Obscurorant 2.0

I loves me some old-time pulp fiction. Indeed one of my favorite authors wrote almost exclusively for the pulp Weird Tales. So I was delighted to find Pulp of the Day, which true to its name, offers a daily cover from one of the old pulp magazines. I love the work illustrators did back then - I mean who wouldn’t want a print of this for their wall? On the other hand, ‘The PT Boat Escape of the Naked Daughters of Papua‘ would be quite a conversation starter.

UPDATE: Also suitable for framing.

Submitted for your consideration: a cookbook featuring recipes from classic children’s literature. The author’s website and blog can be found here.

Speaking of books, there was a particular title I was hoping to come across Saturday (but didn’t). Different folks have recommended Heat and The Apprentice as books that someone with an interest in cooking would enjoy, and I intend to read both. But I’ve also heard tell of another cooking-related book I want to find and read - The Belly of Paris by Zola. Naturally I’m curious to know if anyone else has read it already.

Last week The Intended told me that I shouldn’t make any plans for the coming Saturday, as she had a surprise in mind for me. So Saturday came and we got in the car, and drove. And drove, and drove. And we wound up - Surprise! - at a bookstore. Namely this one, the Montague Book Mill, advertised as “books you don’t need in a place you can’t find.” Go take a look at the pictures.

It’s a lovely use for an old building, isn’t it? The building houses not only the bookstore, but a restaurant and a cafe as well. Since we visited during the day, the Night Kitchen was closed, but after browsing the stacks we had a slight repast (A No. 1 and champagne for her, No. 6 and a Left Hand Chainsaw Ale for me), courtesy of the Lady Killigrew Cafe. The stacks, for those of you who are bookishly inclined, lean more towards hardcovers and trades, rather than your garden-and-yard-sale variety paperbacks; whoever does the buying there is picky, which means good titles for the plucking. I wound up with four books: Wodehouse, The Long Recessional, In Command of History and Defeat Into Victory.

On the way home we stopped in Amherst (like Burlington but slightly less annoying full of hippies and trustafarians) for a brief walkabout. Naturally we stopped at the Amherst Brewing Company for some more eating (beer bread) and drinking (Workingman’s Wheat). Then we went home. The End.

A damn fine day. Lovely weather, a lovely bookstore, good eats and drinks, and the best company. One couldn’t ask for more, and days and places like that remind me why I still live in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.

This map is so feckin’ cool it makes me want to start reading The Mysterious Island immediately.

Last week The Telegraph published a list of the 50 best cult books. Let leave aside the question of what exactly a ‘cult book’ is, and focus on the important thing here - me. I consider myself fairly well-read, but it turns out I’ve only read six of the fifty books listed.

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

I’m not sure how this can be a cult book when it’s shoved down the throats of thousands upon thousands of unsuspecting high school kids every year . It was pressed upon me as an adolescent and I loathed it then as I do now. Holden Caulfield = big whiner. Life is pain, highness, etc. etc.and etc.

Chariots of the Gods - Erik von Daniken

From cover to cover this book is filled with unmitigated nonsense. But for a kid in junior high kid lately enthralled with the original Battlestar Galactica (”There are those who believe that life here began out there…”) it was riveting stuff.

Dune - Frank Herbert

A classic. I’ve re-read it several times.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Another must read in the education of young geek.

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

I didn’t get around to reading this until four or five years ago, and I wasn’t terribly impressed. Maybe there’s another book that can account for Kerouac’s reputation?

Fear and Loathing and Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson

Printed comfort food. The high point of Thompson’s output.

Submitted for your consideration: a post on the 30th anniversary of The Silmarillion. Much less popular (and read) than either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion contains what may be my favorite passage, or story, in all of Tolkien’s work: the tale of Beren and Luthien.

I like gadgets, clever little gadgets. Usually this yen expresses itself through the medium of pocketknives, moleskine notebooks and my undying love for my iPod. But now I think I’ll add book darts to the list, nifty little metal arrows that can slide like a paper clip over a page to mark a spot in a book, without doing any damage.

I purchased a tin while browsing one day at the Museum of Useful Things, without any real idea of how I’d actually put them to use. I have a large selection of bookmarks* that I use to hold in my place in whatever book I’m reading and I didn’t anticipate changing this habit. What I’ve found is that book darts are ideal for marking pages in cook books and noting recipes that you want to cook, or return to, or simply mull over.

* Hi. Yes I actually typed - and you actually read - the phrase “a large selection of bookmarks.” I do realize how strange that makes me look, but trust me, it can’t be helped.

Between the collections that The Intended and I brought along when we moved in together (and two recent purchases en route), there’s a fair number of cookbooks lining the shelf in our kitchen. So what I’m kind of curious about is - do folks treat their cookbooks strictly as reference material, plucking them from the shelf when looking for specific information? Does anyone read their cookbooks like a novel - i.e. cover-to-cover and front-to-back?

Me, I treat ‘em like reference books. But there are cookbooks I could see myself curling up in a chair with, like the gorgeous Pork and Sons.

Yesterday marked the passing of science fiction giant Arthur C. Clarke. I can’t say I was a huge fan of his work, though as a fan of the genre I was familiar with his work. I’d venture a guess that most folks knew of him as the man who wrote the short story behind 2001: A Space Odyssey or perhaps Childhood’s End. Me, I preferred his short stories. Here are two particular favorites:

The Nine Billion Names of God
The Star

Reason number 1,311 to return to London some fine day: The TinTin Shop.

I was just reminded of this lovely exchange from No Country For Old Men (the speaker is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, one of the three main characters of the novel):

Me and Loretta…got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I ain’t even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that’s a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I don’t like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well ma’am I don’t think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.”

When I was reading No Country For Old Men I rather enjoyed Sheriff Bell’s narrative musings; others, however, not so much. I have yet to see the Coen Brothers movie adaption - at this point I’ll probably have to wait for the DVD.

“I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunger back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. Their stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in a cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer’s ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.”

-from Through The Magic Door by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Very few writers manage the trick of creating characters who become true immortals, characters that live apart from the author’s work and continue long after the author’s death, characters that entire into the culture apart form the author, almost as if they were living, breathing people. Interest and fascination with these immortals never end: other writers create new tales with such vivid characters, often in other media such as film.
Dumas accomplished the feat when he sent D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers swaggering through the streets of Paris and Conan Doyle surely birthed a pair of immortals the first time Holmes and Watson sallied forth into the underworld of Victorian London. One could also make a solid case that Ian Fleming’s James Bond has joined the pantheon of fictional immortals. On this side of the Atlantic Tarzan of the Apes, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is worthy of taking a place alongside the others.

All of this is by way of saying that yesterday was the birthday of another author,who happens to be one of my favorites: Robert E. Howard, who also created an immortal…

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyberborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet.”

2008 marks the centenary of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame the best book about talking animals ever written.* The entire text of the book is available online in several places, but I like this one due to the old-school illustrations.

*Watership Down being a very close second.