Read Wisely [09/15/2010]

To know used books is to know the indigent, the diseased and the lonely.  Cast offs congregate.  The slave to the White Lady, hiding his tracks, ineffectively, beneath a quotidien red turtle neck, casting his spittle through his broken gates--shucking and jiving and praying there aren't any scuffs on the discs he peddles--what kinda junkie collects that much opera, anyway?  And Jamie Johnson, crying at the bus stop with her busted foot and bad eye, who can't haul herself to a shelter and they don't open til dusk, anyway, and the man at the house she left, well, he pushed her down and went in her panties and took her money and her pills and she can't get no more, I'm gonna die.  I'm gonna die without my meds, can't you help me?   And the quiet man.  And the one who speaks.  And the weeping sores they're not as good at hiding as some of us. 

Books never say no.  Always yielding, without pretense or prejudice--inexaustibly generous with their offering.  A portal, a mirror, a voice to accompany or quiet our residents. A chorus built of tongues, webs and protean desires. 

Science tells us now that the study of quantum mechanics is the study of the structure of consciousness.  The choices we make inform the outcomes manifest.  So whatever informs our consciousness, in turn informs our choices and shapes our experience of reality.  Perhaps a book is a key, then, to a hallway of doors.  And every smile we give or get, and every warm regard or desultory glance, every kindness paid and repaid, the broken families and broken promises, the chemical waves we call love, hate, mourning and ecstasy that push and pull us toward vanishing points--keys, all. 

I cannot express my gratitude for living a life of books.  Two days from now, I won't work at a used bookstore anymore, perhaps ever again.  But its metaphors have not eluded me.  Choice begets reality and so on, ad infinitum.  A random number generator, a kaleidescope.  What enchantment.  Awe and sorrow.

Provenance & Providence [06/25/2010]

Every book has a fate and that fate is its locomotion. It is passed from one hand to another, from one shelf to the next, to languish in an attic here only to be resurrected in a book shop hundreds of miles away. The lives of books mirror human lives in this and many other ways. Though their pages may contain all the wisdom of the world, they cannot access that wisdom. Though, as many great prophets have told us, we embody the divine we are similarly kept from the fountain within us. Dumb encasements, silent testaments to a knowledge we cannot conceive. 

Perhaps this comparison will chafe those seekers among us, those masters of their own fates. After all, we are active, innovative and loud. Books are none of these things. Their passivity is deceptive, however, as one who has been unable to put a book down may testify. Theirs is a silent rapture that snares us into stasis and solitude, generates a shared and secret conversation. For who can divide a man from his own thoughts like the word on a page? Hardly the behavior of a passive object. It would serve us well to emulate books on this account, to speak silently to those who would listen and surrender to the gears of life that propel us, content to embody and deliver the word rather than to possess it.

In a bookshop one can watch such mysteries unfurl, the book shelved or cataloged yesterday or last year finding its next witness. So, too, the equivalent human conjunctions--those invisible lines of influence we trace across each others' paths. Certainly, mundane exchanges outnumber revelations, as grass outpopulates flowers in a field. 

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Speaking of chance and fate, I'm still working on a board game based on the experiences of working in or frequenting used bookshops. It's a lot like Chutes & Ladders with book trivia thrown in. I hope to get a prototype made some time this year, now that my schedule is loosening up, so if you'd like to try it out and make suggestions to improve play let me know. I might even come up with caricatures of regulars to use as pieces, like Clue! 

As for reading recommendations:

Atmosphere Apollinaire by Mark Frutkin [a very interesting treatment of one of the lesser known giants of La Belle Epoque]

The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages by Frederick Bodmer

Be excellent to each other. 

Life in a Bookstore [05/13/2010]

I want to share with you a neat find, whose subject matter sparks a lot of interesting ideas [in my opinion]. I've come across a book titled, "Alice in Many Tongues: The translations of Alice in Wonderland". It is exactly what it says, no tricks. 

How strange it is, though, to contemplate a translation of a translation--especially of Carroll's work. So much culture and linguistic history informs his narrative, his playful twists of the tongue, that it seems impossible that it could ever be translated. And there's the rub--it can't. It isn't "Alice in Wonderland" anymore once it's translated, but a parallel--a "looking glass" approximation, if you like, set in a world quite different from the one in which Carroll wrote and thought. The great Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian, once remarked that language is the platform of thought [I'm paraphrasing]. If language is as deeply informed by history and culture as a book like "Alice" makes apparent, then, by extension, history and culture are also the basis of thought. Perhaps I'm rambling, now, and certainly my ideas are not original, but the gears are going and my coffee is still hot. 

For your entertainment, here is a brief list/description of some of our regulars:

-Old Skinny Spanish man who wears a beret, reeks of mothballs and won't leave until he has loudly farted in every aisle

-Varicose Creeper dude who brings in books to trade from dead people's estate sales, hits on our male employees and will engage in endless small talk if permitted

-Coolest Little Old Asian Dude Ever who walks around with headphones on, buys techno CDs and brings us homemade pastries

-Very Shy Illustrator guy with mutton chops who buys graphic novels, talks in hushed tones and always wears black

-Hyperactive Photographer Lady who has/had a sideline Amazon store which supplies her with obscure books that she couldn't sell because she overpriced so she brings them to us by the box-full which is okay because she sometimes buys us coffee or pizza or leaves a tip [seriously?] yes, seriously, she'll give us a fiver and be like "You guys are awesome" 

-Little Old Irish Woman who wears a visible layer of sunscreen on her face and a scarf on her head that makes us feel like we're on the set of "Angela's Ashes"

-Dude Who Looks Like Eric Clapton and gives us knowing smiles

-Really Tall Skinny Guy With a Funny Beard who looks like he should participate in Civil War reenactments

-Law Researcher/Philosophy Buff dude who buys big stacks of philosophy books all at once and seems mellow but will talk excitedly if engaged using words like "ossified", "paradigm" and "epistemology" every other sentence

-Scientology Lady who once brought in a Dianetics book to trade, so maybe she's a reformed cult member? but anyways she's kind of rude and smells like old lady perfume

-Guy of Indiscriminate Origin whose accent I can't place and who always ALWAYS bitches about how much store credit we offer in trade for his books and even tried to bribe me into giving him better deals by giving me a ring

Maybe I should print up playing cards with their faces/specs on them? There are more, but I've got to get back to cataloging. Stay tuned for the next episode!

*Edited to add: I think I might start recommending books once in a while. I don't read fiction very much these days, but once in a while something grabs my attention. If you haven't yet heard of it, check out "Gould's Book of Fish" by Richard Flanagan. It's a novel, but not by any small measure. I find myself wanting to quote long passages from it, the writing is immensely good.

Before we get ahead of ourselves....

As a way to jumpstart this blog and set the mood, as it were, I've decided to repost a few short essays that I originally published as Notes on my FB account. I was working in a used bookstore at the time, but they are good examples of what's to come on this blog.

Without further ado.....