It’s a rare warm rainy day in California and I decided to read. The waves from hyped up Hilary actually delivered for a bit if you made it to one of the beaches Gavin Newsome didn’t close and I’m feeling optimistic about the end of August, despite my rant yesterday.

Now I’m as guilty as the next young male English major for glorifying, romanticizing and emulating the Beats for most of my young life — and they did get me fired up on what reading and writing could be beyond the high school classics — but since then, they kind of look like over-drugged hippies — save for a few I will always have a special place for. As I strayed away from the Beats, I discovered a sub-subculture of writers who existed in their shadow and are infinitely more interesting to me now. I told you a bit about Don Carpenter a few weeks ago, he was one of them. Today I want to introduce you to David Rattray and the only collection of his prose that exists: How I Became One of the Invisible.

David Rattray was a bit of a genius, fluent in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek and he applied his smarts to everything from translating books to poetry to mysticism. He studied at Dartmouth, Harvard, the Sorbonne but remained an outsider to academia and the establishment all of his life. This collection of his prose wasn’t published until 1992.

How I Became One of the Invisible is mostly journals and essays, but inside each one is a world if discovery: Rattray finds a way to introduce you to artists, writers and outsiders like Rene Crevel (an especially awesome weirdo), Ezra Pound (who he spent a weekend at St. Elizabeths Hospital with) and Antonin Artaud (who he translated to English).

“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.”—David Rattray

This collection of essays was put together just before his death at age 57 and is the only volume of Rattray's prose. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” read like a more lucid Kerouac and tell the tales of Rattray’s travels in Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk. These are the stories that hooked me and then I couldn’t put the rest of the book down.

This is edition has a great afterword by the badass writer Rachel Kushner, who’s family had a relationship with Rattray and puts together a nice connection to the late writer that makes you feel like you’re on the inside. Next time you’re in the book store and your mind goes blank, think David Rattray and see what you find. Might not be much, but hopefully, if it’s a good book store, they’ll have the new Semiotexte edition of How I Became One of the Invisible. —Travis Ferré