| My rage for the page has continued
apace since Christmas.
Certainly CABINET OF NATURAL CURIOSITIES has taken
up a lot of space, quite literally. It’s a burly brute of
a book, over 500 pages of art quality paper, larger than a phone
book & weighing in at 13 pounds!
ALBERTUS SEBA‘s book is one of the 18th Century’s greatest
Natural History achievements. His passion & adventure led him
to accumulate an enormous collection of animals, plants & insects
from all over the world for decades, when he decided to commision
illustrations of each & every species & published a 4 volume
catalogue of his immense collection. Exotic plants, snakes, frogs,
crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies & more,
many now extinct, are included. This book is taken from a rare handcoloured
original & comes enclosed in it’s own slipcase, an exquisite
piece of book craft, the drawings, accurately & beautifully
inked, are placed in different combinations on a white page, out
of their natural context they take on an almost hallucinogenic strangeness,
overwhelming in number, hypnotically fascinating both as art &
nature. Too massive for even multiple reading sessions, I have my
copy open on a horizontal to a new double page each day or so, each
page turn presenting new delights & wonders. This edition is
an affordable, slighty scaled down version of the even larger first
edition, which was 3 inches bigger all over & over $100 dollars
dearer. A totally immersive experience that injects a sorely needed
shot of natural wonder into the every day lives of anyone who has
forgotten & wants to remember. Like you & me.
Very different in form & content but equally
entertaining & stunning in it’s detailed execution is
THE ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY by artist/illustrator/ CHRIS WARE. A tabloid
size, dense & concentrated 100 page collection of the artist’s
idiosyncratic cartoons, fake ads, diagrams for paper models &
a very amusing mock history of the non existent novelty company.
It’s a surreal world where everything is both true & untrue,
all held together by Ware’s compassionate humour, sense of
fun & his remarkably detailed art. The fun even starts before
you open the book, it’s beautifully bound, bright red gold
embossed cover hides a mini cartoon down it’s spine, with
a wraparound mock paper seal announcing it’s contents. It’s
a virtuoso performance by Ware & a testament to his incisive
mind & pen, a unique artist at his peak.
I’m looking forward to director David Cronnenberg’s
“HISTORY OF VIOLENCE “ getting a local release, his
“Dead Ringers” one of my favourite sex & drug movies
of all time amongst his other visually mind boggling creations.
He’s based the new movie in part on the 300 page graphic novel
written by JOHN WAGNER ( Judge Dredd ), with scratchy art by VINCE
LOCKE ( The Sandman ), so I thought that I’d pick it up &
get a preview of what might be coming on the big screen. And the
book does read like a novel, not like a comic at all, more like
a hard boiled thriller from the great Black Lizard press era, who
bought us brutal writers like Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich &
other unrelenting walkers on the wildside. It is very violent &
tense & works exactly like a movie on the page, I found myself
anxious as I turned the page dreading/expecting the next turn of
the plot. There is nothing really new here, it could have been written
in the 40s or 50s & one plot device I found just too implausible,
but it will be interesting to see how Cronnenberg’s prodigious
visual imagination transforms & enlarges the text. Oh, another
great thing is that it’s easy to read & re read unlike
most print novels which I seem to rarely re-read in their entirety.
THE HOT KID is the 42nd novel in the now 81 year
old ELMORE LEONARD’s prolific career, you may know him for
the almost 20 screen adaptions of his works like Get Shorty &
Jackie Brown. His stripped down prose, character driven romps &
incisive social commentary have earned him the nickname “The
Detroit Dickens “. This latest book set in 1920s backwoods
America is an unambitious but always entertaining tale of a ruthless
dedicated lawman & his shadowboxing relationship with a notorious
gangster of the time, with a little romance along the way. It’s
Bonnie & Clyde with a happy ending ( unless you are a bad guy
).
I mentioned in a previous dispatch that I’d
just read MICHAEL CONNELLY’s The Closers & true to the
bookshop assistant’s prediction I returned to purchase his
latest “THE LINCOLN LAWYER “. Most of his previous large
body of work have been series based around cops, but this is either
a one off or the beginning of a new series based around a down at
heel lawyer working at the bottom end of the American legal system,
trying to survive, stay sane & hang onto some sense of justice
& positive purpose. Connelly’s prose is stripped down
matter of fact, while his plots, often gripping, ring true &
avoid cliché or suspension of disbelief, unlike many of his
precocious contemporaries he gets out of the way doesn’t draw
attention to himself & let’s the book tell it’s
story.
More than an airport read, although it would be perfect, it’s
a slice of modern urban life as it is lived without the frills,
that holds your attention until the very last plot surprise.
& Maybe next time, Brett Easton Ellis, Captain
Beefheart, Frank Zappa, Charles Bukowski & more…
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