There's something about book-buying that just seems inherently healthy to me, and, as such, any internal concept of demand and supply goes completely out of the window. My wallet is deaf even to basic economic concepts, so I hoard with manic delight what is now becoming a small but growing knoll of dog-eared paperbacks in my bedside 'to read' pile. I'm a bit more cautious with other media, perhaps in the sense that I wouldn't happily and with a clear conscience order two pizzas every day, then stock up on eight tubs of ice cream for the forseeable future. Since reading is very much the broccoli of the mind (to stretch a bad analogy even further), you can never, really, have too much of the stuff. Thankfully though, books don't make me involuntarily retch. Not the case with broccoli.
Anyway. Recently I stumbled across a paperback stall in Cambridge and got inordinately excited at a '60s edition of Penguin Modern Poets with Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, and William Carlos Willliams in it. There were a few other editions, but they all contained long-forgotten, pithy, '50s poetasters so I stuck with this one and a new-ish edition of L'etranger. I couldn't read the French, mind you, but it always does well to try and sound vaguely intelligent.
I was particularly taken by Rexroth and his not-quite-Beat perch in literary history. He always commands the sharper image, and reigns in sharply rendered splices of nature along with vague perambulations through glowing, quick-cut images of the human condition. I hate saying the human condition, but its vagueness will serve for now I guess. What struck me in one poem in particular, though, was the candid zoom-out; the portrait of the artist as a pervy old man, as it were. Which is, in fairness, a crude joke of what it really is, which is the bold outing of the shame of his desire, still defiant, set near-mockingly against his tatty, wearied and ageing self. But he celebrates it in a sense, and that's why I love it. Here it is:
The Advantages of Learning
I am a man with no ambitions
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes in the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphmaniacs of my imagination.
It reminds me also of a poem by Howard Nemerov who, in his old age and declined virlity, sees in pornography only the endlessly renewed, Sisyphean theatre of the absurd. In his world this is set against our staid,everyday lives which are numb to the direct and interconnecting reality of the act itself, and favour instead the vicarious libido-diversion of porn.
Reading Pornography in Old Age
Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred,
Immediate and mutual lust, satisfiable
In the heat, upon demand, aroused again
And satisfied again, lechery unlimited.
Till space runs out at the bottom of the page
And another pair of lovers, forever young,
Prepotent, endlessly receptive, renews
The daylong, nightlong, interminable grind.
How decent it is, and how unlike our lives
Where "fuck you" is a term of vengeful scorn
And the murmur of "sorry, partner" is often heard
As ever in mixed doubles and bridge.
Though I suspect the stuff is written by
Elderly homosexuals manacled to their
Machines, it's mildly touching all the same,
A reminiscence of the life that was in Eden
Before the Fall, when we were beautiful
And shameless, and untouched by memory:
Before we were driven out to the laboring world
Of the money and the garbage and the kids
In which we read this nonsense and are moved
As all that was always lost for good, in which
We think about sex obsessively, except
During the act, when our minds tend to wander.
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