Now, Where Was I?
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 24, 2001
Rob Edsall follows a trail of old bookmarks.
The poet e. e. cummings wasn't talking about carpet when he described the "shocking fuzz of your electric fur", but it's a good description of my bookroom floor. A blend of nylon and Velcro that attracts and grips lint, it is impossible to vacuum. Now I just pick up the cat fur by hand and feed it into the nozzle of our old vacuum cleaner, which accepts it gently, as if it were communion bread.
The shocking fuzz electric fur also sends a few volts through me every time I walk on it. So, bold with the new year, I decided to rip it up and polish the boards. That meant removing the bookcases and a day or so of taking each book down and being distracted by it. So there I was, cross-legged on the Velcro floor, re-reading cummings, and page 212 of The Sheltering Sky, and page 178 of The Shooting Party, when I come across a bookmark in The Shipping News.
It was a scrap of paper with "Craig" scrawled in black pen next to the stamp of the Caltex garage in Erskineville, with a phone number. I remember it all. My car was being serviced and I started reading The Shipping News at a nearby cafe. I was to call Craig later to check whether the car was ready. When I got to the chapter where Quoyle and his aunt and kids spend the night in the Tickle Motel during a storm, I laughed so much the waitress came out to see if I was all right. When the aunt wrote a message on a pillowcase and hung it in the window - "HELP. LOCKED IN ROOM 999. TELEPHONE DEAD" - I bent double and stopped breathing.
It was a breathless highlight of my reading year, back then, but it wasn't the book that had reminded me of all this now. It was the bookmark. Craig at Caltex. So I started to flick through each book as I took it down.
Bernhard Schlink's The Reader had a dry gumleaf bookmark from the day our two kittens arrived and I locked us all in the sunroom until they gave up hissing and agreed to like each other. The gumleaf was the thing that got them both playing, while I sat on the couch in tears and read The Reader from cover to cover.
I began thinking. We shouldn't take bookmarks from books when we finish them. They belong there. They are part of the story. Romulus, My Father had a 3-D Bart Simpson card. Maybe I needed cheering up. According to the boarding pass, I was on flight TG 211 on July 18, year unknown, when I read a cheapie edition of Great Expectations. Dickens by a pool somewhere else is life as it should be. Not surprisingly, my Lonely Planet guide to Turkey had a QF1 boarding pass from another uncertain year, June 25.
The label from a leopardskin fez marked my time in Bukowski's Notes of a Dirty Old Man. That seemed suitable, too. Is there a bigger rhythm than coincidences to bookmarks?
Inside a 75-cent, yellow-edged copy of Jules Feiffer's Little Murders there was a business card for Xtreme Games in the city. That fit, too, although I recall I was pricing PlayStations at the time.
I came across 2001: A Space Odyssey and thought, "This will sort things out". I flicked the pages looking for a sign but there wasn't one. No bookmark. No monolith. Maybe we are alone.
Inside Golding's Free Fall a torn piece of paper with writing in pencil - "Geoff Thomas rang. Ring him or he will probably ring tomorrow night." I don't know a Geoff Thomas, or if he called, or which house, or which number, in which State. I last read Free Fall in university back in Geelong.
In Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover I found a 100 rupiah banknote. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, had a table napkin from the Victoria & Albert Museum cafe.
I'll use anything except a proper bookmark. One Christmas, my mother-in-law bought me a gold-coated bookmark from Franklin Mint. Needless to say, it was bloody awful. And it tore each page into strips across the top like those signs seeking flatmates, taped on telephone poles.
I found more of my business cards in books than I could ever recall giving out while networking. People who read books don't network all that well. Unless they are reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. A blank Picasso postcard inside Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory. Sand in Robert Drewe's The Drowner.
They are marks, bookmarks. Marks of where you were and when. Of how life happened around and in between the pages of what you were reading one summer, or on a bus, or in the bath or hammock. I found a tram ticket punched for "7 Feb 1986" in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I was in Melbourne then. I remember now.
I wonder what bookmarks 2001 will produce. A boarding pass, I hope. No. 433 bus tickets down Glebe Point Road, for sure. Another torn-out advertisement for a job I never went for. Maybe the business card of a floor-sander, if I get on with things.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald