My best Christmas present

Kenneth Patchen, Sleepers Awake (NY: Padell Book Company, 1946). I saw it for the first time a few months ago (at Red Snapper in Cecil Court) and must have mentioned it to H, who braved the high-caste book dealers Bertram Rota to acquire one (at a brave price, lacking dw but vg) and gave it to me for Xmas, a complete surprise. I knew nothing about the book (as will be apparent), and next to nothing about Patchen, and it's been intriguing and enjoyable to make it out from this point of ignorance. It's a beautifully designed book of prose ... fiction? perhaps a series of connected short stories, printed very black in a bold sans-serif typeface, plus some red on tp and caption title; but also with lots of visual and display-type layouts, and non-verbal elements. Lists and diagrams and pictures, parallel sequences through pages ... It's a slightly disturbing read though: a surreal, drug-influenced? and sometimes violent picaresque, set in a dystopian near-future, or indeed present (wartime?), with a motif of shootings marked by hardboiled epithets -- 'the head of a crimson mouse working out of his cheek'; 'Thane's shirt was growing a big red rose', etc etc --. Things transform grotesquely, or seem hallucinated; characters morph into others with similar names. There are also passages of obscure soap-box fulminations and exhortations on alienation, God, love, possibly attributed to the unstable narrator. It's a very weird book, but I'm excited to have found it. 1946! amazing. Pre-Concrete, etc. Here's a picture .
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Last week, H in the Charing Cross Road carried away for me a New Directions paperback (ca. 1966?) 'doubleheader' (i.e. printed head-to-tail with two title pages) of 2 Patchen books (first pub. by Jonathan Williams's Jargon Society), 'Poemscapes' (put together with 'A Letter to God') and 'Hurrah for Anything'. The latter consists of very small poems with drawings, with a strong whiff of Edward Lear cum Stevie Smith, some really limericks ('There was an old bronchobuster ...', 'There was a forgetful litle commuter ...'). The drawings are great actually. And here's a page of quite recent (1996) fully integrated 'picture poems'. These outsiderish works help situate the strangeness of Sleepers Awake; but I much prefer its visuals, predominantly rendered in type.
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A couple of weeks ago we went up to Highgate, ostensibly for a walk in the woods, but ended up spending most time in Sound 323, the purveyor of advanced and experimental music and sound art, just over the road from the station. I bought a CD of 'The City wears a Slouch Hat', the 1942 radio play written by Patchen, with music composed by John Cage for an orchestra of radio sound effects ('organiz[ed] ... with their expressive rather than representational qualities in mind') together with frequency oscillators, buzzers, marimbula, coil of wire, contact-mic'ing etc. etc. I remember hearing this first on that marvellous first pilot season of Resonance 104.4FM, in fact it's certainly somewhere among all the unlabelled cassettes I recorded during those weeks. It's great, a bit chaotic; lots of crunchy noises and bells. More slightly uncanny narrative, a semi-psychic looming 'Voice'; more preaching: 'I think we need more love in the world ...'.
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