What I Read On My Summer Vacation

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Well, I had a pleasant week doing absolutely nothing.  Now I have to drive to NYC tonight (along with the legendary Tom Purdom) for SFWA's Editors-Publishers Party -- better known as the Mill 'n' Swill.  Then it's off to Pittsburgh, to Newport NY, and to Kingston NY.  I've got a busy schedule this week.

But what, I hear you ask, did I read during those halcyon idle days Down The Shore?  Well . . .

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt.  This is the novel we all want to write when we grow up.  Either that or else Byatt's  Possession .

Life in a Putty Knife Factory by H. Allen Smith.  Light and inconsequential essays by a New York City newspaperman, back in the days when men word fedoras and Damon Runyan walked the streets.

Percy's Reliques .  This is one of those crosses between scholarship and amateurism gone mad, a collection of ballads and poems, largely from Elizabethan times.   The Dragon of Wantley alone would be worth the price of this eighteenth-century reissue (three bucks at the Baltimore Book Festival), but there are lots of gems to be found.

You Can't Win by Jack Black.  The memoirs of a yegg and a hobo.  Unapologetic and great fun to read -- though less fun to live, I imagine.  One of the very few books that William S. Burroughs admitted was an influence on his own work.

Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees.  This is the long-awaited Carcanet Press collection, edited by Sandeep Parmar, of the poetry written by the author of the fantasy masterwork  Lud-in-the-Mist .  Mirrlees wrote one major modernist poem, Paris, a Poem , which was published by Virginia Woolf and which many suspect (but none can prove) was an influence on T. S. Eliot, a good friend of Mirrlees.  All her other poems are conventional formal.  As Parmar remarks in her extensive and illuminating introduction, "The poems . . . will not necessarily appeal to those who admire Paris ."  But those who wish to understand an artist who created a single important work in two seemingly-unrelated forms must start here.

By Space Ship to the Moon by Jack Coggins and Fletcher Pratt.  Actually, I just looked at Coggins' wonderful pictures.  I bought this, in pristine collection, in an antique shop for six bucks.  Not bad.


And for those who are curious . . .

Why do I admire The Dragon of Wantley so greatly?  Consider only these lines:

Oh, quoth the dragon, with a deep sigh,

   And turn'd six times together,

Sobbing and tearing, cursing and wearing

   Out of his throat of leather;

More of More-hall!  O thou rascal!

   Would I had seen thee never;

With the thing at thy foot, thou hast prick'd my arse

   And I'm quite undone for ever.

Off I go to New York!

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