The other day I bought two books: Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key and John Ashbery's translation of Rimbaud's Illuminations. I wanted the Hammett because I'd just finished Diane Johnson's excellent biography of him and also because it was the only novel of his I hadn't read. It's a hair-raising account
of how politics is practised in an unnamed American city (likely San Francisco) and includes two of the most chillingly theatrical scenes in fiction: the seduction by the hero of a newspaperman's wife while the newspaperman watches (later he kills himself); and the strangulation of a gang boss by his bodyguard ― while the hero watches.
The Rimbaud I bought out of curiosity. I know the Louise Varese translation pretty well and the selections of the Ashbery I'd read online seemed prosaic by comparison but I thought I'd give it a burl. Anyway, I'm loving it. I like the way the text is printed parallel in big clear type so that you can skip from the English to the French and back again.
On my bedside table is Diane di Prima's Recollections of My Life as a Woman, her memoir of growing up Italian in Brooklyn before and during the war and then of her escape into the Beat poetry scene in New York in the 1950s. It's wise and humane: early on she recalls how her grandfather, an anarchist and an atheist, and her grandmother, a devout Catholic, remained in love with each other for all of their lives.
Another book I have on the go is Pete Hay's Forgotten Corners ― Essays in Search of an Island's Soul. The publisher, Ralph Wessman, swapped it with me for one of my own. Hay, it says on the back, is "one of Tasmania's great, distinctive voices" and that's true.
The second essay in the book, 'What I Did On My Holidays' is a fascinating account of the jobs Hay had when he was a young fellow, what he learned from them, and how they inform his defence of the values he sees under threat in his island home. Hay writes about the Tasmanian bush, its wildlife, and its human world, as well if not better than anyone else. It's hard to think of a New Zealand equivalent but there must be one.
