Which is relevant here.

Because last week I dreamed in detail about a literary work that doesn’t exist, a lost novel by an obscure writer of fin-de-siècle Vienna, part ghost story, part a story about sexual jealousy and lust, about two couples whose members are all having depraved sex with one another “secretly,” though everybody knows everything that’s going on, of course. That’s the first half. In the second half, one of the men dies — he’s named Otto — and he doesn’t realize this until he figures out that nobody is taking any notice of him — except one of the women, who continues to maintain an awareness of his existence, or at least appears to, though she can’t speak. The novel was named Teslie, after this character. Later on in the dream it became clear that it had been made into a movie in the 70s — it could have been a great film in the right hands, but it was made by second-rate people who downplayed the psychological drama and played up the depraved sex, so that it ended up being one of those soft-core porn movies, full of soft focus and naked bodies, that were billed as art films in those days.

Obviously (to me) my unconscious — to use a term introduced by Freud, a contemporary of my fictional forgotten author — was partly on Elective Affinities, partly on Arthur Schnitzler, partly on Freud (I’d just read the Harper’s essay about positive psychology from this month), and partly on Easy Rider and Red Desert, because actually Jack Nicholson and Monica Vitti came up in the dream as actors who could have redeemed the film had they chosen. But they turned down the project.

When I woke up I thought this dream was so amazing, I wrote everything down that I could remember (there was much, much more), and I thought about writing a critical essay about Teslie, à la Borges, and posting it here today as a kind of joke about the shared birthday. But I also realized that this could be the seed of a much more ambitious piece, maybe even a novel (there, I said it), so I think I’m going to save it for that. It has a lot of potential, as the whole gestalt combines so many interests of mine: depraved sex (obviously), Freud’s Vienna, ghost stories where the dead narrates the action, the messy, ambitious, libidinous, overreaching, pretentious sprawl of American cinema of the 70s, and of course, critical works on books that don’t exist.

Yesterday morning, nearly a week after having this dream, I shelved a copy of Freud’s Vienna by Bruno Bettelheim. Synchronicity? (To use another term introduced by a Viennese psychologist.) Maybe I’ll buy it when I go back to work tomorrow.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot. Most of it by hand, on sheets of paper. And I’ve been throwing a lot of it away, all the inane garbage I spout when I’m looking for something interesting to say. Today I’ve been working on this short story I mentioned — I finally figured out how I want to describe the approach I’m taking. I’m attempting to write a piece that presents itself as an essay written by the main character. Though a work of fiction, it will read like a memoir, and will be allowed all the liberties of the essay, to offer quotes, to lay out information, to pursue lines of thought, to ignore scene and story and character when convenient, and take it back up again when convenient. None of this is new or revolutionary, of course, and it’s all been done before. But I’m in the process of figuring out how I can do it with this story, I think.

It couldn’t be more beautiful in San Francisco — the evidence of the last three years shows that it’s always warm here on August 24th — and I need to leave the house now, I can delay no longer, various projects having either been left incomplete or delegated. Goodbye Internet, I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.

So I cleaned the office and cleared my desk, and dealt with my email and my bills. It feels so liberating to have an empty inbox. No demands you haven’t met, no debts or obligations owed to anyone in the world. I listened to Adrian Sherwood and then Ljova. I went online and bought six new T-shirts and six desperately-needed pairs of socks, and an army-brown cotton hoodie. I made rice and beans and ate some of the tamales we made the other day, drank two glasses of wine and two glasses of water and two cups of coffee (not in that order) and caught up on back issues of the New Yorker. The trivial things you do to prepare yourself for the week and the month ahead that aren’t actually trivial at all.

And I sat down at my desk to do some writing, yesterday’s blog post. My desk is a pine dressing table that belonged to Torrey’s grandmother, Maxine. I never met her but I think about her all the time because of this desk. It has a drawer to the left, and next to it, in front of me, there’s a deep compartment with an open front. There’s no evidence there was ever a drawer to put there. Inside the compartment I store a ream of blank writing paper and my current notebook. It’s where I do almost everything when I spend the day at home. The corner is conducive to writing and reading and watching movies, and conducive to writing about reading and watching movies. Torrey calls it Command Central because of my dual-monitor setup.

And now I’m thinking about this writing project I’m back to working on. It’s a story superficially about a long-past breakup, the scene revisited by the guy in present time. I was going to get feedback on it from two different friends, but before I could do so they started going through their own messy breakups and I didn’t want to impose on them. August is breakup season in San Francisco, as everyone knows, so I really should have known better. But anyway that’s just the surface movement. What it’s really about is the work of uncovering the past — or not so much recovering memories as going back to the scene of an event to create a mental version of the past that seems richer, more true somehow, though it’s probably just as false to the past, in its way, as your original impressions. We all do this whenever we visit a place we lived for a few months, or a year. It looks different but it reminds you of things you’d also forgotten, and you create a different narrative on the spot.

Paul Collins writes about how Richard Booth scorns the people who come into Hay, buy up local properties and renovate them:

A visitor like me sees nothing but quaintness in Hay, and a certain stark beauty in ruins; but a longtime resident sees … well, ruin. And yet to harangue against their renovation seems hopeless too. Decay might be the best growth industry left in Wales. The damaged past, artfully reused, is all most of us ever have to work with anyway.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at in this story, how we artfully reuse the damaged past — not just writers, but everybody. And I’m not sure I’m getting there, quite. But the only thing I can do is my best.

the great thing about Booth’s is that it is full of stuff that won’t sell in a thousand years. You need to keep your ratio of the utterly obscure and the instantly familiar in careful balance: have too much of one or the other, and bankruptcy or insipidness is sure to follow. You need some odd “worthless” books because, like bending back lines to a vanishing point in a painting, the vanishing recognizability of a few titles in your stock gives the whole selection an appearance of depth. And there really is no telling what people might actually want. [...] Still, some titles truly are worthless, cannot even be given away. Among the many banes to a secondhand dealer’s existence, four unloved genres reign supreme: textbooks, theology, celebrity autobiography, and military history.

That list made me laugh; even the Friends of the Library won’t take donations of textbooks, and there are other genres that I imagine would sell as slowly as the above, like outdated computer manuals. But in all it seems like a pretty complete list. It makes me very glad that where I work, we evaluate every book offered us, so these genres aren’t the problem they seem to become when you purchase books by the ton. Our sale was basically made up of great books that we just hadn’t found a new owner for yet — I picked up a couple for myself, one of which was Vermeer in Bosnia (hardcover), and there were many, many more I would have bought were I not practicing restraint.

But when I read “military history,” I did think of one amusing book I’d seen inside the store. I don’t remember the title, but its cover proclaims that the study “puts sieges back where they belong: at the center of English history.” Every time I see it I smile, not just because of what that blurb posits — an army of scholars laboring under the misguided belief that sieges are of tangential significance in English history, and finally! here’s a book to set them straight — but also because, since the Normans laid siege to England, and they were French, I always think of the French siège, which means chair, and I think, yes, the chair indisputably belongs at the center of English history, who could ever have thought otherwise? On the other hand, the French chair means flesh. Make of that what you will.

As Collins observes, though — who knows? One day somebody might see that book and buy it, thinking: “You know, they’re so right, sieges just aren’t given their due!” Or: “Hm! Intriguing theory; I’d always found sieges to be of tangential significance!” And they might buy it to read that evening. To be honest, I was tempted myself, the first time I picked it up. But I knew I wouldn’t read it.

I finished reading Sixpence House the other day, and I have some more quotes I want to share here, but now’s not the time; I have some other writing I want to do. Last night I got around to watching the new documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is going to open theatrically in San Francisco in a couple weeks. A brief review will appear on the Rumpus on September 2nd and I’ll link to it then, but for now I’ll just say: it’s on the rough side and has some other minor flaws, but it’s really worthwhile. If you don’t know anything about Basquiat, it’s a great introduction; and if you have more knowledge, you’ll learn of details you didn’t know before. Plus, I felt, it gives just enough screen time to just the right number of works — a lot of documentaries about artists really fail at this, either presenting you with too much too fast, or with too few works at exaggerated length.

The history of American film criticism has been covered before, in monographs limited to particular critics or time periods, but Jerry Roberts is the first to attempt a comprehensive single-volume history of the field. The result is a significant and useful book that fully lives up to its billing as “complete.”

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There is some basic human need to read through other people’s journals; otherwise, why would they leave them in unlocked desks? Sitting brazenly in the bottom of a drawer, barely hidden beneath a ream of paper, a stapler, and a Trapper Keeper? That, at least, was my reasoning as a teenager. But now, as an adult, it is unseemly to go rooting about in people’s desks, under their mattresses, and on their upper closet shelves — I must settle for published journals. I’m sorting through the rest of the fiction and essay section today at Booth’s, and a number of the misfiled books are journals by British writers. One in particular catches my eye: The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by W.P. Barbellion. How can you not open a book with that title? For I once came across a book in a library titled Recollections of a Happy Life; it was about a century old, and it had never been checked out. You may wish to infer something from this.

Indeed you may. It’s interesting that Collins happened to come across that particular journal, the one from the Disappointed Man; I came across it too last year, online (follow the links on this page to read it for free), and it’s even possible that Collins himself led me to it via his blog, though I no longer remember the details. Barbellion was a talented naturalist, and a prodigy, who died at the age of thirty from MS (which lately claimed Tony Judt and still hasn’t claimed Stephen Hawking). I read and skimmed much of it one sleepless night last fall and thought about linking to it on the Rumpus, before finally concluding that it was too depressing to be a general item on the blog.

But the reading wasn’t depressing for me personally. Barbellion’s notes to posterity (for he did, obviously, keep a journal with future readers in mind) was a useful corrective to the feelings I was having at the time, of being out of step with where I “should” be in life. I felt as though I’d gotten a late start with my writing, that though I was 32, all my peers were 25, and I was regretting having missed out on the previous seven years in San Francisco. Barbellion’s frustration at being kept from his genuine passions by illness, followed by his early death, which arrived before he could achieve anything of consequence — well, that temporarily stopped me from indulging in that nonsense about having lost time. For a while I felt lucky to be alive at all.

For Barbellion had attempted to enlist in the army when World War One broke out, and his physician had sent him with a letter to present to the enlisting officer. The officer rejected him after a glance, and on the train back Barbellion opened the letter to see what it said. To his shock, he read the diagnosis that his doctor had kept from him, and he learned that he had five years to live. This he learned at the age of twenty-five. From that moment on his journals acquired an intensity that is hard to describe, except by saying that at times, he seems to himself to be the only person in the entire world who is paying attention to the wonder of existence. Take for example this entry of February 7, 1917, two years before his death, to which he gives a title:

Chinese Lanterns

The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another moon — the full moon itself — yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.

In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little pony picked out her way so carefully in little strides — pat-pat-pat — wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature’s merits. It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to ‘carry on’ in a world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be then?

So I flipped to the pages in Mallon’s book that contend with the Disappointed Man. Initially he seems somewhat dismissive of Barbellion, because often enough, as Mallon observes, “there is no room in [his] world for anyone but himself.” Mallon goes on to ask: “what are his daytime work as a naturalist and his nighttime recumbency as an invalid compared to the huge energies forever being stanched inside him?” But Mallon ultimately concludes as follows:

He didn’t want the world his way; he wanted the world to have him his. So he wrote his ludicrously moving journals, never unaware of their crazy bravura. Few people read them anymore, but that cannot undo his improbable accomplishment. In a genre to which it is impossible to ascribe formulas and standards, he forces one to render a judgment — namely, that his is the greatest diary a man has written.

Some praise, that!

Last night I watched Red Desert, a sub-par effort by Antonioni, whose main attraction was the prospect of staring at Monica Vitti’s face for two hours. But more on that another day, as this entry is already too long.

The Times has been pretty dull so far and I regret having bought it, the way you regret buying a disappointing sandwich. (Should have gone for the tunafish.) But Sixpence House, by Paul Collins, cost half as much as the newspaper did, and it has given me ten times the pleasure. It’s about the time when Collins was living in Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border, a town of 1500 people and 40 bookstores, the modern-day center of the antiquarian book trade. He eventually started working at one of the biggest bookstores in town, the Castle (which occupies a castle, duh), and the book is turning into the story of his adventure there.

Somewhere along the way today I lost the bookmark I’ve been using and, out of the house without any paper on me, I was obliged to use my comb to keep my place. I was reading in Four Barrel, regularly distracted by a woman sitting behind Torrey; she reminded me of a girl I had an intense crush on in junior high. I’m thinking that the name Adrienne would suit this woman too, whatever her actual name is. I have a hard time keeping my eyes off her — it’s strange what power these old emotional intensities can have over us, even almost twenty years after the event in question. Eventually I focus again on my book: Collins overhears two booksellers complaining about the Internet, that “nobody makes money on it” and that you can’t see the book before buying it, and condition is everything in antiquarian books, so what’s the use?

I am tempted to interrupt, to correct them, and then I decide: no, let it rest. I buy antiquarian books online all the time; for a scholar who depends on old books, it is a wondrous tool. And people do make money from it. But when you search online, you generally already know what it is that you are looking for. To look for a specific book in Hay is a hopeless task; you can only find the books that are looking for you, the ones you didn’t even know to ask for in the first place. You come to Hay so that you can pick up a magazine you’ve never even heard of and read about Leibnitz’s talking hound.

As it happens, Sixpence House itself was a book that found me. I was putting a bunch of books on sale out front, and it was in the stack, and having just blogged about something Collins has been up to lately, I decided it was meant to be, and I held it back for myself, and I’ve set aside all other reading in order to enjoy it exclusively since then. But then again, a lot of books that relate to books and bookselling have found me recently, before I was even consciously looking for a job. My current reading list has bloated to the point where I’m juggling six books, soon to be seven or eight, so I think the only sensible plan is to read them all, one at a time, and share extracts here as I go.

Today we went to IKEA and solved several problems with an investment of 2 hours and $150, and then ate such a big lunch, we’re having strawberry shortcake and champagne for dinner. Viva la vida! This is exactly what it means to me to be leading “a cheerful aimless life.”

Rumpus: Since you bring up the war in the east, which is obviously a big part of the book, could you describe the Karen and their situation a little bit?

McClelland: Basically you’ve got this ethnic group who were the darlings of the British Empire when the British colonized Burma. And the Karen also fought on the side of the Allies during World War II, and then were promised autonomy as a reward for that, basically their own Burmese state. But they didn’t get it, and the British and the Americans just sort of bailed on them. And so, since independence in 1948, some members of this group, the Karen, have been fighting in this armed insurgency against the government. Over time, as is usually the case, the government has been winning in a major, major way. So now, their numbers are dwindling, their resources are dwindling, they don’t have as many weapons, they don’t have as many guys, they don’t have much money. So now, you just have just a few thousand scrappy soldiers who refuse to give up the fight in the jungle, versus 350,000 Burmese Army soldiers of the oldest military dictatorship in the world. And so as payback for this fight that’s been going on for such a long time, the army has started trying to wipe out civilians from this group, in addition to the insurgents themselves. So now, nobody is safe. Its not a matter of just the soldiers fighting, it’s a war on anybody of that minority who is unfortunate enough to live in that area.

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