Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
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for creating fuller, more voluptuous lips, an effect that lasts up to twelve hours per treatment. A fair price? Who can say what the market will bear when the market did not previously exist?
It requires a special sort of genius to ensure that eccentricity does not diminish as budgets tighten. A pair of lawn aerator sandal attachments—you walk your lawn in these special elongated spikes to revitalize your grass and rid it of thatch build-up—is only $12.99. So is a decorative sink strainer / stopper, which comes in white, almond, blue, or gray speckle (this last ideal for a stainless steel sink). And a mere $8.50 buys a Bracelet Buddy, which by helping someone fasten her own bracelet puts an “end to another of life’s little frustrations.” On the other hand, and at the higher end of the consumer scale, you can replace nearly anything you own, from your showerhead to your hubcaps to your putter to your garden gnomes, with gold. Also, there are countless products that allow you to similarly couch, swaddle, and otherwise pamper your pets, including, for $189.00, a PetStep Ramp to aid arthritis-stricken or injured dogs in getting into and out of the van. And my favorite, for the person so utterly endowed that his possessions seem impregnable to precedent-setting presents, there’s the Sparta Watch Winder, which uses a “natural swinging action” to wind any automatic watch. It takes only two D batteries and $225.00 to guarantee that look that says, “You know, I never would have gotten this for myself.”
It’s like my father’s friend Maury once told me: if the customer already wants it, you don’t have to sell it to him. “When noon rolls around, you don’t have to sell a guy lunch. He comes into the restaurant because he’s hungry already—he’s ready to buy, right? There’s nothing for you to do except maybe get out of his way or refill his coffee. That’s not selling. Selling is persuading someone that he has to have something he doesn’t know he has to have and maybe really doesn’t have to have. More important, that he has to have the one something you’ve got to sell him.”
“I don’t get it.”
“What is it you don’t get?”
“I don’t get how you know people want the stuff you’re selling.”
He leaned in meaningfully. “That is exactly the wrong question. How do they know that they don’t want the stuff I’m selling? That’s the right question. That’s the last twenty-seven years of my life, from my car to my clothes, from that question.” Then the big signature smile of his opened over his cigar. “It’s a lot more interesting than taking orders from off a menu, right? And even though it’s not such a secret, most of the schmucks out there act like it was. Believe it.”
I did. A compelling fellow, Maury, who had the knack of making people feel smart because they listened without contradicting him. Smart the way guys whose pens contain currency translation programs, who travel with laser-sleek leather document organizers, and who store their liquor in massive walnut Old World globes feel smart. Or so I can only suppose, having none of those items and, truthfully, not wanting them either, a fact that does make me feel free, but only when someone like Maury isn’t around to dispel my contentment.
Twenty-five volumes constitute the full set of the American Review, which ran for ten years, from 1967 to 1976, on the literary journal scene. Twenty-five, plus a special valedictory volume compiled once the extinction of the series had been determined. I happened upon my first volume while I was browsing through a used book bin at a university bookstore. My rule of thumb is that a journal must contain at least two items to which I suspect I might want future access before I buy it, and AR #9 readily passed the test. A week or so later, I happened upon AR #7 in that same bin—the merchandise is fluid, and regular customers have the best crack at securing the treasures—and #5 and #6 showed up later that semester. AR #8 appeared on, of all places, a grocery store close-out rack, idly at swim among the reduced plastic wrap and Graham crackers, the remaindered Grishams and Krantzes.
It is hard to say just when not having shaved for a while turns into deliberately growing a beard—the boundary probably differs from man to man and from face to face—but one day you look in the mirror and you’re a guy with a beard. Who knows but that the infamous Collyer brothers, Homer and Langley, whose corpses were unearthed in 1947 from a moraine of newspapers, broken furniture, garden implements, medical equipment, umbrellas, gas chandeliers, rusting guns, and other rubbish—103 tons of junk, all told—heaped in their Harlem mansion, didn’t begin innocuously with, say, a few outdated phone books or the jawbone of a horse? (Yes, the phone books and jawbone were part of the booty that the cops shoveled out.) That is to say, I did not consciously covet the series and never characterized myself as a collector. But when I saw AR #1 in a bag of books a colleague was preparing to trade in for cash, a shiver of eagerness ran through my fingers as I snatched it and, with no bargain hunter’s pretense toward nonchalance, offered him the full cover price.
Around this time I formally subscribed to the periodical and cleared off a bookshelf to devote to it exclusively. In addition to the growth of my collection through the mail—for a collection it by now had most certainly become—there was the occasional swelling of the shelf due to the odd volume I’d find serendipitously. (This was before the Internet, of course, which has made collecting far easier, more systematic, and, assuming one has sufficient cash flow, dependably predestined to succeed.) As for the red-letter day when out of the blue I received a call from an old friend from graduate school alerting me to his having discovered at his campus bookstore AR #2, #3, and #4 huddled inconspicuously together on a sale table like in-laws kibbitzing over the cold cuts at a family reunion . . . well, the memory of that lucky find and lasting friendship still moves me. With a little effort, I believe I can still feel the texture of the checkbook as I gleefully signed off on his reimbursement.
Novelist Alexander Theroux would grant my small penchant greater profundity than I do. To his way of thinking, collecting is, variously, a quest for adequacy and identity, a disclosure of personality through what one accrues to bolster it, and an aspiration, however scaled down or trivialized, toward the Absolute. Or so he asserts at the conclusion of his essay “Odd Collections,” in which he inventories dozens of collectors, from the renowned to the otherwise anonymous, and thereby, in the form of his catalogue, creates an odd collection of his own. “The mere challenge of collecting may generate the impulse,” he muses, “the impossibility of success like the inevitability in high-jumping of failure guaranteeing a strange kind of buoyancy, because it is endless.” To put it another way, the essence is the process, the collecting rather than the collection the key. Indeed, the futility of ever having it all, the principle of inexhaustibility, ensures the sheer ongoingness of the enterprise, which, Theroux suggests, might be the real point of engaging in collecting in the first place. (Comedian Steven Wright may have hit upon the ideal balance between reach and grasp when he boasts of having the largest seashell collection anywhere. It is so extensive, he says, that he keeps it on beaches all over the world.) Thus to amend Camus’ interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus, the eternally condemned man’s confrontation with the Absurd would not result solely from his having finally successfully shoved his boulder to the top of the hill. We must also factor in the paralyzing realization that that single component completed his rock collection as well as his curse.
As opposed to accumulations of marbles or Mickey Mouse memorabilia, though, my own collection is relatively unambitious, being so concisely defined and circumscribed. Neither is it unique enough to warrant inclusion among Theroux’s chosen ones, since with the termination of the American Review in 1976, a comprehensive set could reasonably be had by anyone. As of this writing, I possess twenty-five of the extant paperbacks, AR #11 having eluded me for well over two decades now. As I say, I’m fairly certain that I could scare up a copy of the prodigal volume on Amazon, Alibris, or eBay, but somehow resorting to websites strikes me as not being truly in the spirit of the thing. The prospect rubs against the grain of my idiosyncrasy: in randomness and vague fortune I began, and so I will persist. My compensation for the hole in my holdings parallels that of Thomas Hardy’s Tess, whose slightly flawed features made her all the more fetching: “And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.” And should my collection forever remain unfinished, I shall content myself with my allegiance to those Native American artisans who purposely leave a flaw in their