Rick Moody - Demonology

Note:Dawn in Springfield, where I am writing these words, dawn, hue of oatmeal, Springfield, city of former industrial glory. Something, some animal, has overturned the large aluminum trash barrel I recently purchased from a national discounter, scattering two insufficiently sealed bags across the backyard, one containing a number of the sexually explicit magazines that have served as my companions in the last several years. How I wish I were making coffee. Maybe I will make coffee; in fact, maybe I will embark herewith upon description of my expensive home brewing station of a Germanic or ersatz-Germanic design; my coffeemaker has a timer and a grinder; I will confess, bibliophile, that frequently I allow the coffeemaker to serve as my alarm, my carpe diem, first a high-pitched screech, no more than a second or two, then the beans that I have scooped into the grinding portion of the technology during the prior night’s rash of scotches, these beans, in a clockwise motion not unlike the movement of planets around the sun, not unlike the sun’s motion around the galaxy, not unlike the galaxies as they helix around the circular nothingness of creation, these beans fall upon knives, roasted and seasoned beans slipping down through the grinding stage of the Germanic home brewing station, and then into the filtering area, where a reusable Mylar filter with thousands of tiny filaments will begin trapping and collecting this elixir of Araby to allow it to achieve maximum viscosity; about this time, where I am lying on a full-size box spring that induces unbearable lumbar pain, I begin to hear the blubbering of the local fluori-nated tap water in the stem section of my German home brewing station. The water is beginning to achieve its electrically induced convection current, in the stem section, the water is beginning to reach its boiling, I can hear it, as the grinding noise has penetrated the scrim of my disappointment and I have reluctantly opened my eyes and concluded, again, that I need to launder the sheets, which duty, by nightfall, I will have abjured; never mind all that, I can hear the buoyant chemistries of the German home brewing station, and now I can smell the beverage, my addiction, my blessing, my nightingale, my helpmeet; it is drifting from the kitchen, across the dining room, across the thick wall-to-wall in the dining room with the Beaujolais stains and the woolen gobs hacked up by my incontinent Abyssinian, down the little corridor, the smell of my coffee, the certain basis for any claim of the Divine, coffee, all the beans, all the varieties, I have lingered in the boutiques of shopping malls devoted to its worship, Eritrean beans flavored with betel juice, perhaps a bit of almond or absinthe, perhaps some Percocet or Vicodin to further amplify my caffeinated comforts, a frame or two of my lost childhood snuck into this taste, ice cream cones past, double scoops, my lost parents and the liqueured desserts, I admit it, even house blends can seduce me, even house blends suggest the high art of roasting and flavoring, even house blends suggest a sunrise when the non-union farm laborer is hunched in the mottled shade of the glorious shrub picking green fruits, a dream fit for a victorious conqueror, even the production of these notes (on books I’m featuring this quarter) were composed in a Javanese ecstasy. I have searched among the possessions of dead people, pinchpennies, those with obsessive-compulsive disorder, those who never read, I have searched in second-hand stores in towns like Rockville and Cincinnati, and I did it all for coffee, oh coffee, of thee I sing, profits, lives, loves, passions, all this for thou, oh muse, oh goddess, oh bean, oh coffee.

All books fine in original dust jackets, unless otherwise noted.

1. (Anthology). Kiss My Ass, Motherfucker, Gonna Blow Up Your Damn House. Seattle: Squatters Collective, 1979. Essays on direct action, including one by Tony Puryear, later author of an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Eraser, also including the first ever appearance of National Book Award Winner Eileen Brennan (Several Generations of Forlorn Women) under her pseudonym, Elsie Tree. We had the book in our co-op back in Ann Arbor back in the late seventies. At the time, my roommate, who eventually directed aspirin commercials, insisted that influenza was organized and disseminated by the Central Intelligence Agency in an effort to neutralize the American counterculture.

$ 15

2. (Anthology). Prose by Don. New York: Unfounded Allegations, 1978. Hardcover edition of this sampling of literature by authors named Don, including Don DeLillo, Donald Antrim, Donald Barthelme, Donald Westlake, Dawn Powell, Donny Osmond, Don Knotts, Donald Sutherland, Don Giovanni, Don Vito Corleone, and others, also including excerpts from the autobiography of a Nutley, New Jersey, electrician, Don Vyclitl, of Ukrainian origin. Slight foxing to jacket, otherwise fine. Later titles in the series included the two-in-one volume Works by Zephediah backed with A Couple of Unpublished Scraps by Hamilton.

$35

3.(Anthology). Words, Blossoms, Cars. Austin, TX: Cooked Books, 1968. All contributions are unsigned, although, according to scholars like Tommy McCandless at Western Kentucky Technical Institute, they include Frederick Barthelme, a seventeen-year-old Mary Robison, Rikki Ducornet, Ann Lauterbach, and others, as well as excerpts from manuals on how to disassemble and reassemble the first Ford Mustang, several arguments against popular modifications of the Monopoly board, and some poems in the style of Mallarmé. This copy signed by Barthelme with appended disclaimer, Idon’t know what the hell you’re talking about, I had nothing to do with this book, I like your suede shoes though. KB.

$45

4. Blake, Kenneth M. Elocution. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1986. First American edition of this novel concerning a group of Oxbridge scholars who cook and eat their landlady and who later assume command of British forces during the Falklands War. Not long after, the author himself was convicted of cooking and eating his landlady. This copy also signed, rare as such: Bon Apetit! K.M.B., 7.7.87.

$50

5. Carrington, Leonora. Chilblains. Paris: Editions Aveugle, 1921. Little known roman à clef by the great surrealist. A library copy, actually stolen from the Widener, at Harvard, by yours truly. The story goes thus. I was desperately in love with an art history student, Anna Feldman, she of the blond bob, she of the palindromic name, she of the ballerina’s frame, she of the turnout, of the veils and scarves, of the BMW 2002; having espied her at a fast food joint in town (I was working at a used bookstore), I had taken the opportunity to follow her on a couple of occasions, always at a discreet distance, never in a way that would have intruded. I’d been reading Carrington’s books in the confines of the Rare Book Room at the Widener: For as the reader willrecognize, my famishment is immense. I was fascinated with the way the heroine in Carrington’s novel could change herself at will into the South American mammal called the nutria. I’d felt that Anna Feldman would especially appreciate the image and the book. Getting it past the sequence of alarms in the Widener was a chore, I can tell you, even though security was comparatively lax in those years. When I finally attempted to present Carrington’s volume to Anna, after months of conspiring, the future art historian was aloof, refusing the token of my affections outright. This copy, therefore, though it is in the original edition, has some lonely, dispirited marginal commentary in my own hand, of a mildly misogynistic cast (from which illness I later recovered, I assure you). I offer it at bargain price.