DUNAWAY BOOKS

NEWSLETTER FOR SUMMER

2006

 

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From a golden step,--among silk cords, green velvets, gray gauzes, and crystal discs that turn black as bronze in the sun, I see the digitalis opening on a carpet of silver filigree, of eyes and hair.

Yellow gold-pieces strewn over agate, mahogany columns supporting emerald domes, bouquets of white satin and delicate sprays of rubies, surround the water-rose.

Like a god with huge blue eyes and limbs of snow, the sea and sky lure to the marble terraces the throng of roses, young and strong.

 

--Rimbaud, Flowers

 

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“Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour—but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands—and who knows what to do with it?”

 

--Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

 

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Greetings!  We wave our hellos to you all through the humid mirage of late high Midwestern summer.  We also send out a big thank you to everyone who came out to our recent music events this May.  The four nights of Ancora il Piu Estinto, and the special Jason Zeh and Art Union Humanscape concerts held separately in the basement, went swimmingly.  Your support made it so!  The strange sound-machines were even more fascinating than last year, weaving ballooning veils of sound that swelled to fill the store like the songs of extraterrestrial insects.  Thomas Crone of 52nd City has taken some luminous photographs that are posted in his online photoblog; we will include a link at bottom so that all of you can see how completely a familiar space can be transformed by the power of art and collective will. 

 

Summer spreads its glory out again before us, whether we like it or not, a peacock fan shimmering with radiant heat in the colors of leaf, shadow, popsicle and sky.  The industry of spring has given way to languor of a very special Mississippi Valley sort.  Many of our literary local boys and girls made good are known as Southern writers, and on an August afternoon, it is not difficult to see why.  The rich history of the river and what it has been to us as a modern civilization is not to be downplayed by any means, but the simple delirium of climate would be enough if it were all we had.  The sensation of being in a condensation-beaded terrarium while a heavenly glass concentrates the rays of the sun on our little human heads and hearts certainly has a magnifying effect on the emotions, and our struggles take on a shade of the surreal.  Thankfully, there are the traditional palliatives:  snowcones and Mexican paletas, siestas, 3 am talks on the fire escape, and anything else guided by the animal wisdom that knows better than to let one’s brains fry in their pan.  Our recent blackout certainly revived a remembrance of old-fashioned ways to keep cool!  Thankfully, we seem to be through the worst of the weather and can now enjoy the rest of it.

 

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We have acquired some new things in the store, as always, perhaps since last you were here.  The craft and architecture/construction sections have absorbed a large lot of woodworking books, detailing everything from joinery techniques to fine furniture building.  The Poetry section has received a long-awaited influx of volumes, mostly contemporary work in paperback.  Those searching for modern literature will find our Fiction shelves enriched since the past few months, and the Fantasy/Science Fiction section is always expanding.  We have also bought several lots of religious books:  a few consisting of Christian theology, a large grouping of Eastern spirituality and thought, and one especially scholarly collection of books on Jewish life, religion, culture and history.    

 

We have brought a selection of our favorite novels up to the center front area of the store, so that there is a wide array of material to choose from for those searching for a summer afternoon read.  If there is an author you have an especial fondness for whose books are not on our shelves, let us know; we will try to keep an eye out for your favorites on our buying excursions.   

 

A few very special items have arrived in the front of the store where the rare, antiquarian, and unusual books are kept.  One of these, J. Thomas Scharf’s History of Saint Louis City and County, is a classic reference book dealing with St. Louis and the surrounding area, and almost impossible to find, even in facsimile.  We have a copy of the original 2-volume set from 1883 in our Local History section.  It has been attractively and sturdily rebound, making it more usable than with the often-fragile (or missing) original covers.  This is a set that, at approximately 1900 pages, will be opened, referred to, and enjoyed again and again by any scholar of local history.   Here is an excerpt from Chapter XXXVI, Culture and Literary Growth in St. Louis:

 

“The place was so active and energetic, so entirely honest and naïve, that it had a great attraction for fresh minds bent upon frank and free inquiry.  All Illinois at that time was just “over the river,” and Kaskaskia, Belleville, Edwardsville were tributary to St. Louis.  Robert Owen used to come here to escape from the stagnant pessimism of his impossible perfection at New Harmony, and here he and Madame D’Arusmont (Fanny Wright) used to lecture and have séances, at which the most advanced radicalism was disseminated without hurting any one or even disturbing the general good humor, any more than if rose-water had been sprayed abroad upon the tolerant air…John James Audubon used to stroll in too, when he could escape from Louisville, or had time to come out of the woods enough to gaze and see what civilization looked like.  There was a magic charm about the town, and it has not even yet been civilized out of that charm.  It abounded in original characters, such as the active mind delights to study.  It was here that “Mark Twain” picked up his Col. Sellers, in “The Gilded Age,” and gave immortality to John T. Raymond….”

 

Check out the shelves flanking the windows when you next come in, to see the new rare Americana and sets displayed there.  You might see something you’ve been searching for…

 

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The playwright Tennessee Williams, a Southern boy raised in Saint Louis, is often associated with the sort of emotional thunderstorms that may rise over the Mississippi Valley in August.  The desperate weather has put him in mind many times over in the bookstore this summer:  the volumes bearing his name almost open themselves and speak.  His characters drift, tower and explode over backdrops of flaking iron and splintered wood, their nature overriding culture.  He had an exquisite sense of the tragic and comic extremes of human behavior; in the pauses between his passages, alternately tortured and wry, one can sense a bodhisattvic compassion for the human life force and the channels it must cut to survive.  As a gay man in pre-Stonewall America, his own experiences afforded him the opportunity to observe all facets of American life, the public, private and the necessarily secret.

 

He was the best friend of Carson McCullers and his fragile sister Rose, and a literary devotee of Hart Crane, Rainer Maria Rilke, and D.H. Lawrence.  He spent enough time in our city to be associated with it forever; indeed, is buried here, and as the burial place was decided against his explicit wishes, so was our city for him a part of the structure against which he beat his wings his entire life.  The Glass Menagerie lives in a room that lives in this place; perhaps without that room the wings would not have beat; perhaps we are grateful for it.  Though at times he disowned St. Louis, it is as intertwined with his work as any earth is around the roots of a plant it feeds.  Williams had wanted his remains dropped into the Gulf of Mexico at the spot where Hart Crane had jumped to his death in 1932.  The two of them fought for their work and their lives in inhospitable climes, and shared an invisible companionship, the sort unique to artists who may have never met.  They were both travelers, half-exiles, men walking between the worlds; their words resonate and remain to feed us in the here and now, and echo in the heat …

 

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“Wild things leave skins behind them, they leave clean skins and teeth and white bones behind them, and these are tokens passed from one to another, so that the fugitive kind can always follow their kind…”

 

--Tennessee Williams, The Fugitive Kind

 

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I don’t believe in “original sin.”  I don’t believe in “guilt.”  I don’t believe in villains or heroes—only right and wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents.

This is so simple I’m ashamed of it, but I’m sure it’s true.  In fact, I would bet my life on it!  And that’s why I don’t understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.

 

--TW, Where I Live

 

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Cowslip and shad-blow, flaked like tethered foam
Around bared teeth of stallions, bloomed that spring
When first I read thy lines, rife as the loam
Of prairies, yet like breakers cliffward leaping !
O, early following thee, I searched the hill
Blue-writ and odor-firm with violets, 'til
With June the mountain laurel broke through green
And filled the forest with what clustrous sheen !
Potomac lilies, --- then the Pontiac rose,
And Klondike edelweiss of occult snows !
White banks of moonlight came descending valleys ---
How speechful on oak-vizored palisades,
As vibrantly I follow down Sequoia alleys
Heard thunder's eloquence through green arcades
Set trumpets breathing in each clump and grass tuft --- 'til
Gold autumn, captured, crowned the trembling hill.

 

--Hart Crane, The Bridge, Cape Hatteras

 

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“The whole world, God's world, has been the range of my travels. I haven't stuck to the schedules of the brochures and I've always allowed the ones that were willing to see, to see!—the underworlds of all places, and if they had hearts to be touched, feelings to feel with, I gave them a priceless chance to feel and be touched. And none will ever forget it, none of them, ever, never!”

 

--TW, The Night of the Iguana

 

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…Then what is good?  The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims.  William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having.  “In the time of your life—live!”  That time is short and it doesn’t return again.  It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

 

--TW, from the introduction to The Glass Menagerie

 

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The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

 

--Hart Crane, Chaplinesque

 

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Some links for your perusal:

 

Thomas Crone’s photoblog, with images of Ancora il Piu Estinto, and many other hidden corners of St. Louis:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/51252573@N00/page9/

 

The new 52nd City is out, and for sale at our front counter:

http://52ndcity.com/

 

A tidbit about Tennesee Williams by way of Washington University and New Orleans’ Faulkner House Books:

http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/5005.html

 

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We hope that you all enjoy summer’s last long stretch, and find something of yourself quiet to keep in it, in between the heat waves and thunderstorms.  As hot fades to warm fades to cool, things will look different, as they always do, and afford a fresh perspective.  Piles of pleasurably silly summer reading will molt and be replaced by harder books to crack, and that’s a pleasure too.

 

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DUNAWAY BOOKS

3111 S. Grand

St. Louis, MO  63118

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