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  • The Hookah Quadrille:A Conversation-Loop
  • Henry Sussman
Interlocutors:

T.R. Hookah, D.H. Tortoise, the Cheshire Cat, Achilles Hair

D. H. Tortoise:

The four of us haven't been together, what is it, three years?

Cheshire Cat:

This is a big hop up from the Alleycat Café, where we met last time. The cover was ridiculous, the drinks mostly water, and the music sad.

Achilles Hair:

It was certainly nice of Dick Macksey to let us gather in his library. It's an unforgettable place, organized in clusters corresponding to his encyclopedic range of interests. But since the last time I was here, he's added books to every nook and cranny of the collection. There are new stacks covering every square horizontal inch of space. The clear boundaries he drew when he constructed the library in the early 1960's have gotten hopelessly overgrown. You can get lost if you let your mind wander in here.

T.R. Hookah:

If I recall, after a monumental effort, the collection opened its doors—and I mean wide—in 1962.

D.H. Tortoise:

Places like libraries, whose materials can fan out toward one another in rhizomatic networks, can certainly benefit from numerical ordering systems, like the Dewey Decimal. In a card-catalogue system, the progressive numbers form typographical strings easily handled by a variety of memory-stores, ranging all the way from a shoebox to RAM. The problem with Dick, though, is that he kept collecting interrelated books wherever he could find them, and [End Page 1010] the conceptual bins he had started out with for pigeonholing them acquired more and more give until they all but disappeared.

Cheshire Cat:

But that's why it's such an absolute trip to be in here. It's just you and the unbelievably diverse set of cultural materials, all the way back to the medieval psalter on the wall. You can almost hear the hum of the books conversing with one another. You can say of them


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that they behave themselves, more or less, being rationally organized into a vast array of subdirectories. But the organization is above all loose. The subliminal conversation between the books isn't hostage to any numerical operating system or research mission statement. You can stay transfixed by the rustle of their language for a long time.

Achilles Hair:

Already in the late-1950's, he started inviting anybody interested in books, music, and films, not just his students, over to his place for evening seminars. In those days, his public had to climb four flights to his apartment on Roland Avenue.

Cheshire Cat:

My sixth sense tells me this place was just made for cats and books. I'll bet that's how this particular house got chosen. Where did Dick disappear to, anyway?

Achilles Hair:

Things really started moving as soon he got the library off the ground. The groups of students kept getting larger. The topics more varied. A group of hare-brained theorists called the First Draft Club began using the collection as a hide. Turning a former garage into the stacks gave Dick screening capability and allowed the present main reading room to open, around 1970. To this day, Dick drives anybody who needs a lift home after one of his seminars. After that, he goes off on one of his late-night runs in search of oranges.

Cheshire Cat:

Oranges?

Achilles Hair:

The secret staple of his diet, the most orange, succulent ones he can access in the Baltimore all-night grocery scene. Armed with his oranges he comes home and spends the night conversing, surfing his collections, and attending to all kinds of university business.

D. H. Tortoise:

The organization of Dick's collection, then, as opposed to Library of Congress, is characterized by its loops of recursion and the odd leaps it takes in some of its prized chunks (Henry James or Proust, say, and its overall strength in 19th and 20th-century British, U.S., French, German, and Russian literature). The collection bears the singular imprint of Dick's insomniac mind both in its sheer continuities (the way the...

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