Poem-A-Day #32 : The Sinking of the Titanic

The Sinking of the Titanic

: why so many questions :
          : ice becomes blue after it salts and confronts itself at night :

     : these are just the things
you can carry :                    : here is an X on a map it has no emotions :

                                : underneath the waves :
                      : the sound of one lone viola in the largest theater on earth is the sound a conch hears when it holds a human skull to its ear :

Re-Read : Lord of the Flies

First Edition 1954

Lord of the Flies
Author: William Golding
Publisher: Faber and Faber (1954)
248 pages

A pig's head impaled on a stick delivers a sermon, flies tumbling from its mouth, to a young boy.

A pair of cracked glasses held to the light of the sun.

A bleached white conch shell trumpeting through the remote island forests.

The images in Golding's book are burned into my memory. The island, the insanity that follows. The sudden interruption of rescue at the end that tacitly implies that the world as a whole is just like those boys. Loose, falling apart, afraid.

Penguin cover 1980

What I forgot, or more accurately, what I didn't see the first time I read was the clear homo-eroticism of the boys. Simon clearly loves Ralph. There are numerous scenes of arm caressing and longing looks. Ralph and Jack clearly have a love/hate relationship. They even argue like an old married couple. Piggy looks to all of them for affection and only receives abuse. They are all nearly naked or actually naked at various points and each boy is described in longing, Whitman-esque terms.

Golding's writing holds up fairly well. It is a book set in the 40s and there are certainly a lot of references that date the story, but that only made the re-read more interesting for me. The thought that these were events in the past only made it harder to detach. I had to contend with these kids going home and shaping the world we now live in.

Which is scary, but explains EVERYTHING.

If you haven't seen it, take a moment to watch the great 1963 Peter Brook film. The whole thing is on YouTube. Below is the trailer.





Re-Read is a sometime article where I go back and read a book from my childhood over and examine the threads that I find in my current adult life.

Wherein I Use The Name Paul Giamatti Seven Times

Last night my boyfriend J and I were rummaging around our favorite local book store, Unnameable Books on Vanderbilt Avenue. Unnameable is about 2/3 used books and 1/3 new. They have the best poetry section of any book store I've been in in the city. It stretches over a whole wall and includes many harder to find titles and big name poets/publishers.

William Makepeace Thackeray,  happy

J found a great old copy of Vanity Fair that included Thackeray's original drawings and approximated the appearance of the first bound edition. It has a really odd cartoon drawing of Thackeray himself on the cover holding a Greek comedy mask.

On this trip I didn't pick anything up, but as we were checking out we did notice a copy of Henry James' The Golden Bowl by the register. It was face down and the back proudly displayed its Penguin logo and design scheme.

I've always loved Penguin's design. The use of out of context paintings and those black bars with simple elegant white and orange writing. Classic, simple and somehow evocative of the 'greatness' of the books they publish.

For their 60th anniversary they have added the tag line 'The best books ever written' on their classics editions. That was 6 years ago. I've never noticed it before. It hovers on the back of the James right above the UPC. It looked like a ridiculous blurb that someone would paste onto a copy of Infinite Jest or Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It felt out of place and bombastic. Not like Penguin at all.

I picked up the book to examine the quote and realized that it was Penguin saying this about themselves and got a little grossed out. I give them credit for having the balls to put it out there like that, but still. Ew factor high.

While I was holding it a man came up startled and jokingly accused me of stealing the book. Saying, 'Are you taking my Henry James? Don't steal my James!' I laughed and turned to tell him that I was just  looking at it and the man was Paul Giamatti.

Two quick things. 1) I had noticed that Paul Giamatti was in the store with J and I earlier but I do not get silly around celebrities. They are people. I have waited on many of them in my days and have even dined with a few. They aren't that interesting, really. 2) This is my second odd run-in with Paul Giamatti. I feel like you have to use his whole name when talking about him. Some people are like that.

My first Paul Giamatti run-in was at the Met with my good friend H. We were there to see a fashion exhibit and had paused in front of a painting or photo, I don't remember, but we turned and there he was. Alone. Staring at the art in front of him. He looked sad. Maybe he's just a sad looking guy? I don't know, but he looked sad that day. Maybe it was because that John Adams mini-series was just out and getting bad reviews and his face was plastered on every bus in the city. H and I joked that we should go say hi and offer him a hug. We were very close to doing it but decided to leave for cookies and coffee instead.

Also. J had recently sent me this clip:

That, dear friends, is from the 2000 movie Duets. Staring...Paul Giamatti. Who I forgot was even in the movie until I saw him there. Also, Andre Braugher! Who's currently on that silly TNT show Men of a Certain Age with Scot Bakula and Ray Romano.

Thomas Hardy would take the book

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that J and I are currently in the mood for classic books. I have been reading Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. And I would be reading The Golden Bowl if I had run screaming from Unnameable with Paul Giamatti's book like I kinda sorta maybe wanted to.

Dust Jacket : The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum (1959)
Designer: Günter Grass


The dust jacket is an ephemeral thing. It is really only there as a means of keeping the hard cover of a book from wear. The dust jacket design is mostly a marketing ploy to get our eyes to stop on a particular book and open our wallets in response.

This is the first of what I hope to be regular posts on dust jackets that I find beautiful, or interesting, or important. I will probably veer off into general book design when it applies, so don't quibble. This is meant to be about beauty.

The iconic image on the cover of Günter Grass' The Tin Drum appeared on the first edition in 1959. It has since been on most editions of the book. The young drummer was drawn by Grass himself. He has drawn the covers for all of his books, including Cat and Mouse (1963) and Dog Years (1965).

He has a distinct artistic style that compliments his magical-realist writing style. There is a whimsy that also contains something ominous.

Grass's illustration style calls to mind wood block prints, finger painting, tribal art. There is a connection to medieval art as well. Look at the eyes and nose on this Coptic icon from the 6th or 7th century. Simple lines that are decidedly not to scale or reality. Shortened forms that are more about impressions then anything else.

The scale-like features across the figures resemble armor. They recall Egyptian and Medieval illuminated texts. Grass manages to call to mind a lot of history with a simple drawing of a boy and drum.

There are also recalls to primitive arts. The notches on the boy's body are like the nails on this Congolese power figure.


The notches also resemble Coptic writing and other early scripts such as Cuneiform, tying the artwork to the foundations of language itself.

While I am certain that Grass probably just liked this style, there is a chain that leads from him back to these images. I also understand the dangers of reading into something. Know that I say all of this with heavy grains of salt.

Many artists enact their aesthetic without an eye to all that fed into it initially. Take a little Coptic here, a tad Byzantium there, and you get a Nobel winner who managed to design and execute his own covers for most of his career. A rarity in any art-form. Especially in today's market-minded publishing world. Today Grass would not get to put his drummer boy on his book without a fight and a strong agent.

If you have a favorite cover, or story about a dust jacket, share in the comments.

I would love some feedback on this post. Let me know if this was awesome or not. I'm thinking of expanding the blog to include more pots like this and the Reading List 2011.