where the tangent is the architecture
I'm an independent bookseller, so please forgive me if I chatter about books. They're almost all I have.
The other night I was asked to speak about some new books this season that an audience should strive to read at all costs.
I took some time the night before to write down a few thoughts on index cards. I use index cards for everything.
When going to speak with the audience—residents and curiosity seekers at an artist’s colony in Greenwich Village—I brought the index cards and two sacks of books as props.
When it came time to speak I sat on a black plywood cube before a few rows of chairs in an amphitheater. I placed my index cards beside me. I pulled out the first book. I proceeded to entirely disregard the index cards, instead ranting at length, gesticulating with hooked fingers, swinging the books before me in a threatening display, leather elbow patches agleam, this book, you must read this book, forgetting most of what I’d written, too caught up in enthusiasm, eschewing nuance for needling, for exhortion. I went on for twenty minutes, left the books where I’d stacked them, gathered my unread notes and sat back down.
Below are some of those unused notes.
JOAN DIDION
Tiny Queen of Meter … the evening out of drumbeat to sussuration … with Roth and Merwin, now a poet of the aging body.
GENNADY AYGI
Atavistic imagery … powerful elegies, almost Simonedean
JEAN-PATRICK MANCHETTE/ JACQUES TARDI
Brutal, convoluted, squinty … mute
HAL FOSTER
Hoodwinked
PETER NADAS
Redefining the limits of representation … conventional prose … radically embodied … each gesture becomes portentious after reading … like Elsa Morante, Genji Monogatari
BOOKSELLING
Our inky dog-eared hearts … asking you to revel, to join us in creating a space of impossible oddity and sorrow—sorrow above all else—to let yourself be changed by it and in so doing to change the greater world we share … not known for our bravery … grafters of strange fruit … agents of dissent … pardon me if I quake
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