Rarities from Dennis Cooper’s record collection

Dennis Cooper, whose blog I recently discovered, posts prolifically, and here the entries from the rarities of his record collection, some items of which he found in 1974 (when he was 21). It has been a special interest of mine to discover what the collections are (music, art, books) of artists I know.

Manhood (1939) – Michel Leiris

Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility (1939) – Michel Leiris [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Originally published in 1939 as L’Âge d’homme. This edition translated from the French by Richard Howard in 1992. Susan Sontag dedicated a chapter to it in Against Interpretation. The painting on the cover of this edition is by Northern Renaissance painter Lucas Cranach. [Sept 2006]

Via The Wire’s review of David Toop’s Ocean of Sound.

Ocean of Sound (1995) – David Toop

Ocean of Sound (1995) – David Toop [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Its parallels aren’t music books at all, but rather Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Michel Leiris’s Afrique Phantôme, William Gibson’s Neuromancer … David Toop is our Calvino and our Leiris, our Gibson. Ocean of Sound is as alien as the 20th century, as utterly Now as the 21st. An essential mix. –The Wire magazine.

An incredible breadth an depth of knowledge. Recommended 10/10

See also: David Toop – 1995 – music journalism

Animals are divided into:

Photo of Borges, credit unidentified

Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. —The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List of animals (Borges) [Sept 2006]

Published in:

Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952 (1952) – Jorge Luis Borges
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

See also: taxonomy – Borges

Karel Thole (1914 – 2000)

Illustration of German pulp fiction novel by Karel Thole

Carolus Adrianus Maria Thole (1914, Netherland – 2000, Italy) is a Dutch painter. He is one of the best-known european illustrators of science fiction and the fantastique. Influenced by painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí or René Magritte his style is instantly recognizable.

Via The Groovy Age of Horror.

See also: le fantastique

The Black Dahlia (1987) – James Ellroy

The Black Dahlia is a neo-noir novel by James Ellroy based on true events. It is considered the book that elevated Ellroy out of typical genre writer status and with which he started to garner critical attention as a serious writer of literature. One of the first essays to come to the defense of crime fiction as a serious form of literature was Leslie Fiedler’s 1969 Cross the Border — Close the Gap.