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.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Monday, March 9, 2009
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.
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.
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