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.

Miscellany: Real Folk Vampires

In her Letter from the Balkans in November's issue of Harper's, entitled 'Twilight of the Balkans: Hunting the Real-Life Undead' Téa Obreht takes us through the history of real folk vampire stories from Eastern Europe. Far from the romance of Dracula's inspiration, Vlad the Impaler, the vampire story originally comes from peasants who were believed to rise from the dead and feast on their fellow villagers. They'd look more like a fat drunkard from a Bruegal or Bosch painting than a lithe, aristocratic Gary Oldman or Christopher Lee.

In the age of Twilight and Sookie Stackhouse, it's refreshing to return to the gritty folk elements of the legend.

You can read about one of the most famous Serbian vampires here. His name was Petar Blagojevic, and besides having a horribly coiffed head of hair, his resurrection was witnessed by officials from the Austrian Empire, a reputable source if I've ever heard of one.

If your tastes are more domestic, check out this entry on O.T.I.S. about Rhode Island's own vampire, Mercy Brown.


Here's another historical account of a Serbian vampire, named Arnont Paule.

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.

Haywire - Episodes 1 and 2

Here's a recommendation: a new horror/sci-fi web series created by Scott Klein, titled Haywire. As of today, there are two episodes up, and a helpful timer on the website displays the countdown to Episode 3: fourteen days, nine hours, as I'm writing this. The series has gotten some attention lately, after being praised by Indie Intertube and SciFiPulse.net, and for good reason: the show crams a lot of intensity and drama into its five-minute run time. They've clearly got a very small budget to work with, but that doesn't stop the filmmakers from delivery a quality program.

Each episode opens with a comic-book-style intro that relates the story's basic setup--a bright light erupts in a small NY town, shutting down all electronics, and affecting those who saw its flash in a peculiar way: it sends their brains into a scrambled loop, and they are only able to continue endlessly doing whatever they were doing when the light hit.

Episode 1,"The Gardener," has a house full of trapped people nervously watching their neighbor, outside, working in her garden. When one of their friends approaches the woman, she attacks him, repeatedly shouting for him to get off her lawn.

The subject of the second episode, "The Beaten Path," concerns a jogger who is stuck repeatedly wishing everyone he meets a nice day. Unfortunately for him, he meets some rather nasty folks who are too wary of the new zombie people to return his greeting.

I say "zombie," but really, these guys wouldn't fit under the traditional meaning of that word. For one thing, they aren't dead (or undead), and they don't crave flesh. Still, for me, it falls under the horror sub-category that the George Romero films and 28 Days Later occupy. These sad, confused, braindead people, stomping through the only activity they know--if they aren't zombies, I don't know what the hell they are.

Check this show out if you have a moment. It's a quick download, and is worth watching. I'm curious to see where the series goes, if later episodes will back to these first two seemingly separate stories, or if a new story will appear with each show. It's quality short filmmaking either way.

http://haywireseries.com/

(All artwork and photos are taken from the Haywire website.)

Thomas the Rhymer by Ellen Kushner (1990)

The adaptation of older stories into more contemporary forms, particularly those which were adapted from archaic forms, epic poems, oral legacies, mythical texts, into novels and films, has always fascinated me, both for its rarely satisfactory execution and for the very mechanics of making a popular piece of art from ancient material. In many ways this process is akin to exhuming a Mousterian bowl from your backyard and selling it at Ikea. The critical reception of such exercises always dissuades me from reading or watching them. From Robert Graves's stodgy 1934 novel I, Claudius to Robert Zemeckis's ill-imagined 2007 film Beowulf, most strict adaptations seem to be trying a little too hard to stick to the fictional facts. Give me the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou. You can keep Wolfgang Peterson's Troy. Give me Styron's The Confession of Nat Turner. Keep Madison Smartt Bell's Haiti novels.

In her 1990 novel Thomas the Rhymer, Ellen Kushner, famous for a string of fantasy novels she published in the 80s and 90s and as the host of public radio’s Sound and Spirit tackles the legend of True Thomas, a 13^th century Scottish minstrel and purported prophet. You can read more about Thomas and some of his prophecies at this informative wiki page. Kushner uses four narrators to tell the tale of Thomas’s adoptive family, his exodus in Elfland, and his romance with a milkmaid named Elspeth. It all sounds pretty kooky in synopsis, but Kushner manages to tell her story in an engaging and earthy way. Surprisingly, the least deft of these four narratives comes from Thomas himself. When Kushner hands the narrative over to Gavin, a farmer, or his wife Meg, or Elspeth, we start to see some of the shades of reality seeping through the story. Thomas’s own tale is of nothing more than an orgiastic trip to the land of the elves. Kushner renders this fantasy in a dreamlike psychedelia that only occasionally borders on the inane, as when the elf queen’s brother becomes an orange flame and fights for Thomas’s fate. However, we see from the simpler folk around Thomas that he may have made all of this up to cover up his own gallivanting womanizing ways. The novel’s real worth lies in this examination of reality and the power of storytelling and song in shaping the narratives that are believed in the present and remembered in the future. While the elfin queen and the wondrous feasts denied to Thomas may have some significance as an allegorical digression about the limits of escape and emigration, the uncertainty of Elspeth’s fate is at the heart of the drama here. Thomas manipulates the conventions of the period to his advantage when he asks Elspeth if she would accompany him on his journeys, knowing full well she would risk her standing in the community by running around with an unmarried man. It is her life which is wasted by his flight. Of course, Kushner’s book is a romance, so Elspeth forgives Thomas and they live in happiness until the end of their days and bear many great children together. The end.

In all cases, Kushner renders her novel in a clear and uninflected style, which is infinitely more effective than trying to capture the language of the Scots phonetically, or intersperse archaic words and phrases. Her use of evocative perspectives reminds me of Styron or Faulkner without the arch literary pretension. While most fans of traditional fantasy might bemoan a lack of dragons and magic and violence, I find Kushner’s novel much more revealing about human nature than the average bit of swords and sorcery.

Oh, and how about the dust jacket pictured above. Not Nice Jacket material, that's for sure. I much prefer Kate Greenaway's watercolor below.

Miscellany: Literary Ranch Sale

I’ve always had an awe of the west, some vestigial cowboys and Indians longing for wide open desolate expanses, sagebrush scuttling across my path, clean air and big sky. Every red-blooded easterner has thought wistfully of a return to nature, to the frontier (which exists no more), an escape from the complications of society. I’m no different, and as I age, the comforts of the city become both more appealing and more confining. The call of the wild is stronger but more distant.

So, when I read Annie Proulx’s memoir, A Year of Birds: At Home on the North Platte River in December’s issue of Harper’s I immediately googled ‘wyoming ranches for sale.’ The hefty allure of a new state in which to ply my literary trade is a fleeting, but somewhat therapeutic indulgence.

What's the first Wyoming listing on ranchbrokers.com? That’s right, Proulx’s Bird Call Ranch is up for sale.

The 640 acre ranch is listed at $3.7 million, a hefty, if fair price for the stunning cliff side views (above) and the menagerie of birds and lions and antelope Proulx describes in her Harper’s piece. I’m struck by how lovingly Proulx relates her year alone on the ranch and how quickly she can be unburdened of her property. Maybe the Harper's piece was a bit of veiled real estate promotion. One could do worse than have Proulx marketing one's home.

I’m not sure which stories or books Proulx wrote while living at Bird Cloud, but she sold another Wyoming property back in 2006. So chances are you fanboys can’t purchase the house in which she wrote Brokeback Mountain.

Though I’m pretty faithful to the Audobon guides, Proulx cites the Stokes field guide repeatedly in her article. I’m thinking of checking this one out. Then again I don’t need a more thorough field guide to tell me the squirrels in my backyard are not birds.

Check out one of Proulx’s great watercolors below, apparently inspired by Bird Cloud.

For more information on the historical homes of writers near you, check out writershouses.com.

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.