My East-Coast Bookshelf
This piece was written following the form of David Markson’s brilliant novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I cannot recommend that novel enough–you don’t want it to work it’s way into the canon in twenty years and not have read it.
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The fact is, I did not buy all the books I own.
Well, I should say, I have made some particularly good book purchases, but it just so happens that I also own a lot of books by chance.
For example, just the other day as I was up to my elbows bagging the soggy kitchen trash, my heathen roommate threw Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) by Herman Hesse across the room. I caught it with my gut. I will read it as soon as my teacher stops dictating my weekly reading.
P. Lal had a correspondence with Hesse, if I remember right. Had some influence over Siddhartha.
No, actually upon reflection, it was only P. Lal’s wife’s father. Shrimati Lal was her name, of course, but I cannot remember her maiden name, which would be her father’s name.
P. Lal claims that his wife dated Robert Pirsig is college in Michigan. She denies this.
I do not own P. Lal’s book by chance. One does not own a book by P. Lal by chance. I can hardly claim to have bought it, although I did. I do own it; many of them, in fact.
That is to say, I paid a small price for these books of P. Lal, but they were really brought into my life by good fortune.
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories by Tim Burton came into my life by chance. When I was moving out of an attic apartment in Providence, it lay unclaimed. It is a book with very few words, and with illustrations that look just like A Nightmare Before Christmas. It has a very high production value, for a book, which is why it doesn’t really count, as a book. One would think, it having so few words, I would at least have bothered to read them, but I have not.
I own the Dover Thrift Edition of A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen because it has been assigned to me three times, and so carry a faint dislike for it. I must have bought it, but not the first time it was assigned in college, having bought a copy in Colorado at some point. Such was the nature of my education.
There are three attractively cheap collections of various plays of Bertolt Brecht, because once I found him, I could not be satiated. If I reread them, I will be blissfully happy to be doing so.
A lonely planet guide to Iceland, because at some point my fantasies over-brimmed on amazon.com. I don’t know when, though, because I can’t find the year of publication anywhere on this edition. I tried to sell it, the bookstore wouldn’t take such a thing.
I have just returned from defecation in the bathroom to which I have relegated Pegasus Descending: The Book of Bad Verse by Keith Waldrop. This book I have also tried to sell without having read it. I read a lot of bad poetry in my life—especially during periods when I was a teacher. Now, to celebrate good bowel movements, I read in it randomly, and learn that many great writers wrote at least some terrible verse. But they can be excused. Hopefully this response also can be excused.
The surfaces of books—I mean the covers—are paramount. I want to make a good show of myself, even if only to myself. I think that Miss Lonelyhearts has the best cover, which still doesn’t explain why I have two copies of it.
I am waiting to reread A Lover’s Discourse by Barthes until I am again a lover.
Books owned by my father have a different aura entirely; I miss them since I mailed the bulk of them back to our shared library. The New American Poetry was abused by me way beyond repair, so all that I have left is a second anthology in a similar vein, a book about the poetics of The New American Poetry. And, of course, the book by himself, Minding American Education by Martin Bickman, which could have saved America if more people had bought it in time.
But again I must be showing off.
And, of course, I have been avoiding mention of the first edition of Gravity’s Rainbow, which has against our will turned into something of a holy text, being one the only copy in existence that was read through so many times with so much adoration by both of us. Of all books, that one particularly should not be treated with reverence. However, I remember seeing it on my father’s desk early in life, and knowing that I was waiting to read it. Now it is held together with packing tape and a spiderman band-aid.