Like almost everything else, the instant printing revolution has two sides to it. The dark side, and to my thinking the misuse of the new technology, is the fact that ANYBODY with a few bucks can have their scribblings printed, resulting in a dramatic proliferation of worthless, half-written new "books" that rightly would never have been published before because of their sheer incompetence. This has also created a horde of typists who because they’ve had something "published" (most times at their own expense) consider themselves authors, with all the attendant rights and privileges. This is not just UBU being curmudgeonly – bookstores are swarmed by wannabees who demand that their ugly volumes be carried or, even worse, think that they are owed a book signing. The same is true of conventions and conferences where they clog the positions of honor reserved for the real thing. I know a writer who calls such pests POD people for "print on demand."

But the bright side is that great, or even just interesting works of the past can be more easily reprinted. In a world with very little sense of history and book/music/stationary stores run by grocery clerks who treat literature like a perishable commodity (and even public libraries are shoveling older books out of the back door as fast as they can to make room for crowd pleasing computers), it’s wonderful to have so many of these hard to find volumes available again. This is the way the new information technology should be used, to help bring more of the rich panorama of human culture to people rather than fresh self-absorbed babble. Kessinger (www.kessinger.net) is one publisher that has made thousands of scarce and hard-to-find books available. I’ve been able to find works by Gautier, Musset, and even an esoteric loony like Paschal Beverly Randolph from them and there are many, many more. Wildside Press (www.wildesidepress.com) is another purveyor of the neglected and way cool.

What inspired this little rant’n’rave is a guy named Jens Peter Jacobsen. I first heard about him, as I’m sure a lot of people have, through Rainer Maria Rilke, who said "of all my books, I find only a few indispensable…the Bible, and the books of the great Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen." Well, seeing as Rilke’s Duino Elegies is a book I find indispensable I’ve always been avid to read Jacobsen. Of course in those benighted days there was no www.abebooks.com (No internet at all actually), no Jacobsen in the public library (a lot to ask – he hadn’t been translated since 1919) and I had no access to the University Library, so I was quite elated to hear that a new edition of his most famous work Neils Lyhne was coming out. Sadly, once I did read it I wondered what all the fuss was about. It seemed a fairly conventional sensitive young man coming of age story to me, lyrically written, but without the resonance of Jacobsen’s fellow Nordics Strindberg or Hamsun.

What brought him to mind again was the new Penguin Classics edition. I was hoping that maybe the Fjord Press edition I read was a bad translation that missed the magic but this version uses the same 1990 text. I’m going to give it another go – I don’t think I’m any more savvy than I was sixteen years ago (dumber probably) but sometime set and setting are crucial. But this new Penguin made me wonder if I could get any of his other work, and lo and behold, thanks to Kessinger and Wildside I could. Jacobsen died young (always attractive to Rilke) and produced a small body of work. His most famous novella "Mogens" is available with three other stories in a volume by Wildside, and it’s a pretty good read, with that hard to translate lyricism and keen eye, marred somewhat by the nineteenth century tendency to melodrama and happy ending. You can get his other novel Marie Grubbe from Kessinger, and I enjoyed it as well. It’s a historical novel, set in the late 17^th century, but happily without the usual historical novel folderol, that traces the life of the titular aristocratic beauty’s slow descent from high society to penury, but also to a strange, perverse kind of fulfillment. Once again I appreciated Jacobsen’s style, his pantheistic appreciation of nature, and his keen sensitivity on what goes on between men and women. The book also has a more contemporary appeal in that it presents the tenuous, powerless position of a woman of the time, and engages with the lively feminist debate of Jacobsen’s time. The wayward plot may be forgiven as the novel is based on actual characters and places and largely true to them. It’s grown on me, but I still don’t see what Rilke was raving about. I’ll read Neils Lyhne again and see if I can figure it out.

Anyway what I REALLY wanted to do for you today dear reader is to present a few passages from Marie Grubbe that rang my chimes:

…it has seemed to me that this was whence my bitter sorrow welled, that I touched a string which must not sound and its tone has sundered something within me that could never be healed. Therefore I could never force open the portals of life but had to stand without, unbidden and unsought, like a poor maimed bondswoman.

It had so little desire, so much fear and worship, and yet so much desire. A wistful, feverish languishing for her, a morbid longing to live with her in her memories, dream her dreams, suffer her sorrows and share her sad thoughts, no more, no less. How lovely she had been in the dance, but how distant and unattainable! The round gleaming shoulders, the full bosom and slender limbs – they took his breath away. He trembled before that splendor of body which made her seem richer and more perfect and hardly dared to let himself be drawn under its spell.

…it was not without a certain intoxicating sense of power that she heard herself called the lord of life and death to so strange a person…

DIG IT

YR PAL

UBU