Two bookish things

I. The comments on this very blog have spawned—another blog! Yes, it's The World's Least Popular Book Club, devoted to the reading, at a deliberately slow pace, of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. My fellow adventurers include some of my favorite littérateurs...

II. Via Twitter, I arrived at the site of Juliette Tang, photographer of books—just great! Her style would be so well suited to depicting/mirroring Young's lush, lyrical prose...except that MMMD, in all the editions we know of (Scribner's hardcover, two-volume slipcased paper, Dalkey reprint), has a fairly hideous cover...

(The photos on the left are from Juliette Tang's site.)

Eighteen minutes

Dan Visel commented on my recent post about Marguerite Young and her mammoth, many-years-in-the-making novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965). He sent me a link to her 1977 Paris Review interview, which (he writes) "is full of things like this":

I met Norman Mailer at a cocktail party after Miss MacIntosh was published. I had never seen him before. He came up to me and said, “Were there any fighters in your family?” I answered, “Why yes. My half-brother was a champion in the ring.” “I knew it,” he said, “I knew you had a fighter in the family.” “Well, what made you think that?” I asked. He said, “Because it took a lot of strength hanging out in the sawdust ring like that, punching away for eighteen years the way you did.” Then he wrote to my publisher to say I was a “gentle Hercules in highheels.” My publisher's publicity department gave that letter to a cartoonist at the Herald Tribune who did it up and showed it to me—a cartoon of me punching it out with Mailer with that caption, “a gentle Hercules in highheels.” So Mailer was congratulating me for the stamina of spending so many years on a novel. I suppose it took stamina in a way, but it takes stamina to write anything for eighteen minutes.

Question: Have any of you read this book? Was it great?

The entire field of outdoor sports

"Her dress of sleazy silk was bright burned orange painted with black sail-boats sailing over purple trees and red football players playing over steeples and white skiers skiing over sail-boats cascading to the hem and locked acrobats, the entire field of outdoor sports, it seemed, being on her body, for her scarf was painted with spidery tennis players and tennis nets and ice-skaters skating on silver ponds and red polo riders riding red horses, and there were little footballs hanging from her charm bracelets, tennis rackets and ice-skates and golf clubs and numerous other trophies, some of field and stream, satin fishes running around the hem of her chiffon petticoat edged with yellow lace, butterflies embroidered upon the knees of her thin silk stocking, and her skirts came up high above her knees, higher when she moved, showing her yellow satin garters and pairs of stuffed red valentine hearts dangling from ribbons and faces which were painted powder puffs, and the coat seemed shrunken or a size too small like something she might have worn in a remote youth." — from p. 2 of Marguerite Young's 1198-page Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965)