Following on from my last entry, a couple of people have suggested their dream books, to sit on the shelf alongside Baxandall's On Memory: Tottel's Miscellany and G. K. Chesterton's introductory guide to Lacan. And then I thought of Ken Cockburn's poem 'On the Flyleaf of Jack Kerouac's Kidnapped', which imagines Kerouac in Scotland with Norman MacCaig:
Kerouac took to the Rose Street scenelike a duck to water, except waterwas the last thing on anybody's mind.But he quickly tired of the confines of 'Auld Reekie'.It was MacCaig who opened him up to the mountainson those legendary drives to the far north-weston endless late-June nights [...]
A note to the poem refers the reader to Thomas A. Clark's 'The University of Pittenweem, Library of Scottish Culture', in Alec Finlay's The Libraries of Thought & Imagination. I'm going to look this up at the library in the next few days (if this stinking cold eases up). But wherever the idea comes from, the poem's presence in a collection of poems all written (so their titles assure us) 'on the flyleaf' of real books, such as Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parma or a monograph on Yves Klein, throws those works too into a shimmering fictional - or at least factitious - realm.
Anyway, if anyone else has good made-up tomes of either sort (that is, books never written by real authors, or 'what-ifs' combining authors and titles along the lines of Cockburn's poem/Clark's library) I'd love to hear them - if I get enough I'll try to put them together in a post (all attributed, of course!).
