Poem-A-Day #85 : Mystery #1

Mystery #1

New smell in the sheets
and on the tires of the car in the driveway

There is one burnt tile in the garage
where the box was burned

Poem-A-Day #4 : Midsomer Murders

Midsomer Murders

That moment in the murder mystery when the missing girl wanders in covered in blood or the cute dog scratches up a rib bone -

The veil is mist off the Avon smelling of sulphur from the Baths is green as the burning of boron and the room begins to look like a Lautrec painting -

The girl will be walking towards usher arms out pleading stumbling forward in the same clothes she went missing in she will have a knife she did not commit -

Parting curtains are stages of red are the sound of fissures opening after a long rain the emptying of sink holes -

Knives only hold on to blood for so long then they rust and become objects broken and un-mendable and the dog will ruin the evidence with its teeth -

Dust Jacket : The Last Policeman

The Last Policeman

Designed by: Doogie Horner

First thing's first. This cover was designed by a stand-up comedian. Who was on America's Got Talent. The same man who designed the cover for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

So that is a thing.

More importantly the cover is a simplistic act of beauty. The sort of newspaper feel of it, the letters being burned away as the comet glides across it. It communicates the story without giving anything away.

This will be an apocalyptic novel. Things will burn.
It will be about that.

There is an almost comic book feeling to the work. The drawing of the letters, reminds me of The Human Torch. His fire always represented by a bunch of wavy lines rendered in reds and oranges.


The sheer simplicity of the cover catches the eye. I love a good text-based cover and this one manages to be one of the most simplistic and also most evocative.

Sadly this cover no longer exists. The author, Ben H. Winters and Quirk books recently announced that this was the first book in a trilogy. With the announcement came a new cover.


The new cover was also done by Doogie Horner. I couldn't locate information on who took the photos.

This new cover is also really good. It communicates that the book is about something weird. That there is a comet, that the world will not be the same because of it. And a good photo-based cover is welcome. Too often they are silly or used only for bargain books.

But this cover looses something of the original. It starts to look like an ad for a TV show.

The second book comes out this summer, and the new cover treatment carries through. Which is good.

I feel like there is a missed opportunity to utilize the simplicity of the first book. They could have carried that idea through just as well. A different color scheme or a closer drawing of the comet. Or any other number of ideas.

The photos on the cover evoke the work of Gregory Crewdson, specifically this one. The sort of surreal suburban magic realism of it makes sense. This is not a bad thing, in fact it's the best part of the cover. It also calls to mind the Chris Van Allsburg illustration, "The House on Maple Street".

I assume that Doogie Horner knows his illustration history. The Van Allsburg image appears in a book about a mysterious illustrator who drops off his work then goes missing. The book attempts to piece together the 'mystery'. Stephen King used the same image of Maple Street to write a short story with the same title.

That Horner would pull from these places to create a cover is not surprising. The surprise is that I like the less referential cover more.

EDIT:
On Thursday the New York Times ran a short slide show on the book design process. There is a gallery of rejected vs. final covers. Definitely worth a look.


Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.

The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on...

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is an influential book of Persian poetry. Khayyam lived from 1048-1141. The work spans many years. It is not considered one long poem, though it's parts definitely call back and forth to each other.

There are cups of wine. Food. A beloved. Many scholars point to it as a work of Epicurean ideals. As a strange sort of agnostic, philosophy. It is compared to Lucretius' The Nature of Things. Though it takes a much less academic approach.

Anywhere from 1200-2000 quatrains have been claimed as part of the work. Many of them have questionable origins.

Edward FitzGerald

The poems have been quite influential. Rex Stout, O. Henry, Agatha Christie, Eugene O'Neil,and Stephen King are some of the authors who have titled works after lines from the poems.

D.W. Girffith was about to film a movie version as his follow up to Intolerance but the project fell through. Griffith famously made the not so subtly pro-KKK film, The Birth of a Nation.

It is even featured in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

Edward FitzGerald is responsible for bringing the poem to the English speaking world. Over the course of several decades he would release and then edit and re-release his translations. He grew famous for the work. Mostly because he took great liberties with the lines of poetry. Many called the work FitzOmar because of this.

The connection between the two men was so strong that a rose seed from Khayyam's tomb at Nishapur was planted on FitzGerald's grave in Suffolk.

Translation is a strange game. Because of his tinkering with a Persian work, FitzGerald gave us the Rubaiyat quatrain - AABA rhyme scheme. Also because of it, it is hard to know where the two writers exist on the page. Where is FitzGerals, and where is Khayyam? That gray area is uncomfortable to exist in for some. The question of 'is it right' rises up.

Recently we have seen a large amount of new translations popping up. There is the new In Search of Lost Time, Beowulf, War and Peace. There are new retellings of The Iliad. John Ashbery won praise for his new translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations. Philip Pullman just released a new translation of the Brothers Grimm.

We are in a time of retelling our stories. Dredging the past and re-imagining it in new clothes. Here, then, the opening quatrain from three versions of FitzGerald:

Quatrain XXIV, Edmund Dulac, 1909

1858
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

1868
Wake! For the Sun behind you Eastern height
Has chased the Session of the Stars from Night;
And, to the field of Heav'n ascending, strikes
The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

1872
Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and strikes
The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

I like different lines from each. My version would blend the three together.

Edmund Dulac made 20 beautiful illustrations for a 1909 edition of the book. I recently found a 1952 reprint in a local book store.

The book holds a particular fascination for me. I have mentioned before that I love a good mystery. The Rubaiyat is part of one of my favorites. The Taman Shud case of 1948. I have talked about the case in two posts. I wrote a poem about it. It is a very long subject but basically, a man was found dead on a beach in Australia. He was a John Doe. Events quickly got weird.

Here is the final quatrain of The Rubaiyat. The one the case takes its name from:

Torn page found in the man's pocket.

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass,
And in thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one - turn down an empty Glass!

TAMAM SHUD

The final line means 'finished' or 'ended'. They found that last line folded in the dead man's pocket. A suitcase filled with another man's clothes was found as well. A nurse who may have given the book to the dead man refused to help the investigation. They found what looks like a secret code...

The case is strange. It is about circumstance, misidentification, lack of identification, and cover up. What I find interesting about it is the strange set of events that get you from the book to the dead man on the beach.

The events are random, indecipherable from the outside. But all events are that way. Think about how you got to work today. How you picked the college you went to. What your favorite song is and why. To anyone but you, these things are enigmas. Unknowable.

I was in Taos last fall. I wondered into a store that specializes in old maps and prints. They had a huge book of prints from old books of fairy tales. They were amazing. I bought three on a whim.

They were all drawn by Edmund Dulac. They were all from his Rubaiyat. I had no idea until yesterday. When I bought this old book and opened it, staring up at me was a face from the past.

My copy of The Rubaiyat, 1952 Garden City Books

Unsolved Mysteries

I love mystery. Be it the wonder of how a magician created the illusion or the unexplained murders that Robert Stack menacingly intoned on NBC, then CBS. I am in.

The internet is a boon and an ill-advised hole for people like me. The research-minded. I love reading about events, pouring over details, deciphering meaning. I love to know all the things about a topic. I remember little of it, but the point is in the looking.

The internet is full of the unsolved.

Take the story of Benjamin Kyle in Florida. He was discovered on August 31, 2004 naked in the trash area of a Burger King in Richmond Hill, Georgia. He had no identification, no memory of who he was or how he got there. There was evidence of several blows to the head and he was covered in blood.

He is believed to be in his 60s, from Indiana and he possibly went to college in Boulder, Colorado. He has oddly detailed memories of movie theaters in those two states as well as kitchen equipment.

He was given the name BK for Burger King ans later took the name Benjamin Kyle. Recently a documentary has been made about him and Senator Mike Weinstein was able to get him a Florida ID card so he could start to build an 'official' identity. He has no social security number and thus does not exist. A White House petition exists to help get him one. Without a SSN he cannot legally stay at homeless shelters or get a better job.

Recently I moved back to New Mexico so I'm feeling a little hyper-connected to my history. The concept of a blank slate may sound great, in theory, but it terrifies me. Watching this man attempt to go about his life without a history amazes me. I couldn't imagine it.

A different type of blank slate is the mysterious dead man.

The Taman Shud case is so odd. So very very very odd. That I really want to write a book about it. And will someday.

On December 1, 1948 a body was found on a beach in Australia. He was well-dressed, in good shape, and there was no obvious cause of death. The labels had been removed from all of his clothing. On Jan 14 a suitcase was found with clothing labeled 'T. Keane'. They connected the case to the body through a ball of orange thread that matched some used to fix a hole in the dead man's pants.

A sailor named Tom Keane was missing but his friends and family said that the clothes were not his and the body did not match.

Sewn in the man's pants was a slip of paper that read 'Taman Shud'. The phrase translates from Persian to mean 'finished'. It is the last line in a book by Omar Khayyam. They found the book. It had been left in a man's unlocked car three days before the unknown man died. In a different town.

The image above is what was found in the back of the book. A cypher that has never been decoded. Also in the book was the unlisted phone number for a woman. She claimed she had no knowledge of the man, though she nearly fainted when seeing the photos of the body. Coincidental, (or not) she had given a copy of the book to a different man 3 years earlier. A man who still had the copy. That man would only give half answers and innuendo when asked questions.

The woman's son shared rare genetic disorders with the dead man. The likelihood of this being a coincidence is estimated at 1 in 10,000,000.

And there's more! A man was found unconscious next to a bag containing his dead 3-year-old son's body in June of 1949 after being missing for 4 days. The man's wife claimed her husband thought he knew the dead man in the Taman Shud case. The wife had been terrorized by masked men for the days prior to the discovery of the husband and son. The man was committed to an institution after he recovered.

In 1945, three years before the Taman Shud case, another man was found dead with a copy of Khayyam's book open on his chest. A woman who testified at the inquest into the death was later found face down, wrists slit in a bathtub.

It's the perfect knot. Everyone involved is dead. Everyone involved refused to be helpful. What is most amazing is that despite all the information I just dumped on you, none of it leads anywhere conclusive. It is blank.

And that mystery is what I love. The inability to know. The desire to know. To fill in the blanks. Who was the Taman Shud man? Who is Benjamin Kyle? What led them to where they ended up? How does anyone get where they end up? That's the real point of the mystery. That ?

Dust Jacket : Louise Glück Poems 1962-2012

Louise Glück Poems 1962-2012
Designed by: Gretchen Achilles
Mezzotint by: Vija Celmins

When I first saw Gretchen Achilles' cover for Louise Glück's new collection I thought to myself how perfect the cover was. How it was mysterious. We are coming into orbit of a strange new world. With all the possibilities that that entails.

Simplicity hinting at the complex just out of our reach. This is like Glück's work. Layers are peeled away and things come into focus. Things we thought we knew. That we never could.

Achilles is the owner of Wavetrap Design. She is a freelance designer and has worked for all the major publishers.

Her choice for cover image shows her talent. This is a 1985 mezzotint by Vija Celmins. Celmins was born in Latvia but has lived in the US since she was 10. She works primarily in graphite and is known for her hyper-realistic work.

Darwin 2008-10, oil on canvas

Her space drawings are particularly interesting to me:

Star Field III 1982-83, graphite on acrylic ground on paper

They remind me of work from other artists. Chuck Close comes to mind with his highly detailed paintings and drawings. And Lory Pollina's graphite work:

Noosphere No. 3 2010, graphite on paper

In all these works it feels like something is being revealed while also being kept hidden. It feels like something we have seen before, but is totally alien. Again, this is like Glück's work.

The book covers 50 years of work. It resembles old sci-fi films of the 50s and 60s. It calls to mind great half-true representations of space.

Those half true representations are large in my mind. In the larger culture's mind as well. Below is a photo Cassini took of Saturn in 2006.

It is hard not to picture a space ship moving towards that. Sending a probe out to investigate. Finding an evil creature bent on our destruction.

It's very hard to see in the picture. On the upper left edge of the inner rings is a small blue dot...

Earth.



Dust Jacket is a sometime article about the design and art of book covers. The idea is to shine a spotlight on the work of the designer separate from the author. Literally judging a book by its cover.

Winding

Winding 6/17

There’s that scene in that movie
where this kid films a plastic bag
floating and it seems alive and
it seems tragic somehow and you
want to cry over nothing

This is a tree falling into the road
splintering into small spears that
may as well be glass this is a
glimpse at that secret world that lies
just beneath the surface

It’s a Buddha of gold covered in
plaster for centuries only to be sprayed
with water and broken open geode-like
there is the bag and the inside
of the bag filling with breath

It is a jellyfish in deep water
becoming the only source of light
it is the unseen made real
finding out your ancestors were
hung as witches

Pencil-neck

I love unsolved mysteries.

I also love unsolved history. Rosslyn Chapel was featured in the Da Vinci Code. A book that is not the type of thing I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the real mysteries of Rosslyn Chapel. Mysteries like the weird angels and symbols covering the arches that two men think are a secret piece of music.

I'm talking about the weird case of Taman Shud and the Somerton Man :


Pencil-neck 5/29

In spring
a houri-like sweetheart
fingers a cup of wine
at the edge of a cornfield
If I mention any other Paradise
I'd be worse than a dog
helpless in this game
upon this board

The Moving Finger writes
continues on its way
leaving only empty branches
in winter
No piety nor wit
can cancel half a line
and all the tears
couldn’t wash a word of it

Taman shud

The glass would be empty
save for speculation
Earth could not answer
nor the Seas that mourn
The body of the Somerton Man
Death riddle without name:
                        MRGOABABD
                        MLIAOI
                        MTBIMPANETP
                        MLIABOAIAQC
                        ITTMTSAMSTGAB