From David Markson's edition of The Waste Land, recently ...

From David Markson's edition of The Waste Land, recently bought by some lucky bugger at the Strand.

My friend Ethan paid not enough money for a heavily annotated edition of Hart Crane's poetry, an even more heavily annotated T.S. Eliot, and a beautiful volume of Melville's shorter works, with every one of Bartleby the Scrivener's 'I would prefer not to's underlined. ('Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books,' Markson wrote in Vanishing Point.)

In summer 2000 I explained to an...