Demonology (30 page)

$ 150

An Unusual Association

11. Holberg, Susan Emmerich.
White Male Oppressors.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. It wasn’t long after my initial conversation with Holberg, that, at a yard sale, I stumbled
upon this copy of her second novel, inscribed to none other than
Anna Feldman!
The inscription reads in part,
One broad to another, enduring fealty, don’t let the bastards grind you down.
I was drinking an Irish coffee, about ten in the morning. This was in Glastonbury, Connecticut, I believe, and the people
having the yard sale —their belongings flapping from hastily strung laundry lines —were the Weavers. When I cornered the woman
of the house, a pudgy, outdated example of the nineteen-fifties bombshell wearing the
obligatory pelican blue eye shadow,
I demanded to know where she’d gotten this first edition of the Holberg. She remarked that there was no reason to use threatening
language. I’d used no such thing. She’d gotten the volume at the library sale in town, simply because she liked the dust jacket,
with its leering platoon of American militarists. Supposedly, Mrs. Weaver claimed, she didn’t know Holberg personally, had
no idea of the value of the book (which in fact had one of the Weavers’ orange stickers on it:
500),
and was in the process of declaring bankruptcy. I felt I needed to keep the Glastonbury residence of the Weavers under surveillance
for a
few days, from the far side of Oakdale Blvd., yet I noticed nothing out of the ordinary except for Mr. Weaver’s tendency to
sob while cutting the lawn. Around the back of his ranch house he would go, on his riding mower, his face a mask of anguish.

$275

Very, Very Unstable In the First Place

12. (Institutionalized Writers) Klingman, Finley.
Sun, Shine Down Upon Besieged Humors.
Amenia, NY: M.A.O. Press, 1987. A rare peek at the drawings and poems of one of the foremost of American
outsider artists,
Klingman committed himself in the late seventies upon becoming convinced that computers were beginning to
speak to one another,
a perception that certainly wouldn’t seem unusual these days. I met him thereafter and found him passionate, articulate,
resigned to his fate. He was also an outstanding Scrabble player, specializing in sequences of two- and three-letter words
that all fell, mercilessly, on triple-word scores. These feats were accomplished while Finley delivered lengthy tirades about
particle physics and Ger man phenomenological thinkers. This chapbook is number thirteen of a limited edition of twenty, signed
by Klingman, and thus especially rare, as he believed that signing anything would alert authorities to his political resistance
and thereby bring torture down upon his head.

$ 1,000

13. (Institutionalized Writers) Meyers, Mirabelle.
County Dreambook.
Amenia, NY: M.A.O. Press, 1987. Another in the M.A.O. series. With Meyers’s poetical attention to dismemberment, ecstatic
sexual union, forced homosexuality, religious themes, she’d have been a natural for any controversy relating to government
funding of the arts, but, astonishingly, her work never came to the attention of Helms, et al., even though she was being
housed in a state facility and even though M.A.O. received grants from N.Y.S.C.A. in 1987 and 1988. Meyers’s free-verse poems
are all the more astonishing (with their heavy plagiaristic reliance on conservative publications like the
National Review,
the
New York Post,
the
Washington Times),
when you consider that she was a college dropout and former
domestic engineer
from Corinth, NY, whose husband was the local grocer, and whose children were dyslexic. The author died while incarcerated,
penniless and neglected, and this is therefore her only work, one of a numbered twelve copies. I am forced to price it at
a threshold it deserves. You would be lucky to have known Mirabelle. Those who did miss her.

$2,500

14. (Institutionalized Writers) Poole, Samuel.
In Support of a Reliance Upon Power Tools.
Amenia, NY: M.A.O. Press, 1988. Yes, I knew him, too, during that dark interval of my own. I loved them all, my friends inside,
they were good people, and it’s no
reflection on their own dignity that they didn’t have the kind of insurance that would allow them to stay in private psychiatric
hospitals, or that their illnesses were of such sturdy architecture that they could not lead productive lives, as I have been
able to do, by finding a line of work that made harmony with who they were, with their gears and engines. One night, I saw
Sam Poole,
actually floating in the corridor of the hospital;
I awoke, in the ward, tiptoed quietly out into the hall, knowing that there was no loneliness like the loneliness of the
mentally ill, knowing that my solitude would never be corrected, no matter how many days I waited in front of the brownstone
in Back Bay where Anna Feld-man settled with her husband, the tax lawyer. Every thread of my short life had come to a frayed
end. Out into the hall I went, across the hall, to whisper at the mesh of the window, out at the county road, empty at that
hour but for a tractor, laden with bales, that labored away from me with hazard lamps flashing. I was as astonished as you
would be, to find then, Sam, in his dressing gown, unshaven,
drifting,
as if in a heated, kidney-shaped swimming pool, several feet above the cracked, heaving linoleum. In his sleep, but nonetheless
chattering like a suburban housewife. The night orderly was slumped in a chair by the nurse’s station. And thus there was
no observer but myself, none but myself to ask of Sam the questions that had afflicted me and others
in that institution, but Sam would answer no questions. That was
not
the sort of oracle he was. Instead, amid his jeremiads were the words
Son, you get on out of here now. This is no place for a kid like yourself
Since Sam was asleep his remarks were somewhat disordered, but this is how I reconstructed this particular morsel of advice.
I founded the M.A.O. Press to preserve Sam’s literary legacy, and, yes, it’s true, Sam Poole argued, while drifting lazily
in the corridor of my psychiatric hospital, that no matter the darkness of any life, we should always be grateful for the
band saw.

$2,500

A Run of Defaced Mailers

15. Mailer, Norman (Duffy, Tyrone).
Advertisements for Myself
New York: Random House, 1959. Tyrone Duffy, a graduate of Cooper Union in New York City, began mangling and defacing copies
of Norman Mailer’s work in the early eighties, and displaying them in galleries mostly associated with the East Village scene.
In interviews, Duffy has refused to acknowledge any particular feeling for Mailer
(but how could you have a feeling for Mailer,
beyond being appalled that the writer once stabbed his own wife). Duffy claims to have selected Mailer for his art —which
incorporates doodles, notations for saxophone solos, grocery lists, bank statements, diary entries, and quarrels with the
texts themselves —because the lesser
Mailer titles are readily available at used book stores. This subsequent collection of Duffy’s work (as opposed to Mailer’s),
amazingly owned by a product manager from the Glock Firearms Corporation (Frank Gilman), is an example of the aleatory quality
of all the best literature,
how it conjoins reader and writer blessedly,
how it is never complete until there is a reader who can make of the work what she or he wishes, using it to line their birdcage,
using it for ecstasy or articulation of dreams, using it to imagine their own log cabin in the empty forested regions of Western
Canada or Cincinnati skyscraper in the shape of a flamingo; all this collecting of the perfect copy of everyone’s book, you
and I know that collection is merely autobiography. Mailer now
becomes
Tyrone Duffy, and while Mailer might still haunt the Promenade on Brooklyn Heights, walking a pug and smoking a cigar, Duffy’s
Mailer crowds him out. Late at night the author senses it and trembles.

$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.