If I were in Asheville, NC the weekend of October 28-30, I would totally go to Moogfest. In addition to Brian Eno, it’s a veritable feast of Prog Rock goodness, including Tangerine Dream, M83, and half of King Crimson in the form of the Adrian Belew Power Trio.
Since M83 may be unfamiliar to many readers, here’s them doing “We Own the Sky:”
One of my favorite authors is Gene Wolfe (which you might have noticed before), so naturally I’ve tried to collect all his books. This includes all his chapbooks, some of which can be quite difficult to find.
Among his hardest to find are the ones he did for Cheap Street. Over the years I have picked up four of the five pure chapbooks done by them (as well as the two hardback books, Empires of Flowers and Foliage and Bibliomen), but frequently I would have trouble remembering which of them I have, a difficulty not aided by rather bland exteriors of the chapbooks themselves and the fact that all came in a standard Cheap Street envelope when I bought them, none of which revealed what was inside.
So, for both the sake of Gene Wolfe collectors, and to jog my own memory, I’ve scanned the title pages of each of the ones I have (click to embiggen):
Or, to list them in order of publication:
I think I paid in the $35-$40 range for each of those.
Chalker and Owings says that seven copies of each of the above were done as leather-bound hardbacks. Not only do I not have those, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of them offered for sale.
As far as I can tell, I’m only missing two Wolfe chapbooks now:
I’ll have to add those to the want list.
I think I have a first edition hardback of every other Gene Wolfe book.
More about Cheap Street here.
You may remember me raving about Black Dynamite, Michael Jai White’s awesome parody of low-budget 70s Blaxpotation films.
You may be pleased to know that the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim is doing Black Dynamite: The Animated Series. Click on the link to see the pilot. The show itself is set to premiere in 2012.
J. G. Ballard fans will find this Andrew Fox piece on Ballard’s works and the London riots of considerable interest.
Having been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II (the source of Empire of the Sun), Ballard has always been interested in what happens when you strip away the veneer of civilization. Much of Fox’s piece concerns Ballard’s later novels, which I have not read, “all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyche.” (Though I have a number of Ballard first editions, I’m still catching up on the reading them, having just finished The Crystal World earlier this year.) Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, evidently features “middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives.” Which does tie rather neatly into the London riots of the last week…
Also, I must have missed this Theodore Dalrymple piece on Ballard.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Interesting piece, if only for the gratification of confirming that many other people loath Holden Caulfield every bit as much as I do.
Biggest surprise: Several people (including John Crowley) naming Gravity’s Rainbow as their least-liked great book. I didn’t get far into it myself, but I’m not sure I gave it a fair shot. The problem is finding a big block of time (something I’m preciously short on) to give it another go, as I have the impression that it’s not amenable to the “one chapter a night” method I used to read Moby Dick…
(Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
I may have mentioned that I have a large library. I started out collecting first edition hardbacks of “hypermodern” (which in my case meant “post-Neuromancer“) science fiction (with some fantasy and horror works and authors thrown in for good measure), and once I had collected everything I wanted there, I started going after every important post-World War II SF work, toward which I’m making significant progress. Hence this list of books I’m still looking for.
By and large, I don’t buy later printings, copies without dust jackets, copies with price-clipped dust jackets (unless all copies of the true first edition were released that way), copies with facsimile dust jackets, or overly crummy copies. Most of the books I buy are in Fine/Fine condition, but that relaxes a bit the older (and pricier) books become. I have picked up Ex-Library copies in dust jacket when the better copies of the true first can’t be found under a grand. I also only buy first state bindings and dust jackets, unless there’s no priority, or the true first state is insanely rare (such as with Stanley G. Weinbaum’s Dawn of Flame).
With that in mind, I compiled a list of first editions on my want list, so here’s a significant portion of that list (omitting things available relatively cheap, or hideously expensive), listed alphabetically by author. I also put down all the Manly Wade Wellman and Jack Vance books I was looking for, since I have so many I was having a hard time keeping track of what I had and what I was still missing.
If you have nice copies any of the above, and if you’re willing to sell it to me considerably cheaper than can be found on Bookfinder.com, drop me an email at lawrenceperson@gmail.com and I’ll consider it.
No, really. I wouldn’t call myself a Jerry Lewis fan (his brand of humor had already gone out of fashion by the time I was born), but he did do an excellent job in The King of Comedy (which is, I can assure you, not the film you want to watch while you’re depressed). Anyway, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, even if you take his claim of banging Marilyn Monroe with a grain of salt. I was unaware he had written a highly-praised book on directing, or taught directing classes attended by Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas. He also seems to be a remarkably astute businessman, since he made the studios promise to give all the rights to his movies back after 30 years.
Anyway, it’s an interesting piece, even if you’re not particularly a Jerry Lewis fan.
A swell review, in comic form, of Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires
It has a lot in common with my own review.
(Hat tip: James Wynn.)
One more Heinlein first edition to add to the others:
Heinlein, Robert A. Podkayne of Mars. Putnam, 1963. First edition hardback (no statement of printing, as per Currey, $3.50 price on dust jacket), a Fine copy in a Near Fine dust jacket with slight wear at extremities, as well as a 3″ long faint, irregular, non-breaking crease on front cover (so faint you can’t even see it on the embiggened scan).
The last of the Heinlein juveniles, and surprisingly hard to find these days, Replaces an ex-library copy.
Generations of
Breeding still could not teach you
Optic principles