"Palm Leaves" [Charles Bukowski]

"Palm Leaves"


at exactly twelve o’clock midnight
1973-74
Los Angeles
it began to rain on the
palm leaves outside my window
the horns and firecrackers
went off
and it thundered.
I’d gone to bed at 9 p.m.
turned out the lights
pulled up the covers–
their gaiety, their happiness
their screams, their paper hats,
their automobiles, their women,
their amateur drunks…
New Year’s Eve always terrifies
me
life knows nothing of years.
now the horns have stopped and
the firecrackers and the thunder…
it’s all over in five minutes…
all I hear is the rain
on the palm leaves,
and I think,
I will never understand men,
but I have lived
it through.


–Charles Bukowski   

 

"A is for Armageddon": do you feel lucky, punk?

The end is nigh -- the happiest time of the year!

 

Or so the holiday bookends of December 25 and January 1 are merchandized, pitched, advertised, and wrung (both "-out," after the Christmas wrapping is thrown away, and by New Years, with our party hats askew, back "-in"). What better time to think about the end of days? Humans have thrilled and terrified themselves fantasizing about an event which few of them will ever be unlucky enough to see, although mankind threatens every so often to come tantalizingly close: war, plague, fear, disease, an untested new President, and sheer human nature are capable of capsizing even the warmest holiday thought of good will toward men.

 

And then there's the ever-threatening volatility of nature itself: the butterfly sneeze in the forest that leads to ultimate planetary destruction. It's a wonder that most of us don't spend the next few days trembling in bed with the covers pulled securely above our heads. As the great philosopher Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry Callahan once phrased our eternal, daily doubts about the human dilemma, do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?

 

A is for Armageddon: An Illustrated Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World As We Know It (Harper Books), now released in paperback, is a funny, nervous laugh at the end of days -- whenever and however it should occur. The eternal, open-ended speculation on ultimate doom-and-gloom, as both religious and secular soothsayers have always emphasized, is a game with a singular escape clause: it will happen to someone else before it ever happens to us....that is, if we heed the warning signs.

The book and its accompanying website, a "veritable panoply of impending doom," is a needed tonic to the never-ending round of mall-shopping and enforced jollity of the holiday season. Of course it's a cynic's cornucopia of unknowably bad things that will happen to good people -- and unsuspecting too -- which provides the chill. Those unlucky folks will not be us, likely, so pour yourself another bubbly and put a new log on the fire.

Part of a colorful periodic table of man's possible Doom

 

The author Richard Horne is an equal-opportunity doomsayer: Divine wrath is here (as expected) but one ought to be wary of animal flatulence as well. There are untold ways The End might arrive, and no matter how we prepare and contemplate ultimate Doom, it will still catch us off our guard; for those who like to quantify and identify such unknowables Horne provides a handy periodic table of possibilities. In any event, how can a reader know if it's the beginning of the end? The fully-interactive website offers the nervous and worried a glass-half-empty measure of your own Doom-monger status.

 

Horne is a kind of one-man-disaster band, fixated more on endings than beginnings. He's responsible as well for the list-making success of 101 Things to Do Before You Die. So it's expected that the ultimate end of the inexplicable, irrational human race is presented in all of its widescreen Technicolor glory: the end of the end, so to speak.

 

And if Horne is even half-right it will be a party with a real bang. At this annual festival season of self-congratulation -- we've made it through another year! -- there's always the realization that January bills are yet to come. Or as one wag put it, we should get down upon our knees and all be grateful that we're still on our feet.

 

May the new year bring you all of what you really need, and most of what you really want! (Armageddon optional.)

Winter weather reading: beats, hipsters, and vision quests

 

When the winter weather outside is frightful, cyber-shopping makes more sense than ever. With a few clicks  all of us can go back to dreaming of sugarplums, or whatever makes the winter holidays special for each of us. Here are some books reviewed by others that are worth a year-end browse by the fire.

 

 

Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation: Ann and Samuel Charters (University Press of Mississippi): ... Holmes, a good friend of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and a founding member of the original Beat circle in New York City, also wrote several novels that were respectably reviewed. But he lacked the charisma and theatricality of the later Beat writers, and struggled for literary success even as his friends reached explosive levels of fame. It's only because of these legendary friends, and not because of his own fiction, that John Clellon Holmes merits an extensive literary biography by Ann and Samuel Charters today. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation is unusual among literary biographies because its hero never had a breakout success. Instead, he filled out his career with dead end manuscripts, odd magazine assignments and college teaching jobs. In this sense, Brother-Souls is actually a more accurate glimpse of how most writers live than any typical biography of a famous writer. (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

 

 

 

Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food, Wendell Berry, Introduction by Michael Pollan (Counterpoint Press, above) If you aren't already familiar with Wendell Berry's essays and his fiction, Bringing It to the Table is an excellent introduction, and if you're already an admirer, wanting to spread the word to people on your holiday gift list, this book is a fine addition to Berry's recent publications. Born in 1934, Berry has been publishing poetry, fiction in long and short forms, and essays since the 1960s; he has been working a farm in Kentucky for about as many years. In an essay from 2006 he recalls, "In 1964 my wife Tanya and I bought a rough and neglected little farm on which we intended to grow as much of our own food as we could." Although he came from a farming background, he asked for advice from an organic gardener who was his editor at the time, and seeking out the source of that man's principles, he discovered The Soil and Health, by the British agricultural scientist Sir Alfred Howard. Berry says of Howard, "I have been aware of his influence in virtually everything I have done, and I don't expect to graduate from it. That is because his way of dealing with the subject of agriculture is also a way of dealing with the subject of life in this world." (Jim Quitsland, Sound Food)

What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation: Mark Greif, et al (n+1 Books) All descriptions of hipsters are doomed to disappoint, because they will not be the hipsters you know. But to those of you who are reading What Was the Hipster in 2050, I can only say: Everything in this book is true, and its impressions are perfect. When we talk about the contemporary hipster, we’re talking about a kind of cross-subcultural figure who emerges by 1999 and enjoys a fairly narrow but robust first phase of existence from 1999 to 2003. At which point the category of hipster seemed about to dissipate and return to the primordial subcultural soup, for something else to take over. Instead what we witnessed was an increasing spread and durability of the term, in an ongoing second phase from 2003 to the present. The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young and, more often than not, funny-looking. (Anonymous, Atomic Books)

Fishers of Men – The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest, Adam Elenbaas (Tarcher Press): The cross-generational stories surrounding Elenbaas and his father, and his father and grandfather, sanctify the Freudian influence on drug writing. From the opening chapter when his father lays bleeding, holding a hunting knife, till the final modernist resolution, redefinition of all the relationships occur. It’s very reminiscent of the poem "This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do./ They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.” The Freudian model, which places so much emphasis on a child’s relationship with its parents as a foundation for personality structure, is being played out once more as a literary structure: “One of the most intense psychological settings in the world – the visionary space of ayahuasca” (201). The combination of the psychedelic experience and psychodynamic models is firm territory, not only in Fishers of Men, but in modern drug writing generally. (Rob, editor, The Psychedelic Press UK)

"Eudora's Purple Hat": cocktails with literary pedigrees

 

At this point in the long holiday stretch into December, the only thing left to do with Thanksgiving turkey is throw it out the window. And since no one has dared concoct a turkey martini there will always be one, last, unbound culinary frontier. We hope.

In New Orleans, however, drinks named after literary figures and their works is a bartender's sport. The Houston Chronicle reports of a cocktail in search of a party -- not hard to do at the Monteleone, a venerable New Orleans hotel, and at times home to Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Hemingway.  

Maggie Galehouse, of the Chronicle, and her pal were at the Monteleone on a rainy Friday afternoon. She reports they were "now, officially, wet and thirsty." It seems appropriate  to suggest a cocktail in a literary mood -- "Eudora's Purple Hat," one that even carries a reference to a short story written at the very bar of the Monteleone by Eudora Welty herself. Galehouse writes:

...we were really looking for drinks that somehow reflected writers or their works. He told us some other bars we could try — the Sazerac Bar at The Roosevelt hotel, French 75 at Arnaud’s restaurant — and then, just as we were preparing to leave … the aha moment.

“You know, a few years ago, the hotel hosted a party for Eudora Welty’s 101st birthday,” Allen said. “I created a drink for it, based on her short story, ‘The Purple Hat.’ ”

(It was 2010, and the celebration included a screening of a short film based on the story.) “We’ll take one,” I said.

Welty, apparently, wrote the strange little story at the Hotel Monteleone bar. Indeed, the story is set in a bar, “… a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans.”

There’s a bartender and two patrons at either end of the bar; one of the patrons is a fat man, the other a nervous younger man with shaking hands. The fat man tells a story about a mysterious middle-aged woman who wears a “great and ancient and bedraggled purple hat” each day to the Palace of Pleasure, a gambling hall where he works. The woman keeps a syringe and a vial in her hat, which she secures with a long pin. She meets the same young man — or the same sort of young man — every afternoon. “I have watched her every day for thirty years and I think she is a ghost,” the fat man observes. “I have seen her murdered twice.”

Welty’s story raises more questions than it answers: What does the purple hat represent? Is the lady who wears it a ghost? Does the young man at the bar know more than he lets on?

As Allen mixed us a “Eudora’s Purple Hat,” he told us the ingredients: citrus vodka, black raspberry liqueur, crème de violette, fresh lemon juice, simple syrup and an egg white.

“When we made it for her birthday party, we served it with edible violets,” he told us. ...

The full story is at the Houston Chronicle's Bookish blog. The photo of Eudora Welty, at top, is from the Southern Literary Trail.

Halloween approaches: an encounter with a loup-garou

A Loup-garou (image from Wikipedia.)

Here is a blood-chilling folk tale concerning a loup-garou, or werewolf, appearing -- out of nowhere! -- to menace a well-meaning husband, who is saved from certain disaster by the parish priest (and whiskey). With notes and further links from the fascinating website New England Folklore, curated by Peter M in Boston.

With the Halloween season of apparitions, spirits, and creatures of all imaginations about to descend, always take care!

 

Many years ago on a dark snowy night a man left his warm house and hitched the horse to his sleigh. His wife was ill, and maybe close to death, so he was going to get the local Catholic priest.

As he rode down the forest road, all he heard was the hiss of the sleigh's runners and the thudding of the horse's hooves. The snow was good for sleighing and soon he was near the church.

Suddenly, the horse slowed down and the sleigh barely moved forward. The man whipped the horse, but to no avail. It was as if the sleigh was suddenly burdened with a two ton load.

Looking back, the man saw a large black wolf with its front paws on the rear of the sleigh. Its hind legs stood in the snow, and was stopping the sleigh from moving forward. The wolf's yellow eyes burned bright in the darkness.

Fear gripped the man's heart. No ordinary wolf was strong enough to stop a sleigh. This was something far worse! It was a loup-garou, a man who had sold himself to the Devil who could turn into a wolf. Sometimes the loup-garous just ate corpses, but sometimes they liked their dinner to be fresher.

The creature jumped fully onto the sleigh, and the sleigh shot forward as the horse pulled harder than ever. The loup-garou stalked to the front of the sleigh and put its front paws on the driver's shoulders. The weight was so heavy the man thought he would be crushed.

In a panic he searched his pockets for his knife. If he could cut the loup-garou its devilish magic would be dispelled and it would turn back into a human. But in the dark night, distracted by the monster's hot breath on his face, he couldn't find it.

By this point the sleigh reached the churchyard and the priest opened the front door. Seeing what was happening, he said a brief prayer. Instantly the monstrous wolf turned back into a man, who fled into the forest.

Luckily the priest had a good supply of whiskey to calm the man's nerves. Even luckier, his wife recovered from her illness and didn't die.

**********

Rowland Robinson apparently wrote fourteen fictional books which incorporated real folkore from New England. Unfortunately, he wrote most of his dialogue in dialect so it's hard for a modern reader to understand. For example, here's a direct quote from the loup-garou story, which is told by a Vermonter of French-Canadian descent. Robinson is trying to capture the storyteller's Quebecois accent:

"De hoss was scare an' run lak hol' hurricanes, 'cause de loup garou gat hees behin' foots off de graound an' can' pull back som more."

My guess at a translation: "The horse was scared and ran like old (?) hurricanes because the loup garou got his behind feet off the ground and can't pull back some more."

If you don't mind a lot of crazy dialect writing, you can find the entire text of Danvis Folks on Google Books for free.

Lupercalia and Valentine's Day: Wolves, vestal virgins, and the Pipes of Pan

While most of us consider February 14th a date to celebrate or avoid all together, February 15th became an important date in ancient Rome as a time of rebirth and renewal -- and to its human cousin, fertility. 

As springtime festivals go Lupercalia was a wild affair of debauch and drunkenness, not a bad way to chase off the dread spirits of winter or the very real threat of the wolves outside your door. Appropriately so: the Latin holiday takes its name from the Lupercal, oldest Roman settlement -- on the Palantine Hill -- in which the wolf was supposed to have suckled Romulus and Remus. 

Hallmark won't mention it, but the flayed skin of a sacrificed goat was used by loincloth-clad men for lashing women in order to promote fertility and ease of childbirth. It seems clear that by classic times some ancient ritual had degenerated and its original significance had been lost, but because it involved a lot of nakedness and riotous running around and tomfoolery, the ancient Romans were loathe to abandon it.

But why February? February occurred later on the ancient Roman calendar than it does today, so Lupercalia was held in the spring and regarded as a festival of purification and fertility. Each year on February 15, the Luperci priests gathered on Palantine Hill at the cave of Lupercal. Vestal virgins brought sacred cakes made from the first ears of last year's grain harvest to the fig tree. Two naked young men, assisted by the Vestals, sacrificed a dog and a goat at the site. The blood was smeared on the foreheads of the young men and then wiped away with wool dipped in milk.

The youths then donned loincloths made from the skin of the goat and led groups of priests around the pomarium, the sacred boundary of the ancient city, and around the base of the hills of Rome. The occasion was happy and festive. As they ran about the city, the young men lightly struck women along the way with strips of the goat hide. It is from these implements of purification, or februa, that the month of February gets its name. This act supposedly provided purification from curses, bad luck, and infertility and also imparted a wish that the maidens would marry soon. Of course, with any Roman or pagan fertility festival, a 3-day orgy followed the initial festivities.  

By the time of Imperial Rome the celebration was in full flower: Mark Antony was master of the Luperci College of Priests. He chose the Lupercalia festival of the year 44 B.C. as the proper time to offer the crown to Julius Caesar.

As many a pagan custom in the Roman world, the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity altered the nature of such a free-spirited debauch. Lupercalia, with its lover lottery and more precisely lengthy orgy, had no place in the new Christian order.  Finally, in the year 496 AD, Pope Gelasius did away with the festival of Lupercalia, citing that it was pagan and immoral. 

He chose Valentine as the patron saint of lovers, who would be honored at the new festival on the fourteenth of every February. St. Valentine's feast day became associated with the more genteel and social aspects of courtship. The flailing of one's beloved and the wearing of goat-skins disappeared, and the forms of romantic love took shape that led Hallmark to its hearts-and-flowers domination of the once raucous holiday..

The rites and rituals of Lupercalia were not abandoned completely. In Morocco the springtime celebration is still an intense event of magic and fertility, wildness in honor of the god Pan -- with his goat-skin and dancing, shrill piping and midnight debauchery, he is the god of Panic in the tribes of the desert.

The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka is a field recording made in Morocco by Brian Jones and Brion Gysin in 1968, an edited document of ancient Lupercalia rituals dedicated to the god Pan that are hours, and sometimes days, long. These rituals echo through every springtime rite from the pre-Lenten celebrations of Mardi Gras and Carnival to Easter. Although the recording has been given a psychedelic gloss it doesn't really need, the result is powerful music, if the listener is open to it. 

This is an old, old trip -- and the album, recorded during a visit in 1968 and originally released in 1971 on the Rolling Stones' label, is considered the first of its kind. Since then the Master Musicians of Jajouka have recorded a wildly unique series of albums, produced variously by Bill Laswell and Talvin Singh, that are worth the shoe leather to track down -- short of a journey to Jajouka itself, of course.

Guinness Christmas pudding: holiday over-indulgence ahead

 

Depending on your point of view, the holidays are either (a) just around the corner and not a moment too soon, or (b) the right time to up your meds to holiday strength. Darkness swirls in earlier and the north face of winter can mean a cold, bitter slope with a fatal crash into the none-too-festive retail season. The good news: tomorrow's winter solstice means the days will begin their slow march toward spring. The bad news: Spring is three months away.

Better get to your doctor right away, then.

Many folks just banish all the misanthropic gloom with the joys of over-indulgence and damn the expense -- and calories too. Just in case you've misplaced your Christmas pudding recipe (and, you thought, just in time for the holidays, too -- unlucky you!) your luck's improved: here's the replacement: step-by-step instructions from Barrie Pepper's The Bedside Book of Beer. The collection is a convivial compendium of beer and ale in British literature -- and, of course, English politics. 

The book was originally published by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, complete with CAMRA application form in the back. Here are cartoons, limericks, poems, histories written by authors high and low and anonymous about the joys and sorrows of bitters, plains and smalls through the ages. No need during the impending months to belabor the point: there's too much to do to just sit and read about beer, when there's a holiday party somewhere we're all going to be late for. Cheers ....

Reading Dickens: high tea optional

Original illustration from A Christmas Carol (John Leech, 1843)

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The  register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

You have read A Christmas Carol, haven't you? 

Without Charles Dickens, what would have become of Christmas --in the nineteenth century, that most somber and soberest of all religious days on the Church calendar? After the initial success of A Christmas Carol (it was published December 19, 1843, a tale written in six weeks to pay off debts) Dickens' tale of seasonal goodwill eventually became the antidote to England's Victorian gloom which, truthfully, wasn't very dark to begin with: the empire's money was rolling in from the burgeoning railways and overseas trade, and people had money to spend ... well, not everyone, as the story of Bob Cratchit and his family was meant to illustrate. The divisions of the English class system, and the poverty and hardship it wrought, were unassailable, it seemed.

Yes, I know: at this point, old Dickens seems as antiquated as the dead Marley himself, an overstuffed Victorian curio whose funny-named characters and creaking plots are the stuff of school-day dread. It's unlikely that Oprah's book club will find in either Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities much more than "old school" mustiness. She deserves an "A" for bravery, though the two books are being published together in one volume as an Oprah-show tie-in -- a merchandising feat Dickens himself would endorse.

But a far better choice would likely be A Christmas Carol: the cautionary tale of what just too much money in the wrong hands can do. Imagine what the book club could make of that discussion, a familiar theme these days it seems. The soft-hearted old Marley was  dead -- and his business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge, wasn't going to part with a shilling's worth of work from Bob Cratchit even on Christmas Eve. Thereby hangs a tale of the economic system, moral values, and three visiting spirits.

I doubt that Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Dickens: Being a Good-Natured Guide to the Man Who Invented Scrooge will be included in the deluxe-Oprah package, but it does make the case for Charles Dickens in an entertaining way. The book is funny, lighthearted and full of anecdotal stories about the novels and Dickens' own life as it unfolded around his personal fortunes.

These turn out to be as complicated as the fate of any of his own characters; debt, bankruptcy, divorce ... he could have been his own best fictional creation, only Dickens was too busy knocking out the next installment of, say, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, which were published in weekly serials. Creaky plots? Stephen King must eat his heart out in jealousy. The stories sold, and how:

The serial's primary advantage was its low price. By paying a shilling a month, a reader eventually got an original, illustrated 300,000 word novel for a pound. Spread over nineteen months -- and sales for The Pickwick Papersoften reached 40,000 for one installment -- that one shilling grew into a fortune, netting 10,000 pounds. ... Sales figures for a successful installment are enough to make a modern novelist weep with envy. One number of The Old Curiosity Shop sold more than 100,000 copies in one month....

All of these profits were being made as Dickens sat feverishly writing the next installment, with creditors usually knocking on the door. Here's Epstein's account of one such episode:

"Martin Chuzzlewit, his current serial, was falling in sales, and in an effort to boost his flagging income, Dickens dashed off a tale for the Christmas of 1843 in about six weeks. The manuscript for his 'ghostly little book' is a scant sixty-six pages, as compared to the usual eight hundred for the typical Dickens blockbuster, yet it is the biggest seller he ever wrote. ...

The previous summer he had visited a 'ragged school,' part of an  evangelical movement to provide basic instruction to poor children. Although he disapproved of religious indoctrination, believing that the poor need a bath more than a psalm, (Dickens) firmly held that ignorance is inseparable from want.

... The sight of such wretchedness horrified and unnerved him: 'I  have very seldom seen in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited by these children.' Dickens had intended a tract on education for the poor, but he now decided to write a story that, he announced with justifiable hyperbole, would hit his readers over the head like a 'sledge-hammer'."

It's another Dickensian irony that the beautifully-bound first edition netted the author only 230 pounds -- most of his royalties were absorbed by printing costs, which he had paid for himself. Dickens wrote he "had set his heart and soul on a Thousand clear," and he thought he was ruined. He packed up the family and moved to Italy to avoid creditors. Eventually, his own staged readings of A Christmas Carol made him more money than any book he ever wrote -- career-enhancing tours that likely would be in keeping with Oprah's own post-show future plans.

In the meanwhile, here are Epstein's suggestions on "How to Read Dickens." High tea at four is, of course, optional, but in keeping with the spirit of things.

1) Take a Zen approach: the destination doesn't matter, it's the journey that counts. Savor each word; don't rush. And don't try to think logically! The truth is not always literal.

2) Read like a child, i.e., allow yourself to slip into Dickens' world completely. Let go of the desire to "find out what happens."

3) If you're tempted to skip something that looks boring, and it's either that or not finish the book, skip it.

4) Expect the author to make mistakes. He wrote fast. He wrote to entertain.

5) Expect inconsistency.

6) Read out loud! Dickens spoke his characters' lines as he wrote.

7) If one Dickens novel isn't to your taste, try another. A Tale of Two Cities, often the only one most people read in school, is the least Dickens-like of them all.

8) If you've read a late-Dickens novel (anything after David Copperfield, or 1850) and hated it, try an earlier one. It's almost as if the two groups were written by different authors.

The Friendly Dickens is a great introduction to those novels we were all supposed to read  and seldom did. Judging from Epstein's foreboding outline of the aptly-titled, late period Bleak House -- more than 800 pages of Dickensian gloom which begins with six paragraphs describing the murky London fog -- I may save that work for next January's chill, when the Christmas bills begin rolling in.

"The Library of Dust": an exhibit of neglected remains

From poet C.A. Conrad comes this link to David Maisel's Library of Dust. Here's an article at boingboing about this extraordinary exhibit, which was mounted at San Francisco's Haines Gallery in 2008. A book featuring Maisel's photographs of copper cremation cannisters found at the abandoned Oregon State Hospital (filming site of Milos Foreman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is published by Chronicle Books; the Oregon State Hospital is currently slated for demolition. Conrad remarks, with the sweet irony that only all we the living can afford, "these people were so neglected, so hated for their conditions while living, but now people (can) flock from all over to see the urns of their remains."

From David Maisel's website: "Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families. The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans.

Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial - the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky. Sublimely beautiful, yet disquieting, the enigmatic photographs in Library of Dust are meditations on issues of matter and spirit.

The room housing these canisters is an attempt for order, categorization, and rationality to be imposed upon randomness, chaos, and the irrational. The canisters, however, insistently and continually change their form over time; they are chemical and alchemical sites of transformation, both organic and mineralogical, living and dead. The Library of Dust describes this labyrinth, and in doing so, gives form to the forgotten."

Maisel, quoted here from the article at boingboing: “There are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time ... but perhaps the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and what may happen to the souls that occupied our bodies. Matter, these canisters show, lives on when the body vanishes, even when it has been incinerated to ash by an institutional practice."