[sic]: A Memoir (24 page)

X

CANAL STREET

Let us end this book by answering an old question, rather than posing a new one: who stole the
Mona Lisa
?

—Norman Mailer, Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

Okay, um, here’s maybe not such a bad way to end
this:

So a lot of the aforewritten (that’s not a word, but anyway) was inscribed in longhand, in journals, in hospital rooms, or at the side of a lake; in waiting rooms, or in cafés, where people, obviously, sit in different proximities to vertical walls. So I’ve got this pretty big stack of journals here, which I term “journals” as opposed to notebooks. Notebooks have horizontal lines. Journals are just big blank pages, so you can make up your own lines. As David Byrne once mused, “Notebooks? What good are notebooks? They won’t help you survive.” He was correct. Journals, on the other hand, just might.

The
Mona Lisa
at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, France, 2005.

(Obviously these aren’t the correct definitions of the words “notebook” and “journal.” It’s just the way I think of them, and I’m a little tired, this book turned out to be a little longer than I thought, and way more work. Plus I’m hungry. Let’s just agree that the word “notebook” strongly suggests ruled paper, and classrooms, and after-school afternoons; and “journal” is a broader rubric.)

Anyway it’s funny how each of these journals comes to an end, and then there’s another one that follows. Like look at this one here, for example. So on the last page, I wrote—I remember this, I remember writing this, I was sitting in that café over on Church Street—I wrote, “A woman just came up. Is that your paper? I hadn’t noticed that I’d been sitting next to a copy of the
Times
. Boston won the World Series. ‘Boston Sweeps Series.’ That’s the headline. I almost asked her why on earth—what with all this—why on earth she’d want to read the
Times
?
But I gave it to her, of course, without saying anything. She’s taken it back to her seat, on the other side of the café, to my right; she’s reading it now. Hopefully she’s waiting for someone, anticipating a meeting with a friend or a spouse or boyfriend, and she just needs to pass the time. What I mean to say is—I hope to God she’s not just actually reading the
Times,
as an activity in itself: hopefully that isn’t the only reason she’s here, having coffee at four o’clock in the afternoon, sunnier now than before, the day’s turned surprisingly warm, I don’t even need the coat I brought. Hopefully she’s waiting for someone.”

It goes on:

I have space left in this notebook for about ten more handwritten lines, and after that I’ll have to go buy another one, over on Canal Street. No more pages. I’m heading towards the edge of the last page, even as I write. Canal Street, in the seventeenth century, was the northernmost edge of New York. The key to any kind of composition, it occurs to me, is to write against an edge, a frame. Put a frame around something, anything—the frame of cancer, say, around a life—and you’ve already gotten somewhere, without even willing it: then, as if by magic or by grace, you’re waiting for someone, and can read the Times.

Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to the following, in roughly chronological order.

Patricia Cody

Matthew Cody

Nancy Bush

Ann Volkwein

Cassie Jones

William Breitbart

Barry Crooks

Rick Dickens

Paul Bozymowski

Katherine Lytle

Anne Philpott

Aaron Adams

Juliette Adams

Theodore Boulokous

Heather Keller

Jonathan Dreyfous

Swanna MacNair

Edward Lovett

Erin Lovett

Gabriel Jones

Belzu DuHoinx

Louis Warren

Ildiko Szollosi

Max Karkégi

Fred Lerdahl

Peter Maxwell Langrind

And then of course Bill Clegg, Jill Bialosky, Alison Liss, Alexandra Pringle, and all the inspired, admired persons at W. W. Norton and Bloomsbury, whose continued demonstration that books are, in fact, collaborative never ceases to create a sense of wonder.

Notes

1.
Bob Spitz,
The Beatles: The Biography
(Little, Brown, New York, 2005), 641.

2.
Louis S. Warren,
Buffalo Bill’s America
(Knopf, New York, 2005), 538–540.

3.
C. David Heymann,
Ezra Pound: The Last Rower: A Political Profile
(Viking, New York, 1976), 309.

4.
Ibid., 53.

5.
Ibid.,62.

6.
Nicholson Baker,
U and I: A True Story
(Random House, New York, 1991), 19.

7.
T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound
, ed. Valerie Eliot (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1971), 67.

8.
Hugh Kenner, “Leucothea’s Bikini: Mimetic Homage,” in Noel Stock, ed.,
Ezra Pound: Perspectives: Essays in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday
(Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1965), 39.

9.
David Foster Wallace,
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
(Little, Brown, New York, 1997), 189.

10.
Heymann,
Ezra Pound: The Last Rower
, 118.

11.
Ibid., 298.

12.
Will Grohmann,
Paul Klee
(Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1967), 94.

13.
Alexander Theroux, “Revenge,”
Harper’s
, October 1982.

14.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan,
De Kooning: An American Master
(Knopf, New York, 2004). 628–629.

15.
Madonna,
Sex
, ed. Glenn O’Brien (Warner Books, New York, 1992), 12.

16.
Heymann,
Ezra Pound: The Last Rower
, 64.

17.
John Tytell,
Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
(Doubleday, New York, 1987), 293.

18.
Noel Stock,
Ezra Pound: Poet in Exile
(Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK, 1964), 258.

19.
Tytell,
Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
, 246.

20.
Ibid., 278.

21.
Ibid.

22.
Ibid.

23.
Carroll F. Terrell,
A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1980), 29.

24.
Lisa Armstrong, “Death, S&M, Violence and Religion Were All There on Alexander McQueen’s Catwalk,”
Times
(London), February 11, 2010.

25.
“Politics of Culture: Considering David Foster Wallace,”
Bookworm
radio broadcast, KCRW, September 16, 2008.

26.
Tytell,
Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
, 247.

27.
J. G. Pilkington, trans.,
The Confessions of St. Augustine
(Liveright Publishing, New York, 1942, Black and Gold Edition), 314.

28.
Salikah: A Student’s Digest
(blog), August 1, 2007,
http://salikah.blogspot.com/2007/08/something-of-confession.html
.

29.
Thomas J. Lucente Jr., “More Disgusting Behavior from Islamic Thugs,”
Light of Liberty
(blog), April 2, 2009, http://www.lucente.org/blog/cate gory/religion.

30.
Eliot,
Waste Land
, 97.

31.
Terrell,
Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound
, 372.

32.
Heymann,
Ezra Pound: The Last Rower
, 52–53.

Credits

p.6
: Allen-Bradley Clock Tower retrieved from
http://commons.wikime dia.org/wiki/File:Allen_Bradley_Clocktower_8208.jpg
.

p.12
: 59th Street Bridge (Queensboro Bridge) (1910) courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

p.16
: Acropolis retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acropilos_wide_view.jpg
.

p.16
: Taj Mahal and the Yamuna River retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taj_Majal_y_rio_Yamuna.jpg
.

p.19
: United Nations Secretariat Building Façade retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UN_Headquarter_Facade_2005-04-29.jpg
.

p.63
: Francesco Guarino’s
Sant’Agata si copre le ferita
used courtesy of Museo di Capodimonte, Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali.

p.70
: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s
The Slave Market
retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:G%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Jean-L%C3%A9on_The_Slave_Market.jpg
.

p.73
: Titian’s
The Flaying of Marsyas
retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Titian_-_The_Flaying_of_Marsyas.jpg
.

p.108
: Place Mohammed Ali in Alexandria, Egypt (1910–20) used courtesy of Max Karkégi.

p.111
: Image of the first page of Beethoven’s manuscript of the Kreutzer Sonata used by permission of the Juilliard Manuscript Collection.

p.122
: Budapest and the Danube at night retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Budapest_at_night.jpg
.

p.143
: Paul Klee’s
Analysis of Various Perversities
© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

p.150
: Temple of Saint Sava retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_of_Saint_Sava_Belgrade_detail.jpg
.

p.214
: Olympus Fashion Week Spring 2006—Morgan Le Fay—Runway used by permission of Getty Images / WireImage.

p.220
:
Burial of Saint Monica and Saint Augustine Departing from Africa
retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maestro_dell%27osservanza,_sepoltura_di_santa_monica_e_partenza_di_sant%27agostino.jpg
.

p.258
:
Mona Lisa
in the Musée du Louvre retrieved from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mus%C3%A9e_du_louvre_mona_lisa.jpg
.

Excerpt from
Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man
by Norman Mailer used by permission of Michael Mailer, Michael Mailer Films.

Excerpt from
Le Lien
by Vanessa Duriès used by permission of Magic Carpet Books.

Copyright © 2011 by Joshua Cody

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

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Manufacturing by Courier Westford

Book design by Chris Welch

Production manager: Devon Zahn

Ebook conversion by
Erin L. Campbell
,
TIPS Technical Publishing, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cody, Joshua.

[Sic] : a memoir / Joshua Cody. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-393-08106-0 (hardcover)

1. Cody, Joshua—Health. 2. Cancer–Patients–New York (State)—New York—Biography. 3. Composers–New York (State)–New York—Biography. I. Title.

RC265.6.C63 2011

362.196'9940092–dc23

[B]

2011026035

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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