Nice Jacket: Dispatches

*The Picador Paperback edition of Michael Herr’s 1977 book Dispatches.

This cover reminds me of M*A*S*H.  In both, a weird brand of 70s minimalism flavors the apocalypse with humor and whimsy.  The saturated green helmet with its slogan ‘HELL SUCKS’ and a teardrop peace sign in vivid yellow, nestles in a hyperbolic (but mostly true) blurb from John Le Carré.  It’s certainly the best book I’ve ever read on men and war in any time, but then again I haven’t read many true war narratives. 

When I hold this book in my hand, I can see the yellow of the passing years on the white cover, the thumbprints of everyone who has picked it up over the years shining in the light.  It feels like a cheaply-made, but beautiful communiqué, delivered personally by a friend.

When you get down to it though, Dispatches, isn’t much of a narrative.  It’s more a patchwork of impressions.  Herr uses an erratic, stream-of-consciousness style.  He’s a straight, war-hardened Hunter S. Thompson with big balls and a bigger heart.  His reports stick close to the dirt as he follows the lowest ranks of the most active units in the marines.  He’d rather tell us what the stoned grunts are talking about than the generals or the intelligence agencies.  Herr’s Vietnam War is in no way romanticized.  He refrains from the easy exoticism of Hollywood’s Vietnam films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now.  There are no easy political answers like you might find in Peter Davis’s powerful documentary Hearts and Minds.

Herr’s gift is the ability to show the horror and madness of war without any bloviating rhetoric, just the facts and the action of it all.  He shows most of the men in a human light, which is what they deserve, no matter the atrocities some of them participated in.  Herr’s strongest moment is his long description of the press in Vietnam.  The journalist’s odd hypocritical stance and parasitic nature is set into stunning relief against a war most of them objected to.

Dexter Filkins accomplished something similar for the Iraq War in his brilliant 2008 book The Forever War, but some of the resistant glamour of the journalist has been lost in the intervening 40 years.  The alienation is stronger in Iraq, it seems, and perhaps the disinterest of civilians back home has helped make the Armed Forces more callous.  Let the draft be reinstituted and see how oblivious we remain.

Related Links:

1. The American Scholar Essay on Dispatches

2. The Massachusetts Review Essay on Dispatches

3. New York Times Review of Herr's book on Kubrick

Nice Jacket: Endgame

*The Grove Press Twenty-Seventh Printing of Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play Endgame

The cover image is terrifying and conjures, for us now, less the post-modern existential horror of the play and more the squalor of our political realities.  More Abu Ghraib than a bad dream, the power of the grainy reproduced photograph of the cover comes not from the fear we have of the figure, but the moral fear produced by the figure’s implications.  The man is bound to a chair.  His face is draped with a towel.  Spots of blood form a ghostly mouth and eyes over his face.  His hands hang limply over the arms of the chair, and his human form is hidden beneath a heavy sack or straight jacket.  The typewriter font of the play’s title lends the image the quality of a piece of classified information from a government file.

We’ve all seen the now iconic images of prisoners being tortured and humiliated in Iraq.  I’m sure some have been desensitized to their power, but I still feel they symbolize the U.S.’s foreign policy of the past ten years in a way nothing else can.  There’s a delicate balance between immersing oneself in the nonstop media onslaught of the 21^st century and being a complete Luddite.  I lean toward the latter, but accept the power of images to affect policy and the moral opinion of a nation.  Sometimes a snapshot can do this more effectively than a brilliant movie or play or book.

But none of this is what Beckett’s play is about.  Endgame belongs to the Theater of the Absurd, a school of mid-century European theater firmly set on the premise that in a godless universe all human endeavors, especially communication, are meaningless.  This begs the question – why write a play in the first place?  Why, for pedantic reasons of course, to show the rest of the human race the meaningless of their lives and their relationships.  In Endgame, Hamm, a paralyzed man, is served by Clov, a clownish servant.  They rely on each other more for petty arguments than for survival.  But in this way each is indispensible to the other.  Beckett is not much of a humanist when you get down to it, though I suppose he does, in his better plays, capture the real taste of 20^th century human suffering better than most writers.

More than anything, Beckett’s plays strike me as visually important and innovative.  Happy Days, the play Beckett wrote after Endgame, centers on a woman who is literally buried up to her chin in the rubble of Western Civilization.  Her situation is much like Hamm’s in Endgame.  They are both paralyzed but still willful and struggling against the cruel world.  Joyful stuff!

These Faber editions of Beckett's plays are more typographically interesting, but much less visually powerful.

 Here's the first part of a filmed version of Endgame.

 Related Links:

1. An Appreciation of Beckett from The Guardian
2. Review of Faber's Reprints from The Telegraph
3. New York Times Review of a Recent Production of Endgame

Nice Jacket: Blow-Up and Other Stories

*The Collier Books 1971 Third Printing of Julio Cortázar's Blow-Up and Other Stories.

Writers and lawmakers had contemplated the moral and social implications of photography for decades before Cortázar published Blow-Up in the mid-60s. The peeping tom strikes us as the creepiest kind of voyeur. Give him a camera and his offense becomes a civil issue. He's now not only breaking the law, he's also infringing on our rights. With the recent prevalence of social networking, which integrates photography into our daily discourse to a degree unimaginable only a decade ago, an individual's control of their privacy and personal image is even more tenuous.

In the 60s Cortázar, and filmmakers like Michelangelo Antonioni, who adapted Cortázar's story, and Michael Powell, whose Peeping Tom stands up even better as a psychologically terrifying and socially relevant document, sexed up the idea of the camera's power, both over the photographer and the subject. It's an issue we should reexamine, now that a million drunk college girls are indiscriminately sharing pictures of themselves draped over each other at the bar.

Collier's cover of the Cortázar collection shows a grainy close-up of a photographer, his piercing eye contrasted with the glare of the camera's lens. Underneath, the same image is shown at a greater remove, suggesting motion and distance. The photographer's stare becomes horrifying because of its vapidity. Its mere presence is cause for alarm, like the stranger standing on the tower in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

These movie posters are sinister in two different ways. The poster for Blow-Up uses negative space and the human form to show the photographer's wicked power. The poster for Peeping Tom shows a more paranoid image, the light from a keyhole imposed over a bloodshot eye. Great typography all around.


Check out this intense trailer for Antonioni's film.



Look out! for this trailer for Powell's film which reminds me of a module of Look Around You a hilarious British parody of educational films.



Related Links

1. Cortázar Interviewed for The Art of Fiction

2. The Times Review of Antonioni's Blow-Up

3. The Times Review of Peeping Tom

Nice Jacket: The Ginger Man

Dell's second Laurel printing from March 1974 of J.P. Donleavy's 1955 novel The Ginger Man - Art/Design Uncredited


I like to call this one Still Life with Debauchery. While it's no Cézanne, this cover does a good job of capturing some of the spirit of the novel with a few well-chosen objects photographed in a bare studio. The discarded clothing suggests sex. The whiskey suggests, well, whiskey. The old wrought iron chairs hint at domesticity and give the piece its structure. Sure, you could buy all this junk at a thrift shop for $20 (other than the whiskey of course) and take a snapshot, but the cover is still miles ahead of the pastel illustration montages on most literary paperbacks from the 70s. The typeface is spare and unobtrusive, almost an afterthought.

The cover below, from Oympia Press, is a mid-century abstraction of the shattered nerves of the novel's namesake drunk.


Berkeley went with psychedelic sex for their cover.

I think the ginger man looks best in tweed.

Here's an interview with J.P. Donleavy from the Paris Review's recently opened Art of Fiction archives.

Nice Jacket: The Lime Twig

New Directions paperbacks have fascinated me as objects since I first saw an old copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind on a bookshelf in a friend's attic on College Hill when I was a teenager. They've always struck me as the literary equivalent of a punk rock zine, with their black and white covers like photocopied collages cut from magazines by a kid in his basement.

The cover art for New Directions's 1961 edition of John Hawkes's The Lime Twig shows a fever dream, the blurred faces of a street crowd with only a woman's face in focus, her eyes and mouth in shadow like a skull or specter. The severe title helps enforce this uncompromising vision and prepare the reader for a serious bit of post-modernist horror.


The back cover, as with most New Directions paperbacks, includes a nice black and white author photo. Hawkes is shown in a woodland setting smoking a pipe. You can see a white mark on his wrist where his watch has blocked the sun. Writer's tan! The back is also jammed with text, not only a synopsis of the novel, but also quotes from Flannery O'Connor and William Kennedy. The whole layout looks more like a press release than a retail copy of a book. The spine is just as austere.

As is common with books of the period, the design and cover art are uncredited.

It looks like New Directions has added color to their covers. I still prefer the old DIY look.

Nice Jacket: The Demolished Man

In order to widen the scope of The Bent Spine, I've decided to introduce a few new features. The first, which you're reading, is called Nice Jacket and will be dedicated to the incidental art of book covers. I'm no art historian or critic, and I know even less about design, but I know what strikes me as an interesting visual accompaniment to a book. Nice Jacket will always be brief. I don't want to bore you with theory (and to tell you the truth, I don't know much art theory). While I won't limit this discussion to genre books, I'm starting with one of my favorite sci-fi covers.

The cover art and book design for Signet's fifth printing of Alfred Bester's 1951 novel The Demolished Man are both uncredited. While the design is not revolutionary, it is certainly evocative of a certain clean, bold layout that was abandoned with the cartoon Frank Frazzeta covers of the 60s. The clean sans-serif title on the left and the bold text of the author's last name on the right leave room for a great bit of cover art below.

Unintentionally phallic, the art shows a towering collage of details from the book. From the gun at the bottom of the painting, to the silhouetted figure above, the tape reels flanking the figures head, the bifurcation of the two-headed brain, and some great red-and-green lasers shooting from the oracles' eyes, the artist has given us a psychedelic fantasy that has a strange visual appeal. It's not sophisticated, but it is pretty fun.

I like the back cover as well.