by Rick Moody
$750
16. Mailer, Norman (Duffy, Tyrone). Tough Guys Don’t Dance. New York: Random House, 1983.
$500
17. Mailer, Norman (Duffy, Tyrone). Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983.1 should admit that I am a great appreciator of spines of the book, their simple elegant signs of authority. I like the multifary of jackets, I like the simple three-color jackets of an earlier time in the century, I like the type jackets of Salinger, I like the jackets of Gallimard and all French publishers. But as for books themselves, I care minimally; I didn’t even open most of the books you see on this list, it’s true. Opening them would damage the spine. But I did, however, at a certain time in my life, read the opening pages of Ancient Evenings. I have no idea how the rest of the book turned out, but the opening was among the most beautiful things I’ve ever read, and I can tell you exactly where I was when I read this opening; it was during my Cambridge experience, before the arrest, and I was working in the secondhand bookstore and going home at night to an apartment I shared with a guy called Reginald, at which point I would hit the lush hard and then climb up on the roof of the apartment building (a three-story townhouse sort of a thing), as if it were the roof of the world. It was there one night I was reading the opening of Ancient Evenings by flashlight when who should go past, down below, on the verdant Cambridge street where I lived, but Anna Feldman, like a specter from a future I would never have. I called to her, Anna! Hey, Anna! Its me, up here on the roof! I’m up here! Was it a harbinger of my decline that there was an unmistakable hastening away of her footstep at the sound of my voice? Did I imagine it? Or was I my own adversary, and she just my catalytic muse? I threw the book after her, from the roof, its leaves, its boards, like wings flapping, flight less, tumbling, foliating, to earth, in the little area beside my neighbor’s recycling cans, If I can’t have you, I believe I shouted, I’ll have nobody, I’ll be noteworthy for my absence, for recoiling! I will make a temple to your unattainability! I will worship there! I will charge exorbitant fees to the members of my congregation! I will found a mystery cult! I will become a preacher!
$900
18. Moody, Rick. Garden State: A Novel. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1992. Hard-to-find hardcover edition. Signed.
$325
19. Olafson, Olaf. Um Yceghrönte då Kzæpøqubnïòõs-ghemen der VhäYçhnachtÿshesse! Ostuni, Italia: Editore Zanare, 1921. Arguably Olafson’s towering achievement, certainly one of the most compelling of early twentieth-century philosophical works, this argument dates from the years after the author was shipped from Oxford directly to Broadmoor, where he was compelled, in his madness, to address the indeterminacy of, indeed, the total inability to prove the existence of any other, of any love, of any parent, of any pet, of any friendly acquaintance met in passing at a coffee shop, anyone. The work is based of course on a brain-in-a-vat hypothesis that came to Olafson as delusional inmate, at which time he suffered with a hysterical cessation of all sensory data; not eyes, nor ears, nor taste buds, nor olfactory receptors, nor even the surface of Olafson’s skin would receive data. He was left entirely alone without intellection. This work, then, is a repudiation of all that comes to us from Descartes’s cogito ergo sum and from the positivists who still cast a long shadow on Olafson while he was pursuing his studies in England. So profound, so uncompromising is Olafson’s nihilism that he might have prevented this work ever coming to light(of what value is publication if you don’t believe that any reader exists?), were it not for his brother Hans, who in 1920 took the author to southern Italy, to a region of olive trees, the luscious teal of the Adriatic, La Città Bianca, the narrow streets and medieval basilicas, the whitewashed alleys, dating all the way back to the occupation of the Masapians from distant Croatia (they ritually consumed their young). In these austere yet strangely celebratory streets, young Hans, desperately morose, sat with his brother Olaf (drooling, incoherent) at a table outside a local cafe and ordered for him uno cona di gelato pistacchio. Whereupon a great light, like that which brightened Theresa in her ecstasy, enlightened him and he could see and he could hear the music coming from the basilica, there were women in their shawls, there were dogs in the piazza scratching their fleas and sidling up to the turisti for food, there were carts and horses and fresh cherries and this fabulous gelato, and thus were born for Olafson the twin discourses of all his philosophy, negation and recreation.
$2,500
Translated by a Goddess
20. Pizzicato, Sergio. (Anna Feldman, trans.) Illusionism in Mannerist Painting and Since. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. By mannerist, Pizzicato referred, of course, to the period after the great paintings of the Renaissance, when what was so routine, the masterpiece, gave way instead to frescoes and canvases that while delightful seem suddenly to reflect not the perfection of human imagination, but rather its imperfections, its artifices, its dodges and feints. Pizzicato suggested this illusionism in his own sleights of hand, by addressing forgeries as though these were genuine paintings of the period, by footnoting texts that didn’t exist, by creating fraudulent citations for his bibliography. He was discredited at the università in Rome. He was then arrested, as the story is recreated, by the polizie at the Pantheon itself, while listening to a group of American teenagers singing madrigals, while afternoon sun streamed in through the opening in the ceiling, while he ate from a bag of french fries purchased just up the block at a McDonald’s franchise. The charge, of which he was entirely guilty, involved incorporating into his work uncited quotations from the early poetical works of Pope John Paul II. After serving out his incarceration, he left Italy altogether for Ireland, of all places, where his monumental interpretation began contextually to appear as what it was, the most creative of all Italian postwar works of fiction. But this is all beside the point. If Pizzicato’s contention is that the illusionism of mannerism is more realistic than the realism of the Renaissance, if artifice —magnificent, playful, salacious, decadent, sullen —is more real than the studies from cadavers of Leonardo and Michelangelo, then what of Pizzicato himself? Can we really be sure there is a Pizzicato? And if Pizzicato is himself, say, a bank teller from Phoenix, or an incredibly bored naval cadet (on six months of submarine duty), or a dealer in rare books and manuscripts, what of his translator? Her early work, as I have already pointed out, was in Pre-Columbian forgeries, and so why the sudden interest in Italian painting, in the period after Italian painting was any good? Was it a crisis in her personal life? Was she heartbroken because of the defection of a lover? Had a beautiful young bibliographer of the greatest of expectations been suddenly sundered from her by the constabulary forces of Back Bay, who mistook his constant serenading at her window, his ritualistic garbage-can rifling, his worship of her utility bills and postcards for a derangement? Was it possible that she realized that all of her life’s ambitions were just elaborate put-ons, that no author, no hack, no unpublished scrivener, was anything but an articulation of God’s devotion to his own rich creative energies, just a mutable symbol, therefore, a little placeholder? Was this the truth of Sergio Pizzicato, and thus of Anna Feldman herself (and me, too, if we’re being con sistent)? Thus Pizzicato’s inscription on an English translation must be spurious. Nevertheless, I price it as though it were real: Pizzicato, hit etnunc, 4.1.1992.
$1,500
21. Straw, Syd (Harris, Susan). The John Cage Story. New York: De Capo, 1999. First novel by the singer/songwriter and former lead vocalist for NYC’s Golden Palominos. Not a story of John Cage, the composer, in the conventional sense at all, but rather the story of Straw’s thirteen months caring for her ailing father (song-and-dance man Jack Straw) as he relinquished himself to lung cancer. What’s reliable in the fluxus of grief? Nothing, and the twittering of birds, the wind chimes on the snowed-in porch, the sound of a leak in the basement, the notations for her own wordless canticles at her father’s bedside nonetheless suggest the inadvertent beauty that was so essential to Cage’s work. Those of us who have now o
utlasted our own parents will find this a worthy investment at an attractive price. This reading copy signed, in a fascinating association, for short story writer Amy Hempel, author of the influential Reasons to Live and Tumble Home:Thanks for the week at the beach, you are my idol, love Syd.
$350
By Jerome David Salinger
22. Salinger, J. D. The Diamond Sutra: A Cookbook. Unpublished manuscript, typed on a Royal, from the late sixties or early seventies. Mimeographed, not photocopied. Contains no mention of the Glass family, but does meditate at length on vegetarianism, Taoism, baseball, and the electric period of Miles Davis. Includes some mournful anti-war poems that are quite moving. Signed by the writer to a friend, Tom, rare as such.
$30,000
23. Vidal, Gore. The Diagnosis of Collectors. Providence: Burning Deck, 1983. The title here alludes to the pathology of collection, and not only that pathology of book collectors, clearly the most disturbed of the breed, but also to hoarders of antiques, of miniatures, ceramic bears, Star Wars paraphernalia, Kiss action figures, early video games, Gidget novels, Jell-0 molds, LPs of progressive rock acts of the seventies, garments worn by Elvis Presley, and so forth. Vidal, the author among other things of a masterpiece entitled Myra Breckinridge, correctly posits collecting as a pathology of the amorous in a Capitalist economy; it is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute. I loved words when people were nowhere on the horizon and having begun to have a taste for them, for all that was summoned by words in my skull —a wealth of imaginary comforts —the world with its people seemed but a discount substitute, Anna Feldman with blond bob has goslings now, trailing after her on the beach at Nantucket, no doubt, where the sun this week is bright and plovers scatter at her feet. Little Dee Dee and Marie and Liza, each carries a stick with a length of kelp spiraling around it; each makes hearts in the sand, writes names; am I the bad guy from some videotape that Anna puts on in the living room so that she might kiss her husband, the tax lawyer, before repairing to the garage to call her lover on a cellular phone, her lover never to be possessed but in motels and hotels, and in her imagination; who has conceived of whom, Anna or her collector, and from which book did they get the idea?
$350
24. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Coded Remarks: 1919-1920. Not a manuscript so much as a series of remarks written in a simple code that the author used occasionally in all his many diaries (a=z, b=y, et cetera). Sometimes this cryptographically rendered manuscript took up matters of philosophy, sometimes not. The significance of the period described here, however, is that it concerns Wittgenstein’s lost decade, during which he mainly taught elementary school in Austria. (Later, he was driven from this his homeland by the Anschluss.) The coded remarks contained in these pages, however, most often concern themselves with Wittgenstein’s fantasies about working class men, the angelic and brutal boys, who inhabited a park nearby, creeping from copse to meadow on the prowl; or, at least, remarks on these boys, some quite lengthy, are interlarded with exacting and unyielding truths of Wittgenstein’s daily life after the First World War, Ate Dover sole. Stupefied by the continuing manifestations of sensuality in myself. That the lion should speak is by no means guaranteed, though possessed of a tongue. Commentators are at loggerheads, as commentators always are, as to whether the boys in the park actually existed for Wittgenstein in the carnal sense, whether he possessed them, knew them, saw them frequently, or whether, having occasionally observed them, he merely imagined a sinful compulsion, in his view, thus engaging in what was hardest to admit to himself, the need for a physical articulation of a love he felt strongly, If my body should sing the perfect round tones of an oratorio across a forbidden boundary of shrubs, is it not inevitable that its cry should be unmistakable? Of course, there are parallels here, and not only in that Anna Feldman was also of Jewish ancestry, somewhat assimilated, married goyim, thus diluting whether intentionally or by happenstance her bloodline. I’ve already intimated, moreover, the possibility that your bibliographer has exaggerated the tone and frequency of contacts with Anna, because, as with Wittgenstein, his experiences with the sweet mayhem of intrapsychic libidinous exchange are limited to a few meaningless couplings, after which he found himself suddenly alone. In conclusion, there is a mystical level to this collection of excerpts torn from the famous lost decade of Ludwig Wittgenstein, as in the inscription on the title page, in his elegant but somewhat florid cursive. Am I correct in how I decipher the words? Perhaps it says To any friend who would labor here for my full and complete confession I bequeath herewith the force of my affliction. When I showed it to my friend Don, the U.P.S. delivery man who comes to visit occasionally, his interpretation was as follows: To any fiend who lives here in complete decomposition of beneath hereafter the fast forward of my afterlife. We argued strenuously about it. I told Don that his high school education wasn’t up to the task of handwriting analysis. Then I signed for the packages he’d brought. The final word on interpretation I leave for myself, unless some institution is willing to pay the absurd price I suggest below. Wittgenstein’s inscription does not say To any friend, nor does it say To any fiend. Actually, as you should have guessed, it says, To Anna Feldman—who should labor here for my full and complete confession—Ibequeath the price of my affection. Of course, it’s anachronistic, this signature, unless Anna is a condition of the universe, a condition of all language, a condition of nighttime in Springfield, MA, unless Anna is merely an aspect of longing, the longing I have always felt, and therefore an inscription in all the books ever produced. How I miss her.
$ 100,000
Demonology
They came in twos and threes, dressed in the fashionable Disney costumes of the year, Lion King, Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, or in the costumes of televised superheroes, protean, shape-shifting, thus arrayed, in twos and threes, complaining it was too hot with the mask on, Hey, I’m really hot!, lugging those orange plastic buckets, bartering, haggling with one another, Gimme your Smarties, please? as their parents tarried behind, grownups following after, grownups bantering about the schools, or about movies, about local sports, about their marriages, about the difficulties of long marriages, kids sprinting up the next driveway, kids decked out as demons or superheroes or dinosaurs or as advertisements for our multinational entertainment-providers, beating back the restless souls of the dead, in search of sweets.
* * *
They came in bursts of fertility, my sister’s kids, when the bar drinking, or home-grown dope-smoking, or bed-hopping had lost its luster; they came with shrill cries and demands —little gavels, she said, instead of fists —Feed me! Change me! Pay attention to me! Now it was Halloween and the mothers in town, my sister among them, trailed after their kids, warned them away from items not fully wrapped, Just give me that, you don’t even like apples, laughing at the kids hobbling in their bulky costumes —my nephew dressed as a shark, dragging a mildewed gray tail behind him. But what kind of shark? A great white? A blue? A tiger shark? A hammerhead? A nurse shark?
She took pictures of costumed urchins, my sister, as she always took pictures, e.g., my nephew on his first birthday (six years prior), blackfaced with cake and ice cream, a dozen relatives attempting in turn to read to him —about a tugboat —from a brand-new rubberized book. Toot toot! His desperate, needy expression, in the photo, all out of phase with our excitement. The first nephew! The first grandchild! He was trying to get the cake in his mouth. Or: a later photo of my niece (his younger sister) attempting to push my nephew out of the shot —against a backdrop of autumn foliage; or a photo of my brother wearing my dad’s yellow double-knit paisley trousers (with a bit of flare in the cuffs), twenty-five years after the heyday of such stylings; or my father and stepmother on their powerboat, peaceful and happy, the riotous wake behind them; or my sister’s virtuosic photos of dogs—Mom’s irrepressible golden retriever chasing a tennis ball across an overgrown lawn, or my dad’s setter on the beach with a perspiring Löwenbr
äu leaning against his snout. Fifteen or twenty photo albums on the shelves in my sister’s living room, a whole range of leathers and faux-leathers, no particular order, and just as many more photos loose, floating around the basement, castoffs, and files of negatives in their plastic wrappers.
She drank the demon rum, and she taught me how to do it, too, when we were kids; she taught me how to drink. We stole drinks, or we got people to steal them for us; we got reprobates of age to venture into the pristine suburban liquor stores. Later, I drank bourbon. My brother drank beer. My father drank single malt scotches. My grandmother drank half-gallons and then fell ill. My grandfather drank the finest collectibles. My sisters ex-husband drank more reasonably priced facsimiles. My brother drank until a woman lured him out of my mother’s house. I drank until I was afraid to go outside. My uncle drank until the last year of his life. And I carried my sister in a blackout from a bar once —she was mumbling to herself, humming melodies, mostly unconscious. I took her arms; Peter Hunter took her legs. She slept the whole next day. On Halloween, my sister had a single gin and tonic before going out with the kids, before ambling around the condos of Kensington Court, circling from multifamily unit to multifamily unit, until my nephews shark tail was grass-stained from the freshly mown lawns of the common areas. Then she drove her children across town to her ex-husbands house, released them into his supervision, and there they walked along empty lots, beside a brook, under the stars.
* * *
When they arrived home, these monsters, disgorged from their dads Jeep, there was a fracas between girl and boy about which was superior (in the Aristotelian hierarchies), Milky Way, Whoppers, Slim Jim, Mike ’n Ikes, Sweet Tarts, or Pez —this bounty counted, weighed, and inventoried (on my nieces bed). Which was the Pez dispenser of greatest value? A Hanna-Barbera Pez dispenser? Or, say, a demonic totem pole Pez dispenser? And after this fracas, which my sister refereed wearily (Look, if he wants to save the Smarties, you cant make him trade!), they all slept, and this part is routine, my sister was tired as hell; she slept the sleep of the besieged, of the overworked, she fell precipitously into whorls of unconsciousness, of which no snapshot can be taken.
