Transit Winter Staff Picks

Ashley Nelson Levy, Publisher

When I was twenty years old I put my things into storage—which, as a college student, consisted of a bed, a desk, and a few treasured boxes of thrift store clothing—and moved to Florence for a year to study. My coursework focused on Italian literature, but there was also a class on Italian opera, Italian history, and, of course, Italian art history, taught by one of the curators of the Uffizi Gallery. Often on Mondays, when the Uffizi was closed to the public, our teacher would walk us from the large apartment building where our classes were held to the museum, its one day of respite from flag-waving guides and endless lines tracing the periphery. On those Mondays, the building transformed into our classroom, twenty of us spread out on the cold floors and benches with only our notebooks. What good were textbooks reproducing Botticelli’s Venus when the real goddess was arriving at the shore right in front of us? 

I’ve been thinking about Florence again lately while reading The Mirror and the Palette (Pegasus) by the Australian art critic Jennifer Higgie. The subtitle might explain why the book attracted my attention: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resistance: Five Hundred Years of Women’s Self Portraits. I vaguely remembered when our teacher had taken us to the Vasari Corridor, the world’s largest collection of self portraits, housed in the elevated passageway between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Palazzo Pitti, constructed in the sixteenth century so that the Medici family could amble through the city without ever setting foot on its cobblestones. What little I remembered of the collection was the views of the Arno and a long, long hallway of men.

Higgie attempts to answer the question I would certainly have now, strolling the galleries again: where are the women? Spanning five hundred years, the book details the lives of bold and brilliant female artists forgotten by history, or often misattributed by it. Its focus, fascinatingly, is self-portraiture, how with their exclusion from the art world these women turned to themselves as the only subject available. When so many weren’t allowed to enroll in art schools, how did they receive training? How did marriage and motherhood affect their creativity and ambitions? How were they treated if they chose not to marry or have children? Who bought their work and where is it now? The Mirror and the Palette, though not encyclopedic, offers some dazzling insights, seeking to unearth not just the stories behind these women and their work but, as Higgie notes, of the societies that produced them.

Order The Mirror and the Palette from Point Reyes Books.

Jarrod Annis, Sales and Marketing Manager

The Dice Cup is Max Jacob’s magnificent cabinet of curiosities, filled with prose poems that gleam like bizarre and lustrous amulets, each a world unto themselves. First published in 1917, it stands easily alongside Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, and Pierre Reverdy’s Prose Poems as a defining volume of French prose poetry, while also deliberately setting itself apart from those works—ultimately bridging the gap between the symbolists and surrealists.

Jacob’s poems render language into a similarly distorted view of reality as the Cubist paintings of his artistic contemporaries Picasso (Jacob's roomate), Modigliani, and Georges Braque. There is also a tender, melancholic absurdism and humor at play which recalls the music of Erik Satie (whose “Furniture Music” debuted as an intermission score for one of Jacob’s plays). This is all to say that The Dice Cup manages to render the world into something less decipherable and more wondrous than we might otherwise imagine.

Though Jacob met an untimely end at the hands of the Gestapo in 1944, the new edition of The Dice Cup from Wakefield Press (tr. Ian Sneed) ensures one of the greatest voices in prose poetry is alive and well, and having the last laugh after all.

Order The Dice Cup from Community Bookstore.

Tricia Viveros, Publishing Assistant

“I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. […] Everything that I see, or read, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, or else—simply nothingness,” writes young Jonas Mekas, in a diary entry published in I Had Nowhere to Go (Spector Books).

Written between 1944 and 1955, I Had Nowhere to Go compiles the diaries of late filmmaker Jonas Mekas, amid the years that he and his younger brother, Adolfas, navigated life in exile. Being diaries, Mekas’s accounts are unsparing: he writes about the detriments of war and displacement with a plaintive vulnerability that is so often only afforded to our private, innermost thoughts. Drifting between forced labor camps and displaced persons camps, and later as an émigré in New York City, Mekas solaces his homesickness with books, nature, and above all, memory.

In our age of mindfulness and future-oriented manifestations, Mekas’s wistful pining for the past seems counterintuitive. But what do we amount to when our present and futures are stripped away? Looking backward becomes his means for moving forward. There is a gentle, affectionate attention given to describing the minutiae of his memories, in contrast to the bleak precarity of his surroundings.

Though predating his filmmaking, Mekas’s diaries are evocative of his now-emblematic technique: a montage of impressionistic vignettes anchored in the recesses of time and memory, the only places one can turn to when there is nowhere else to go. “But then, that is your only comfort: as long as you feel homesickness you know that you aren’t dead yet. You know that you still love something.”

Order I Had Nowhere to Go from Skylight Books.