radiant fracture

Coast of Many Faces (1979) seems to have a startlingly modest origin story.

This is the remarkable collection of photographs and brief interviews / oral histories I quite randomly took down from the shelf one sleepy afternoon in the library of Royal Roads University, which campus resides in the northern part of lək̓ʷəŋən territory, currently known as Colwood.

I have two copies now, a paperback purchased from Russell Books, and a hardcover just arrived from a seller in California.

( Material culture notes on the two copies )

Photographer: Ulli Steltzer

Before I opened this book to a black and white photograph of octogenarians flirting in the tiny ferry terminal at Alert Bay, I had never heard of Ulli Steltzer, yet she worked all over the world for forty years as a photographer-activist. Not quite a journalist -- a photo documentarian, maybe? Is that a thing?

The jacket copy tells me that Steltzer's "powerful photographs have been commented on by reviewers around the world for their 'remarkable quality of direct engagement' and 'poignant discernment,'" which I think also reflects my own response.

The jacket also notes that Steltzer "perceptively photographed ... Adlai Stevenson, Robert Oppenheimer and Martin Buber" (!).²

Steltzer died only in 2018. She has a brief Wikipedia page, just longer than a stub. From this and some useful sources like the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative at Concordia, I have begun to get a rough sense of her life.

( Stelzer's biography will need a longer post of its own -- here is a sketch. )

Co-Interviewer: Catherine Kerr

It is more difficult to find information on Kerr, and the most I've learned about her so far comes from her eulogy for Steltzer. Kerr recalls meeting Steltzer:

My friendship with Ulli started in 1975 when I was a fledgling editor with Douglas & McIntyre and she a distinguished photographer whose project, Indian Artists at Work, the company was understandably excited to publish. While the book designer was crafting the graphic layout, my happy assignment was to review the text with a copy editor’s eye.

So at that point in their collaboration, Stelzer was the sole interviewer (unless she worked with someone else on the first book).

The arrival of my hardcover cleared up Kerr's role on Coast: she was a co-interviewer and editor, who "selected from the transcript a vital mixture of narrative, explanation and personal commentary."

I wonder if there are extant transcripts or recordings of the longer interviews in an archive somewhere. That would be amazing.

There's not much more in the book that frames its purpose; the introduction talks about their process but not the thinking behind it. Steltzer and Kerr must have taken for granted that the reader/viewer would recognize the value of these images and words on first encounter -- and also that they would share the collaborators' own readings. A book like this, created now, would do a lot of work situating the project and its intentions. I feel a little adrift without that context.

There's an odd justification for the interviews:

[E]ach of her portraits capture circumstance as well as expression, each landscape speak[s] eloquently of its people. But since people must sometimes speak of history, of fact, and of the future to explain what can be seen in a photograph, the words of today's coast people have been recorded in this book.

-- which makes the voices sound supplemental and almost unwished-for. Perhaps it is my bias towards language, but it seems to me that the voices are what elevate this book beyond a beautiful collection of photographs to -- well, to an oral and visual history, though I'd like a grander word.

Let's finish with an image, though.

Here is my very bad copy of Stelzer's photograph of oolichans at Fishery Bay (p.10):



-- what I notice is the way Steltzer has noticed that the diagonal lines of the oolichan heap and the tarp on top echo the forms of the mountains; to me, it also looks like a cutaway geological illustration, so that the oolichans become both the landscape and its underlying strata, the foundations of the world.

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Notes

1. In full, the inscription reads as follows: "for Ken – I know you appreciate the rugged coast of BC and are fascinated by the many different people who each lend their own special charm to each magical place. I hope you enjoy the stories and truly magnificent photographs. Love, Marilyn & Ken".

2. A rabbit hole opened up under my feet concerning the Oppenheimer photography: you can follow it here at this post from 2012 on Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog if you wish.

3. Steltzer also created a book about this experience, A Haida Potlatch (1985), which earned a brief review in the Atlantic. It also sounds like an extraordinary record.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulli_Steltzer

https://cwahi.concordia.ca/sources/artists/displayArtist.php?ID_artist=5651

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1985/05/a-haida-potlatch/667235/

https://celebratingullisteltzer.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/catherine-kerr/

https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/obituary-ulli-steltzer-photographer-with-a-social-conscience

https://blogs.princeton.edu/manuscripts/2018/08/03/ulli-steltzer-1923-2018-photographer/

Steltzer, Ulli, and Catherine Kerr. Coast of Many Faces. U of Washington P, 1979.

It is a morning like wearing an upturned iron pot that drips condensation directly into your mind. The Beautiful Shed refuses to be warmed or comforted. There's nothing for it but to make a book-buying post with minor material culture notes.

The local newspaper's book sale happened last weekend. You will be delighted to know that the sale is usually held in the curling rink. Cheap rent, big space, authentic cultural aura.

The sale is one of the iconic events on the city calendar, with the Moss Street Paint-In (local artists line the titular way with booths and demonstrations) and the Symphony Splash (the symphony plays on a barge in the harbour, culminating in the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire from the nearby naval base).

I have to be careful, faced with the rows and rows of heaped books, with more stacked in boxes beneath the tables, or I get trapped in discovery anxiety -- you know: must look at everything so as to miss nothing. Instead, I try to surrender to serendipity. I try.

There are themes in every sale, and one can't help but speculate -- who moved? Cleaned house? Split up? Got together? Who died (peacefully, after a brief illness)? Who grew suddenly tired of old preferences and began anew? -- all to create this momentary pattern. This year there seemed to be a lot of A.S. Byatt, which is admittedly not a very dramatic finding.

I spent more money (and concomitant time) than I intended, for they had two levels of paperback pricing: pocketbook and large-format. However, the prices are still fantastically cheap, so I escaped at the cost of a pricey brunch. My only quibble was finding out afterwards that I'd paid $2.00 for a Dover Thrift Edition of Bartleby that cost only $1.50 new. (It's all in a good cause.)

The 2017 Haul

• Annharte. Being on the Moon. (1990) Annharte, an Anishinabe poet, is one of the poets in the anthology I used in teaching Indigenous Literatures and Oratures. I don't know her work well, so this presented an opportunity to deepen my knowledge. Signed by the author!


• Byatt, A.S. The Game and The Shadow of the Sun. (1967, 1983) (1964, 1991) -- honor the pattern. Also, they were about British academics. (Goodreads is not so sure about my choices.) Sun is one of those nice solid Vintage editions that came out I think with/because of Possession. Game is orange-spine-era Penguin.


• Clarke, Lindsay. The Chymical Wedding. (1989) I had no prior knowledge of this book's existence, but John Fowles claims to have liked it, and Michael Wood said "the very craziness or the Hermetic Quest is turned into a sane metaphor, representing a glimpse of how symbolic the world actually is, how much it is made in our image, littered with fragments of our dreams," and I thought "Yeah, all right." (Goodreads is fairly positive.)


• Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood. (1960). As booksales are for the cheap acquisition of classics, and as it is fun to read old criticism. A dramatic University Paperback with vermilion woodcut trees on age-stained ecru air.


• Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. (1984, 2001). To remedy my lack of having read Erdrich. When opened at random, full of beauty.


• Lathers, Marie. The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's L'eve future. I'm actually not that interested in artifice-for-its-own-sake -- more in self-creation and inhabitation -- but I picked this up and read from the Foreword (by John Anzalone, a person of whom I know nothing): "Defiantly unconventional, despite his deep-seated traditionalism, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam produced a body of writing so uncomfortable for canonically determined hierarchies that for a time it seemed in danger of disappearing altogether." This is a convergence of an author, a forewordist, and a subject I have no knowledge of whatever, but sometimes these convergences produce beautiful inkblooms in the mind, where mystery must be filled in by supposition.


• Le Sueur, Meridel. The Girl. (1982) Seems to have been damaged in a fire: a river of smoke runs up the gutter of the dedication page. (Goodreads cautiously approves.)


• McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. (1978, 1980) I'm not a particular fan of McEwan, and I don't know his oeuvre that well -- I found Sweet Tooth a little disappointing -- but I liked the film of this book a lot when I saw it in my hazily distant past. A nice old weird-looking Picador edition.


• Melville, Herman. Bartleby and Benito Cereno. I really just wanted to have actually read "Bartleby," rather than nodding and chuckling knowingly whenever someone says "I would prefer not to."


• Meredith, Richard C. We All Died at Breakaway Station. (1969). One of two purchases from the SF table. Here's a sample from the back cover copy: "these brutally injured officers had been restored to temporary, artificial life ... because no intact man or woman could be spared from the main conflict" (to take a hospital ship back to Earth). Um, yes please.


• Merril, Judith (ed). Judith Merril's England Swings SF. (1968) -- for this, I broke my rule about no dilapidated/stained/smelly books. It was dusty, and someone had spilled an alarming substance on its first few pages at some point in the 1970s, but it is an intoxicatingly self-delighted artifact of New Wave SF. (Only 12 ratings and one review on Goodreads! A true Find.)


• Tonks, Rosemary. Bedouin of the London Evening. (2014) Bloodaxe Books. Poems and an interview with Tonks in the back. I believe I first read of Tonks' poetry and this collection only a few months ago in the TLS, so this was fortuity manifest and was obeyed. (Her name always makes me think benignly of the Harry Potter character.)


• White, T.H. The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King. (1988) There were actually two copies of this -- one in a random fiction pile, and one with SFF. This scholarly edition (U of Texas P) is an unbeautiful but intriguing artifact in a bright vermilion cover. (Vermilion again!) Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner (!!)


• Yeats, W.B. The Poems of W.B. Yeats. (1966) A nice little hardcover, just a hand high, green, smelling of horse-glue. Probably the best artifact here for material culture. The owner's signature on the flyleaf in black ink has imprinted its mirror image in yellow on the inside front cover: M (E? G?) Y (F? J?) Williamson, in an upright but emphatic hand. A Macmillan (Canadian) edition. I wanted a proper Yeats -- my last one is a Dover all marked up from class.

There are more important things to be said, but they cannot be copied from the copyright page of an aged book, so they will have to wait.

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Herein I attempt some deduction.

My edition of Howards End is a decaying Penguin Modern Classics paperback once owned by a Warren Cocking. I don't think he would mind my publicizing this, since he wrote his name the inside front cover, followed by both his address and his phone number.

( In which our hero spends a perhaps surprising amount of time describing a hypothetical felt pen. )

( What I really came here to do, though, was to talk about the blurb on the back of the book. )

I can see what the blurbist is going for: you are meant to really value and appreciate this book, not just consume it. It's just that they seem to be telling you this while backing away, slowly and mournfully, into the void.

Here is someone else's entertaining mention of the self-same blurb (on a slightly earlier edition). In this blog post, Robin Stevens mentions "the 60s, era of charmingly hilarious back-cover blurbs", and a similarly misguided blurb for The Waves.³

Was that a thing? Was it just a Penguin thing? A British thing?⁴ I don't remember my other paperbacks of the era having anhedonic and passive-aggressive blurbs.

What I'm asking is -- where can I find more?


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( more footnotes )
3.So far searching for strange old book blurbs just finds me many, many sites about how to write a catchy blurb for your self-published book, and searching "The Waves back cover" gets me illustrated phone cases.
4. It seems very British indeed, in reflecting that distinctive double-negative-for-positive phrasing, e.g. "not unpleasant".