Paperback sprezzatura (for Tower of Sleep).
My father and I made this bookmark on Sunday night out of twine, sandalwood and Labradorite. A little paperback sprezzatura anyone? For the photo, I bookmarked the latest César Aira novella The Literary Conference, which I finally got around to reading yesterday. I’m ambivalent to Aira’s books, but I keep reading them. I don’t know why. Of the four translated works, I think Ghosts was the most successful. In The Literary Conference Aira is too sarcastic, as if he’s holding the reader in contempt. But I wanted to use this book, because displaying this elegant new paperback continues the theme I’ve been following (viz., text and its manifestation re: the Nancy quote a while back, my “Too Many Words” essay, the Publication Studio posts, the Marías video, the recent Temple Classics post), this being an example of the New Direction’s new Pearl series, which seems to have replaced the previous Bibelot series. The only two Pearl edtions I have are this Aira one and a Marías one, and I thought I’d been posting about Marías (both here and on my fb account) too much lately.
