A selection of art & photo books for summertime reading

These previously-reviewed titles at Bellemeade Books are a good reason to enjoy summer indoors on the couch: from a rediscovered story by William Burroughs getting the graphic-novel treatment, to the photography of North Carolina photographer Joe Webb. There's still plenty of summer left to be lazy and entertained, too.

Above: Everyone's favorite cranky Uncle Bill, William S. Burroughs, continues to battle the forces of Control years after his death. The author gave name to heavy metal, provided inspiration to underground writers everywhere, and pissed off an entire generation of academic critics, and now his forty-year old "bedtime story" Ah Pook Is Here is re-published in a deluxe edition by Fantagraphics Books: "Ah Pook Is Here is a consideration of time with respect to the differing perceptions of the ancient Maya and that of the current Western mindset. It was Burroughs’ contention that both of these views result in systems of control in which the elite perpetuate its agendas at the expense of the people. They make time for themselves and through increasing measures of Control attempt to prolong the process indefinitely."

The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s. Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructed with random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

The University of Texas at Austin recently offered a rare opportunity to see an image considered to be "the world's first photograph." Taken in 1826, the shadowy, indistinct image is almost invisible to the eye, but it is the centerpiece of a grand collection of 35,000 photographs, nearly 200 of which were displayed at the Harry Ransom Center on the Austin campus. The University of Texas Press is publishing a companion volume with 125 plates selected from the Gernsheim collection. From the book's preface: "The collection’s clearest strength remains its holdings in nineteenth-century British photography, including hundreds of images by such masters as David Hill and Robert Adamson, Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, and Henry Peach Robinson. The Gernsheims carried their passion for the medium into the twentieth century by also collecting significant works by modern photographers, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Man Ray, Paul Strand, Albert Renger-Patsch, Edward Weston, and Henri Cartier-Bresson."

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books. While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or (more rightly) kitsch's complete lack of one. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.Some of the academic essays have not aged well -- the book was originally published in 1968 -- even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks,"writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

"In the Good Old Summertime" (Michael Ruby)

In the Good Old Summer Time
Michael Ruby

            —For Mary Ford

In the good old lemon elegance
Megalomaniacal summer time
In the good old elastic blueprints
Soft real estate this summer time
Strolling through Tory bottomland
Morgan melted the shady
And dice prolong the lane
With seasoned eaglets
Mexican blues your baby
Mandarin professionals mine
You hold premium soda
Heartless tupelos plagued her hand
Press plastic and she
Belted ice monster holds yours
And that’s a precious peace sign
Diamond horseshoes a very good sign
That she’s red sugar
Almonds mask your tootsie wootsie
In the good old placement soup
Solomonic summer time

In the good old plastic gasoline

Pell-mell summer time

In the good old purple machines

Mascara opens summer time

Strolling through lefthanded force fields

Toys rising the shady

Peaceable development lane

With primetime parking lot

Heavenly silver your baby

Seasoned eaglets mine

You hold plastic Rangoons

Precious membrane her hand

Sincerity breathes and she

Meaty begonias hold yours

And that’s parallel sauce

Leather orifices a very good sign

That she’s omnivorous eelgrass

Monstrous pie your tootsie wootsie

In the good old oily fractures

Whales talkin’ through summer time

In the good old sordid ether

Position holograms for summer time

In the good old monster factory

Makeup performs through summer time

Strolling through ambulance regions

Pinecones polish the shady

Lampblack neglect the lane

With telltale megalomania

Mesmerizing blue your baby

Elevated feathers mine

You hold purple plastic boys

Leather salvation her hand

Devilish soybeans and she

Household plastic hold yours

And that’s somatic ice

Breathing eagles a very good sign

That she’s boiling blue bananas

Morganatic toothaches your tootsie wootsie

In the good old mama petunias

Onyx eagles through summer time

"In the Good Old Summertime" by Michael Ruby appears online in the current poetry section of The Straddler. Ruby is the author of two poetry books, At an Intersection and Window on the City. He is currently at work on several new books of poetry: The Mouth of the Bay, based on pre-Socratic propositions; Close Your Eyes, transcriptions of what he sees with his eyes closed; and American Songbook and The Star-Spangled Banner, two related works using lyrics from 20th century American popular songs and the national anthem. His blog is Fleeting Memories.

On the road with Michael Chabon's "Gentlemen"

Summer's here, and the reading -- as it should be -- is easy. June 16 may be Bloomsday, but I'll save reading Ulysses for some other season. Meanwhile, trips to the library can provide some entertaining surprises when the air conditioning is running on high.

Michael Chabon's 2007 novel Gentlemen of the Road is a fast and dizzying spin through lands far away and long ago. Like other writers who have enjoyed taking their readers to unexpected places, the prolific Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys) weaves a spell here that recalls the adventure tales of Rudyard Kipling and the travelogues of 19th-century British wanderers like Sir Richard Burton.

Unlike their British predecessors, however, these are certainly no gentlemen of leisure. Amram and Zelikman aren't even British. Chabon's original title -- Jews With Swords -- lays the story more directly on the line than the published novel's genteel title would suggest. Whether or not the reader is swept up in the story of two Jewish charlatans in the Caucasus mountains of Khazaria circa 950 A.D. is a moot point, since the novel's quick 200 pages leave very little room for second-guessing the writer's intentions. Neither is Chabon interested in a plain, unvarnished tale: Gentlemen of the Road is told in a baroque writing style that pulls out all the considerable descriptive tricks at Chabon's command.

 

"Then tossing aside the wine bowls, they faced each other. The watchful mahout caught a flicker in the giant African's eyes that was not torchlight. Once more the ax dragged the African like a charger dragging a dead cavalryman by the heel. The Frank tottered backward, and then as the African heaved past he drove the square toe of his left boot into the African's groin. All the men in the inn-yard squirmed in half-willingsympathy as the African collapsed in silence onto his stomach. The Frank slid his preposterous sword into the African's side and yanked it out again. After thrashing about for a few instants, the African lay still, as his dark -- though not, someone determined, black -- blood muddied the ground." 

A reader getting lost in the thicket of Chabon's prose is on his own. Chabon writes with the literary abandon of the pay-by-the-word adventure serials popular in the boys' magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, and with a suspension of belief that equals the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs before that. Its a fun and exhilarating style, a little exhausting -- the tossing of a knife warrants fifty words, if it wants five -- but Chabon knows that Gentlemen of the Road is a tale told quickly. Originally a serial published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the novel jumps from scene to scene is a breathless hurry. Any reader of Neal Stephenson's collected works will marvel at Gentlemen'sbrevity. No moss gathers here.
Although some readers will likely grouse about the lack of Serious Writing in Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon isn't out to trick the reader: in an afterword the writer makes it clear that he is stepping outside his usual story framework of "divorce, death, illness, violence, random and domestic; divorce, bad faith, deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce -- that about covers it."

In short, says the author, I have gone off in search of a little adventure. The point is made again by the design of the book: it's profusely illustrated, as the publishing trade used to trumpet, with drawings by Gary Gianni, illustrator of the Prince Valiant comic strip.

And a novel that centers on the exploits of two tenth-century Jewish comrades-in-arms is not your typical colonials-in-bush-country, although it does echo the rollicking style of, say, the late George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series. If Chabon enjoys this kind of story-telling, he could fashion a second career by picking up where Fraser left off in that lengthy series of escapades, based on the fictional memoirs of Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.

One element that makes Gentlemen a pleasure to read, like Fraser's Flashman books, is that Chabon tells his story without irony or tongue too firmly in cheek. If there's no heavy thinking going on here, it's a relief to read a novel that doesn't keep winking and nudging the reader for approval of its cleverness. Sure, it's doubtful that this ranks with great literature, but it's a fun read and a summer afternoon's entertainment. In that, Chabon -- who shows a remarkable imagination for a good yarn -- joins others like Dumas pere and fils, and Victor Hugo, who knew a thing or two about swashbuckling narratives. That's not bad company at all.

Inventing the 60s: an excerpt from "Fug You," Ed Sanders

Calling Ed Sanders a "lion in winter" these days (he's 73 now) would probably solicit more a laugh than a growl from the one-time publisher of a review called "Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts." But then he liked to add a gleam of mischief to his creative mix of ideas even in the heady 1960s. 

Musician, writer, bookstore-owner, publisher -- and, occasionally, all at the same time -- Ed's still out swinging the hammer as the online publisher of The Woodstock Journal: "working for an organic food supply, safe air, nonpolluted water, a total end to poverty, national health care, personal freedom and fun." America needs his voice as much as ever (and maybe more: his recorded projects include Thirsting for Peace, 2005, and Poems for New Orleans, 2007). These days boutiques, high-rises, chain caffeine and furniture stores have replaced the storefront mimeograph-revolution barricades. Ed's 1991 self-produced "Yiddish Speaking Socialists of the Lower East Side" is a poetic retelling of an even older East Side history -- New York isn't what it used to be, either. 

His memoir Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, The Fugs, and the Counterculture in the Lower East Side (DaCapo Press) is a freewheeling history of a creative era that has pretty much disappeared into legend and myth. Here's an excerpt.

The Founding of My Magazine

I founded Fuck You / A Magazine of the Arts in February 1962 after a bunch of us, mostly friends from the Catholic Worker, went to see Jonas Mekas’s Guns of the Trees at the Charles Theater on Avenue B. I was there mainly because the ad for the film in the Village Voice stated that my hero Allen Ginsberg was in it. For years I had avidly read Jonas Mekas’s weekly Voice column, “Movie Journal,” which mainly focused on the struggles and delights of the world of underground films.

I sensed from reading Mekas’s weekly columns that he was a person of great generosity and communality of spirit. That is, it wasn’t all Me! Me! Me! as in so much of the avant-garde. I thought he had a genuine will to help other filmmakers thrive and survive. I later learned that Mekas had paid for the printing of Jack Smith’s filmFlaming Creatures.

Mekas had just founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and lived nearby on Twelfth Street, although I didn’t know that while I was watching Guns of the Trees. The Lower East Side in those years was a Do-It-Now zone, and you knew maybe only a snippet of someone’s history or scene, if anything at all. All I knew is that the first thing I read each week in the Voice was “Movie Journal.”

I was particularly fascinated by the appearance of Allen Ginsberg as a narrator in the film. I had not yet met Ginsberg, although I had memorized “Howl” when I was still in Missouri in 1957, and I had seen him at Beat/New York School readings, such as one in November 1959 where he read at the Living Theater with Frank O’Hara. Wow. As I sat fascinated in the Charles Theater that February night with my pals, I never could have dreamed that the author of “Howl” and “Kaddish” would become a close friend.

At one point in Guns of the Trees Ginsberg chanted one of his poems with the sentence “I dreamt that J. Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hall of the Capitol.” It was a fragment that opened up such huge vistas of possibility in my mind! I transformed the fragment into the dedication for my soon-to-be-published magazine.

Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Just as Allen Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926 (and not near the Dniester River in Russia) because the pogroms in the Russian Pale, first in the 1880s and later around the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1904, drove his mother’s and father’s families to the American Dream, so, too, were Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, driven from Lithuania to the United States, this time in their case by the Nazis. In the early 1940s Jonas and Adolfas put out a mimeographed anti-Nazi newspaper, cutting stencils on a typewriter in a woodshed behind their house in Semeniskiai in Lithuania. Later they escaped from a German slave labor camp.

In 1949 they arrived in the United States, where both of them became filmmakers. In 1955 Jonas founded the magazine Film Culture. In the fall of 1958 he began his very influential weekly column, “Movie Journal,” in the Village Voice. In the summer of 1960 the Mekas brothers purchased some out-of-date film stock and began their feature-length film Guns of the Trees. Jonas wrote the script.

Mekas formed the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in early 1962 after another film distribution operation refused to screen a film by Stan Brakhage, Anticipation of the Night. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative practiced no censorship at all, and 75 percent of the rental fees for showing a film went directly to the filmmaker. And so in early 1962 the Charles Theater on Avenue B near Twelfth Street began showing underground films. Some of us from nearby streets eagerly attended.

Across the street was Stanley’s, a packed bar frequented by poets, civil rights activists, filmmakers, painters, and oodles of others from the nearby rent-controlled buildings. After Guns of the Trees my friends and I adjourned to Stanley’s for conversation and fun. Inspired by the film, I announced that evening that I was beginning a magazine and I solicited manuscripts. The name I tossed out among the revelers made them laugh. It had been in my mind a number of years.

Excerpted from "Chapter 1: The Glories of the Early ‘60s" in Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side, by Ed Sanders. The book is published by DaCapo Press.

Aspirin, cocaine, heroin: the history of feeling better

At the io9 website, Esther Inglis-Arkell writes a quick overview of the nineteenth-century opiate craze, When Opium Was For Newborns And Bayer Sold Heroin. The discovery of new and stronger pain-killers was a development of British and American medicine, the big pharma of its day  (Bayer & Co., in Germany,  marketed the new painkilling compound,  heroin). 

Regulation at the time -- as the current class of laissez-faire proponents and Ron Paul supporters would like to overlook, or even address -- was practically non-existent. This led to an easy availability of patent medicines, from laudinum (opium & alcohol) to Coca-Cola (which original formula included coca leaves and was marketed as a quick-acting, pick-me-up refreshment).

By the 1970s the cultural view had shifted to the point of Nixon's call for a war on drugs, although this seems now, as then, a political manuevering that intended to garner more votes than actual results. How much money has been spent on the American battle against "drugs" (both in legal and illegal intent) will never be calculated properly. Senior citizens crossing the Canadian border for cheaper prescription drugs? Arrest them on the bus. 

The current tussle over the Affordable Care Act is simply a battle to decide who gets the money, and how much. At last count, Republicans in the Senate have said "nope, that's still not enough money for us" 39 times in their drive to "stop" Obamacare. 

Yet the successive anti-drug campaigns create more problems than they were ever meant to solve, and result in more addicts than arrests. In 2013 the solution is farther away than ever, and with one political party obsessed with simply getting Obama out of office, any intelligent approach to drug regulation is not going to be an issue on either side.

Here, then, is an except from the golden age of deregulation which politicians would rather Americans never learn about.

There was a time when mothers gave their babies opium, people bought hallucinogens at the local bar, and anxious patriots sent hypodermic needles and cocaine to soldiers as a present. It was called The Great Binge, and it's probably wrong to feel sad that it's over.

Today we have Bayer Aspirin. It relieves headaches. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they had Bayer Heroin.

It was most often a cough syrup, though it probably took care of headaches as well. Heroin was not a slang term developed for a drug, but an actual brand name claimed by the drug company. (They have since allowed their proprietary claim on the name to lapse.) This, and many other drugs were used for everyday maladies like dry throats, menstrual cramps, and babies who cried too long. The period between 1870 and 1918 was called The Great Binge — and people shoved everything into their bodies that they could.

Heroin, believe it or not, was hailed as a wonder substance for its ability to wean addicts off their drug of choice. It was developed by Bayer, when Bayer was primarily called Aktiengesellschaft Farbenfabriken, as a way of treating pain without exposing people to that terribly addictive drug known as morphine. The painkiller was a scourge of the land, turning wounded soldiers into addicts. Bayer & Co. was trying to synthesize, from morphine, the less addictive codeine, and they stumbled on heroin.

Heroin was used for many things, such as cough drops and as a painkiller for menstrual cramps and migraines. And it was used to "cure" addiction to morphine. This non-addictive painkiller was meant to quell the pain of withdrawal from morphine and help morphine addicts kick the habit.

Heroin, outside the body, was unquestionably different than morphine. Unfortunately, when heroin crosses the blood-brain barrier, the body metabolizes it to morphine. In fact, heroin gets into the brain quicker, thanks to its particular solubility, than morphine itself. The company had just worked out a way for someone to get a high faster.

... Opium was also used as a treatment for asthma. Asthma was considered a "seizure" disorder, located mainly in the muscles. Opium was thought to relax the muscles constricting the tubes in the lungs, and allow the sufferer to breathe more easily. All kinds of opium tinctures and vapors were devised to help poor asthmatics. Possibly the stuff worked by drugging them so much that they couldn't participate in any activity that might cause an attack. ...

But even if opium was given to children, it at least wasn't endorsed by the Pope. Cocaine, it seemed, was the preferred drug of religious leaders everywhere, and it started with Angelo Mariani in 1863. The vintner decided to do something to spice up his wine, looked around for something to really add a kick, and settled on coca leaves. The coca leaves transferred benzoylecgonine and ecgonine methyl ester to the alcohol in the wine, and the three combine to form a powerful psychoactive drug.

Vin Mariani was so popular that it earned a place on the person of two different Popes. Pope Leo VIII and Pope Saint Pius X both carried hip flasks of the wine, and Pope Leo awarded Mariani a Vatican gold medal, something the advertisements for Vin Mariani regularly stressed. The wine became the inspiration for using coca leaves in coca cola. Many energizing beverages with coca leaves were sold. One tonic advised customers to drink a glass after each meal. Children were to drink half a glass.

The Pope's use of coca wine became the inspiration for other religious leaders. Cocaine drops were sold regularly for those who had to do public speaking. Supposedly it was meant to give speakers a smooth and rich speaking voice, but its special ability as an "invigorator" featured prominently in most advertisements. Preachers, with their need to give animated and prolonged sermons, and especially stump preachers that traveled around, were frequent users of these lozenges. Stage actors, singers, and teachers took them as well. ...

Shy as they might be about acknowledging the money of American corporate giants during the continuing assault on the Affordable Care Act, the drug industry (and Republican politicians) will support the confusing status quo. It's a sad statement that the richest nation on earth would rather argue dismantling universal health care than construct a successful economy, but that's American politics in the 21st century. Pass that cocaine lozenge.