ANOTHER NEW YEAR

z--- I realize that the vast majority of Americans do not live in Manhattan so… (you can skip to fragment U… but)

y--- Anna was talking about David Bowie’s  Berlin Trilogy and not having Station to Station my first impulse was to check Amazon and of course it is there but then I remembered J&R downtown on Park Row which must be one of the very last cd/dvd stores in the country  with a huge selection of all types of music from classical via country to gospel to… and so a subway ride away I was able to go down town and get the CD.  A pleasant smile from the girl at the checkout also looked into the classical selection to see if any new CDs from ECM and then to the basement where I always look through the westerns hoping for one I have never heard of but need to watch… 

x-- I came back  via The Strand where I found the bound galley ($2.00) for David Slavitt’s translations of Petrarch which Harvard is publishing in February. 

w-- The Strand was stuffed with tourists on the main floor mostly looking at displays of new books that are surrounded by  large areas displaying candy, cooking gadgets, t-shirts, shoulder bags, strange spur of the moment purchases… but very few looking at the  secondhand books further back in the store.  One notices that lit criticism has been moved to the basement.  The Strand is now a destination store.  A little like Macy’s for the literate or those who still like to think of themselves as booklovers or who have friends who are booklovers

 v--- I also looked into St Marks Bookshop whose fate is still precarious.  There had been protests and a rent reduction was given to them by their landlord but and more books have been faced out and there are  fewer and fewer individual titles… unless someone gives them a very large chunk of cash so that they can again purchase books directly from publishers their fate is most likely sadly evident…when one starts to see the 20% off everything…and then that number begins to change… one takes no pleasure in this and tonight (3 January 2012) Patti Smith is reading there and there will be many people in attendance and they will all feel good about being there but the store like Patti Smith herself is from another time.  UPDATE, I later walked by the shop and saw that she did have indeed a packed house, complete with people standing around outside the shop hoping for whatever it is when people come to see a celebrity.  Now if rock millionaires like Smith and superrich leftist film makers like Michael Moore, who read recently at the shop, really wanted to put their money where their mouths are always going, they would help a place like St. Marks by arranging credit for the store… but hey…  that is not very likely:  for Smith it has been a long and steady downhill slide from her first so-called hit “Piss Factory.”

u-- The December 25, 2011 New York Times Book Review SHOULD BE PRESERVED.  It is probably the 32 page impending death notice for what we have known as the world of books and bookstores like St. Marks.

Pages  2 and 3--- from The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group:  JUST UNWRAPPED A NEW E-READER?  TIME TO UNWIND WITH A GREAT BOOK.   20 intellectual properties are illustrated and plus one illustrated inside an e-reader.  There is one of those curious designs:  Scan here to read more… 

Page 4 DOWN load a bestseller for your new eReader today!  From Simon and Schuster…

Page 25 Amazon takes a whole page to advertize its Kindle fire

Page 27another full page from Random House advertizing Download ebooks for every reader is your family.

And Page 7 from Zagat which used to publish books of restaurant rating and toilets around the world is now in the wine business :  BEST CELLAR LIST  Enjoy 15 Outstanding Reds Worth $219.99—Jut $69.99

There was another full page ad from Xlibris of 15 titles available in hardcover, paper and electronic form.  None of these books will be reviewed in the New York Times or in any of the few remaining book sections being published in major American newspapers but their individual authors have paid good money to be able to say that their book was published and advertized in The New York Times.  It is unlikey that any of these books will be available from any public library.  Their authors will have received a few copies of the book.  They will give them to close family members and hope and hope

t--Even Anna received a Kindle for Christmas and promptly downloaded a Norwegian mystery by a woman and the how:  she wanted to see the process and what determined the purchase: a mystery, cheapness, Norway, a woman…  she quickly read the e-book and then moved on to a book by a popular Brooklyn writer whose name I won’t mention as he is not worthy of being mentioned… but I think of Anna is the same way that James Joyce thought of Nora… but Anna will one of these days publish a book that will come as a great surprise…

S-- I was talking with Jeremy Davies, an editor at Dalkey Archive (which publishes my own books) about the difference between the sort of books that work on e-readers and those that work best on paper.    I had discovered this by being unable to read the e-reader version of the bound galleys for the second volume of THE CIVIL WAR  written by those who had lived it that the Library of America is publishing.  I had read with great interest the first year and wrote about  it.  I had failed in reading and have had to ask for the actual book when it is available.  I will long think of this experience and very quickly such a description will be read with a condescending smirk by those coming quickly behind me.  I missed in the e-reader the easy of turn from selection to selection, back and forth and with equal ease going to the table of contents to see what to read next… maybe my computer literacy leaves something to be desired.  With the e-reader you can only read A PAGE AT A TIME… and there is implied in the electrification of  the text: move on, wipe your finger across the screen…

R--- But to make it a bit more complex.  A guy at Library of America sent me the e-galleys for the DAVID GOODIS volume and I started to read DARK PASSAGE as I had seen the Bogart movie version.  Boy, my index finger swiped those pages away and I found that it was really easy to read and I decided to save the remaining four novels to read for later in the month as I drive along the southern border of Arizona and New Mexico…

Q—The first person to go on with me about how much she loved her e-reader was my dental hygienist who had a long subway ride morning and evening.  She read mostly best sellers.  Those fat books , brand names really one for every season and…  she mentioned how cheap they were, how easy to carry and you don’t have to figure out what to do with the book after you ave read it…

P- books to most people have become things, those things you want to get rid of…

O--  the guys at Dalkey say that for the most part their readers are not wanting to read the books on e-readers but gradually the books will all be on e-readers…

N---I suspect that eventually there will eventually be books that will remain books and one can safely say the majority of books on   the lists at Dalkey Archive, at New Directions, at Pushkin Press, at Archipelago, at Library of America will remain as books.  The people who read “best sellers”, genre books… as in  a customer walks into a shop and says give me three new mystery books or sci-fi books or crossword puzzle books… the e-reader will be for them…

M—Jeremy mentioned that one of the problems  no very good writer has written a book designed to be read on an e-reader…  maybe that is coming and I have already seen what can be done with T.S Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND…  the app made for my iPad makes really available this poem as it always was the one essential poem of the Twentieth Century and is now the first fully realized poem for the 21^st Century… combining the orginal text which can be read by itself or it can be read silently while listening to two readings by Eliot himself  or then by a professional actor or then by a modern poet or then read and viewed while listening to a staged reading with a woman reading the poem and then there is the edited version by Ezra Pound and then there are complete notes as well as filmed commentaries by the likes of Seamus Heaney… if this was a print book it is the sort of book sentenced to the basement of the Strand…   

L ---Eventually my own books will make the transition but for now they are only in paper.  But if given the chance I think I would like to add to GOING TO PATCHOGUE… and the same would go for THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV

k---One of the problems is that the texts available for e-readers are still predicated upon our memory of the printed page...  they do not take advantage of the actual capabilities of the e-reader and this was apparent with an e-galley Dalkey sent me of MATHEMATIQUE: by Jacques Roubaud that expects the reader to move back and forth through different sections of the book.  This is something easily done with the printed book but would only be possible if they programmed the text to respond to a command mimicking that movement… but if in my primitive understanding can state this I am sure we will be seeing at first junk books that will easily be capable of doing this but that is some time away… Farrar Straus published a novel , LUMINOUS AIRPLANES, by Paul LaFarge with a notice on the last page that the reader could go to a website where the novel would be continued…  but it seemed not…  and the same happened when I was reading  WAR & WAR by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. A web address was given and it seems that the site has been turned off due to lack of payment…

LAST WORD for now:  I am reading SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.  I am continuing to read PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  I am reading The AVIGNON QUINTET by Laurence Durrell.  But I am thinking it is time to re-read Gottfried Benn…

KAPUTT: bookstores, book reviews, writing, my own

KAPUTT (due homage to Malaparte): Bookstores  Book reviews,  writing , my own .

      

ONE                    “If I had planned it, I should not have made the sun at all.  See! How beautiful!  The sun is too bright and too hot… And if there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing,” Ludwig Wittgenstein quote in a biography by Edward Kanterian (Reaktion Books)

  

TWO            “ …and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away only, eventually, to deliver himself--- utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials--- into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses,  people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers ad flayers of skin,” from SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, to be published by New Directions in February, 2012 (these quoted words show why I can write that there is not a living American writer who comes anywhere close to Krasznahorkai in ability or in genius.

1-      DEATH is the most mind concentrating word in the English language… in all languages.  To even begin to write why is to attempt to dilute… but death is never diluted.

2-- The death of a bookstore has been on the mind here in Manhattan, NY, US.  Having lived through the death of New Morning Bookstore on Spring Street in SOHO--- given what SOHO has become--- it is a little hard to imagine at one time there were seven bookstores within that area and New Morning was the one where I worked.  The film director Nicholas Ray lived upstairs from it and was dying. 

3-- New Morning was owned by the guys who put out HIGH TIMES… it was both very literary and a destination store for what was new in every aspect of that word.  But it died.  The founder of HIGH TIMES blew his brains out… other people ran it… money problems… the stock begins to shrink… shelves disappear, individual books begin to be faced out…book stock has to be bought from wholesalers… magazines are no longer being delivered for sale… smaller presses start to see their books faced out—since they are really unaware of the lack of credit they advance books and so become the last in and the last screwed… and then eventually the marking down of books…

4-- I went through the agony down to collecting a few of the metal book ends made in the silhouettes of airplanes.. . hinting at the planes used to airlift essential supplies from South America or Mexico… the quick money fortunes that bought the first lofts in SOHO … 

5-- New Morning pioneered the idea of having low tables on which piles of new books would be displayed, mixing new with the old, fiction with nonfiction…  a demonstration of the eclectic taste of the managers…on Saturday nights the three Old Testament prophets as they were called would come in: Samuel Menashe, Tuli Kupferberg and Sidney Bernand… I hope everyone who might read this knows who they are… as they Irish would say, their like will not be seen again

6-- After New Morning closed,  I worked at the oldest bookshop in what became the East Village: East Side Bookstore… by the time I worked for them they were in a tiny shop on the north side of St Marks Place, next door to St Marks Bookshop.  The owner was a professor at Pace but was dying and after he died his widow kept it going for a time…  the same thing happened… the stock shrank etc…

7--St Mark’s Bookshop prospered and then moved across the street to larger quarters, had some problems and moved again to its current location on Third Avenue after receiving help from the founder of Rodale who was sadly killed in an auto accident in Moscow 

8-- Currently, the store’s stock is shrinking, shelves from sections have been removed, books get faced  out, smaller presses see their books being prominently displayed and one is aware that the shop does not have credit to order directly from the big publishers and they are having problems meeting the rent… and for a while that problem has been met with a temporary reduction but I would think by the time the lease comes for renewal in two years St. Marks will be but a memory unless they find a rich leftist--- and there are many many of them--- who is prepared to stake them to a chunk of cash… the latest estimate from an employee: six months more… I suspect  and hope I am wrong but March will see the end…   

9-- The best bookstore of recent memory was Books & Co. up on Madison Avenue but that was supported by the heir to IBM though  even she eventually got tired of putting  up buckets of cash…  of course landlords, gentrification, the economy are always dragged into play but the reality is that we are living through the waning time for the book and bookstores… even The Strand which according to tax returns still produces millions of dollars in profits for it owners is now a tourist destination that is thriving just on that… secondhand books are a shrinking part of its business and the selling of shoulder bags, candy, cooking gadgets and a myriad number of other spur of the moment purchases along with well discounted new books is what is keeping that show going, plus they own the building.

10- I treasure St. Mark’s but I see my own mortality in it.  The ageing owners who have heroically kept the store going—even stocking my own books from Dalkey Archive--- have a long and honorable life of selling books and making available books that would not normally be available… going as far back as when one of the owners then learning the trade by working at the East Side Bookshop was arrested for selling the infamous ZAP comic book that featured incest as a pleasurable activity and as a way to keep families together… and more recently they even sold THE TURNER DIARIES, a very controversial book that showed in glowing terms the triumph of a Nazi ruled US… written by a man who was not being ironic. 

11- The owners of St Mark’s deserve to have that one rich person help them… that is what they really need… but I have a feeling it is like hoping to find that last seat on a life raft after an iceberg as done its work and echoing William Burroughs  these guys are not going to put on dresses to save their skins---  for many years the best-selling novel at St Marks was William Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH… but now you can see I have been writing about the past and a past fondly remembered as the semi-literate youth have  other things on their mind or minds…

12- Books have been shoved to the side and for a long time when the conversation turns to books they are quickly exhausted and replaced by the latest movie or movie available on DVD…

13 --The US has only newspaper book review section that deserves that title and it is the rather pathetic New York Times… but I have no real complaints, both of my books were well reviewed there but when the burden falls upon them as being the sole book section one is disheartened by the pages of the review given up to best seller lists and articles of a general interest… so in a sense even they are a little embarrassed by having to actually run reviews.

14--The Wall Street Journal on Saturdays now has a large book section but the editor obviously is interested in non-fiction which seems naturally to revolved around and around business, war… and eccentric lives… literature is treated in columns…

15—Newspapers still review books but most are like the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe… a couple of books reviewed usually by staff on the newspaper… there is no personality, no feel that there is much thinking going on… and while it is true that far more books are reviewed on the basis of whim than anyone realizes, now all to often it is a simple of matter of seeing if someone can be cajoled into saying something, anything really, just as long as it vaguely makes sense.

16—But is there a future ON LINE?  Isn’t that the desperate hope… blogs, online reviewing sites… I myself read some of these but I still want those words on actual paper though I will also admit that while I have a subscription from my sister for The New Yorker I download it and read it on my iPAd and then the actual print version arrives in the mailbox and is not usually opened…

17--  For a long time I have noticed the disappearance of news papers from the subway here in NYC and I have begun to notice people reading on handheld devises… and they seem to be reading what looks like novels. 

BUT I AM STILL ANNOYED BY THE CRAP THAT GETS PUBLISHED IN BOOK FORM… So I guess you can say I still have an interest in books

(I have privileged moments of criticality)(I especially regret the lack of women and minorities in this book)(To make matters worse mine is a small canon of only of white men) These words are from the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archeology at Princeton University who has published a book THE FIRST POP AGE which is packed with full colour reproductions but no thinking… a book about Warhol, Lichtenstein, Hamilton, Richter and Ruscha… the selection of course is arbitrary but so ordinary… all the complaining or excusing, all so much throat clearing…  I guess if he had at least mentioned John Wesley, I would not have been so annoyed, but Princeton does that to its tenured professoriate who it seems spend too much time thinking and talking about their favorite Chinese and Indian restaurants in the Princeton area as reported by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who had the well paid accident of spending some time among this human society, a place, as Anthony Burgess noted, even the bank tellers are rude…

18--  HOWEVER there are a few tiny scraps of interest available:  THE POETRY OF THOUGHT FROM HELLENISM TO CELAN by George Steiner which is published by New Directions…just mentioning the publisher is designed to show how that word has changed.  The so-called larger publishers cannot afford to publish a book like… Steiner well understands, “this little book, the interest and focus it hopes for from its readers--- statistically a tiny minority--- the vocabulary and grammar in which it is set out are already archaic.”

And the reason for that is quite simple:  the universities are controlled by those who write inside the thinking exemplified by the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archeology at Princeton University  and we all live in a world where the young  (8-18) devote  eleven hours of their day to their engagement with electronic media of one sort or another and where they use a vocabulary of approximately 65 words…

There are these words by Steiner:  “… the “discovery” of metaphor ignited abstract disinterested thought.  Does any animal metaphorize?  It is not only language which is saturated by metaphor.  It is our compulsion, our capacity to devise and examine alternative worlds, to construe logical and narrative possibilities beyond any empirical constraints.  Metaphor defies, surmounts death—as in the tale of Orpheus out of Thrace…”

JOURNEY OF THE DEAD or the ALMOST DEAD

Q             The world is calling is a cliché of what the young experience.  As one gets older increasingly it is the world within calling and that is finally the only to explain how the books pile up about me since it gets a little more difficult to go out into the world…

Q             Last night Denis Donoghue was here for dinner and I showed him a line in a new book from George Steiner that is coming from New Directions: THE POETRY OF THOUGHT From Hellenism to Celan.  I also mentioned that Steiner was the only critic today who did what Denis does: close reading of texts and writing for the general educated population…  Denis did not dispute this but did mention that he thought Steiner far better  read and in fact much more erudite… and then Denis mentioned the loathing that people felt for Steiner when he was a professor at Cambridge and the ridicule he was exposed to  if not to his face than  firmly to his back.  And I was saying I thought it no accident that Steiner was now being published by New Directions since that publishing is one of the very few that is still engaged in publishing what is genuinely of interest in terms of literary originality.  Happily Denis Donoghue’s WARRENPOINT is being reprinted in the near future by Dalkey Archive, the only other American publisher what keep to the Poundian way of : MAKE IT NEW.

Q             But that line from Steiner:  WHERE EVER FEASIBLE ADORNO YIELDED TO THE CHARMS OF OBSCURITY.

Q             Of course Steiner’s touchstones are those epitomes of the obscure: Heidegger, Hegel, Celan,  Holderlin, Plato but he also fears not to venture into the works of Genet, Valery, Strindberg, Goebbels, Marx and the list goes on… I am willing to follow him as I am Pound… because the question is what to read next, or re-read next.

Q             Steiner also knows that things have changed:  “In the “free world” license has often been indifference.  What potentate in the White House would take note of, let alone dread a Mandelstam epigram?”  But is he saying that George W and BO are incarnations of Stalin… the comedy of it all…

Q             The sentence after the one just quoted:  “The image of Marx in the British Library rotunda is totem.  It is a celebration, now virtually erased, of the belief that “In the beginning was the Word.”

Q             An aside:  Heidegger is the great seducer of Jewish intellectuals, both mentally and physically, if I mention Steiner one has to also mention Levinas and of course Hannah Arendt  

Q             So Steiner has sent me back to the dialogues of Valery, he has returned me to Faulkner--- though never far from him to be sure and Poe as they are really the only American prose writers he is interested in while of the poets there are only Eliot and Pound…

Q             My only contact with Steiner was in a classroom--- too many years ago--- at Columbia and he was mentioning how fortunate I was to have been talking with Anthony Burgess who was the only English writer who was not an English writer, because to be an English writer was almost a term of abuse in Steiner’s vocabulary of criticism, Burgess if he wanted to, if he had not given into being an entertainer ,might have been a very great writer, he was the only one in Twentieth Century England who had this potential, all the rest of them were minor regional provincials…

R             I prefer Steiner’s pompous  attituding  (which is probably the worst that can be said.. but I still read carefully as he like Calasso are even at their most pompous are not devoid of interest) when compared to Geoff Dyer  whose bound galleys for ZONA a book he has written about STALKER  fell into my hands and  I tried to read  in it going to and from doctor...  I was going to write about it on this blog but I type so slowly....  i think that Geoff Dyer writes all the reviews in all the English newspapers and magazines... all the culture pages, all the commentary pages.

R             At one time I looked forward to London because of the number of national newspapers and their book pages… but that is no longer so and the reason is that Geoff Dyer is writing all those pages.  In the first few pages of ZONA  my eyes ran into or were run over by these phrases that I circled as evidence for my contention that he is solely responsible for all the book pages of the English newspapers:  1, the barman's jacket could do with a good clean   ,2, as anyone who has enjoyed a couple of bong hits already knows  ,3, Tarkovsky couldn't give a toss about the audience  ,4, the screen was no bigger than a big telly ,5, we were able to have a discreetly good gawp, 6,sitting near her at a lavish fund-raiser.
              It is the phrase, “no bigger than a big telly” that did it for me.  The instant response: Dyer writes all the English newspapers

S              I have been reading PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas since the summer… and have made it to about page 200 with another 900 pages.  Some of that time was taken up with surgery and recovery but the actual reading of this novel by Peter Nadas is the most difficult, the most complicated, most demanding of my life.  And not being done inside a class, not being read against a deadline and not worried that I would have to fake the in depth review.. but already I know this is a terribly great novel, beyond probably my ability, but still demanding and I will not be able to show how he used Plutarch’s lives to structure his novel, I will not be able to talk about the use of time:  Is it taking place on 16 June as Peter Esterhazy suggested all novels now take place:  I spend three weeks reading the section:

Two women are in a cab on the way to the hospital where the older woman’s husband is dying, or about to die.. the younger woman is in love with this woman’s son… There is a terrible rain storm going on and the driver of the taxi has difficulty driving… it is possible the driver is an agent as this is still communist Hungary… the older woman loathes the younger woman, the younger woman is in awe of the older woman… the older woman and the younger woman eventually clutch each other and the older woman is remembering long ago another clutching as she was nursing a recently born child and the younger woman is described as having been used and abused since she could not get a residency permit to live in Budapest…  All of this is told with the objectivity and distance of Plutarch… almost as if we forget we are reading invented lives: while Plutarch was describing mostly historical figures, but which in some cases would not exist unless he had described them… Now what to made of PARALLEL LIVES… the discovery of a murdered man in a Berlin park and the insinuation that a young man did it… We creep on into the book ,900 pages to go and off to the side I am aware of a huge Murakami and even a Stephen King… but all three didn’t get the Nobel Prize and the mind drift as to which will be really talked about, reviewed, and most importantly like the movie box office results on Monday morning…

T              Francois Augieras is not a household name.  Probably and sadly for a good reason, but on the other hand I wish I could give his JOURNEY OF THE DEAD to every smart kid I know or will know and I wish some had given me this book many many years ago…  I had read his JOUNREY TO MOUNT ATHOS and  THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE which like JOUNREY TO THE DEAD were published by Pushkin Press in London, the only English publisher that can stand with Dalkey Archive and New Directions when it comes to being perfectly essential to anyone who might in any way describe themselves as interested in reading, in being well read or…

                JOURNEY OF THE DEAD is Augieras long life as wandering shepherd in Algeria in the early 1950s… he rivals Genet for the clarity of his writing, for the ordinariness of his understanding of human nature, for his acceptance and fearless  confidence…  as Genet mentioned when he was in Chicago for the Democratic Convention in 1968: the only sexy people were the leather clad police… all the mere political became uninteresting… Augieras writes, “Whenever the moonlight offered them up to my sense of purity and wonder, I loved these symbols of the twentieth century, the perfection of things that were easy to come by—guns, gramophone records.”  OR   “What makes Africa enchanting?  Is it the sound of dogs barking at night?”  OR three incidents:  “What whet my appetite was just being with women,; prostitution appealed to me, I didn’t find submissive young women so threatening.  Europeans didn’t interest me: they knew nothing of the steppe, the animals  I loved, they had no smell… How fine it was to be twenty and between a girl’s legs!   OR  I noticed a tall Arab boy of about eighteen with beautiful well rounded shoulders… I followed him into the darkness.  I kissed him in the lips but instead of kissing me in return he told me to meet him some distance away… He returned my kisses so passionately  that my eyes filled with tears… We stayed where we were, leaning  against a boulder .  At my waist the pistol gleamed  in the darkness  OR OR  I went into the sheepfold grabbed one of the lambs by its fleece.  I had my favorites and as the rest of the flock retreated to the far end of their prison with a great rumbling sound, kneeling on the urine soaked bedding and holding its head down , I imitated the rams and made violent love  to him.  The wool rubbed against my belly…”

U             Far gentler is another Pushkin title  HYMN TO OLD AGE  by Hermann Hesse… but that is for another time as is THE UNCANNILY STRANGE AND BRIEF LIFE OF AMEDEI MODIGLIANI by Velibor Colic.  Just by mentioning the Hesse and the book by a Bosnia writer living in France, one can see  the range of PUSHKIN PRESS

V             ISLE OF THE DEAD by GERHARD MEIER is a perfect Dalkey Archive book:  two old men walk around   a city in Switzerland, one of the guys talks a great part of the novel and the other guy listens and observes… 110 pages: “What has time, what has life done with these faces?”

                But more from ISLE OF THE DEAD on another day…  what an act of optimism…

W            Hard to believe but back in 1963 SIMON AND SCHUSTER  actually occasionally published real literature.  In addition to Michel Butor they published COMPOSITION NO.1 by Marc Saporta.  The book was unbound and came packaged in a bright orange, black white glossy box.  There was a sort of introduction on the inside front of the box telling readers what to do and reminding them that “a life is composed of many elements.  But the number of possible combinations is infinite.  He pages were wrapped in a narrow orange band with instructions:  The pages of this book may be read in any order.  The reader is requested to shuffle the like a deck of cards.

                VISUAL EDITIONS in London has reissued the book in a yellow box but does not mention on the title that it was translated by Richard Howard or the date of its original publication. Two introductions to the box are now included and a grey illustration is printed on the back of each page… the illustrations seem very intrusive and distract from the confrontation with words on a page and the shuffling of those pages as we are now also shuffling these illustrations. 

                Of course COMPOSITION No. 1 preceded THE UNFORTUNATES by B.S. Johnson but in one essential way these are quite different.  The Saporta is more radical in that individual pages are shuffled while with Johnson’s box it contained signatures of pages… and it seemed that he was shuffling events while Saporta was moving about elements… however in no way should one be discouraged from getting a copy or getting the box by Marc Saporta… this gauntlet remains ever new which cannot be said for ALL the books that Simon Schuster published in 1963, all of which are dead and gone.