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Tag: london review of books

At the Tom Verlaine Book Sale

Alex Abramovich has a nice piece at London Review of Books on the late Tom Verlaine and the sale of his massive book collection:

Verlaine, who formed and fronted the band Television, died on 28 January 2023. Over the years he had acquired fifty thousand books – twenty tons or more – on any number of subjects: art, acoustics, astrological signs, UFOs. The sale of those books – a two-day affair in August, run out of adjacent garages in Brooklyn – was a serious draw. Arto Lindsay, the avant-pop musician, walked by. Tony Oursler made a short video and posted it on Instagram. Old friends, some of whom looked as if they hadn’t seen daylight in decades, found each other in the long line.

Dealing with that many books was quite an undertaking:

Verlaine had been a regular at the Strand, where he’d once worked in the shipping department – you’d see him on the sidewalk in front, where the dollar carts were. On tour, he used the space between soundcheck and showtime to visit local booksellers. In Brooklyn, he had packed his storage units so tightly that Patrick Derivaz, the friend charged with handling his estate, had to rent another unit just to have space to move boxes around. Jimmy Rip, a guitarist in Television’s most recent incarnation, had flown in from Argentina in January; seven months later he was still in New York, helping out. Dave Morse and Matty D’Angelo, of the Bushwick bookstore Better Read than Dead, had come aboard too.

‘Usually,’ Morse told me, ‘people call and say: “We have fifty thousand books.” You get there and it’s more like five hundred. In this case, we counted the boxes.

My books are not in storage units but having also helped some relatives downsize recently, this is a reminder that I need to take a long hard look at what I want to keep.

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James Wood On Not Going Home

Norfolk

In an essay for the London Review of Books, critic James Wood considers what is to be an immigrant and the desire to return home even though one can’t:

When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

I’ve lived in Canada for over 10 years now and I don’t have a ‘home’ to return to either. My parents no longer live where I grew up. My friends are scattered across the UK. Yet I still get pangs of homesickness at surprising moments — walking in a Toronto park on a rare foggy morning, or the smell of urban wood smoke — and it is a strange experience to feel nostalgic about a place that no longer exists and never really quite did. I know the England (and Scotland) that I miss is a fictional place — one that exists at least in part in books, film, and music as well as my memories — even as I miss it.  It doesn’t mean my feelings aren’t real, it just means that I know I can’t go home again. And it’s all right.

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