CoL49, Library copy, 2ed ed.: $40 @ Moe's Po-Mo Outpost

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Hi, I'm Moe Syzlak and this is our annual fire insurance sale ! ! !

http://tinyurl.com/5jd737

Had a lovely little trip over to Sather Gate and environs, 
me lugging up a substantial portion of saleable Lps and 
Cds over to Amoeba in exchange for music, books & cold
hard. This might sound like waxing bombastic, but the light 
up there really is different, the air really is of another order. 
The People's Republic of "Sparechange?" was overcast 
and cool.

Ran into an old buddy and fellow Pynchon buff who's been 
working at University Press Books as long as I've known 
the store. Jay just got his P.H.D., the subject was Foucault.

Understand that our relation consists of an open ended 
Firesign Theatre channel, two out of at least four or five 
crazy guys, Jay being particularly adept at folding in still
more obscure philosophical references along with Duke
of Madness Motors, Beat the Reaper and Pappy Hod's 
Green Aura. 

I ask Jay if he's got a copy of the "Italian Wedding Fake 
Book by Deleuze & Guattari", he starts looking it up in the
store database, turns out this man hasn't gone past Gravity's 
Rainbow. Then Jay picks up this special order of some black 
covered University Press [SUNY] Po-Mo tome, entitled: 
"Masocriticism" [the seemingly natural marriage of criticism and 
masochism] by Paul Mann, and sez "This is what you really need!" 
turning to:

     Stupid Undergrounds, pages 168 &169

     Day Job 

     Best of all, furthest along its trajectory, is "zerowork," 
     the refusal to work, the refusal to bid for equal alienation, 
     disappearing from the tax rolls, from the very category of 
     the unemployed. But how then to survive? By hook and 
     crook, and the stupid underground is rife with pipedreams 
     and proven scams. Loompanics Press offers the libertarian 
     illusion, at least, that one can get by in the American economy
     without ever having to hold a job, and they will send you 
     information on how to (theft, phony credit, welfare scams, 
     scrounging freebies, various black market economies). Or 
     maybe you will try dealing drugs (too many down sides). Or 
     being in a band, the archetypal boy-dream of play as work 
     (as it turns out, too many down sides as well: venal managers, 
     if you can even get one, larcenous promoters, an overpopulated 
     market, weird compromises with industry and stupid audiences, 
     and, after all, too much work). Not working is not easy, no 
     matter how hard you work at it. Hence, as has always been the 
     case for the underground, the phenomenon of the day job, an 
     epitome of stupid. 

This is some funny Po-Mo-Lit theory book [and there's a copy of 
Frederick Crews' "Postmodern Pooh staring  me down right now]. 
Easily the funniest essay I've encountered since David Foster 
Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." In any case, 
Jay was waving a special order under my nose, so of course the book 
wasn't on the shelves. I ran [really more of a Groucho Marx styled 
maniacal lope/lurch] down Telegraph back to Moe's, where a used 
copy [$10] of Masocritism was waiting for me, then zipped back to 
UPB. Jay, in Oz-ian form, congratulated me for my resourcefulness.  
J.M.Coetzee's "The Master of Petersburg" was taking up space on 
UPB's shelves in a used [$8] copy. After talking up the Panic Movement,
Theater of Cruelty, Fernando Arrabal's "Automobile Graveyard" and
Giordano Bruno, I got back to Moe's, where Allen talked me into "The 
New Science of Giambattista Vico", Norman O. Brown's "Love's Body" 
and "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" by Francis A. Yates.

I'll stick around and try to do my best in the upcoming Dostoevsky 
sing along but in the meantime I'm gonna figure out how to get my 
hands on "Anti-Oedipus" without actually having to pay for it.

Oh yeah, Moe's had a hardback copy, second edition, of The Crying of 
Lot 49. It was a library copy, so it's stamped and has a pasted library
card but otherwise was in better shape than usual for suchlike. $ 40, 
drive it away today. If I had any to spare after Vico, Bruno & Brown 
I woulda gone for it.

And the W.A.S.T.E. mail drop is now behind Ned's Books.

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