I’d heard about the haul from Jeff Severs, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. He’d heard about it from a student who’d stumbled on Markson’s copy of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. ‘my copy of white noise apparently used to belong to david markson (who i had to look up),’ the student had written.he wrote some notes in the margin: a check mark by some passages, ‘no’ by other, ‘bullshit’ or ‘ugh get to the point’ by others. i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer.
‘That’s amazing,’ Jeff had replied. ‘Did he write his name in the front or something? Did you buy it secondhand recently – as in, his family sold off his library?’
yeah he wrote his name inside the front cover and the cashiers at the strand said they have his whole collection. favorite comments: ‘oh god the pomposity, the bullshit!’, ‘oh i get it, it’s a sci-fi novel!’ and ‘big deal’.
That night, I put $262.81 on the credit card and brought three shopping bags home to my fourth-floor walk-up: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood ($7.50), Yeats’s Essays and Introductions ($15), Leslie Fiedler’s Life and Death in the American Novel ($10), Tristram Shandy ($5); 27 books in all. My new collection includes old Modern Library editions (Joyce, Kafka, Balzac, Pater, Lao-tse and Tacitus), undergraduate philosophy texts (the future novelist paid more attention to Kant and Hume than to Erasmus, Descartes and Hegel) and Joyce’s Selected Letters (with brackets around the dirty bits). Thanks to Markson, I now own Stephen Joyce’s Modern Library edition of Gogol’s Dead Souls. A gift? Did Markson borrow the book and fail return it? Or did he run across it himself on a visit to the Strand and wonder how it had ended up there?
― max, Monday, 26 July 2010 17:58 (fourteen years ago)