Tag: america

There’s Nothing Like a Cheap Paperback …

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ 3 Comments

I believe a cheap paperback of great literature dresses up a book shelf better than overpriced hardcovers and oversized trade paperbacks… I mean just those small ones that fit right in the back of your pocket like it was always meant to be there. There’s plenty I found through my years bought for a nickel or a quarter, or maybe I stole from some flea market table where I didn’t have the dime or quarter, but the title or author drew me to such extremities. I feel guilty about that…

There’s a whole line of Faulkner paperbacks I have with split black spines and mysterious photos of a vanished America that retains the hate and desperation of its people in the American south, of fronds of Spanish Moss and blood soaking in puddles within a rutted wagon wheel path. All the Snopes and Compsons in the world took up a couple of feet on the bookshelf near The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Women In Love.

I have a really aged copy of Kerouac’s The Subterraneans sent to me from Terry Malick. He said he had it as a boy when he worked on a farm where he drove a tractor to harvest wheat. He kept it in the glove box. He told me one December evening in Austin that he “wanted to look cool,” but he never really understood the book at all. A few months back he mailed it to me with a neat inscription.

Cheap dirty paperbacks, the pages pungent of must and experience. If we could lift the prints from the cover, how many murderers and saints have clutched these titles in a search for redemption and resolution?

Maxwell Bodenheim was murdered clutching a copy of Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and as he laid there in the Bowery cold water flat, the blood sea of his heart pumped out his life essence to stain his Arrow collar shirt.

Once I rode a trolley to Tijuana from San Diego holding a thick paperback of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I never have been able to read it the same way again, with the lift of spring flowers wafting through the air imagining the Salinas Valley.

Right here with me is a Vintage paperback of Faulkner’s Flags In the Dust with its front cover photo of a dilapidated home and Weeping Lilac Tree and I remember reading it, the first time reading Faulkner, and being entranced with the language (and this was not even vintage Faulkner in his prime!):

“They drank again. It was high ere, and the air moved with gray coolness. On either hand lay a valley filled with shadow and with ceaseless whip-poor-wills; beyond these valleys the silver earth rolled on into the sky. Across it, sourceless and mournful and far, a dog howled. Before them the lights on the courthouse clock were steadfast and yellow and unwinking in the dissolving distance, but in all other directions the world rolled away in slumbrous ridges, milkily opaline.”

These words turned me on to Faulkner, and at the time, I think it was a little bookstore in a Massachusetts mall, there was a shelf of them, all Vintage books, each equally enigmatic. Light In August had its cover of a window shade with the mysterious yellow light tinging it, and The Sound and the Fury had its little country cemetery awash in sunset blood red sky.

Pocket paperbacks: a dishwasher in Detroit washing pans with a volume of Stephen King jammed in his back pocket; a socialite reading Lolita in the back of a limousine; an old man reading Beckett on a park bench; a sailor reading Jack London’s Call of the Wild; a bored teen reading Naked Lunch. I would defer to a quality paperback of Ulysses over a grand Folio edition. In between its beat-up pulpy pages, a secret pulses like a buried ember in its bed of ashes, waiting to spark into full flame.

As a kid, we went to flea markets spread out over the lot of a drive-in theater, and there was table after table of people with books, many of them remaindered. We knew they were remaindered because they tore the front cover off, thus stripping the book of its character. Dirt cheap, then, wasn’t always better. I was weaned from young adult fiction to Stephen King back then. I distinctly remember finding an almost-newish copy of the Signet edition of Salems Lot with its slick black embossed vampire girl with that one crimson drop of blood seeping out of the corner of her mouth and no title on the cover. A collectible now, it was commonplace then … and I could never pick up the novel again, because that edition kept with it the entire mystique of the little village taken over by everyday vampires. Who could ever forget floating Danny Click in that book?

I’m not one for memory lane type of blogging, but picking up this copy of Carl Jung’s edited collection Man and His Symbols published by Dell flooded me with memories.

What’s your favorite pocket paperback book?

On a Lost/Stolen Notebook

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ 1 Comment

In August 2017, I began a new notebook, handwriting in concentrated spates of a few hours at a time, all of the writing clusters having in common the character of Violet Sweet, her mother, a dying neighbor among several others. It was a journey of a pure being deriving much from Jungian traits (Aspects of the Feminine & The Sacred Prostitute). There were also items quoted at length from these 2 books and The Golden Bough, and heightened drawings of perception… alas, one day it was just no longer in my satchel bag, or in our apartment, the car, or at work. It had utterly vanished.

It made me wonder: I always have notebooks, most times they are blank as I compose directly into my laptop, eschewing the notebook as only placing effort into something that I would have to do twice (not counting drafts).

I had considered putting my name inside the notebook, with my address and its reward, should it be found, “your conscience.” However, since I place no faith on human values, I left it blank and so the work I wrote is now tossed to the dustbin of humanity in all of its glorious anonymity.

After days of frantic searching. I gave up looking for it, like a sailor lost at sea, surrendering my hopes to my memory of what it was I wrote (much of it done trance-like). Erring on the side of the power of imagination, I have a new notebook to begin the novel anew.

Maybe, as they say, ‘it was meant to be.’

I’ll shall see.

On Poe

~ Paul Maher Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I once laid hand on a volume of Poe, yellowed and missing the back cover, the front emblazoned the legend that it was the “Selected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe” whereupon a publishing house hack etched out a marginal likeness of the troubled writer using a blood-red crudity of lines hatched and crosshatched so that the looming visage emerged from a tapestry of naked November tree branches. I kept the volume for many years, never really reading it, but was more engaged to the scribbled marginalia peppered throughout. One such comment, “brilliant, seeding intrigue with eeriness” struck me for the relative sophomoric observation the reader had for the line lifted from “The Premature Burial”:

Methought I was immersed in a cataleptic trance of more than usual direction and profundity. Suddenly there came an icy hand upon my forehead, and an impatient, gibbering voice whispered the word “Arise!”within my ear.

Ah, but one day the book began to smell of “old” and I eschewed it with a newer volume, one of those Library of America volumes with the slick black gloss framing the tortured expression of Poe staring as he did from a hundred others of public domain appropriations from such sellers as Barnes & Noble and Borders Books, (remember those?).

Poe is a household name, an irony I guess, because I’d venture that 95% of the population that knows him has ever read anything beyond “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” and even those two but shallow readings, like seeing the flowers but not seeing the flowers for what they are beyond perennial reminders of life and death and rebirth.

These are plebes choosing to believe a myth because it’s more interesting than the truth.

Longfellow thought Poe a plagiarist. Writing after the death of Poe: “My works seemed to give him much trouble, first and last, but Mr. Poe is dead and gone, and I am alive and still writing, and that is the end of the matter.” The great Concord sage Emerson saw little merit in Poe, calling him the “jingle man.” Poe in turn denounced Emerson a mystical fraud. Hawthorne was an admirer, though Poe had trashed his Mosses from an Old Manse: “I confess, however, that I admire you rather as a writer of tales than as a critic upon them. I might often—and often do—dissent from your opinions in the latter capacity, but could never fail to recognize your force and originality, in the former.”

But time is a great forgiver, and to Poe and all we place their works canonical and enduring. The horror and might of Poe and his pen have been bludgeoned by the jaded sensibility of our times. Poe’s wandering fancies and quicksilver mood of darks and dreams endure for the sheer ability to repackage and sensationalize a batch of works that readers of today hardly understand. I have not run into a single person that has fairly read, digested and understood the writer. He is more appreciated as a person, that is the myth of the person, than the scores of stories, essays and poetry he has written. Often anthologized, he is but a curiosity item for fledgling students as an oasis through enormous dry spells of similarly anthologized writers meditating tedium in humdrum English classes across America.

Thus, alas, the sounds of voices heard beneath the wind-caressed eaves of abandoned homes and down the stairwell, are composing poetry upon dusty banisters once stroked by generations of a family driven to annhilation. Blood scores the ink well, the feather tip’t grip of pen in hand scribbles a furious paean to a long lost America, where mystery once held sovereign sway and the earnest scrivener labored at the dictate of his imagination.

This is an essay without purpose. I feel the need to write. Writing can have no purpose. It has no more use on a Sunday morning than sugar sprinkled over a brisket. The inherent need to express and create finds its way across the landscape of the mind like a river wending its path through the topography of a strange new land. At the end there is always an ocean, and there the waters can spread and sink and rise to an eternity of waters greater than the land it sprung from.

Is that not our purpose, if it can be dignified at all?