. 

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Labyrinths'

No library is complete without some Borges. I obtained this 1964 edition at a used bookshop on the recommendation of a friend who was going through a Borges phase in college. Someone I don’t know wrote an inscription in the cover to someone else I don’t know, dated 1986. A doomed romance or friendship. Upon review, the text seems more oblique than I recall. From a piece called “The Immortal”:

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. I have noted that, in spite of religions, this conviction is very rare. Israelites, Christians and Moslems profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment. The wheel of certain Hindustani religions seems more reasonable to me; on this wheel, which has neither beginning nor end, each life is the effect of the preceding and engenders the following, but none determines the totality… Indoctrinated by a practice of centuries, the republic of immortal men had attained the perfection of tolerance and almost that of indifference. They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men. Because of his past or future virtues, every man is worthy of all goodness, but also of all perversity, because of his infamy in past or future.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.