Disney/Marvel Versus

You’ve all heard about it by now: Disney (AKA The Benevolent Mouse-Eared Overlord) has purchased Marvel Comics for an undisclosed sum that is rumored to include a lifetime supply of Mouse Bars. There’s been a good deal of debate over whether this purchase bodes well for either Marvel or TBM-EO. Disney benefits because they get free access to the, ah, heretofore unexploited (read: B-List) canon of heroes. Marvel benefits because… Really, I got nothin’. I guess Marvel benefits somehow. Marvel fans, however, stand to lose. How soon will it be before Disney starts to exercise influence over Marvel? I can see it now: each issue of Moon Knight must feature a full-scale song and dance spread; Super-heroines will have to cover up a bit; Marvel writers can no longer wear jeans but must instead wear Aladdin pants.

Arthur and I have been speculating on what the first massive success to emerge from this union will be, so we’re going to rev up the old Versus engine and take a crack at it.

We’ve flipped a coin. I’ve called Donald Duck, and Arthur has called Howard the Duck. …And it’s Howard! Arthur goes first:

Arthur: My first thought about this versus was: my goodness, where do I go from here? Then as ideas percolated in my mind, one crystallized and rose above the others. So with much further ado, I give to you lady and/or gentleman, the first Marneyvel collaboration, Daredevil Duck, the Manduck with no Fear(?) The title is tentative but the explanation is as follows:

Villains: My primary line of thought on this was which villains line up together well, after all a hero is nothing without a tasty villain. So which villains gel the best? Bam! Kingpin and Scrooge McDuck, two people after one thing: cold hard cash.

Secondly, we need some heroes. Daredevil easily gets the call here; he’s been after the Kingpin for years. Who better to go after a duck than another duck, so Donald scores the invite as well.

The plot is as follows Kingpin and Scrooge team together for crime hi-jinks. In their endeavor they are foiled by the Devil & Duck Duo. A nefarious plan is hatched where Huey, Dewey, and Luey are ducknapped and a rescue mission transpires. The building the baby ducks are kept in is rigged with all sorts of traps that no one could handle alone. Daredevil is forced to rely on Donald and vice-versa. Before you know it they are acting as one cohesive unit. The nephews are rescued and returned to safety while the real threat has been revealed. Scrooge and Kingpin have taken over Wall St. They are emptying out the Federal Reserve.

Duck & Devil descend on Kingpin’s lair where they are met by none other than Kingpin and Scrooge. The villains indicate that they were no match for the heroes and so had to enlist some help. Out of the shadows step Bullseye and Taurus Bulba “an actual bullman”. They quickly beat down our heroes, trapping and torturing Daredevil when Scrooge realizes Donald has gone missing. He looks around where he sees a shadowy duck like figure. Out of the shadows steps none other than Darkwing Duck (let’s get dangerous).

After a quick fight where Bullseye is defeated, Daredevil is freed and takes out Taurus Bulba. The heroes turn to face the villains Scrooge and Kingpin. After another quick fight where Kingpin uses his massive physical presence to challenge the heroes, he is eventually defeated. While attempting to run away from Darkwing, Scrooge falls into a thick fat of cooking oil, where he slowly sinks to his doom.

The heroes wrap it up and part with a handshake. Meanwhile, back in the Kingpin’s lair the vat of hot oil moves as a grizzly fried duck hand rises from the oil. So is born Kung Pow Chicken…

That’s my take, now on to Bill:

Bill: Wow, Arthur. That’s a dang well fleshed-out plot there. I feel like I just sat through an action movie. I’m starting to wonder if you were inadvertently exposed to a radioactive book at some point, giving you heightened powers of imagination.

When we first came up with the idea for this installment of Versus, I thought it would be a breeze. Making fun of Disney using Marvel characters? What could be easier? (Or more fun?) But you’ve thrown down the gauntlet, and I’ll admit to being a little intimidated.

The problem, of course, lies in coming up with an idea that is too ridiculous even for Disney to attempt. And that’s ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO DO. Will we see a movie starring Miley Cyrus as Dazzler? Of course we will. An animated feature in which the Avengers team up with the Rescuers? Someone’s penciling that sucker as I write. Heck, if we don’t see a new Marvel series in which an updated version of Power Man and Iron Fist do battle against the evil, Disney-downloading video pirates, I’ll eat my boots.

You see what we’re up against here? Now, you, Arthur, have a pronounced talent for the ridiculous and awesome. You could be just the super-villain to take down the new media juggernaut (Dis-vell? Marv-ney?) Me, I’m just your sidekick who can turn invisible or see 47 seconds into the future or something useless like that.

That said, I’ll give it a try (and I have to give props here to my friend The Rev, who helped this idea along during our geek-summit yesterday at our own little Avengers Mansion):

Somewhere in the West Village, in a dark attic room, a figure enshrouded in a long, blood-red cloak calls upon the power of the Vishanti to transport him to an alternate reality. His apprentice, it seems, is missing, having vanished in the midst of his cleaning duties. Disturbances in the threads of the universe have led this magician to believe that danger is afoot. He must investigate.

Passing from our plane into the next, the visage of Dr. Strange is revealed to us. He is focused and intent on his journey, but confused and awed by what he perceives. From all around him come the sounds of strings, tympani, brass. Abstract colors flow around him, seeking to distract him from his purpose. Such naked trickery reeks of the demon Satannish. Strange forges ahead.

The next plane holds no clues, only temporal acceleration. Dr. Strange watches as the seasons shift rapidly around him: summer flows into autumn, autumn into winter. Nature’s fauna seem to have become sentient and are either celebrating or causing the smooth but rapid change in seasons. As he passes from this plane, Strange catches a glimpse of the Man-Thing, engaged in a slow pas de deux with a giant mushroom…

As our dark hero breaks through the next barrier between planes, he senses chaos, panic, and danger. He is approaching his destination, and he instinctively draws on the power of the hoary hosts of Hoggoth to prepare himself. What he sees shocks and alarms him. His apprentice is under attack by an army of enchanted cleaning implements. The apprentice hacks away at the demonic hoard with an axe, but the monsters only sweep past him, filling an overflowing basin with water in an attempt to drown him. The air fills with the laughter of the Dreaded Dormammu. Strange's enemy is revealed. He uses his elemental magic to halt the flood and repair the damage wrought on this plane.

Dr. Strange is angry. His apprentice strayed from our plane and attempted magic far beyond his reach, nearly destroying an entire plane of existence. But Strange cannot sustain his rage for long. He was once a young mouse himself.

---

So, there you have it, readers. I’m not sure whether to hope that these projects come to light or are forever buried in the vault of the Gargoyle. If you’ve got ideas for Marv-ney projects, or if you simply want to beg Arthur and me to never enter the comic business, leave a comment. Until then, we’ll see you at the Gothic.

Easygoing, Friendly Bookshop ISO Friends

Hi Folks!

Well, it's happened. The Gothic Bookshop has joined the, um, latest century. 20th? 21st? 44th? The neo-post-industrial-halfway-hip age? The pre-tweens?

Anyway, we're on Facebook now, is what I'm saying. We're just getting started, but soon you'll see a steady stream of updates about new books, events, and special sales. You'll also find links to things that we just think are cool. (I promise that Arthur and I will do our best to limit the number of links to abjectly nerdy stuff.)

Also, much like the Rockin' Robin, we now tweet. Or twit. The difference twixt the tweet and twit escapes me (though I do know how to do The Twist); regardless, we're on it.

So feel free to friend and follow us! Frankly, you can fawn over us if you're feeling flirty (though as far as I know there's not yet an app for that...).

Twit you later, Facefriends!

New Duke Reads Selections!

Welcome back to campus, Gothic Shoppers!

We're glad to see so many of you back in the store. We've got stacks and stacks of great new books on the shelves for you to see, including...

THE NEW DUKE READS SELECTIONS!!

That's right, folks. The 2009/2010 selections were announced this morning, and we've got the books in stock here at the store. Remember, when you buy all seven books at once, you receive a 25% discount off the retail price, and we throw in a free Duke Reads tote bag!

And now (drum roll, please!) here are the presenters and reading list for 2009-10:


October 14
Peter Lange, Provost and Professor of Political Science
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess by William D. Cohan '81

November 11
Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of English, Literature, and Women's Studies
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

January 13
Reynolds Price '55, James B. Duke Professor of English
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

February 17
Blair Sheppard, Dean of the Fuqua School of Business
A Brief History of the Human Race by Michael Cook

March 17
Michael Malone, Professor of the Practice, Theater Studies
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

April 21
Stephen Nowicki, Dean and Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

The summer reading selection for first-year students is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. The author will be on campus during orientation week and will be giving two presentations August 20 at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. in Baldwin Auditorium for the entering Class of 2013 and you are invited.

Were Back.....well we will be soon anyway

The Gargoyle has been away on a much appreciated summer break but we are coming back with a book vengeance Monday August 17th. Until then, check out our completely new and different website.

SIBA Book Awards

Hi Fellow Gargoyles,

Many (some? none?) of you have been waiting eagerly for this year's list of SIBA Book Award winners. The rest of you are scratching your head and wondering (again) what the heck I'm on about.

SIBA is the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, an organization of scrappy, non-corporate, southern bookstores. These booksellers come together online and out in the real world to celebrate and/or bemoan the bookselling life, to exchange advice on making it in the current economic climate, and -most significantly, for this post- to promote good books for southern readers.

(A disclosure: The Gothic's former commander-in-chief, Gerry Eidenier, was president of SIBA once upon a time. While his dream of an insurgent battalion of armed, poetry-reciting booksellers was never realized, he is nonetheless remembered fondly by SIBA members. For our part, we at the Gothic are predisposed to feel generous towards SBIA as an organization.)

Once a year the SIBA members vote on the best new writing to come out of the South. Now, don't get me wrong: I loves me some Southern Lit. Both of you who read this blog have seen me wax enthusiastic, if not eloquent, on books such as Padgett Powell's Edisto, Donald Hays' The Dixie Association, and Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.

I'll confess, though, to approaching the SIBA awards with a little wariness. As a community of booksellers, we sometimes endorse the same names and topics over and over again. I like a good straight-up narrative yarn as much as the next fellow, and I'll eat grits pretty much any day of the week (especially if served up in a giant make-your-own-grit-bowl over at Durham's own Watts Grocery). But I feel that we SIBA members are inclined to promote books that are broadly palatable and that reinforce an image of Southern-ness that is less nuanced than it could be.

There's good reason for this, of course. We're all trying to sell books here. Slapping our award sticker on the cover of a proven seller such such as Pat Conroy or Rick Bragg (no offense meant to either of these fine writers) is a more profitable move than promoting stylistically experimental writing from the amazing Selah Saterstrom or dark, challenging writing from Robert Goolrick. I get that, and I get that we as a community are often too busy to go digging up writers from independent presses when corporate presses have lots of bells and whistles to draw our attention.

But we owe it to our customers, and to the reading public at large, to reach a little. When we proclaim a book "the best in Southern Literature by the people who would know", let's make sure that it actually is the best and that we actually do know.

You wouldn't believe it, but all this soapbox crankiness is by way of saying that I was particularly pleased with one of the awards this year. Kevin Young's moving, elegiac book, Dear Darkness, was given the 2009 SIBA award for poetry, and I couldn't be happier about it. I've been a big fan of Young's work ever since his book To Repel Ghosts, originally published by the independent press Zoland Books. (Young has since moved on to being published by one of the corporate biggies, which tempers only slightly my enthusiasm.) Dear Darkness is a book of work that reflects on place, family, and history. In the midst of Young's working on the book, his father died unexpectedly. Temporarily silenced by grief, he ultimately turned to writing poems about the food he so closely associated with his Father's Louisiana-based family. Pickled okra, turtle soup, maque-choux, kitchen grease: these and more down-home delicacies get turned into verses that evoke both the complexity of grief and longing and the comfort-food that helps heal such grief. It's truly a knockout of a book.

It seems incredible to say so now, but when I first heard these poems read aloud at the great A Cappella Books in Atlanta, Georgia, I never considered that they might be "Southern" poems. I think that's what makes me so enthusiastic to see Dear Darkness in the ranks of the SIBA awards. Though many of the poems deal with the touchstones of life and food in the South, they are not in structure or even tone what we have come to expect from the canon of SIBA-endorsed verse. Our booksellers reached a little on this one, and I think that with more such efforts the award will carry more significance moving forward.

SIBA is starting a new brand: the Okra Picks, designed to promote newly released southern writing. This is a chance for SIBA to broaden its perceived tastes a little bit, to show that being Southern isn't being static. I'll be doing my best to find lesser-known writers and publishers to recommend. Any (either) of you readers out there who want to direct my attention to a book I might have missed should email me through the blog. I'll be happy to pass on any suggestions.

Congratulations to Kevin Young on his award, and congratulations to SIBA members for a wise selection this time around!

Versus: Monster Blog!!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s been a national, runaway sensation. There have been news stories, reviews and editorials on the book. It is far and away our bestselling title, whenever we’ve been able to keep it in stock, that is. . It’s truly shaping up to be the book of the summer, against all odds.

Well, I say “against all odds”, but that’s not really true. In fact, the odds were solidly in the book’s favor. For any of you who’ve been living under a rock or who in fact are zombies yourselves, let me present the basic concept: it’s the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, with scenes inserted in which the characters try to fight off zombies. There. It’s simple, isn’t it? Simple, and flat-out brilliant. The brainchild behind the project, Seth Grahame-Smith, is lurching & staggering all the way to the bank. His fingers are falling off as he counts his money.

Why? Because monsters are hot right now. Zombies are all over the place, that’s for sure. Max Brooks’ World War Z has been a big seller for us, especially since Arthur had it as a staff pick last month. There’s the Zombie Survival Guide, the Zen of Zombie, Zombie Blondes, and Never Slow Dance With a Zombie. For my money, the best of the lot can be found in Kelly Link’s book Magic for Beginners, in which her story, The Hortlak describes a convenience store at the edge of the world in which zombies shop for things that don’t exist. But then I’m something of a Kelly Link nut.

It’s not just zombies that have overrun the book world. We’ve got yetis, Bigfoot, Werewolves—you name it. And we can’t forget the hottest of all hot monsters, the vampire.

Not since Harry Potter came on the scene has there been such a breakout book for young readers as Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. That title and Meyer’s subsequent books -New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn- have been huge bestsellers, spawning a hit movie with sequels to come.

The monster-driven riches that authors like Meyer and Grahame-Smith are rolling in have gotten Arthur and me thinking about what the next hot (or hott) monster will be. We want in on this. We had a conversation with one of our Schokenly intelligent customers recently. She agreed with us that werewolves are up and coming, but thought there was probably room for the faerie folk to make a comeback. Arthur and I think that she’s the one to write it, so watch out for that somewhere down the line.

As for Arthur and me, we have slightly diverging opinions (as always) on what will be the next big sexy scary. So we’re doing an installment of Versus today. It’s a scare-off!

You first, Arthur:


ARTHUR:

Before I roll out my mythical pick for you I thought I might touch on what I feel are some points that make for a great mythical archetype.

1) Must Appear Human: vampires, werewolves, and even zombies to a degree can appear human at times. It would be difficult for a storyteller to weave a compelling tell about a monster who was always monstrous. Humanity is one of the few things that all of an author’s reader will have in common. Humanity also makes for an interesting plot point. The monsters desire to return to mere humanity. It is what drove the television series Angel.

2) Love: You are much more likely to be interested in something if there is a potential for a love story to be told. I would argue that Twilight is a love story, which just happens to include vampires. We are suckers (no pun intended vamps) for a good love story.

3) Mythos: any good mythical monster comes with a mythos, some larger than others. The larger the mythos the harder the job for the writer. Do you lock yourself into the existing mythos or forge ahead a slightly altered mythos at the risk of offending others?

I have decided on a “monster” that can appear human from time to time. This allows him/her to build relationships with humans and even love them. I chose a monster with a limited mythos so a new fresh one could be rolled out without traumatizing too many followers.

Insert drum roll here

My selection is the Djinn, or genie as we call them from time to time. The Djinn for all intents and purposes is a human who has been granted the rights to make wishes happen.

Several questions come about when thinking of this:

1) Why the lamp? First thing I would do would be to ditch the lamp. I would spin this into a different story. Lets say the Djinn’s spirit is contained with a vessel of some sort, not necessarily a lamp. The Djinn would need to be in constant vigilance over the whereabouts of their spirit vessel.

2) What about the wishes? I think a lot can be done here. Imagine a Djinn who has existed for eons. He has done both good and bad things. He is traumatized by the bad and desires only to do the good. He is at his deepest a good person who wishes to improve people’s lives. (See what I did there? He’s a genie that wishes something for himself. The depth of humanity there.)

3) Where’s the love? Through chance or luck our djinn's spirit vessel ends up in the possession of the most thoughtful woman he has ever met. He desires to stay with her forever but he knows there is a limit to what he can do. He is bound by magic older than himself. What if she desires to stay with him too but understands the condition he is in? They could try to unravel the mysteries surrounding what it means to be a Djinn together.

4) Finally, Where’s the plot? The plot is in the discovery. How did djinns come to be? Who are these people who are now djinns? How did their spirits become tied to these vessels? How or can they ever be free again?

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s it for me. I think the idea is fascinating but maybe I’m in the minority here. Either way I can’t wait to see what Bill’s got cooking:

BILL:

Arthur, that’s a very well thought-out take on the monster novel. I’m totally with you on the Djinn. I wish I could promise the same degree of insight with my pick. I do have a monster in mind, though I have no delusions that my choice is likely to catch on. Out of respect for your thoughtful choice, I’m going to try to get down a few notions of my own regarding what we can call the MLS (Monster Love Story):

1) I’ll take your notion of the monster/human one step further. I agree that a humanoid or even part-time human monster makes for a good story (and especially good film rights- let’s not forget the riches we’re after). But what I think makes a monster appealing is his/her/its reflection of some aspect of the human condition: the vampire is a lonely creature who hides from the light; the werewolf periodically loses control of his animal nature; the yeti… smells bad. It’s what we see in monsters and recognize in ourselves (or wish we did) that makes them alive and enticing to us.

2) Monster love is, ultimately, impossible love. You referred to the TV series Angel earlier (and I will bring you those DVD’s back, honest). I’ll also invoke Twilight here. Both stories feature love that cannot and must not be consummated. The most successful monster/human love stories bring the reader into contact with something dangerous without asking that he (or, more likely, she) commit to something dangerous.

3) The monster must be mortal. This is crucial. And not only mortal, but flawed in some way that makes him more vulnerable than even a human. The vampire is killed by a wooden stake; the werewolf is killed by a silver bullet; the yeti… I don’t know, the yeti dies from breathing his own stench. This of course introduces a measure of fragility to our monster, but more importantly it brings the threat of death. Let’s not forget that these MLS’s are ultimately about temptation and transgression. Nothing like almost certain death to give characters the permission to go walking on the wild side.

So, without further ado, here’s my pick for next year’s hot monster:

fanfare, please

It’s The Blob.

You heard me, The Blob. The Blob is the next great heartthrob. Or heartblob, as it were. Just bear with me. I can back it up using my own three rules:

1. The Blob embodies (sort of –he’s got no body) many aspects of the human condition, especially the adolescent condition: he’s an outsider, picked on because of his size; he’s an out-of-towner (well, an out-of-spacer) who doesn’t know anybody in his new school; he’s afflicted by that social disease that so many adolescents suffer from: mindless, endless consumption.

2. Is there any love more impossible than human/blob love? Beyond the inter-species difficulty, it’s clear that The Blob, in the rush of emotion and/or hunger of new romance, would absolutely smother a girlfriend.

3. Despite poor Blob’s massive size and unquenchable appetite, he’s just so fragile. He’s in terrible health—one hard winter will absolutely kill him.

So there you have it, Gothic Shoppers. Arthur and I have each set forth our picks for the hot monster to come. Feel free to leave a comment endorsing one or the other of the two plans (I’ll go ahead and concede victory to Arthur right now), or let us know what sexy beast you see slouching across the horizon.

It's a good day, Gothic Shoppers.

Way back when we first got started with this here blog-type-thing, I posted on those bookselling moments that make it all worthwhile. Just a few of those moments every couple of months can get a bookseller through a good long stretch of the doldrums. I bring this up now, because –shockingly—a customer just bought our last copy of Baseball Haiku.

Don’t panic, though. We’re ordering more.

At a former bookselling job, I was roundly mocked for suggesting this fine anthology as “the perfect holiday gift for fans of sports and poetry,” as though such a creature had not yet been invented. In the defense of my colleagues, total sales of the book came to a big fat goose egg. But I never lost hope in that little book. It seemed like a perfect idea. Baseball is a game that, for both spectator and player (well, outfielder, at least), provides ample opportunity for contemplation. Between concentrated bursts of action are periods of near stillness that can seem timeless. What better art form to capture such an atmosphere than haiku, poetry that draws heavily on a sense of stillness within the natural world?

Anyway, we’ve sold the heck out of those suckers.

As soon as it starts getting warm I get excited about going to baseball games. I won’t lie to you, Gothic Shoppers: no one who knows me even a little would confuse me with a die-hard sports fan. I just don’t have a brain for it. But I like baseball. I like its sounds and its pace and its place in the mythology of our country. And its hot dogs and beer.

I also really love baseball novels.

Baseball is by far the sport that gets the most representation in the world of fiction. I’m not sure why this is, though our understanding of it as America’s Game must have something to do with it. Perhaps it’s that contemplative pace that I was alluding to before (golf runs a close second to baseball in the world of fiction). Certainly the structure of a ball game lends itself to written description. Try, on the other hand, writing a chapter than contains a shot-by-shot description of a game between the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels. Your fingers would fall off.

This is not to say that there haven’t been great novels written on other sports. Don Delillo, for example, gave us End Zone, a brilliant postmodern novel about a college football team, and Dan Jenkins’ Semi-Tough is a funny-as-all-get-out story of an epic Super Bowl game. Gothic favorite Nick Hornby’s book, Fever Pitch –weirdly made into an american baseball movie—is now considered a classic of soccer (sorry, football) writing. Boxing been represented in any number of great novels, most significantly Leonard Gardner’s Fat City.

But lest I get off on a tangent, I’ll bring this post back to baseball novels and my fondness for them. The genre has some classics: Bang the Drum Slowly, Shoeless Joe, The Natural. But my favorites have been those odd, lesser-known titles –the ones that have come out of (I really am sorry about this) left field. Here are a few:

The Dixie Association, by Donald Hays – a great southern yarn about an Arkansan minor-league team, owned by a one-armed socialist and populated by ex-cons, American Indians, Cuban communists, and women. This could be your most fun read of the summer.

The Seventh Babe by Jerome Charyn – Charyn is one of those great American writers who has gone almost completely unnoticed by the reading public. In Seventh Babe, Charyn gives us a baseball story that resembles nothing so much as a medieval legend. We follow the ascent and downfall of a Jewish third basemen –Babe Ragland—through a crazy season with the 1923 Red Sox. (One reader who has noticed Charyn is Michael Chabon. If you liked Chabon’s last novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, do yourself a favor and read some Charyn.)

Season’s End by Tom Grimes – Set in the malaise of the late seventies and leading up to the players’ strike of ’81, Grimes’ novel is a bittersweet tale of baseball success amidst the escalating greed and racism of that time. It’s a great read, as much for the fan of classic American fiction as for the baseball fan.

The Brothers K by David James Duncan – Those who know Duncan’s work are passionate evangelists for it. His novel The River Why is considered, along with A River Runs Through It, to be the very epitome of the fly-fishing novel. Brothers K is one of those great, sprawling American family sagas. Against the backdrop of our country's Vietnam-era turbulence, the Chance family struggles to reconcile its two driving forces: religious fundamentalism and a love for baseball. It’s a moving and often funny book, and of course there’s a comeback-kid story to follow, as there should be in all baseball literature.

I could go on and on about this (as you all well know by now). But it’s a sunny day out there, and you Gothic Shoppers need to shut off the computer and get outside. First, though, swing by the store and pick up a copy of Baseball Haiku to take with you to a Bulls game. As I recently found out, though, there are no home games this weekend. You’ll have to wait until next Tuesday. Until then:

Blinding spring sun:
Upturned faces
Wonder where the fly ball went.

In Memoriam: Dave Arneson

I just want to echo the sentiments in this link. I’m not sure how my life would have panned out if it were not for the systems this man created. It is hard for me to imagine a world without RPG’s in it. The sad thing is to many his death will go unnoticed. Many people think RPG’s have nothing to do with their existence, and for many they might not. But, if you’ve ever played an RPG of any type, played a MMORPG, or enjoyed the feel of an RPG on your next generation gaming system then this man was responsible for helping define it.

Some may argue that the Monster Manual or the D&D Rules Book don’t constitute reading a book. I beg to differ those books are equal parts story and textbook, and in a way more difficult to get through than a regular book.

In closing, this man created the skeleton on which all RPG’s are forged today and for that I honor his passing.

Like, Wao!

Hi again, folks.

Many of you have probably already heard that the summer reading for the incoming class of 2013 is Junot Diaz's book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book was chosen from an excellent list of finalists, but I will now freely admit that I was pulling for this title all along. It's a challenging but fun read, and I think it will make for a great campus-wide conversation in the fall.

Diaz was on campus a few months ago, giving what I understand was a fantastic reading. Any of you who missed it can go to the NPR website and hear a clip of the author reading a passage from Oscar Wao. Check it out, and if you like what you hear you'll find plenty of copies of the book here at the store.

Taking Stock

Hi Gothic Shoppers.

The throngs of you who flocked to our doors this past Saturday probably noticed that our doors were locked. At least, I hope you all noticed that; otherwise, our security procedures need some adjusting.

It wasn’t that we’d grown tired of servicing your book needs. No, we were engaged in that great retail ritual to which we all must submit: we were doing inventory. Now, those of you who have not worked in a bookshop before do not know the pure joy of a physical inventory. It involves pulling out every single book, magazine, card, and tchotchke, and scanning its barcode with a little raygun until a beep is heard.

It takes a really long time.

I’d like to tell you a story of how I came to enjoy the process, how I came to feel close to my fellow booksellers as we pursued some common goal. I’d like to say, even, that I was a ray of sunshine the whole time. If I tried to tell you this, though, my coworkers would murder me on the spot. (I acted like something of a you-know-what there towards the end, and I duly apologize)

No, none of us really came to feel anything other than dread and annoyance about the whole thing. However, it did give me a renewed sense of the scope of our stock here at the Gothic. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the titles of the books I was scanning; that just slows a person down. But once in a while I would surface from my ennui-induced walking coma to find myself holding a book on the conquest of the American West, or some random book on mathematics, or a book on making pickles, or Kevin Young’s volume of film noir poetry, or Foucault’s History of Madness, or (I’m not making this up), a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And I’d think to myself: wow, we’ve really got the bases covered here.

If it sounds like I’m bragging here, well, I can’t deny it. We do have a seriously well-stocked bookstore, and, after all, the purpose of this blog isn’t to tell the world that we suck rotten eggs.

So, after all, in the midst of the hellish slog that was inventory, I once again found purpose as a bookseller, and was truly glad for the experience...






I’m kidding, of course. I hope I never have to perform that godawful task again. But we do have a lot of great books here.

Dang

Dang.

Not five minutes ago I caught a glimpse of some actual, honest-to-god sunlight through the coffee shop window. I dug my super-cool shades out of my desk drawer, summoned my co-worker Captain Courageous to man the front counter, and made a break for the outside. But by the time I got there, clouds had blocked out the sun, and that inescapable feeling of gloom that’s been hanging around for the last week or so was back in place.

I’ve been doing what I can to help usher in Spring, Gothic Shoppers. I hauled all those short-sleeved shirts out of the basement. I pumped up the tires of my bike. I’ve even been listening to the Meat Puppets non-stop, and if there’s any better way to draw down summer in a shamanistic fusion of noise and jangle, I can’t think of it.

It looked like it was working, too. We had a handful of nice days. Sitting outside days. Hiking in the park days. Days that promised a near future when you wouldn’t really be able to remember being cold. That was until, ironically, Spring Break. We waved adieu to the departing students, most of them off to warmer climes, and they left in their collective wake one (hopefully) final smackdown from winter.

It’s been almost a week of cold and constant rain. Colds are catching. Basements are flooding. Enough is enough.

Here’s what I’ve decided: I’ve been reading too many gloomy-weather books. Back when we in a serious drought here in the Bull City (those were the days), some bookseller colleagues and I made a list of as many books as we could think of that featured the word “rain” in the title. Our theory was that if we hit upon the right number we’d make some rain. Sure enough, our customers pitched in and we came up with a good long list, after which we got three days of downpour.

Now, Arthur and I don’t really like to be confronted with the fact that with these posts we’re basically shouting into the void, so I’m not going to throw out a plea for any Gargoyle readers to start listing books here. But I will pledge to either of you who might be reading that I’m going to do my part by reading almost exclusively warm weather books for a while. I’m going to try to get our customers to do the same.

I’ve ordered some of my favorite baseball novels for the store (you’ll hear more about those goodies when the Bulls’ season starts in April), and I’ll be shoving them into people’s hands as soon as they get here. That should get spring rolling.

For my part, I’m going to resume the Don Winslow kick that I had going for a while there. Winslow writes killer mystery novels set in southern California that can best be described as surf-noir. When Royal, my good bookselling pal, recommended Winslow’s The Dawn Patrol, I, um, voiced my skepticism. Emphatically. Shows what I know. Winslow is great at writing taut, suspenseful plots while evoking the sunny, laid-back lifestyle of surfers and beachdwellers.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned here on the Gargoyle that Padgett Powell’s Edisto is being reissued. You Gothic Shoppers should come buy a copy as soon as you can. You’ll be doing your part to drive out the late dreariness by diving into Poewll’s excellent novel of languid mischievousness in the South Carolina lowlands.

If these warm-weather reads don’t do the trick. We’ll have to resort to more drastic measures. I’ll keep copies of the Grapes of Wrath and the Worst Hard Time on hand, just in case.

And if I see anyone reading Call of the Wild or A Perfect Storm any time soon, there’s going to be trouble.

I'm Just Tryin' To Find The Bridge

It may or may not surprise some of you (well, any of the three of you who may be reading this blog) to read that while sitting in a stark white room, listening to a grown man make guttural sounds that were not in any way intelligible but that nonetheless constituted poetry, I encountered a new sense of purpose as a bookseller.

I know what you’re thinking: Again?

It’s true, I’m constantly redefining (or, at the very least, restating) what it is we booksellers do and why we do it. But in addition to the giant sack of money that the Gothic hands me at the end of each work day, what makes me enjoy being a bookseller is the multifaceted nature of the job. The interaction of customers, publishers, authors and booksellers provides for a job that is rarely the same from week to week. In that way, it’s very much like the game of Pinball, although we should probably not get started on that train of thought because then I’ll use up all my allotted space trying to lay out a cohesive argument for why there should be a Gothic Bookshop-themed pinball machine, preferably manufactured by Williams.(Which there really should be.)

So anyway, there are always more reasons out there to be a bookseller, and you can find them if you’re into the job. Which I am, so bear with me here.

See, a couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be selling books at the poetry festival Infection in the Sentence. (Many thanks to Rebecca Gibson for making that possible) It was a great scene. The mix of poets, from Cecil Taylor to Susan Howe to Tracie Morris to Eileen Myles, was impressive in itself. But the energy that the poets generated in collaboration with the students who organized and attended the conference was something to see. Between readings the conference-goers would spill out into the hall to discuss what they’d just heard. It was, to borrow (steal) from the conference’s title, totally infectious.

Over the course of the meeting, I got the opportunity to chat with some of the graduate students and professors who were in attendance. Many of them are themselves poets and writers, whose books we’ll be keeping on our shelves for some time to come. It was clear that the experimental styles of the visiting poets had energized them, and one could imagine a straight line from the readings to the adventurous work that we’ll see from each of them in the future.

Now, I have to admit that I spent most of my time outside the readings. I was babysitting my table of books, and I was pretty well engrossed in Forrest Gander’s recent novel, As A Friend. (It’s a real stunner of a book and currently featured on our staff picks table at 30% off, hint hint.) At one point, though, a poet whose work I respect quite a bit gave me the heads-up that I needed to catch the Christian Bök reading in person.

If anyone had described to me a poetry reading that was to contain gibberish sound-spews, entire poems using but a single vowel, and invented alien-language love songs sung aloud, I would have fled in the other direction as quickly as I could. But I ducked into the room and was completely blown away by what I saw. The reading was precisely as I describe it above, but in practice it was closer to watching a punk rock show than catching a reading within the halls of academia. While I watched it go on, I had the feeling that I should be running out into the street and pulling people in by force to see what I was seeing. Because something as exciting as Bök’s work should be seen by as many people as possible, and not just by the people in the white room that rainy Saturday.

And that’s where we booksellers come in. At our best we can be a bridge between what happens within an academic community and curious readers who find themselves outside of that community. There’s no denying that experimental poets, novelists, and critics can drive global language and thought towards places as yet unexplored. But there’s an improved chance of that happening when readers have as much opportunity to stumble on such work in the course of random browsing as they do to discover it through intentional and guided study.

That’s why it’s important to us to keep work by experimental writers on our shelves. Sure, it’s not as profitable as loading up with copies of Twilight (which we do have on the shelves, at a 10% discount, hint hint). But it’s one of the ways that we serve both the Duke community and the community of Durham at large. We provide a commercial –which is to say accessible—context for challenging, progressive literature which seems less threatening by its placement next to more familiar and less intimidating books. It’s the democracy of retail (someone shoot me now, please, for coining that particular phrase), and if done right it vastly extends the reach of the impressive work being done and presented here at the University.

Right, thanks for hanging in there with me. Next week I swear I’ll just write about baseball books.

The Winter of Our Bookish Contentment

Friday's Guest Blogger
Stuart Wells covers book news and continuing education for the Office of News & Communications at Duke. He’s also in charge of news release production and distribution and the gathering of Duke-related news clips.

You’ll need an extra large book bag to hold all the new titles arriving this winter from the studies, offices and sabbatical hideouts of Duke authors.

From history to politics, from witch trials to the economics of obesity, Duke faculty have been generously sharing insights and personal reflections.

Oxford University Press has just published history professor William Chafe’s book, The Rise and Fall of the American Century: The United States from 1890-2010.

The book describes the rise -- and potential fall -- of the U.S., a nation more powerful, more wealthy and more dominant than any in human history.

Chafe also acknowledges the persistent challenges the U.S. has faced and continues to face -- inequalities of race, gender and income that contradict its vision of itself as "a land of opportunity."

And unlike our memories of U.S. history classes in high school, Chafe brings his account to the present day. The epilogue discusses important economic and political events through 2008, including the financial crisis and the 2008 presidential election.

By the way, Chafe’s groundbreaking set of interviews about African-American life in the segregated South, Remembering Jim Crow, is now available in an affordable paperback edition with a remastered MP3 CD of the companion radio documentary program produced by American RadioWorks. The book was also edited by Duke public policy professor Robert Korstad and Duke history professor Raymond Gavins.


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Art and art history professor Kristine Stiles wrote the monograph-length survey text for a new book on the internationally renowned Serbian performance artist, Marina Abramovic. The book, Marina Abramovic, has been published by Phaidon in its artist book series.

As the first book in more than a decade to look at Abramovic’s work in its entirety, this monograph will offer a fresh take on an artist whose work is key to understanding the latest developments in contemporary art.

Abramovic was the winner of the Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 for her piece "Balkan Baroque," a multimedia installation and performance.

Watch an excerpt on YouTube here.


Art historian Richard Powell's new book, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (The University of Chicago Press), offers a stunning visual tour of the evolution of black portraiture from the late 18th century through the modern day, linking art with slavery and the civil rights movement.

The term “cutting a figure” gained popularity during the 19th century and refers to people who make a spectacular display of themselves, he says.

One such figure, the legendary African musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, is portrayed in truly iconic terms by Barkley L. Hendricks, whose Fela: Amen, Amen, Amen … could be viewed full size (60 X 48 inches) at the recent Nasher Museum of Art show. Powell writes that Hendricks’ Fela “employs his art as a creative offense and his body as a jump-suited defense against moral hypocrisy, political corruption, and, above all, social invisibility.”

This Month at Duke article here.

Professor Powell’s website here.


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Law professor Jedediah Purdy’s new book critiquing America's ideology of freedom is getting the best kind of advance praise – a starred review in Publishers Weekly.


Coming to bookstores on March 3, Purdy’s A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom (Knopf) is touted by the magazine as a “tour de force of engaged political philosophy.”

LINK/Publisher’s details:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400044474

In his wide-ranging account from the author of For Common Things, we’re reminded that our ideas of self-mastery and freedom have given us both stirring liberation movements and pointless wars.

At this time when economic forces swirl beyond our control, Purdy believes realizing our ideals of freedom today will require the political vision to reform the institutions we share.

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Visiting economics instructor Eric Finkelstein has been getting timely attention for his new book, The Fattening of America: How the Economy Makes Us Fat, If It Matters, and What to Do About It. Finkelstein, a health economist, told Politico earlier this month that tighter family budgets are making fresh produce and whole-grain foods less affordable, pushing families toward fast food and other less healthful alternatives.

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Gerda Lerner, a visiting professor of history, is out with Living With History/Making Social Change, a stimulating collection of essays in an autobiographical framework that spans the period from 1963 to the present. The essays illuminate how thought and action connected in Lerner’s life, how the life she led before she became an academic affected the questions she addressed as a historian, and how the social and political struggles in which she engaged informed her thinking.

On Wednesday, April 1, at 3:30 p.m., at an event hosted by the Sally Bingham Center, Gerda Lerner will give a reading and book signing at the Biddle Rare Book Room in Perkins Library. The Gothic Bookshop will be on site to sell copies of the book.
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Duke history professor Thomas Robisheaux is on the public radio/bookstore circuit this month to let folks know about the release of his new book, The Last Witch of Langenburg.

The release coincides with the anniversary of Anna Fessler’s death on the festive holiday of Shrove Tuesday in 1672 Germany. Fessler died after eating one of her neighbor's buttery cakes. Could it have been poisoned? Robisheaux chronicles one of Europe's last and most complicated witch trials.

He joined “State of Things” host Frank Stasio this week to talk about the roles
religion, gender and fearful imagination play in this vivid story and in
our society. You can listen to the segment here.


I’ll have a few more Duke books to share in a future post, but maybe that’s enough for now to keep us reading -- and thinking this winter.

You’re all so shy….

Events in the Gothic today (well, not exactly in) brought to mind children’s books. Arthur is the proud father of a new baby girl and I started thinking about what books I give babies. I know lots of people go the traditional route of Goodnight Moon or Pat the Bunny, both wonderful books and ones kids love, but I like to give lesser known ones and ones that I think are fun and hope that the parents will too since they are apt to have to read it out loud over and over and over. My current favorite is SouperChicken, a charming story of a chicken who can read and how this goes from being a bad thing to being a really good thing. Two of my favorites for little girls, as antidotes to the usual roles for girls in fairy tales, are The Paper Bag Princess and Cinder Edna. The Paper Bag Princess is the tongue-in-cheek story of a princess named Elizabeth who has to rescue her prince from a dragon. Cinder Edna is Cinderella’s neighbor who falls in love with the prince’s goofy younger brother, Rupert. There are two shoes left at the ball, one slipper and one loafer, and the contrasts between the two couples will leave you giggling.

So why, you might ask, did this start out with “you’re all so shy?” I know people out there are reading our blog, but no one ever answers my questions. What are your favorite kids’ books to give as gifts -- or read yourself? Show me you’re bold – comment!

Whoa-oh-oh-oh

Estelle Bennett died just the other day.

Some of you aren’t going to know who that is. Heck, most of you won’t. She wasn’t any grand dame of the publishing biz. She wasn’t some obscure Welsh writer known for talking animal stories. She wasn’t the stoic wife of a famously drunken crime writer. Estelle Bennett was a member of The Ronettes.

You know, The Ronettes: Be My Baby, Wall of Sound, beehive hairdos, all that good stuff? Now, I love me some girl group music. The Marvelettes, The Shirelles, The Crystals, The Supremes – I dig it all. Give me some harmonies and complicated backup vocals over a cheap sound system down at the local watering hole, and I’m happy as the proverbial clam.

You may rightly be wondering, Gothic Shoppers, what difference it could possibly make that I’m a Ronettes fan. This is a blog about books and bookselling, after all. But the thing is, (and you did know I’d make this work, didn’t you?) there’s a Ronettes book connection.

Let’s flash back to the Mesozoic Era: I’m fresh out of college, living in Texas, attempting (and failing) to turn a literary bookstore into a raging success, and inhabiting a rundown house with three other guys. We’re all broke, all the time, so all we ever do is read and talk. And listen to rock and roll. We pass books around and stay up late into the night discussing them as though they constitute Holy Scripture. There are rambling discussions of Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges, Gertrude Stein, and (god help me) Derrida. But by far the most discussed book of that stretch of time is, hands-down, Be My Baby: How I survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette by Ronnie Spector with Vince Waldron.

We were obsessed with this book. This is no exaggeration. During the month or so that we took turns reading this now criminally out of print masterpiece, the house was flooded with the thundering, lush sound of the Ronettes’ music. We memorized passages from the book. We debated what the creepiest aspect of Ronnie’s relationship with the great (and twisted) producer Phil Spector was. We lived and breathed Ronnie Spector, her sister Estelle Bennett, and their cousin Nedra Talley.

I still love to read books on music, and there are plenty of killer titles out there. Geoff Dyer’s book on jazz, But Beautiful, is as elegant a piece of writing as you’re likely to find on any subject. In England’s Dreaming, Jon Savage drags punk rock history snarling and spitting through pre- and post- Thatcher Britain, forcing the reader to wonder who gave birth to whom. Durham’s own John Darnielle wrote a nifty little masterpiece for the 33&1/3 series, a novel about one troubled young man’s obsession with Black Sabbath. For that matter, George Pelecanos’ A Firing Offense and Sean Stewart’s Perfect Circle are as much about rock and roll as they are about crime and clairvoyance, respectively.

I could go on and on (and you’ll be surprised, I know, when I don’t) with such a list. But while each of these books is in its own way amazing, it’s been about a couple of decades since those Be My Baby days. I’m skeptical of hitting that level of fandom that I had back then. When you’re in your twenties, music matters in that particular, intense way that tends to mellow across the years. These days I’m more likely to enjoy a book on music for the skill of the writer rather than the appeal of his subject. Heck, I’ll even read about Randy Newman, if Greil Marcus is writing about him.

Still, whenever I hear the opening drumbeats of a good Ronettes song, I’m back in that crappy old house, sitting across a table from my best friends. One of us has the book open and is reading aloud from it. We’re all laughing.

It’s a good memory. Many thanks to the Ronettes. And rest in peace, Estelle.

Versus: Settings

This week for the Versus installment of the Gargoyle, Arthur and I are going to tackle fictional or mythical settings. We’ve been saving this one up, and I’m excited to see what Arthur comes up with. (Of course, our favorite actual setting is the Gothic Bookshop. Especially that nook under the Religion Sale Books table, which is where I like to nap…)

Arthur first:

Before I launch into a nice meaty chunk of why I picked the locale I did let me first address my criteria for a great book location. In my case, my location is fictional so the number one criterion for me is: is the place believable. Secondly, would be can I close my eyes and see the details the author describes to me. Thirdly, does the location fit within the greater scope of the book? Lastly, Is the location relevant to what is transpiring in the book?

My favorite setting for a book is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry from J.K Rowling’s’ Harry Potter novels.

Is Hogwarts believable? I think so; after all it’s really just a castle on the outside. The English countryside is dotted with castles. Hogwarts is located in Scotland in the novels so a castle would hardly be a stretch for Scotland. Inside of Hogwarts there are all sort of magical things, paintings that talk, ghosts that walk, and moving staircases. These things would all be typical to find in a castle, especially a magical one.

Secondly, can I close my eyes and imagine the place? Absolutely, I daresay nearly everyone who read the Potter novels has a pretty clear image of Hogwarts. They may differ slightly but I believe they would overall be very similar. Deep down inside I believe a good book to be fuel for the imagination. Rowling does a wonderful job of painting Hogwarts almost as a living breathing entity. The best part is that Harry has never had a home that he felt comfortable and welcomed in. Then he arrives at Hogwarts and realizes that it is his home, and for the first time he feels wanted somewhere. Rowling uses the castle to cement the protagonist. It actual adds something to a character.

Thirdly, does Hogwarts fit in the grander scope of the Potter novels? Well we have schools for lawyers, doctors, and engineers, so why not a school for up and coming wizards and witches? If one is prepared to accept the premise of the novels, that witches and wizards exist. Then certainly one can understand the need for a place to teach them the craft. As the books go on we see Hogwarts importance grow, culminating in the final battles of the books taking place at the castle. In fact I would argue that well over 50% of the Potter books take place inside the castle.

Finally, is Hogwarts relevant to what is transpiring in the books? Well not to sound cliché’ (thanks Obama) but Hogwarts is a beacon of hope in the wizarding community. It is a school for the future of wizardkind. We know that other schools for magic exist but none are revered as highly as Hogwarts. Hogwarts becomes extraordinarily relevant when it becomes the host/home for the Boy who Survived, Harry Potter. Potter’s presence at Hogwarts, and subsequent growing love for the building, cement the place as a relevant, vital part of the books. We see this particularly in the book The Order of the Phoenix with the addition of the Room of Requirement. The room is an area of Hogwarts that becomes available whenever there is a great need for a place. The room becomes available to Harry as a place for him and his fellow students to practice their Defense against the Dark Arts. They are unable to do so normally because of a haggish teacher named Professor Umbridge. Harry states in the book that it is almost as though Hogwarts were helping them fight back by providing them with the room as a place to train.

In closing, there are so many more things I could touch on, which in and of itself is a testimony to how viable a pick I feel this location is.



Now Bill:

Arthur, I’m totally with you on your pick. No fictional setting has absorbed me as much as Hogwarts, not since I was a kid and reading about Sherwood Forest or Middle Earth or the House of Usher. I think I may go a little more abstract, though.

You guys are going to think I’m taking the easy way out, but I’m gonna have to go with The Garden of Eden for my Best-Setting Versus pick today. Think about it. Whether you’re a biblical literalist or a reader who’s inclined to treat Adam & Eve’s backyard as something closer to a mythical ideal, you’re affected by the notion of Paradise. (And I hope I'm not offending anyone by calling Paradise a mythical setting; for the sake of this installment of Versus, I'm treating the Bible purely as a literary text)

When Arthur and I decided on settings for our Versus topic this week, a cascade of ideas ran through my head: Yoknapatawpha, Narnia, Macondo, the futuristic dystopia of Orwell’s 1984, Superman’s Metropolis. It kind of made me dizzy until I realized that each of these settings are defined by the degree to which they resemble or diverge from the notion of utopia.

So where do we get the notion that there is any state of perfection towards which we can strive? What begets the dissatisfaction that we humans feel when all is not right? I’m going to say that we can lay the responsibility, if not the blame, on the book of Genesis and its notion that there was once an environmental manifestation of perfection.

We don’t have a whole lot to go on for a physical description of Paradise, but for generations we’ve been undeniably affected, addled, and inspired by the idea of it.

So that’s my pick, and we’ll see you next week, Gothic Shoppers.

Speaking of pet peeves….

I’m not sure actually that this is a pet peeve. It may just be a peeve, but for me, it’s a big one. Amazon has announced it will soon be bringing out the Kindle 2, an updated version of their electronic book reader. Now, I don’t object to the Kindle in general. I will probably never use one because I like to see, feel, and smell books too much to give the actual thing up, but I understand the desire to be able to carry around many books without carrying the actual books. What I do object to is that books for the Kindle are only available from Amazon. Why isn’t this restraint of trade? Why do publishers go along with this? Why does Indie Next (the independent bookstore wing of the American Booksellers Association) not bring their collective weight to bear on publishers about this? We can sell regular e-books from our website, why not Kindle format titles? AND NOW, on top of this, Stephen King has agreed to write a short story that will be available only in Kindle format for the launch of the new Kindle. How could he?? Apparently he doesn’t remember what it was like to be an unknown. Only a few writers ever become a commercial success and of those, rarely does one ever become known because of Amazon. They become known because people who work in independent bookstores read their books, like them and get them in the hands of other readers. After all that, then they might end up being a good deal on Amazon.

Okay, I’m done. Not a big rant, but I haven’t had enough caffeine and I have lots of returns to do. Tempted though I may be, I won’t send back all of our Stephen King....

Trans-Nation Boogie

Welcome to Monday, Gothic Shoppers. Like many of you, I’m not normally inclined to celebrate the first day of the working week, but given that seven days ago I completely spaced out on what day it was and failed to turn in my weekly blog post, I’m happy just to be slightly more on the ball this week.

I should warn you right now that we’re in for one of those sprawling, directionless rambles that I occasionally turn in. It’s a beautiful day; my supplier next door has me on the way to being fully wired, and I’ve got a couple of notions that have been kicking around in my head for a while. I think it’s time to throw them at the wall and see if they turn into anything coherent (unlikely, I know).

What’s up is that I went to hear some incredible jazz about a week ago, and the shortlist for the best translated book award has been announced. You get where I’m going with this, right? No? Well, I can’t be sure myself, but let’s see what happens.

First things first: It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, and we at the Gothic Bookshop want to offer our congratulations and gratitude to its staff. In addition to the many services that it offers Duke Students, the Center brings excellent jazz to campus, in keeping with the spirit of its namesake. We’re lucky to have them here on campus.

As part of its anniversary celebration, the MLW Center, in conjunction with Duke Performances, hosted the great pianist Geri Allen for a performance of Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite. My friend Stompy Jones and I made the scene, and I kid you not when I say that this was one of the most exciting jazz shows I’ve seen in a good long time. It was fascinating to watch a performer at her peak bring her talent to bear on an extended piece written by another composer.

When a jazz musician such as Allen takes on a piece by another artist, her goal is to honor the original composition while making the piece a vehicle for her own voice. No two musicians will perform the same piece in an identical manner, and in fact no two performances of that piece by the same musician will be alike. This is how an older standard such as Mary Lou Williams’ Hesitation Boogie stays alive: by being constantly, subtly altered.

Is the same true in the literary world? Certainly there are multiple English translations of almost every classic text, but is the goal of a translator, like that of a jazz artist, to use the text as a vehicle for his own stylings? I’m going to have to say no. A translator’s job, ideally, is not to reinvent a text, but to keep its translation as close as possible to the spirit of the original. And the driving reason behind a new translation of a work is (or should be) a renewed attempt to get the thing right.

Now, that’s not to say that it isn’t entertaining to watch a translator go off the reservation once in a while. One of my favorite translated-lit memories is of coming across a passage in Federico Garcia Lorca’s beautiful book, Poet in New York. In the poem The King of Harlem, there’s a very simple line: Hay que huir. Now, literally this means we must flee, or one should flee. The Simon & White translation, however, has this line translated as there must be some way out of here (!!). I’m sorry, was someone a little distracted by the copy of John Wesley Hardin playing in the background? How did a Dylan lyric make its way into a Lorca poem? Or had Dylan been browsing a little Lorca when he sat down to write All Along The Watchtower? Maybe it's a private joke on the part of the translator, a tip of the hat to Bob's well-known familiarity with Lorca. I love thinking about this kind of stuff (Yes, Gothic Shoppers, I’m a geek, but you knew that already).

Weirdo exceptions aside, translations of books from other countries offer us the chance to understand, even experience, other cultures from our remote vantage point. For this reason above all others, though the translator’s role in the world of books is paramount, he must remain as invisible as possible, so as not to block the bridge he’s attempting to build.

That bridge to other cultures is something we’re dedicated to maintaining here at the Gothic. Whether it’s a book written in English right here in Durham, or any one of the broad selection of translated works we’ve got on the shelves, we like to think that we offer myriad jumping-off points for a reader to go outside his or her own experience.

So come in and browse, or let us recommend a good translated work to you. Then when you get home, slap Geri Allen’s Zodiac Suite Revisited on the stereo for some background music while you cross that bridge.

The Road Less Peeved

So, I have a couple of pet peeves when it comes to what I read. If I start reading a book at it becomes apparent that any of these peeves are present it makes the book tons easier to put down. Now before you lambaste me for quitting so easily let me tell you that in general I am a very forgiving reader. You have to go out of your way to lose me but some books go above and beyond.


Just the other day I picked up a new read from our hardcover fiction section entitled Beat the Reaper. The book had garnered pretty good word of mouth. It was a Booksense recommended title. I opened it and started reading; within the first 15 pages it had broken at least 3 of my peeves in half.


Let me amend this post to include a warning:


Just because a book possesses my pet peeves, it doesn’t mean it’s not good for someone else.


1- Swearing un-profoundly: I do not like it when an author seems to include a ton of swear words. By and large I think of swear words as weak writing. I believe an author turns to swear words when they lack the imagination to come up with anything else to say. This does not mean I’m against an occasional swear word. I believe that when used properly a swear word can have huge impact. Especially, when said swear word is out of place or character. It can emphasize how much a character is struggling with a situation or person. When every other word out of a characters mouth is a swear word, they lose any impact they ever could have had. A second reason a writer turns to swear words is to appear edgy. Much like why teenagers swear these days, so they can appear cool to their friends, an author might turn to swear words to appear cutting edge or noirish. I'm all for returning the impact to a good swear word by adopting the less is more attitude.


2- Footnotes: If I wanted to read footnotes I would choose a scholarly text. I especially hate it when the author uses footnotes to try an add humor to the novel. Why not add the humor to the actual book instead. As I explained earlier, just breaking a single one of my peeves is not crime enough to stop me from reading a book, and there is a prime example here. The book Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett contains footnotes and I plowed through them and still can highly recommend the book. To me footnotes can add little to the story and distracts me from the actual plot of the novel.


3- Stereotypical Cookie Cutter Characters: The number one offender of this too me is the loose woman. I have read books with women as the heroines, the villains, the partner, the victim, and the professor but I really cannot stand it when without any rhyme or reason a female character is included to give a man something to do (and by that I mean sexually) These are throw away characters that add nothing to a plot. They are merely used again to show a character as a womanizer or to appear edgy again (see #1). Characters in general deserve more than stereotypes. The black rapper, the Italian gangster, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the elf archer, or the cannibalistic serial killer, they all deserve better classifications. When an author includes a character in a story is it too much to ask that they be fleshed out and somewhat original?


When I started thinking of writing a book a few years back (yes I’m still writing it). I bought a book entitled Building Believable Characters. It is a great book that helps you build a characters back-story up so that when they appear in your novel you can figure out how they would react to a plot device by just looking at it. It is a fantastic book and a must read for any aspiring author.


Well those are my pet peeves and I know many of you may not share mine, agree with me on some but not others, or just have radically different ones. Feel free to let me know what yours are because complaining is fun.