what he took on the plane with him

For his plane-ride back to Hollywood, I gave Kyle my Modern Library copy of Rousseau's Confessions. There are no volumes of greater portability and discretion. Apparently they are collectible. I find that books seldom recoup their investment. They are devalued more abruptly than cars driven off the lot. Thirty-five dollar hardcovers will bring four or five dollars. When the seller protests, believing that the retailer merely wants an increased margin, the retailer will refuse them altogether- "Noone wants hardcovers." There were many times when selling books was all that saved me from hunger. Eight dollars for a box of books could buy me a week of dry-goods, plus bread milk and coffee. Books cannot be bought for investment. There is no market beyond that the established antiquarian booksellers have manifested. Quietly scratching 1st ed. 295.00 in pencil and patiently stroking their moustaches. Somehow it works for them. Ebay seldom produces an audience for my books.
I undersold a Faulkner 1st of "Go Down, Moses! (and other stories)" a volume to which was attached the specific opprobrium of Faulkner (for the other stories part). 100.00. But it went to Oxford, Mississippi where it probably belonged. (Belonged? To which it was a stranger. Though a product of a New York Publisher and Printer its contents fully described the South, like a telling bloodline in a child born expatriated from his fathers' home).
Kyle read the Sky-Mall. Who doesn't. Who can concentrate on a plane? I hope he will hold Rousseau in his palm as so many 18th century pedarasts attempted to do, and feel moved to open it.
Kyle is, of course, naked culpability. Every man he has anything to do with announces that he has been ill-used, and details it. We are both designed as scapegoats for the world. My own misdeeds, like a weighted hat, bow me. Rousseau liberates. Whose sins are so penetrating that they can not be washed clean in this stream of words? My own sins are nearly expiated in his confessions.
Rousseau lies. He is ungrateful to those who help him, who free him from his just punishment. He weeps, pleads and confesses to anyone by whom he is cornered in guilt. He abandons friends who fall in epilepsy. He exposes himself in public squares to women, but cannot get erect. Most notably, he is a thief, and will steal from anyone without regard to his attachments. He will accuse the innocent of the theft and see them ruined. He passes himself off as master of that he barely knows. He publicly performs these unheld skills believing that he might possess them after all. He is insulting when he means to be clever- slow-witted in company. He is untalented at every trade. He is a sexual masochist, and desires to be dominated by the petulance of women who are born of a higher class. He undergoes a factitious religious conversion. He contributes testimony only half-believed to a beatification process.
Yet, despite all this, nothing frightens and disgusts him more than the attempts of men to carress him.
I adore Rousseau, nevertheless. He is my savior. I would like to adapt the Confessions to make some sort of stage work. THey must be royalty free, and salacious enough to keep teh attention of an audience. It would need to be highly stylised. Well, later, maybe....maybe later.