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.

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 Wall of Promise

After last’s week’s surprise mention of The Gargoyle in the email newsletter, The Week At Duke (many thanks to Gargoyle contributor Stuart Wells and everyone else over there in the Office of News and Communications), we’ve had a steady stream of Gothic customers coming by to check out our new look. Response has been good, I’m glad to say, and it’s been gratifying to watch people cross the threshold and head straight for the New Arrivals section.

(WARNING: Timely Book/Democracy Analogy Ahead!)

Even for those of us who have worked in books for, well, decades, a wall full of new books holds an amazing allure. You learn after a while that a good percentage of all books published each month are going to be junk. There’s no way around that. Corporate booksellers and publishing conglomerates have partnered up in such a way that pushing a lot of garbage out the door and onto the shelves in the hope of big profits is simply too attractive. And while we here at the Gothic try to be discriminating in our ordering, we’re probably going to get a few dogs on the shelf once in a while, too. (We’ll do our best to sell you exclusively Really Good Stuff, though. Honest.) But when any of us opens a box of brand-spanking-new books, we get a little light-headed. Because before any of the books are cracked, before one delves into a book and assesses its quality for himself, the promise of a fantastic read is intact, seductive, and undeniably enjoyable.

I can’t deny having the same feeling today, the day before the inauguration of our 44th president. There’s a tangible promise in the air, a promise of –as we’ve heard almost ad nauseum—change. Now, I hope I’m not stepping out of bounds here on The Gargoyle by saying that I count myself among those who look forward eagerly to experiencing life under the new administration. I’ve believed in Obama starting with his very first appearance on the national stage. I’m not, however, naïve. I know that reality tends to wreak havoc on aspirations. I know that the nation will experience some disappointments and setbacks as those who have as their goal the betterment of the nation make difficult and pragmatic decisions. Tomorrow, we move from the Realm of Hope into the Realm of How-It-Is.

But from this vantage point, all is promise. All is good. All that follows will be that for which millions have yearned over these months, years, decades.

In a (much) smaller way, that’s what we hope our customers feel when upon entering The Gothic the first thing they see is a big wall of brand-new and as yet unread books: a promise of discovery, of adventure, of many great reads to come.