{"id":71866,"date":"2022-11-12T01:18:18","date_gmt":"2022-11-12T06:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=71866"},"modified":"2023-02-22T14:17:01","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T19:17:01","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-33","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2022\/11\/12\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-33\/","title":{"rendered":"I arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

I arrogantly recommend…<\/strong> is a monthly column of unusual, small press and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired pavement inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, ‘This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.’<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher. Bookshop.org is an alternative to the Amazon gorilla that benefits indie bookstores nationwide. If titles are unavailable online, please call and we’ll try to help. Most of Mr. Bowden’s suggestions are stocked at Book Beat. Thank you for your support! Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at:
\nI arrogantly recommend… <\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Polaroids<\/a><\/strong>
\nCary Loren
\nEdition Patrick Frey, No. 208<\/p>\n

The first book (that I\u2019m aware of) to reproduce Cary Loren\u2019s solo early art, unencumbered of the Destroy All Monsters collective, to which he was a heavy contributor and with which a number of obsessions are shared in Polaroids<\/strong>: Replace Warhol\u2019s icy, aloof icons of pop \/ gay culture with the fantasies of hetero boys, say from 8 to 15, involving monsters, lasers, robots, cute daughters of mad scientists, and astoundingly low budgets. For certain boys growing up in the fifties and sixties, Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/strong> had an atomic glow that was simultaneously fascinating and horrifying.<\/p>\n

The bug-eyed monster films of the 1950s were often scripted as cautionary tales about the limits of \u201cman\u2019s\u201d knowledge of the universe and the results of hubris. The folly of \u201crational\u201d thinking mediated via B-films presumably leads to, in the 1960s, questioning the assumptions \u201cthe System\u201d (or Establishment) is built upon and interests it serves. LSD and other psychotropic drugs\u2014via the immersive sense of otherness they induce\u2014helped perpetuate ideas of the better life as consisting of more than mere material accumulation. The irrational soul needs tending to, too.<\/p>\n

Whatever state Cary Loren\u2019s irrational soul was in one night in 1976, was jumpstarted by an emotional breakdown whose origins weren\u2019t explained until decades later. Finding himself inexplicably hallucinating, he was institutionalized for three weeks and misdiagnosed as schizophrenic\u2014all of which meant, in the institution and afterwards, he was being kept on a steady diet of medications to tame his \u201cschizophrenic\u201d tendencies. Not until 2012 did Loren find out that a person at a party he had attended had poured an entire vial of LSD in his drink.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The images comprising Polaroids<\/strong> were made during his period of recovery. By slowly heating Polaroids in a toaster oven, he mixes the photographic emulsions, blurring the colors and separations among the images shown, an assortment of cut-out photographs of pop and religious icons and mementos from his personal mythology. Polaroids are the tin types of late 20th-century photography: The look of the medium is associated with its time as much as any object captured by that medium. A contemporary tintype will still make viewers think \u201c19th-century\u201d as much as a Polaroid will make them think \u201c1970s-80s.\u201d The medium, what and how it expresses are one. Contending forces of good and evil, love and hate, devotion, alienation: eternal and universal themes of life.<\/p>\n

The still photographs with unmixed emulsions are staged and costumed: The home movie versions of the TV screen shots some of the other Polaroids depict: The vixen, the femme fatale, at a moment of viewer enthrallment, in opposition to the creatures of the screen.<\/p>\n

The reproduction of the images and the paper their printed on are both excellent. You can almost see the acid trails across the images\u2019 surfaces.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nInterview with Cary Loren:<\/strong><\/p>\n

When you created these Polaroids under the influence of acid, did they seem at the time like surrealistic reactions to the world around you or were you trying to render realistically what you saw and felt?<\/p>\n

I wasn’t aware of how the LSD affected me because I didn’t know I had taken any. Much time had passed since these were made, and I never considered that connection until the book’s editor Cameron Jamie brought this up during the interview. At the time, making collages with a Polaroid was an alternative to fixing collages on paper or making a “straight” photograph. I was trying to depict images in a realistic way and manipulated the in-between spaces to merge the edges to create a more connected image.<\/p>\n

Certain icons recur in your pictures: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Werewolf\u2014horror icons from the \u201830s and \u201840s\u2014and bug-eyed monsters from SF films of the \u201850s and \u201860s, with a smattering of beautiful women throughout, mainly femme fatales. What did you like so much about these films? You keep re-documenting icons from your life going back, say, 60 years. I\u2019m assuming they must trigger something inside you. William Burroughs once called his work a \u201cmythology for the space age.\u201d Do these pop icons function in a similar way in your work?<\/p>\n

I’m still fascinated by monster movies, silent films, Victoriana and sixties pop-culture. I like the “twilight zone” and weird dream consciousness that these images and times evoke. Recreating the art was a process of self-mythologizing, creating something from the past. Making art is sometimes a way to deal with the chaos of the world in a positive way -to arrange and order it. Burroughs used the collage technique in his writing to splice into reality and that was a definite early influence, especially for it’s campy satiric style, and the nightmarish world it explored.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nSomething that collage has in common with other photographs here is that they\u2019re both emphatically staged\u2014the elements of the image and their positions tightly arranged. Microwaving the Polaroids to blend the colors opened the results to haphazard outcomes, an element the staged photographs don\u2019t seem to allow. What makes you feel that an image is better suited to staging than chance processes?<\/p>\n

Photography is an art of chance to various degrees. The staged photos in reality had some theatrical direction or theme planned ahead. They were made like stills for an unmade movie and involved models and sets. I was usually also shooting 35mm film and using the Polaroid as a guide or \u201cnotebook\u201d for the shoot. There’s more control and chance arranging happening with collage and the final result is usually surprising and transformative. Collage mimics reality in a strange way and can be a parody and practice of imagination.<\/p>\n

How has your approach to collage changed since the works in Polaroids were created, and what has remained consistent?<\/p>\n

With Polaroids you could move and blend images in an organic hands-on way. That kind of direct manipulation in photography is probably gone for good. The chemistry of the Polaroid has changed and is not the same. I’m using more drawing and painting techniques to create backgrounds as a space to “hold” the cut images. The backgrounds also help define what the collage will be about. I’m also still very interested in how images circulate in books, zines and printing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nIt seems that even if today you can take from the internet, your collages still have images that look like magazine cut-outs\u2014is that a look that you deliberately seek out?<\/p>\n

Polaroids and collage have a presence that digital or online reproductions can’t compete with. There’s a long history of cheap magazine cutouts from scrapbook diaries and how collage connects to all the baggage of surrealism -it’s a very loaded, misunderstood, ignored medium, and that’s partly why I’m drawn into it.<\/p>\n

Do you have any other books of your work coming out? As much as I like Polaroids, I feel like I\u2019m 45 years behind what you\u2019re doing. Also, any more shows coming up?<\/p>\n

I’ve been working with a small publisher on a miniature book and am thinking of self-publishing a zine of silk-screens. My next exhibition is in a group show of artists zine makers from North America and that will open next fall at the Brooklyn Museum.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Bruges-la-Morte<\/strong><\/a>
\nGeorges Rodenbach \/ Will Stone
\nWakefield Press<\/p>\n

It was as if the frequent mist, the veiled light of the northern heavens, the granite of the quays, the incessant rain, and the bells passing through had together influenced the very color of the air\u2014and also in this ancient town, the dead embers of time, the dust from the hourglass of the accumulating years, over everything, its silent legacy.
\nThat was the reason Hugues had wished to seek refuge there, to feel his final energies imperceptibly and irrevocably silt up, sucked down beneath this fine dust of eternity which too lent a grayness to his soul, the color of the city.<\/p>\n

A mournful tale told simply, each chapter a step in the emotional evolution of the 40-year-old widower Hugues Viane. His wife having died five years earlier, Hugues moved to Bruges both to escape where they had spent much of their lives together and because Bruges had struck them both as a melancholy place, which Hugues feels is apt, given his depth of mourning for her. First we meet Huges and find out how he came to be in Bruges; then are shown his walks through town; his first sight of Jane Scott, the dancer with whom he will become infatuated and the spit and image of his deceased wife; how they come to meet; etc.<\/p>\n

Originally published in 1892, Bruges-la-Morte<\/strong> introduced the technique of including in the book photographs of the places either described or forming its emotional shape, a technique often associated with the late 20th-century writer, W. G. Sebald, with which the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is blurred, heightening the story\u2019s sense of lived reality.<\/p>\n

Hugues, as it turns out, does not love Jane but merely what she represents to him:<\/p>\n

All he wanted was to perpetuate the illusion of this mirage. When he took Jane\u2019s head in his hands and drew it close to him, it was to look into her eyes, to search there for something he had seen in another\u2019s: some nuance, a reflection, pearls, a flora whose root is in the soul\u2014and maybe which were floating there.<\/p>\n

Of course, events come to pass so that Hugues and Jane become disenchanted with each other, Hugues in particular with the folly he\u2019s committed in hoping through Jane\u2019s resemblance to imagine himself again with his dead wife. The novel\u2019s second half deals with the slow, painful, and mutually recriminative dissolution of what had once been a mutual passion.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne would think all cheerful plans are a challenge! Overlong in preparation they allow ample time for fate to switch the eggs in the nest and we are left to brood on sorrows.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Creepy<\/a><\/strong>
\nLee Sensenbrenner & Keiler Roberts
\nDrawn & Quarterly<\/p>\n

When my daughter was in early elementary school, I used to tell her that pencil erasers were the thumbs of bad children. Who compiled the list of bad children in the world? Santa. His elves handled the manufacturing. That said, this short story about a totally normcore woman\u2014save for one unpalatable tic not dissimilar in spirit from what I used to tell my daughter\u2014serves as a good cautionary tale for children too enrapt by their screens for their own good.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Beyond<\/a><\/strong>
\nHoracio Quiroga \/ Elisa Yaber
\nSublunary Editions<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything you do is useless.\u201d
\n\u2014from \u201cThe Call\u201d<\/p>\n

The eponymous \u201cbeyond\u201d of this collection of eleven macabre stories refers to that which occurs or exists after death\u2014whatever that may be\u2014and that which seems ordained by death or mere Cosmic whim. \u201cBeyond\u201d is the shudder-inducing unknown eternity, which seems likelier spent in further torment than cessation of sensation. Little has been published in English translation, Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) was a Uruguayan writer of the uncanny, whose own biography was a master study of morbid concision. According to the blurb on the back of an earlier translation of Quiroga\u2019s stories, The Decapitated Chicken<\/strong> (University of Texas Press, 1976),<\/p>\n

As a young man, he suffered his father\u2019s accidental death and the suicide of his beloved stepfather. As a teenager, he shot and accidentally killed one of his closest friends. Seemingly cursed in love, he lost his first wife to suicide by poison. In the end, Quiroga himself downed cyanide to end his own life when he learned he was suffering from an incurable cancer.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Kafka, there is hope, but not for Quiroga\u2019s characters. Think of Poe in a rain forest amid lurking dangers and rotting vegetation.<\/p>\n

Story topics in this collection include a double suicide; a form of vampirism as miserable as its European cousin\u2019s; spinal paralysis from a fall in a rainforest miles from help; insane railway workers; parents unable to save their children from death, and so forth. At least during the Halloween season, this stuff should be flying off the shelves. Elisa Taber renders Quiroga\u2019s prose into contemporary, idiomatic English, keeping his voice fresh and the feel of the stories new rather than as descriptions of yore, and offers an Afterward that contextualizes Quiroga\u2019s contribution to world letters.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>The Forest<\/strong><\/a>
\nThomas Ott
\nFantagraphics<\/p>\n

Thomas Ott is a master of scratchboard art with the ability to unspool wordless, \u201cTwilight-Zone\u201d-like tales of the weird, morbid, and unsettling. As with any other art involving carving and scraping, scratchboard is a subtractive process, making errors indelible from the work\u2014and if there are errors here, my eyes have missed them. The predominantly black tones of scratchboard images are aptly suited to the stories Ott tells and are both strange and beautiful, in proportion to the needs of beguilement.<\/p>\n

The Forest<\/strong> is a short tale both bittersweet and haunting. In the tale, a tween-aged boy leaves his house, which at the moment is hosting a wake. Some fresh air will be good. And, in a way, it is, because it tells what we need to know about the wake. Overall, the story, told across 25 pages, is eerie, mournful, and\u2014loving.<\/p>\n