David Rattray

How I Became One of the Invisible (Native Agents)

This collection of stories and essays reveals the erudite as well as the adventurousside of David Rattray, whose writing lies at the conjunction of travel and wisdom, where thespiritual informs the sinful.

How I Became One of the Invisible

This book presents a unique view of the work of the great Italian violin-makers from the 17th to the 19th centuries, based on the collection of The Royal Academy of Music in London. The Academy, founded in 1822, is Britain's senior conservatory and one of the oldest institutions in the world for advanced musical training. Included here are masterpieces by Amati, Cappa, Celoniato, Ceruti, Dalla Costa, Deconet, Gagliano, Grancino, Guadagnini, Guarneri, Landolfi, Pressenda, Rota, Rugeri, Seraphin, Sorsana, Stradivari, Tecchler, and Testore. This revised edition has an updated descriptive text, features 15 extra entries, devotes at least two full-color spreads to each instrument, and is supplemented with a new dendrochronological study. Specially-commissioned photographs display each violin, viola, or cello with large, high-quality illustrations, revealing details of these instruments as never before. The Academy's collection of stringed instruments consists of around 100 violins and a similar combined number of violas and celli, the majority of which were received as gifts over the last century, beginning with the Rutson Bequest in 1906. These working instruments are maintained in fine playing condition and generally are in the hands of young musicians during their time as students or at the outset of their careers. The fine selection presented here underlines the collection's core of masterpiece Italian violins, and for the most part this book includes only those instruments in the purest state of conservation.

Important Stringed Instruments from the Collection at the Royal Academy of Music

Masterpieces of Italian Violin Making (1620-1850)

Peter Thomson

A Red-framed Print of the Summer Palace

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw oneself into the arms of God... Some of us stayed for weeks, some for months, some forever. —from How I Became One of the Invisible Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s. Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would. As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, “You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department.” Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

David Rattray

Books

Your next favorite book is out there