Climb ev'ry mountain

Via Conversational Reading, I'm directed to a Believer essay about a book called Codex Seraphinianus, a book by an Italian architect, artist & author named Luigi Serafini, which is apparently totally untranslatable.

Gravity's Rainbow is looking like Sesame Street in comparison. This word nerd just found a new challenge to tackle... of course, you can't find an American pressing of the damn thing anywhere for less than $500. Figures.

Update: After a bit of digging I found that you can buy a new Italian-language edition, with a new introduction by Serafini as well as new illustrations, here. The inevitable caveat: It costs 89 euros, which shakes out to about $120 American.

It stinks to high heaven when you can't get interesting works through American retailers. At least the remaining two volumes (The Prisoner and The Fugitive, Finding Time Again) of the Christopher Prendergast-supervised translations of Proust's In Search of Lost Time are available from Amazon. (Because of copyright laws they cannot be published in America until 2018.) At Amazon UK you can also get all 13 books of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage cycle -- frustratingly hard to find in America, it's a work I've been wanting to get me greasy mitts on for a while.

As Al Swearengen would say: Anyways...