JLB Books West

 

Back to looking for that full time job again. The bookselling continues.

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.

The Cornelius Chronicles by Michael Moorcock

Selling Price: I'm not certain but I'm sure I lost $1.00 on the sale Is this the turning point?

As of last month it was over a year later and this project was still running itself nicely. Only making a couple of dollars a month but it was still nice to see the shipping notification show up in my inbox occasionally.

I think I read most of the first two Cornelius books. They're an interesting mix of Spi-Fi fantasizing and a typical New Wave SF fondness for ennui and curious stylistic experiments. Moorcock calls it a quartet instead of a quadrilogy: it's not one long story, it's the same story told four times with minor alterations. In the first one super spy Jerry Cornelius is albino, but in the second he's black. Also in each iteration reality seems to be falling apart more severely.

I read these quite a while ago, but Jerry is a space captain in the Moorcock book I'm reading by audiobook now, Doctor Who and the Coming of the Terraphiles, which strikes me as a bit pornographic now that I've typed it out. Yes, Jerry's in this story too I'm told, but I havent gotten there yet. Moorcock can do that, as he's built a huge mythology around elevating his characters to archetypes.

Cornelius is recommended, but one is enough for the most part. As for his venture in the Whoniverse, a subject close to my own heart, well, it's a bit silly.

[Thanks to Prof. Faustaff for fact-checking. ]

Timelords Corner: Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord (Stories 144 - 147)

Doctor Who: The Trial of a Time Lord (Stories 144 - 147)



Part two of my now I guess maybe continuing series on why Colin Baker was not the worst Doctor. He only played the part of the worst Doctor, and he did a hell of a job with what he was given to work with. Although his first season and some of his second were butchered at every turn by my arch-enemy John Nathan Turner, his outing as the Doctor returned the character to his roots as a cranky (this time not so old) genius, and he did it with style and grace.

His second season was almost a proto-Children of Earth miniseries. Actually a lot of the mid-eighties stuff, starting with the stab-happy intergalactic foodie cannibals of The Two Doctors reminds me of the dark direction Torchwood allows these days. That and Peri's swimsuits and cleavage shots.



The story of the whole second season is that the Doctor has been recalled to Gallifrey to stand trial for his involvement in events that lead- and this is where it gets good, to Peri getting her head shaved and lobotomized, replacing her personality with that of an evil dying slug mutant. It was super creepy and a most welcome change for the character, and the idea predates Epitaph One by thirty years or so. Isn't that correct, Mr Whedon?

The comments by the Doctor, the Valeyard and the judge during the trial seem half-metatextually to be putting the character of the Doctor, or rather the show itself, on trial. It's almost as if they were daring the BBC to cancel the show. Fortunately, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred provide a fine rebuttal in the Seventh Doctor and his excellent companion Ace, but sadly their redemption came too late, and Doctor Who finally went off the air in 1989, after 26 years.

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

The Disenchanted by Budd Schulberg

I've actually started reading, like, real books since I came to California. My roommate doesn't have a TV, and I've found it kind of refreshing.

I was browsing the free book cart at the Santa Monica Public Library (a lovely place, but I won't be able to get a library card until I changed my driver's license over). I happened to pick this one up to look over when the cart was whisked away. Turns out it was a serendipitous find.

Schulberg is a fellow alum of Dartmouth and is probably best known as the screenwriter of films like The Harder They Fall and On the Waterfront. My screenwriting professor held up the latter film's script as a paragon of screenplay format and plotting. Being a (fairly) recent Dartmouth grad and having made my way out to L.A. to work in entertainment myself, I take this find as a promising omen.

Famously (among Dartmouth folks, anyways), the (mostly true) story of the book goes like this: Schulberg was a junior writer just starting his career after graduation, and had written a treatment for a sweet nothing of a romantic comedy set on campus during the annual winter festival. For obscure reasons the studio brought in no less a luminary than his literary hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald, to punch it up and give it some respectability.

The resulting film: Winter Carnival (1939)

However, Fitzgerald was a recovering alcoholic, and when the strain of traveling to New Hampshire to see the Carnival first-hand proved too much for him, he fell off the wagon in a big way. In an ethanol-fueled haze of a trip from Hollywood to New York City to New Hampshire and back, Fitzgerald and Schulberg try to massage the flimsy story into something more substantial.

It's by far the best book I've read in a long time, and it's positively criminal that it's been out of print since 1989. Schulberg's prose demonstrates a torrid love affair with the English language, and his humor and pathos as he goes from idol-worship to, well, disenchantment for his hero is engaging nearly from cover to cover. And he succeeds most of all in making real the feel of Old Hollywood in the 1930's. This atmosphere and many elements of the story itself were an obvious inspiration for the Coen brothers' bizarro version Barton Fink, which substituted Faulkner for Fitzgerald as the dipsomaniacal writer in decline before veering off into a glorious existential hell.

...

By the way I'm not going to be adding any more books to my Amazon store's inventory. It was great fun back when I was doing the fulfillment myself, but when I moved that was no longer an option, so I shipped all my books out and set up Fulfillment by Amazon. Since then, it's just been a sucker's game of constantly checking my prices and lowering them by a penny every couple of days. Maybe it's worth it if you have lots and lots of inventory to sell, but the profit margin gets cut more than one would expect, and if you set the price point below $3.50, you lose money on the transaction. I went from pocketing to 74% down to 55% of my sales. So now I'm just running out the clock, trying to break even. And I haven't had a sale in over a week? Blah.

Time Lords Corner: Doctor Who: The Two Doctors (Story 141)

Doctor Who: The Two Doctors (Story 141)

Oh, what the hell. I do have one VHS tape for sale, so it's semi-relevant to this blog. Also, I don't read much.

A little backstory: I really liked the 2005 version of Doctor Who when I finally got into it. So much so, I decided to start at the beginning (1963) and watch the classic series in chronological order to its cancellation in 1989, and the one-off TV movie in 1996. Including the new series, currently going into its seventh year, it all adds up to over 294 hours of surviving serials.

It's the Appalachian Trail of marathon television-watching.

Someone suggested that I blog about the project, but it doesn't meet my blogability threshold. I can't imagine the details of my little journey being interesting to anyone else but me. I have, though, compiled a spreadsheet breaking down every episode's status and running time, with pictures of each character indicating their first appearance.

So this is a random sampling, but I found "The Two Doctors" a fascinating gem in the wasteland of 80's Doctor Who. It brings back the great lost second Doctor, Patrick Troughton (most of the original tapes of his episodes were tragically recycled in the 70's). And he brings along Jamie McCrimmon, one of my favorite early companions and favorite doppelgangers, for that matter.

The sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, gets a bad rap. He was only on for two seasons, and in his first two serials has some "regeneration issues" giving him an absurdly manic-depressive personality. He was also saddled with my least-favorite companion, Peri. She spent her first outing in a bikini being ogled by the camera and bleating in a wandering American accent that makes her sound like an ersatz Judy Garland in the uncanny valley.

I don't blame Baker, he had to work with what he was given, and at the center of the black hole of Doctor Who in the eighties is the bane of my existence for the last month, John Nathan-Turner. He announced his arrival on the scene by ruining the opening and closing sequences (the latter ends with the screen going white in an enormous cringe-inducing explosion), and gave us nearly a decade of companions that spend most of their screen time complaining.

After several false starts that represent some of the least watchable episodes of the series, Baker finally finds his stride as a serious-minded but self-centered genius, and he more or less maintains the persona for the remainder of his two short seasons before regenerating into the seventh and final Doctor of the original series.

"The Two Doctors" is all over the place. The bad guys in this outing are the Androgons, a society of advanced Epicurians. The muscle of the Androgon faction is Shockeye, a creepily-gluttonous monster, an intergalactic foodie fixated on tasting human flesh. Troughton's Doctor gets his DNA mixed up with Shockeye's, resulting in a pair of ravenous culinary aesthetes on a quest to sample Earth's finest delicacies, resulting in the following exchange:

Shockeye:  "Do you serve humans in this establishment?"

Waiter:       "I believe 100% of our clientele is human, sir"

Shockeye:  "Human MEAT, you sniveling imbecile!"

Perhaps it was the relief of a surprisingly watchable episode after Baker's first few miserable episodes (again, not his fault), but I actually enjoyed "The Two Doctors." It was funny and weird, but most of all, I was actually able to pay attention to almost all of it.

P.S.- Real Time Lords shop at Time Lords Vintage.

Typewriter in the Sky by L. Ron Hubbard

It's funny, but after over 250 books sold, not a single person ever commented on the bibliomantic scrap of paper tucked inside almost every single one, cannibalized from a Scientology manual in the furtherance of enturbulation through the stochastic forces of the MEST universe.

Hubbard didn't just write lists of things he thought of, though. He also composed today's book, Typewriter in the Sky.



Like Fear, it's not a bad story. This one about an author out to kill his main character, in whose personality is trapped his best friend, was cited as an influence by Philip K. Dick. It's also an easy book to get a hold of. Like all writings of L. Ron Hubbard, sales of the books are highly subsidized by the Church of Scientology and its members, who end up with stacks of the things. So the entire secondary market is flooded, hence second-hand copies end up having negative value.

The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	Sold
Sentimental Value: Selling Price:	$333.93  $39.98

The Book of Lies: Which Is Also Falsely Called Breaks: The Wanderings of Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Perdurabo (Aleister Crowley) Itself Untrue


I picked this up, along with a pair of Corcoran boots, in Greenwich Village on my first trip to NYC. I immediately removed the dust jacket, as it didn't do anything for the aesthetics of the volume. 


This is a very strange book, full of obscure Qabalistic riddles and inside jokes, and purportedly contains the key to the 9th degree of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley alleged that Theodore Reuss immediately inducted him to that degree after reading ch. 69: "The Way to Succeed; and the Way to Suck Eggs."


The initial page gives the complete, ridiculously long title of the book in all its glory:

The publication data on the next page goes on to tell us "There is no joke or subtle meaning in the publisher's imprint." I can't recall whether I ever found it, but I believe it may refer specifically to the first edition of the title. 

Finally, to give you an idea of how crazy these little poems are, here are the first and second pages proper. Elsewhere referred to as "The Soldier and the Hunchback":

It's not so much a book that you read from cover to cover, but very useful, for example, for bibliomancy. Or you could immerse yourself in qabalistic knowledge for a decade or so, in order to understand (most) of the jokes contained therein.

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?"

The game players of Titan by Philip K. Dick

Grade:	D (Didn't Read)
Status:	For Sale $old
Sentimental Value: Current (Sane) Market Value:	$220.00 (which a couple of fools are selling these for) $38.49

The Game-Players of Titan (The Gregg Press science fiction series)

I'm hoping I get a chance to read this one before it sells. I borrowed it from my college library right before going on a leave of absence, and when i got back there was no record of it on my library account. Eminent domain? I think the statute of limitations has run out at least.

Anyway I hear it's mad.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Grade:	D (Didn't Read)
Status:	Sold
Sentimental Value: Actual Selling Price:	$6.99 $1.25

I wasn't sure how I was going to review a book I didn't read. Fortunately Reading Rainbow did the job for me:

Reading Rainbow Banned Book Review #1 - watch more funny videos

Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius by Gary Lachman

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	For Sale
Sentimental Value:	$93.23

Gary Lachman (aka Valentine), the keyboardist from Blondie, is a deeply cool guy. He's written about the Gurdjieff work in a very astute yet personal way, and here he unearths all the juicy occult stuff from the little corners it's hidden itself in in 1960's culture, all clearly well researched and referenced.

Some of my weird and mind-bending favorites from the book:

"At a seminar "On Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, LaVey served the amputated thigh of a young woman, donated by a Berkeley physician, perpared by his second wife Diane following a Fiji islander recipe for puaka balava, 'long pig'. The most satanic of his audience in the early days was the film-maker Kenneth Anger, who introduced Marjorie Cameron, Jack Parsons' widow, to LaVey ... Susan Atkins, who stabbed the pregnant Sharon Tate to death, was for a time a dancer in LaVey's tawdry Topless Witches Revue that played in some of San Francisco's seedy venues. She would later claim it was LaVey who put her on the road to murder. And as we will see, Bobby Beausoleil, another member of the Family convicted of murder, starred in an early version of Anger's Lucifer Rising. Tate's husband, Roman Polanski, was the director of Rosemary's Baby, which features LaVey as the Devil."

So really that last part is a myth, which is weird because I really thought I remembered seeing LaVey as the Devil but it never actually happens. Zizek would have something to say about it, I'm sure. But the occasional misstep is worth it for such a journey through the hidden underbelly of 1960's stardom.

Later Anger falls in with the Stones through the witch Anita Pallenberg, but I don't want to spoil any more of it. It's like Anger's own Hollywood Babylon, but for Rock 'n Roll.

Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius by Gary Lachman

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

Grade:	A (Excellent)
Status:	For Sale
Sentimental Value:	$19.99

A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

So, first up on the chopping block. I actually wrote my final paper for phil on this one. Hume breaks down the source of all morals and human feelings with merciless precision, explaining how and why they come about in an almost phenomenological way, describing how they arise in the mind and make reason "the slave of the passions.”

I compared Hume's analysis of morality with Singer's hypothetical scenario, in which you are walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it. The problem is, you just bought these pants today, and they were really expensive. Do you risk getting the jeans muddy just to save a child who is going to die any second?



Psychologically healthy people would feel obligated to help, to prevent the suffering and death of the child. Singer's comparative example from real life is the equally certain imminent suffering of those threatened with starvation. I would add all the people living in hell in the Congo.

He compares the uncomfortable but morally irrelevant sacrifice of the cleanly state of one’s clothes to the equally morally irrelevant sacrifices of enjoyment of wealth the affluent would have to make to help the starving. The only difference between the two situations, Singer argues, is distance. Thus, if distance carries no intrinsic moral weight, as Singer holds, the affluent are under equal obligation to help alleviate famine as they are to save the drowning child.

Bummer city, right?

The other little story I liked from that class was supposed to illustrate a woman’s right to choose.

Imagine you live in a city where there’s a serious vagrancy problem, and the bums all catch a weird sleeping sickness that causes them to fall down and roll around on the ground. It’s summertime, and no one can afford air conditioning.

It’s a really hot night, and it would feel so much better to open one of the french windows everybody in town has and let the breeze blow through. You can just taste the cool breeze on your skin. But the law states that if through your negligence, one of these bums rolls into your house, you have to feed and care for him for the next 18 years to life.

Proof that NYC is bummer city USA courtesy of Girlnarly aka she of gnarly ideas