So I got a package today at work — a battered-looking manila bundle, excessively taped — from my grandfather, Stan Winston. It contained precisely the following, in precisely the following order:
- A copy of Áegis Living, the newsletter from his retirement home (slightly creepy motto: “People live here”), with the “Recent Activities” article highlighted, reading as follows: “We had a well-attended Halloween Party with the Spiral Mystics band playing oldies but goodies. Many of the staff and residents were in costumes. New resident [and the Palaverist’s grandmother] Shirley Winston and her husband Stanley accompanied the band with percussion instruments. Stanley has also started a percussion class on Saturday afternoons, which has become very popular.”
- Four photos from the abovementioned Halloween event, including one of my grandmother looking ancient and one of my grandfather and an attractive young black woman in standing side by side and drumming intently on a pair of mounted bongos.
- The Zenith of Desire: Contemporary Lesbian Poems About Sex, edited by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, including such poems as “Shave,” “Changing the Oil” and “Why Is There No Dyke Bathhouse?”
- The first issue of GNAOUA, which according to Wikipedia was “a magazine devoted to exorcism introducing the work of Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse and other members of the Interzone,” published by Ira Cohen in Tangier, Morocco. The inaugural issue includes several works by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg.
- An issue of Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon from February 1949, consisting entirely of The Oasis by Mary McCarthy, described on Amazon.com as “a wickedly satiric roman a clef about a group of urban American intellectuals who try unsuccessfully to establish a rural utopian colony just as the Cold War is setting in and fear of the atomic bomb is reaching panic proportions.”
- Elizabeth McNeill’s Nine and A Half Weeks, apparently a first-edition hardcover from 1978.
- Male/Female Language, by Mary Ritchie Key, a cross-cultural exploration of differences between male and female uses of language; also apparently a first edition, this one put out by Scarecrow Press in 1975.
- Paul Auster’s 2006 novel The Brooklyn Follies.
At least I come by it honestly.