Cultural critic Mark Dery and I have overlapping interests in subjects that, as once defined by Mark Frauenfelder’s young daughter Sarina, are “creepy, interesting, and real.” Mark Dery’s take on such matters is often filled with wonderfully obscure references to history, culture, and philosophy that, more often than not, are news to me. That’s one of the reasons I like reading his essays and books so much. When I finish one, I always have a great list of links and juxtapositions to follow up on. Once, I asked Mark to list of some of his personal favorite books. Two years later, he’s come through. And I’m grateful. His essay “Unpacking My Library” is a veritable wunderkammer of printed matter. I already treasure several of the titles he mentions, like JG Ballard: Quotes, Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, and The Nutshell Library of Unexplained Death. But most of his selections will quickly move to the top of my reading queue.
From Dery’s post:
2. Albertus Seba: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities—The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765, edited by Dr. Irmgard Musch. Another breathtaking wonderbook from the German publisher Taschen. From the Amazon blurb: “In 1731, after decades of collecting, Seba commissioned illustrations of each and every specimen [in his wonder closet] and arranged the publication of a four-volume catalog detailing his entire collection—from strange and exotic plants to snakes, frogs, crocodiles, shellfish, corals, insects, butterflies and more, as well as fantastic beasts, such as a hydra and a dragon. [These] illustrations, often mixing plants and animals in a single plate, were unusual even for the time. Many of the stranger and more peculiar creatures from Seba’s collection, some of which are now extinct, were as curious to those in Seba’s day as they are to us now. This reproduction is taken from a rare, hand-colored original.” Once seen, never forgotten, these hand-painted dream photographs from the Baroque capture, with stunning vivdness, the aesthetic of wonder…
5. Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture by Regina Janes. The fact that there’s an entire book devoted to this subject gives meaning to my life, and almost convinces me there’s a god…
9. The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators by Gordon Grice. A mordant masterpiece, in which the author invents a genre all his own: Nature Gothic. The chapter titles—“Tarantula,” “Recluse,” “Mantid,” “Black Widow,” “Rattlesnake”—tell it all. Fascinated by the alien ways of the nonhuman world, Grice combines the sardonic deadpan of noir fiction with the best naturalists’ unsentimental scrutiny of animal behavior and a rural midwesterner’s applied knowledge of the predator-prey relationship. A Jean-Henri Fabre for literati who drive pickups with rifle racks.