Captain Cap, His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks
Alphonse Allais
Translated, annotated, introduced, and illustrated by Doug Skinner
Black Scat Books ($26.95)

The Adventures of Captain Cap
Alphonse Allais
Translated, annotated and introduced by Brian Stableford
Black Coat Press ($22.95)

by M. Kasper

What an interesting coincidence! Recently, simultaneously, and unbeknownst to one another, two different translations of a collection of sketches by the heretofore little-translated 19th-century French comic writer Alphonse Allais were published by small publishers, with similar names no less!

Allais (1854-1905) was a key figure in Montmartre’s Belle Époque, a frequenter of cafés and a frequent contributor to journals like Le Chat Noir and Gil Blas. He’s only half-jokingly called the father of Conceptual Art on account of his suite of monochromatic, hilariously captioned prints, entitled “The April Foolish Album,” and his silent musical composition, “Funeral March for a Deaf Man.” Posthumously, Allais has been continually in print in France and acknowledged as one of that country’s great humorists.

The Captain Cap stories originally appeared in magazines and newspapers, and then were collected into a book in 1902. As Brian Stableford says in his introduction, they “hybridize fictional discourse with mini-essays.” Typically, the narrator and his buddy Cap, a Canadian seadog (and “a useful mouthpiece for tall tales and curious inventions,” as Doug Skinner has it in his introduction), meet up at one or another of the many English pubs and American bars that opened in Paris in the 1890s, and they discuss things—Cap’s far-flung exploits, say, or his philosophical or scientific schemes, or recent technological advances—while enjoying cocktails. One neat and unifying feature of the anecdotes is that many include cocktail recipes, in footnotes, so readers can keep up with the principals. In Skinner’s version, the amusing appendix that appeared in the 1902 edition, repeating the recipes along with pithy comments, is translated; Stableford unaccountably drops it.

Both editions have genuinely erudite introductions and footnotes, but different approaches emerge: for Skinner (a musician and longtime collaborator with artist Bill Irwin), the heart of the matter is Allais’ avant-garde humor; for Stableford (a mind-bogglingly prolific British author of speculative fiction and translator from French), it’s his scientific and pseudo-scientific imagination. Nevertheless both translators—though they rarely choose exactly the same words, and sometimes one, sometimes the other does a better job with wordplay—manage about equally well in capturing the sprightly, ironic, and self-reflexive style that distinguishes Allais. And there’s added value in both editions: Skinner’s—a more handsomely designed book—tacks on eight extra Cap stories that Allais published elsewhere, plus a selection of historical photos, and lots of really charming, apt, and accomplished illustrations by the translator; Stableford’s includes two dozen non-Cap pieces by Allais on related themes—eighty pages worth!—a nice bonus, especially given how little Allais there’s been in English until now.

Why is Allais suddenly popular here? Well, he was one of the makers of modernism, admired over the decades by both avant-gardists and a wider public, and with short prose (the Cap sketches are only a few pages each) and stylized absurdist humor now widespread in American literary circles, maybe he’s just due for discovery at last. In any case, these two books are welcome.

Click here to purchase Captain Cap at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Adventures of Captain Cap at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Encountering Pauline Réage • Dominique Aury • Anne Desclos

Essay by Gregory Stephenson

Stephenson delves into the story behind Story of O and it’s elusive author.
Download the PDF of this essay here.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Vivian Maier, July 3, 1959, France, from Vivian Maier: Self Portraits

by Susan Buechler

You may have heard of Vivian Maier, and then again, you may not have. A brilliant photographer completely unknown in her lifetime, she made her living as a nanny for well-to-do families in New York and Chicago. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Maier shot approximately one roll of film per day. Her stealthy passion ruled her life, yet she kept her visions hidden, much even in undeveloped film.

Maier’s oeuvre has only taken its place in the field of photography through its chance discovery in 2007, and entirely without her knowledge or choice. Old and isolated, she was in a Chicago hospital when a handful of collectors purchased the contents of her abandoned storage lots and discovered over 100,000 images, along with some audiotapes and home movies. Among the purchasers was John Maloof, a Chicago historian; he tried to locate this reclusive, talented artist he had stumbled upon, but was unable to before she died in 2009. Since then, Maier’s work has been highly acclaimed and shown in museums and galleries around the world, and is the subject of the recent documentary film Finding Vivian Maier.

photo by Vivian Maier from Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

In Vivian Maier, Street Photographer (powerHouse Books, 2011, $39.95), Maloof presents about 100 of Maier’s photographs. All are black and white, and all taken with her trusty Rolleiflex, a choice that set her apart from most photographers who were using the then-more modern 35mm.

While focused on street photography, the book still shows the breadth of Maier’s interests. She creates striking geometric patterns from sunlight and shade and the occasional painterly image of buildings and public spaces. There are mid-range shots showing groups of people in action; these catch a moment and imply the before and after, the mind inevitably reeling out a story. We see social commentary as well as death and disaster—a half decomposed cat on the curb, a smoldering armchair on a sidewalk—but from this selection, she seems most interested in individual people. There are shots of the well dressed and well heeled, of the derelict and deformed, of men at work and children at play. She took pictures of black and white, rich and poor.

Maier excelled at making portraits. A striking example in this collection shows a young, thin man with two pigeons—one settled on his forearm, the other, its wings still flapping, just landing on his fist in which he clutches bird food. Dapperly dressed in pleated pants and white shirt, he looks down intently, his mouth drawn, his brow knit. Best of all, his hair is swept up from his forehead into an elaborate pompadour. The hair and the flashing feathers are of a piece, conflating man and bird: the young man is a bantam cock who struts the streets, challenging anyone to take him on. But there’s an incongruity, too, between his dress and his intent focus on the birds, his desire to connect with the nonhuman, to escape the weary charade that is the human pecking order.

photo by Vivian Maier, from Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows

With nearly 300 photographs reproduced, the selection in Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows (CityFiles Press, 2012, $60) is much larger, but the onslaught of images is tempered by being arranged into categories (“Snapshots,” “America,” “Beach,” etc.) The added range of images highlights Maier’s openness to the moment, her ability to capture a complete scene: in the Beach section, for example, a posse of teenage girls in bikinis emerges from the waves of Lake Michigan under a vast sky above. Edited by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, this volume shows that Maier’s vision and technique rose to wherever her camera took her.

Maier’s oeuvre is large, and these two books present just a first serving. Both contain only black and white photographs, but she shot color film in her later years, and movies, too. Some of this color work is on display in Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits (powerhouse, 2013, $50), a subsequent volume edited by Maloof; Maier’s work in the subgenre of self-portraiture is particularly haunting, given the artist’s invisibility during her lifetime. Photography fans are advised to keep their antennae up for new revelations as more of Maier’s treasure trove of images is made public.

Click here to purchase Vivian Maier: Street Photographer at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

James Sallis
Bloomsbury ($24)

by Robert Martin

The newest novel by noir master James Sallis begins with the straightforward propulsion of a typical crime drama. But in the opening of this slim book, we learn in disturbing and exhilarating detail the protagonist’s atypical backstory: Jenny was abducted before she hit double digits and was kept in a box beneath her captor Danny’s bed for years. She escaped, surviving as a feral resident of a shopping mall before getting picked up by the foster system and shuffled through various homes.

Adulthood, for Jenny, comprises a freedom few of her peers could understand. “I wanted desperately, after all those years of absolute dependence, to be on my own. I could almost taste it, like that drop of sweet dew you pull out of honeysuckle, like the metallic taste of Danny’s genitals.” Despite her tumultuous origin, Jenny is a well-adjusted and perspicacious narrator. When she’s cross-examined by a social worker, it’s the bureaucrat made out to be the fascinating character study:

“Adults are supposed to care for children, not take advantage of them.”
“Danny did take care of me. He brought me sundaes. He fed me, he cleaned my box. Took me out when he came home.”
Tears replaced the concern brimming in [the social worker’s] eyes. I had the feeling that habitually they waited back there a long time; and that when they came, they pushed themselves out against her will.

Yet despite the narrator’s clarity of insight, Others of My Kind struggles to keep its elements in line. A child shuttled through the foster system is ample basis for a novel, let alone a young girl who was imprisoned in a box beneath her rapist’s bed, or an adolescent young woman coming of age in a shopping mall while hiding from security guards during business hours. Sallis only glances over this rich terrain, nudging the book instead down the disheveled path of Jenny’s adult life, taking on themes without apparent discrimination.

After a sixty-page muddle of chronology, the scope of the plot has long overshot practical narrative boundaries. In addition to Jenny’s life story, Sallis crams in a portrait of the foster care system, a critique of the 24-hour news cycle, and high-stakes elements like presidential kidnappings and terrorist attacks. Over the course of a mere 120 pages, these elements are a bit more than most readers will be able to chew.

Taken in small doses, though, Sallis’s skill with a sentence renders the book an exceptionally pleasurable read. For instance:

What difference could finding my parents possibly make? I’d always made light of adoptees who, coming to adulthood, insisted upon doing so. So many years have passed. Whatever congruencies and connections once may have obtained are long gone. One might as well seek out Cro-Magnon ancestors.

Jenny ultimately does track down her birth parents—one more narrative layer to an ultra-compressed work—and when she does, Sallis wields a mighty insight into the workings of the world. Quite an accomplishment, considering how little the world he describes has in common with our own.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Dave Eggers
Alfred A. Knopf  •  McSweeney's ($27.95)

by Jason Harris

With the author’s signature flair for plumbing societal ills, Dave Eggers’s latest novel The Circle focuses on Mae Holland, a twenty-four-year-old college graduate recruited to work at the world’s leading Internet technology company, something akin to Google. Readers will think of Google Glass when Mae learns about the “Retinal Interface” Circlers use to communicate. Eggers postulates what the world might look like if such a company dominated the globe with universal membership.

When Mae joins the Circle, she is impressed by its various altruistic programs. Who would oppose putting a bracelet on every child to prevent kidnapping? Why not—instead of a bracelet—a mandatory chip? Or how about cameras throughout the world to monitor not only criminals but oppressive governments? “All that happens must be known” is the motivating mantra for the Circle. As the Circle evolves to gain more control, Mae helps to articulate the company’s goals: “Privacy is Theft”; “Secrets are Lies”; “Sharing is Caring.”

The Circle is an intriguing examination of how the convenience and utility of technology may come to imprison us. Mae’s friends and lovers present different perspectives about what matters most in people’s lives: transparency or privacy. Similarly, the trajectory of Mae’s relationship with her parents helps track her development at the Circle, which becomes ever more intrusive; the notion of “extracurricular activities” turns out to be mandatory rather than elective.

Mae is not particularly reflective about the corporate culture she inhabits; however, Eggers deftly juxtaposes natural and urban scenes to imply that something fundamental is threatened by it. In contrast with the transparency expected at the Circle campus, where employees are locatable through proprietary social networks, Mae enjoys kayaking in the San Francisco Bay and contemplates wildlife “hidden in the dark water, in their black parallel world, and knowing they were there, but not knowing where, or really anything else, felt, at that moment, strangely right.” Similarly, when discovering a bird’s nest on an island, Mae thinks, “Could she lift it, bring it down to her to peek in? Just for a second? She could, couldn’t she, and then put it right back? No. She knew enough to know she couldn’t. If she did, she’d ruin whatever was inside.” These moments highlight the beauty of mystery and privacy in nature that defies the intrusion of constant data collection.

Why is Mae vulnerable to the lure of transparency? Both Eggers and her corporate overlords chose Mae to be the messenger for a thesis of how techno-dystopia could overtake humanity. It’s a disconcerting and compelling thesis, and an engaging novel presented in efficient smooth prose, but one that feels flawed by insufficient character-building and arbitrarily underdeveloped defiance. Nevertheless, as The Circle closes, it looks to be one that would fit well in Dante’s Inferno. Eggers warns us to get outside the lines while there’s still time.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014