by Richard Oxman

Growing in the wet areas of U.S. libraries, too weak to rely on…are literary oddities. [1] Magnificient odysseys I thought I’d call your attention to…to kind of balance what I put on the table in yesterday’s Alternative Dates section. For reading…once the school bells stop ringing in your ears.

I recommended an English translation of (German) Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer yesterday. But I don’t have a clue as to why –as fine a trip as it is– I chose that over Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine. Or something by Pynchon.

Then there’s dead Alexander Trocchi; not a lot to choose from by virtue of his unvirtuous early demise from an overdose. Nevertheless, his Cain’s Book struck quite a few chords. There’s a Foreward by Greil Marcus, and an Intro by Richard Seaver in the 1992 Grove Press edition.

Samuel Beckett said, “Can’t write about writing so will simply say that I find it excellent, very strong and moving –all the visual writing in particular– it seems to me of the highest order.”

Ken Kesey called it a “treasure,” Mailer labeled it “true” and “brave,” and Alan Ginsberg, Terry Southern and Kathy Acker all, arguably, thought it was a masterpiece.

Considering what Burroughs wrote about so much of the time, his imprimatur means much: “Cain’s Book is *the* classic late-1950s account of heroin addiction…. An un-self-forgiving existentialism, rendered with writerly exactness and muscularity, set this novel apart from all others of the genre.”

Celine, who has an 1894 birthday/anniversary on the 27th, should be checked out too at Reading Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Doesn’t matter if most of the above is… unreadable for you. There’s a value in being reminded that the books we often resort to are too often too grounded in mounds of mediocrity…routine, rules. Rimbaud’s “deregulation of the senses” is called for more than ever today.

And it won’t hurt to sink among the tall grasses.

Drowning Footnote:

[1] Soaked by the mold of neglect, devoid of the *practical* so prized by the mundane many.