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.

What Makes It All Worthwhile

The thing is: bookselling is something of an uphill battle. You have to have a sense of mission to keep at this quixotic endeavor, and many of us do. But the stronger the sense of mission one has, greater is his potential for getting discouraged.

Now, folks have been proclaiming the death of reading for as long as I’ve been in the business. Video games, cable television, IPods, texting: each of these in its ascendancy –according to pundits, educators, and codgers alike—has spelled the demise of biblio-centric culture. I don’t really buy into all that hysteria. When you read that more kids lined up for the release of the last Harry Potter book than lined up for the last installment in the Star Wars series, it’s hard to argue that books are fading into obscurity.

Still, I can’t deny that it’s getting harder to put good books into people’s hands. It’s increasingly rare for someone to walk into the Gothic and ask for a recommendation, and it’s rarer still for the mainstream publishing industry to release a book that makes a missionary of you.

It can wear you down.

But there are days when it’s all worthwhile. A newly invigorated Lost Roads Publishers has reissued three books by the great American poet Frank Stanford, and I’ve ordered them for our store. Stanford was a major poet, the best I’ve ever read, and he’s been all but ignored in the canon of American literature. Once in a while I’ll run into a fellow fanatic (Duke’s own Tony Tost is one), but for the most part, his work remains unknown to most readers.

Stanford’s books have been out of print for so long that it’s criminal. I’ve had to talk to customers about him as though he were some sort of imaginary friend. There are books of his that I’ve never even seen. Soon, though, I’ll be able to force our unsuspecting customers to read The Singing Knives, You, and, most importantly, The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, Stanford’s 400-page poem that, until this edition, had never been published in a corrected, annotated edition.

Do these reissues constitute a major, significant moment in the world of publishing and bookselling? Maybe not, but, given the chance, I can put these books into people’s hands and be excited about doing so.

That’s enough, for now.