Then We Came to the End of last year's hardcover season

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

- from "The Dolt" by Donald Barthelme

Last year's unobtainable hardcover hotties are becoming this year's softcover take-home dates. I've got Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris and The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño on my bookshelf. I think I saw The Raw Shark Texts in paperback, too, though that is not on my bookshelf, because only so much is enough, and the book stack is tall, tall, tall. Plus I think Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and some others come out in paperback in the next couple months. The stack, it grows. Though actually the Ferris book is on my couch now, next to me, where it may remain for a while, because I'm a quarter through it and faintly bored. Maybe I'm just tired, maybe I'm more irritated with the plural third person narrative than I let on to myself, maybe what I expected to happen (not wanting to read about work while not at work) is, in fact, happening. Maybe all, maybe none. I think it's not what I want right now. What do I want, anyway?

What I want right now is to be able to write essays the way William H. Gass writes essays. The man's a crack in a dam meant to contain genius. Splish, splash, splurt, sploosh. I found a copy of Tests of Time at the half-price store the other night, nice shiny new hardcover, had to grab it, along with the Delany I just read. Read the essay "I've Got a Little List" last night and over lunch today and I want to be able to do that, myself, damned if I know how. Though I suppose it begins by having better ideas, blast. (I need some ideas.) Essay ought to be required reading by all book columnists in November as they prepare their end-of-year lists, and all book column readers in December who like to bitch about lists. Lists are--can be--passionate things, see. Like that Barthelme quote up there. It's a list. It's a good list. It's true, too, at least, according to my largely stalled latest attempt at writing a novel. Damn doubt. Excuses a mile long.

But yeah, that Delany book, man, it's been a long time since I've touched a copy of Mythology by Edith Hamilton and my memory sucks but I might have to grab one and review, refresh, reprise, renew. See, Delany's book is about myth, and I know this because he says so in the middle of the book, in an extract from one of his notebooks, written during the composition of the novel, a novel which does a good job of informing me that, oh hey yes, he wrote books that aren't Dhalgren, and some of them might be pretty good things to read.

Whatever's good to read is never best picked an hour before bedtime. Novels are always a little too much, around this hour. Sleep, though, is never enough.

Desire is never dampened by its dampening, but only grows greater, and its object is not consumed by its consumption but is multiplied, and pleasure is not lessened by its repetition but enriched and revered. None of this is true in life, another reason why the page is to be preferred.

- from "I've Got a Little List" by William H. Gass