STEALING AND GIVING ODOR.

I am packing up my library. Yes, I am. The good books below (mostly critical theory and poetics titles) are looking for some new shelves to occupy. I’m moving to Florida this fall—early retirement!—and, alas, have decided not to take them with me. I need to downsize my library. Drop fuel. Before I cart them off to the University Bookstore or wherever to meet their remaindered ends, I thought I’d try my luck as a virtual book vendor on the grad list first. Sort of gross, I know. I’m selling the books for $5 each. They are all in Good to Very Good condition, many of them nearly new. If you want to add any of them to your library, just send me a separate e-mail and I can drop the book(s) in your campus mailbox. Again, that’s $5/book. Everything must go! Thanks, and have a great summer. Adieu Derrida, later Deleuze…

That was an e-mail I wrote about a month ago now, on May 14th, a “Critical Bargain Blow-Out” as the subject heading read. It was both a practical attempt to sell some of my books (about 40 of them) and cut my losses. And also, I suppose, a fare thee well, see you later alligators. I pressed SEND at 7:55 p.m. and by 10:30 that night all the books were claimed. I was trying to figure out which books to sell, which to take home to my parents’ house, and which to bring with me—my essential portable library—to Florida. All of the books I sold that night were critical theory and poetics books, some Agamben, some Benjamin, some Deleuze, a ton of Derrida, Lyotard…the usual critical suspects. Heavy reading and heaving lifting. Not stuff that would particularly help me become a better creative writer.

I lugged a few boxes of books back to my parents’ house, to keep in my little library there, books I wasn’t going to bring to Florida for whatever reason, but nevertheless wanted to save for my future library. I kept all of my Paul de Man books. Just couldn’t get rid of them. I was up late the other night reading the title essay of Blindness and Insight and remembered why I felt compelled to study literature in the first place:

the encounter with literature involves a mental activity which, however problematical, is at least to a point governed by this language only … A literary text is not a phenomenal event that can be granted any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as an act of the mind. It leads to no transcendental perception, intuition, or knowledge but merely solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent because it poses the problem of its intelligibility in its own terms. This area of immanence is necessarily part of all critical discourse. Criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading, and this act is itself inexhaustible. (106-107)

A bright beautiful morning w/sun shining thru the blinds. E-mail, coffee, and talking with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a profile in the Guardian. One of “the holy trinity of postwar German literature (alongside Grass and Walser) whose voice has been most audible in public,” Enzensberger is a literary beast if ever there was one; poet, polemicist, essayist, travel writer, contrarian, and omnivore. Enzenberger’s got two new books out, an experimental history of the Weimar Republic, The Silences of Hammerstein (read an excerpt here), and a collection of poems, A History of Clouds: 99 Meditations–both published by the smartly edited and lovingly designed Seagull Books. An excerpt from the article I like, Enzensberger on Enzensberger and poetry:

One of the advantages of poetry is that it is an omnivore. It can absorb anything within the human experience. Sometimes I am confused by why fellow poets limit themselves to one subject: they are astonished when you talk, say, about mathematics within a poem.

Spent a couple hrs last night and this morning with erasure and books. I was furiously erasing my notes, underlining & marginalia from books I don’t plan to take with me to Florida and plan on selling instead. Dropping fuel. Lightening the load. Downsizing my library. It’s no coincidence that most of these books are academic criticism and lit theory. These are books I bought, read, studied, and took notes on/in as a lit studies grad student @UW-Madison. Many of these books and authors remain important to me and have undeniably impacted my thinking. But they bear the stain of my time here, which I nearly let destroy—who would have thought—my love for literature and which in all my erasing I suppose I am trying to forget and leave behind. A violent and ultimately futile act, no doubt. The more I erased, the more the gum piled up in little gummy piles on my kitchen table, the more I had to sweep away with my hand, or blow with my breath off the pages of my forsaken books, the more that fell on the floor to be vacuumed later.

Then I got to one of the books I read as a first year grad student in Jacques Lezra’s terrific Critical Methods seminar, my memories of which still remain untainted, though tinged with the embarrassment of taking an Incomplete in the course (“a badge of honor,” Jacques called it) because, as I rationalized it, I was so thoroughly absorbed in writing and wanting to write something consequential on the place of hospitality in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which was the book I picked up and began erasing this morning, but with an elegiac feeling in me now, reading erasing and reading erasing the graphite evidence of my intellectual curiosity and active engagement with the book in question, talisman in which, there on page 65, I see that I have circled “infinite promise” and “just opening” in an extended period of Derrida’s in which he offers this poetic meditation on spectrality as hospitality:

Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not yet expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality.

Some things you can’t erase, or won’t—in memory of that hope.

That’s James Schuyler at his writing desk when he was living in The Chelsea Hotel around 1989. I can’t tell from the photo, taken by Chris Felver, if it’s early morning or late at night. I imagine it’s “very, very early. Well before Sunrise,” as Schuyler describes his daily routine in this interview with Raymond Faye. And after waking? “Drink coffee and put on the weather channel.”

I’ve been reading Schuyler’s diary recently, picking it up whenever I’ve time to unwind my mind. Which is mostly late at night. Simply incredible how much world gets into his writing just sitting by any old window. Window and page. World and weather. I like his hundred ways of describing fog, for instance. “Fog”–that’s the one word entry for August 25, 1968, and I think the first time fog appears in his diary. And then–July 12, 1969: “Humid and cool (cold feet in red wool socks) fog pressing down on the South Woods like a migraine headache, birds jabbering listlessly”; July 24, 1969: “The fog burned off but there are bits of mist drifting around in the distance like dust kitties…some frayed fog in the channel”; July 3, 1970: “A cold night, rain in the morning changing to warm rain and now fog moving in like blindness”; August 21, 1970: “A few sound[s] are embedded in the fog–a gull mewing, different far off fog horns–like unset polished stones laid out in cotton wool,” and so on. Schuyler’s fog is as clear and bright as sunlight flashing through the windshield of your car.

His thoughts and ideas have the effect of objects in a landscape suddenly emerging from and dissolving back into fog. A startling imperceptible nearness. Last night I came across this entry from “February 22, 1971″:

Creepily misty morning, dank, dark, disheveled and rather ominous, like a destroyer just gone into dry dock. But how beautiful it was at the first light to hear the repetitious song of a cardinal–my pleasure in it is more than just that I can recognize it: it is not unlike that which someone who doesn’t “know” music takes in the songs he does know. Simple and right from the heart to the heart–or perhaps from the throat to the ear is enough, but in that way in which hearing is itself suddenly a kind of singing.

The image of the destroyer docking in the misty morning surfaces, I surmise, from Schuyler’s own private archive of image and metaphor. After all, he joined the Navy in 1943, enrolling in sonar school at Key West, and was eventually discharged in 1944 after his homosexuality was revealed. Close listening, it’s the sound of the cardinal’s song Schuyler “takes in” and improvises on. Active and collaborative reception. If “hearing is itself suddenly a kind of singing,” might reading be a kind of singing too? And what would that sound like? It would be the sort of reading that could reveal a song embedded in fog.