Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Thursday, April 17, 2003 The Pitch: It's like Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade meets Jingle All The Way! So, anyway, I had a momentous event today--I came across the last two Don Delillo novels I need to complete my collection. Well, more or less: I haven't bothered with The Body Artist or Cosmopolis which should be readily available for some time. But, man, the early stuff! I hadn't even seen a copy of Americana before today. Likewise, The Names. And there they both were at Dog-Eared Books, used (which here in San Francisco, generally means you're paying close to cover price. The Names was issued at $7.95. This dog-eared battered paperback is now, fourteen years after it was issued, $7.00. Woot!). All I had to do was buy them both and I'd be set. Game, set and match. No need to walk into bookstores anymore.The Delillo obsession had been nice, precisely because I had so few copies of his work, and he had written so much. And, apart from the ubiquitous Underworld, there was no guarantee walking into a bookstore they'd have anything else. So I was more than happy to pay nine dollars for a used copy of the End Zone re-release five months ago (and somehow both chagrined and ecstatic to pay three dollars for an earlier edition in Berkeley four months later). It was a nice little hunt, and kept me focussed when I went into a bookstore which is important--if I don't have some idea of what I want when I walk into a bookstore, I either overspend or become dithering and morose, unable to leave and yet somehow nauseated by the over-stimulation of so many bookstores. (Indeed, when leaving the third "bookstore"--I have to use the term in quotes because it was one of those shopfronts rented out with tables of remaindered books sorted and heavily discounted on foldout tables (and, indeed, there were two Delillo books there--the large print edition of "The Body Thief" and a small, almost devotionary, hardcover of Pafko at the Wall)--I realized as I got in my car that writing a book seemed to me, like hope, a tacit admission of despair). And so today I only bought The Names, and left Americana for another time--something sort of satisfying in that, the idea that Delillo's first novel will be the last one I buy. And besides, I did end up spending too much at Dog Eared Books. They had a remaindered copy of Sarah by JT Leroy, and also this book, which I really shouldn't have bought new but I did, because it's research. No, really. Although like so many Taschen books, it seems to consciously resist being genuinely useful and stubbornly insist on being a beautiful fetish object only. It and The Names must have felt strange sharing the bag. posted by Jeff Lester | 7:41 PM | |
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