February 07, 2005

Good God. Pause.

The other day I went down to visit the Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center with my new buddy Steve, an American Novelist who permanently resides in Paris, except for now he lives in Amsterdam. He stopped in Austin, and stayed with us on his way to San Francisco. I believe I am actually getting further away from the point, so without even a hint of transition I am going to leap ahead.

This fucking place -- the HRC -- is really unbelievable. I spent an hour or so reading a hand-corrected manuscript of Henry Miller's essay on Rimbaud, "When do Angels Cease to Resemble Themselves?" while Steve read "Waiting for Godot" handwritten by Beckett, in a notebook. No shit.

We held these things in our hands, and read them, as if we were reading something the other wrote. We might just as easily have read Dickens', or Don DeLillo. They're both there. In fact the Center recently acquired DeLillo's entire archive. 125 boxes. Manuscripts, letters, reviews, all manner of various ephemera that the self-important tend to collect about themselves, and then sell for LOTS of money, is now there.

I found this bit, reprinted in the local paper. It's from one of his letters to another Novelist. "The reason I use a manual typewriter concerns the sculptural quality I find in words on paper, the architecture of the letters individually and in combination, a sensation advanced for me by the mechanical nature of the process - finger striking key, hammer striking page. Electronic intervention would dull the sensuous gratification I get from this process - a gratification I try to soak my prose in."

Good god. Pause.

I say it condescendingly, like I'm immune. But I sold, for $25, my copy of "A Tale of Two Cities". It contained all my handwritten notes, cuts, and the various annotations I used for the Vortex adaptation in 1998. I know I probably should've asked for more, but I was flattered that someone even gave a damn.

Plus, the guy who bought it is really responsible, not to mention Canadian. I knew he would take care of it, and in the unlikely event that it did eventually merit an institution's interest, he would be able to find it, and get it to them quick, before they came to their senses and instead bought Kirk Lynn's copy of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces.