A Rebours

or Against Nature; a new translation of A Rebours (Alternately translated as "Against the Grain") by JK Huysmans

Current price: $40.00

Ok, so this is hardly a book at all in that it has absolutely nothing in common with any other book you've ever read. Huysman was a kook and kind of brilliant at times. La-Bas was better. But this one, there's barely any story.

Des Esseintes, our hero, is the sickly scion of a dissipating landed family. Abandoning his youthful indulgences, he sets out to live the life of an aesthetic hermit, basically a collector of rare and refined sense-impressions. Aside from a few anecdotes of Des Esseintes' wild younger days, the book is a catalog of all the crazy weird shit he keeps in his weird little house in the suburbs of paris that he had built inside a larger house, so he would never have to hear his servants.

A strange, curious and sometimes challenging book- Huysmans spends long passages detailing for instance every book in Des Esseintes' library. This is the "little yellow volume" mentioned in "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and the inspiration for Dorian's collection of jewels. So far I'm the only seller of this edition, marking it high for now.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

Grade:	B+ (Difficult but mostly worth it)
Sentimental Value: Current Price:	$99.99 14.94

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault

The sale of this book has, appropriately enough, been somewhat maddening. It's the last holdout from Foucault, and is something I feel I need to read all of. The parts I studied in school were eye-opening, especially in the way they shed light on other theories of psychology such as that of RD Laing. This is the kind of thing I would like to one day need to know, if I can ever get off my ass and get ready for grad school. I priced it pretty high though, seeing as it's the only copy of that printing for sale on Amazon.

Update 2/7:

I almost didn't make it through the first part about the transformation of the artistic representation of madness from the renaissance to the "classical age" of reason, the enlightenment. It's a slog, if you're not well-versed in the art, literature and history of the period, but I can't be bothered to sort it all out. Eventually I think I pretty much got the picture.

He traces the imagery from the pilgrimage of Bosch's Ship of Fools

to the confinement of first lepers, then, as leprosy disappeared from Europe, the mad as well as criminals and the excess human capital from the first factories (the poor), to the exhibitions of such "monsters" (derived from monstrare: "to show") for entertainment. One administrator found his colleagues had discovered an elegant moral loophole to justify the practice:

The English traveler is right to regard the office of exhibiting madmen as beyond the most hardened humanity. We have already said so. But all dilemmas afford a remedy. It is the madmen themselves who are entrusted in their lucid intervals with displaying their companions, who, in their turn, return the favor. Thus the keepers of these unfortunate creatures enjoy the profits that the spectacle affords, without indulging in a heartlessness to which, no doubt, they could never de-scend.

This became useful as an additional revenue stream after the ineffectual efforts to exert corrective effects on the markets (by incorporating the inmates into a factory for useful work) devolved into a mission to break man's rebellious animal spirit and restore the divine order, based upon the collective acceptance of the curse of human labor. Kind of the same way the Soviets went down.

It makes me wonder what influence the instruments of control developed in the houses of confinement may have had on the methods used by other organizations, based on the training at the last job I had.

It was at a warehouse for a large online retailer. I had to leave after two days. Actually, it's what inspired me to open my bookstore. Now they fulfill my orders, instead of the other way around.

You know those dreams where you're back in college/highschool? The training was like that, except you keep regressing until you're like, "I know I went to Princeton, dammit. What in blazes am I doing in Kindergarten, man?"