Nate D’s Comments (group member since Sep 17, 2012)

Nate D’s comments from the Completists' Club group.

Primary works (chronological by composition):
The House of Fear / La Maison de la Peur (1938, pamphlet with illustrations by Max Ernst)
Little Francis (1937-38, pub.1986, novella)
The Oval Lady (1939, stories)
Down Below (1943, memoir)
The Stone Door (1940s, pub.1977, novel)
A Flannel Nightgown / Une chemise de nuit de flanelle (1951, play, untranslated)
The Magical World of the Mayans / El Mundo Mágico de Los Mayas (1964, possibly an exhibition catalog, untranslated)
The Hearing Trumpet (1976, novel)

Collections:
Pigeon Vole, 1986 (1986, stories, in French)
The Seventh Horse and Other Tales (1988, includes: uncollected stories, a shorten version of The Stone Door)
The House of Fear (1988, includes: The House of Fear, The Oval Lady, Down Below, and Little Francis)

Uncollected stories:
"The Sand Camel" (Surrealist Women, ed. Penelope and Franklin Rosemont)



Additional materials:
Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Susan Aberth, 2004)
The Spiritual Journey Of Alejandro Jodorowsky (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2008, appearances by Carrington).
Leonora (Elena Poniatowska, 2011)

Realizing that true completism was not going to let lack of translation get in its way, so I added the 31 untranslated Vesaas works, with google-translated titles.

Alright then!

I'd really like to read some Aragon (beyond a story in the dedalus anhology), but I'll probably start in prose. I think there are copies of Paris Peasant about?

Also, as of this afternoon, I have held a copy of Evening Edged in Gold in my real hands and it's even more insane than I was prepared for. Details when I have a chance to upload images.

Yeah, Schmidt is kind of a bizarre mess of densely garbled erudition in English, but I suspect that's still relatively true in German. Although obviously some amount must be impossible to carry over into every language.

I was going to say something about at least I get to read Joyce in myb own language, but really doesn't everyone have to read Joyce in Joyce's own language anyway? >>Maybe the same with Schmidt (: ? - : ! )<<

Absolutely agreed. I read it as a novel as well (and listed it as such in the list above). I'm not sure what Kavan called it, but it certainly seems to function as a cohesive whole (especially the first person sections, but the middle interlude is essentially of a part too), and it was written in a pretty compressed period, post-breakdown as she was remaking herself, so it certainly seems to have been conceived of together, too. Maybe it was just easier to market it that way, as independent "stories" appeared in the New Yorker and elsewhere around that time.

See, I just dive into unread uncertainties to the exclusion of the books I know will be amazing. I think I may actually be more of an anti-completist, always racing past the things I like for more that I've only just heard of. Hence these.

He's one of the very best. The works in English are:

The Ship [1949 / revised 1959], the first standalone part of Fluß ohne Ufer (River Without Banks, a trilogy).

The Night of Lead [1956], printed both alone and with three stories from Thirteen Uncanny Tales by Atlas Press. Extracted by Jahnn from a longer unfinished novel.

Thirteen Uncanny Tales [1954],stories from Perudja and River Without Banks, selected by Jahnn as stand-alone pieces. Out of print.

Seeing this with a thread here made me completely unreasonably excited. Maybe you'll entice more readers -- I would particularly invite a few more minds chewing away at The School for Atheists right now.

But anyway, read so far: Nobodaddy's Children (trilogy) and The Egghead Republic.

Currently reading in fits in starts for the indefinite future: The School for Atheists.

Now I'm going to go open the equally thrilling HHJ thread, which I can probably assume you also created (for which, thanks).

I think I'm bad at setting completion plans cause I'd typically rather savor a good author for years than just sprint through the catalogue.

But I'll probably finish all translated Tarjei Vesaas novels in the next few months, nonetheless.

I'd recommend pretty much anything from her actual Anna Kavan period, Asylum Piece on. Ice is the rare case of simultaneously most popular / most easily available / and, I think, actually most complex and developed.

Also: The Horse's Tale now has a Goodreads page!

Thanks Lily. Still sounds worth it to get the stories, though I suppose the rather surface discussion explains why this was published on Lulu. At least they're available!

Another update: Anna Kavan's New Zealand, with contains more previously unpublished stories and letters, I believe, along with biographical insight into her New Zealand period during WWII.

Editor Jennifer Sturm discusses Kavan here.

Found via the new Anna Kavan Society.

Update to the Reading List: Stranger Still: The Works of Anna Kavan.

Thanks to Lily for finding this one. It seems to be mostly a work of criticism, but is also the first and only publication of four recently discovered stories from her later period!

Also: the long-awaited I am Lazarus reprint is supposedly shipping now after a year of delays, though I'm only going to believe it when I finally hold a copy in my hands.

Excellent news: the long-sought House in the Dark is back in print! It's a pretty basic print-on-demand deal from the original English-language publisher, but as with the similar edition of The Ship, it seems well worth getting even in this form.

Thanks for the link Jessica! Always excited to read more Kavanalia and scholarship.

And have you read any Kavan yet, Ali? Who Are you? would be an excellent, quick non-Ice introduction, if you wanted to start elsewhere than the norm. Beware the cries of the brain-fever birds.

Once I have "I am Lazarus", I'll have read all her collected stories and it'll be time to start hunting down all the uncollected, so I'll definitely be turning to this list at that point! Particularly interested in the Horizons material of the 40s, seems like a unique milieu in British writing in general.

Alright, I was just so entirely into The Lathe of Heaven that I'm now ready to get on board with this. Which next? I read a couple Earthseas ages ago (must be 20 years at least now) when I surely wasn't ready to go much deeper than surface (will revisit sometime), but aside from that I've never read anything else.

intrigued / just picked up a copy of, I think, The Terrible Twos.

Paul wrote: "I'm a David Bowie token-albumist, which is the opposite of a completist. The token Bowie album I have is Low. Love those instrumentals..."

This!

Actually, Bowie's generally wonderful, I just find myself ambiently saturated in him, such that I don't have to expend effort of my own to hear him. Low is just the one I love that isn't as widely played.

I think I used to be more of a completist before everything became digital, making CDs more or less just vehicles to mp3. I would be more of an LP completist, now, only they tend to be crazy expensive once you scratch beneath the bigger stuff.

Some completist CD-buying streaks from highschool and college, though, albeit ages ago:
-Squarepusher
-Future Sound of London
-Mountain Goats
-NIN