radiant fracture

Join us as we host a virtual visit with Rachel A. Rosen, an activist, graphic designer, a high school teacher and co-author of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

I’m fitfully trying to cull my books. I don't have time to make a proper job of it, but waiting until spring seemed too long.

So far I’ve made a pile of about fifteen, including an almost unreadably faded copy of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov with this excellent pulpy cover:

As I have not read it, I do not know what character Doris Day is playing in this image.

I had plucked Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories to send away as well, but then I thought perhaps I should actually read it. The trouble with culling.

I believe I bought this book mostly in order to share a Moment with the bearded and bearish bookseller.

These are not, as one might hope, ghost stories written by Roald Dahl, but stories he anthologized. Dahl himself wrote only the peculiar introduction, which begins by describing his anthologizing process, including a long and irritating dissertation about gender and genre (women, he opines, are good at ghost stories, novels, and children's stories, and bad at all other genres of short story and at plays); veers off into children’s literature; and ends up talking about a failed television pilot.

Dahl also makes the perplexing claim that "the best ghost stories don't have any ghosts in them." This is an interesting idea in itself, but not supported by his own evidence, since all of the stories he's selected, except one, have highly palpable ghosts.

Still, many of the book's stories are by giants of the ghostly age, so that was promising.

As you know, older ghost stories can be disappointing because their mechanics are now so well-established that it’s hard to surprise, alarm, or usefully distract even a casual reader.

I am extremely susceptible to being creeped the f* out. On the whole, these stories did not do that -- or not in themselves. Some, I notice, have implanted images that are creepier than their delivery systems. Maybe this is the real haunting they accomplish: not so much to scare me in the moment, as to seed ghosts in my mind.

And perhaps looking to be scared is the wrong way to approach these stories. They may have quite other goals. Certainly they are written for a different set of expectations. I'm not a great consumer of horror film (see above under creeped the f* out), but still, my expectations are constructed by the media of my own era.

These ghost stories are more about regret than terror. The ghosts are transparently (excuse me) the ghosts of past misdeeds and wrongs, often rather mundane ones, which is sort of interesting: our own everyday hauntings rather than horrific tragedies.

I liked the ideas behind “In the Tube” and “Afterwards” best – “In the Tube” works with non-linear time and fixed destiny, but also responsibility for other people; “Afterwards” has that delicious idea of encountering a ghost that you don’t know is a ghost until long afterwards. I liked “Playmates” in a more sentimental vein.

So if I were to put “something is coming”, “what’s wrong with this picture”, non-linear time, and the ghost you don’t know is a ghost together, with a bit of Aickman’s stomach-churning deep mythology and a little sentiment, I’d have my perfect Hallowe’en story.

Meanwhile, my own books continue to haunt me with past selves, old ambitions, former loves, and fruitless arguments with absent judges.

{rf}

This warning against nostalgia and advocacy of the 'now' appears most clearly in Bowen’s final radio feature, "Anthony Trollope: A New Judgement", which was broadcast two days before VE day in May 1945. In this broadcast, Bowen continues the ghost-novelist conceit of her other radio features while also communicating more explicit messages about the relationship between print culture and nostalgia. The later broadcast was evidently popular—Oxford University Press published the script as a pamphlet in 1946. (100)

1. Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing Grove Press, N.Y. A collection of pieces first published in the Evergreen Review. In terms of material culture, this is the score. It has a great cover: fragments of Beckett's name arranged orthagonally in blue and green. The paper's water-damaged and mustier than I usually accept -- but the illustrations!
   
   The book is illustrated with terrific 60s-era line drawings, and these drawings are all about the line. Geometrical forms somehow give the effect both of rapid work and of obsessive precision, and the image arises out of their intersection -- almost despite the lines rather than because of them.
   
   I thought I had a mystery in the illustrator’s name (which I was misreading), until a friend pointed out his credit on the copyright page right where you’d expected it.
   
   ( The illustrations are actually by Avigdor Arikha. (Cut for biography intersecting with traumatic 20th C history.) )
   
   
   ( Further instances of obsessive precision behind the cut )


2. James Thurber, Lanterns and Lances I mean, Thurber. This is an odd artefact, a "Time Reading Program Special Edition"³ printed in or about 1962. The cover is of thick immobile cardboard, matte purple inside. There's no jacket copy, just Thurber's drawings blown up. It is also illustrated, by Thurber, natch. You'll be excited to know it has a New Introduction, probably because it's a posthumous edition.
   
   A thing I like very much is a book with layered introductions which, as we read forwards, take us backwards into innocence and before death. Alternatively, I have, I think, that edition of James Tiptree, Jr's Warm Worlds and Otherwise with the two introductions, before and after.


3. (Collected by) Sage Birchwater, Chiwid Now this is interesting. It's an oral history of a Tsilhqot'in woman named Chiwid, born in 1904. She lived in the Chilcotin (a region of British Columbia just south of the Cariboo, where I was born a long time later.) Birchwater seems to have been interested in her because she was famous for living independently on the land, and maybe more as a figure around whom stories crystallized than for herself (she'd died before the book was published).


4. Christina Rosetti, Goblin Market A tiny Phoenix booklet containing the titular poem and a few others, marked 60p. A lot of UK expats fetch up here.


5. Vera John-Steiner, Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking Printed in 1985, this is an obviously dated book about modes of thought, but as I leafed through I saw it had a section called “The Thinking of the Body”, which goes to my preoccupation with embodied mentation, so I snagged it on spec. As well as compiling published research, John-Steiner conducted many interviews for the book with subjects from novelists (Margaret Drabble) to psychologists, poets, and scientists (though fewer of these).