The Muttering of Old Books

Dale has opened an interesting thread, taken up by Jarrett, on going to a bookstore—perhaps the finest bookstore in the world, Powells—and feeling less than excited, newly so, about the books on the shelves. He describes the “dreary hopelessness” of walking through the philosophy section, an experience that used to be so satisfying.

I suggested this might be a distribution problem—that the really good new stuff is out there, hiding, unpublished and unnoticed because of corporate decisions relating to “the market” (us) and its perceived desires. I think it might not be that simple, though, having thought about it further.

Walter Benjamin spent weeks at a time not talking to other people. Cornel West doesn’t do this. There are demands on his time that are probably getting in the way of some writing that might, in fact, get Dale really excited. If not West, then others. Very few of us know how to be alone.

What are the really important books of our time? Can we know? This is a question that has been asked in different ways by many different bloggers, some of whom appear in the list at left and many more that don’t. Is this also a function of our failure to embrace aloneness and thinking hard? I’m not sure, but I think we need to keep looking. I think we need to keep going to Powell’s. Like Icarus falling unheeded into the drink, we may not know for some time.

I was talking this afternoon with a mentor from my publishing past, who told me that Vicky Nelson, author of The Secret Life of Puppets, puts it this way in answer to someone who was getting less than excited by the books in her high-powered reading group: forget the reading group. Go to the grimiest used bookstore you can find and head for the dustiest section. Something will leap off the shelf at you, and it won’t be what you’re expecting. It might be Icarus.

A childhood friend has recently left the rat race and opened her own used bookstore in Picton, Ontario. Olivia & Co comes with the eponymous cat draped over comfy furniture. It’s not very grimy, at least from the photos I can see on her website, but I’ll bet there are a few gems in there. And at the very least there’s a cat to balance the muttering of old books, as Jarrett puts it.

Whither American Fiction?

One of the things my mother does when we meet up, here or in Bodega Bay, is that she (messily) unloads a pile of things she wants me to see that she’s been saving up since last time. One of these latest unpackings was some excerpts from the current issue of the Antioch Review, a piece called “The Writing Life: Envy and Editing” by Daniel Harris. In this he wrings his hands about the state of American letters, where creative writing programs mass-produce out-of-work MFAs, all of whom are first in line to nab spots at prestigious art colonies and write stuff that is read only by others like them. Whom they envy and take delight when some small failure or other befalls them. It’s a shrinking pool, he says, one that despises the mass-market authors but secretly envies them more than anyone else.

I’m not sure I follow the entire drift, not having the article to hand, but this section (as quoted by my mother) caught my eye: “The five best books I’ve read in the last couple of years have been Harry Mulisch’s Siegried, Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time... Not a single American author alive today … is capable of writing a novel like one of these. Because they dare to take on the big issues of life and death (because they’re presented without chilling effects), knowledge and meaning, learning and forgetting, without shame, without fear, without self-doubt…”

Is this because American writers are too geared toward publication, or getting on Oprah, or receiving kind notice by the New York Review of Books? (Or that they are too weighed down by Hemingway or even Faulkner?) What would happen if someone quietly writing away in the backwaters, away from writing groups and even bookstores, produced something like G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer LePage, the most quirky novel I’ve read in over a decade? Is it just not now culturally possible for this to happen in the United States? Or to write a highbrow novel that doesn’t, somewhere deep within, have an unpunctuated stream of consciousness that mimics the Hot Thing passage in Toni Morisson’s Beloved?

To all of you who’ve been working hard on your fifty thousand words for the month of November (and even those who haven’t), I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Me, I’d settle for an American version of Terry Pratchett. We’re ripe for some serious satire.

La Casita del Cielo

We went on a downtown bookstore outing today, and wandered for the first time into La Casita del Cielo, which is a new Spanish children’s bookstore hidden between D and E streets. Pica was looking for a grammar to send her sister, who is helping teach Spanish in her primary school back in Maine. She found a perfect book, and talked a lot to the owner about bilingual education here. One of the reasons the owner, who is from Peru, started the store is because of concern over Spanish literacy here. Most bilingual teachers in the schools have very little command of Spanish, and Spanish-speaking students do not end up learning much in the way of Spanish grammar or writing skills. On top of all that, American culture as a whole is not one where most people read much. Anyway, he was happy to hear about Pica’s sister’s efforts, and gladly gave Pica several free books to send along to her school. As for myself, Spanish children’s books make for good reading practice at my level, and I settled in this evening to a copy of Helico y el pjaro, by Andr Dahan. Fun little story about a bird being taught to fly.

Paths Not Taken

Long ago and far, far away, I was an assistant editor at a major university press. (Hint: it’s in the same town as the team that just won the World Series.) Not a line or copy editor, the kind of editor that makes decisions about what gets published or not.

Times are hard in scholarly publishing right now; print runs have shrunk, nobody’s buying criticism, and the machine—the deeply flawed machine that goes by the name of publish or perish—is grinding to a halt. There are plenty of very smart people out there, some of whom can even write very well; but whether their books will sell or not is a very hard question to answer. Actually, it isn’t: they mostly won’t.

I used to move in these exalted circles, have intricate discussions about subjects I knew a lot less about than I appeared to (but so, always, did my interlocutors); travel to conferences, try and find the diamond in the rough—the hot new commodity everyone else was also on the lookout for. It was cut-throat and it made your heart beat fast. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and ultimately, too much for me.

Yesterday I got a call from someone who was visiting Davis—an editor I knew well from my conference circuit days. He was giving a talk to graduate students about how to get their work published. His hosts invited me along to dinner—the inevitable expense account dinner—and for an evening, before I went off to the shabby offices of the Yolo Beat Bush/Democratic Party HQ, waiting to get our Nevada assignment for tomorrow, I was transported back to the world of publishing. It was fun. I got to talk to people about their interesting work (and it IS interesting, it turns out, if unpublishable), enthuse, trade jokes, remember Edward Said making one of his grand entrances at MLA with a long black cape (fifteen thousand people would part like the Red Sea).

I’m not sorry I chose a different path. There’s too much posturing in that world, too much bullshitting. But the dinner was a reminder that my life could have been very different—and a great deal more stressful.

Writing for Oprah

When I lived in the 13th (Vietnamese) arrondissement in Paris in the early 80s, my then husband and I were befriended in the supermarket by a sephardic couple (he was learning English, overheard us, wondered about English conversation). They had a television, we did not. They invited us over regularly on Friday nights (their Shabbat evening featured an oil lamp and exquisite stewed clementines) to watch Apostrophes, a show on which the host, Bernard Pivot, interviewed about five or six authors whose books he had read (another gluttonous passion of his was wine, so when he did the wine week with Hugh Johnson and other oenophile writers, it was a double treat: watching this guy ENTHUSE was a spectacle).

The French in general have a much higher level of popular discourse than we do here or in Britain —philosophy is taught as a compulsory subject in high school, so even kids whose destiny is to become mechanics or plumbers have a vague understanding of Descartes and Hegel. Pivot’s show was watched by hundreds of thousands; book design is almost nonexistent as a profession except for children’s books, because the French buy BOOKS to read, not because they’re pretty or enticing on the cover (this would render them suspect, in fact). However, Gallimard, Grasset, and Garnier Flammarion rubbed their corporate hands and stocked up local bookstores in preparation for Friday nights when one of their own was to be featured on Apostrophes, because sales would skyrocket the next day. (Pivot saved them millions of francs in marketing.)

Oprah Winfrey triggers the same hand-rubbing mechanism in publishers here. The books she plugs are in general quite different; though I don’t watch her show (still don’t have a TV), I know enough from spending time in bookstores where the Oprah Book Club sticker pops out at you from all over the place (salivate, salivate go the publishers) that she leans heavily toward fiction about women in history whose stories were inadequately told (if at all). (The genre has become a self-perpetuating one—Maria of Alembic and I were giggling about this during a recent visit: imagine a woman in history about whom almost nothing is known, and make up her life story; get it published; get on Oprah. Pass it on.)

That Oprah is getting millions of Americans to read when they otherwise wouldn’t is a) astonishing b) mahvelous c) slightly sad. But I’m reminded by Siona who is going to lead a discussion about The Red Tent soon that I balk heavily at reading a book that is either recommended by Oprah or that is making the book club circuit. I confess this is probably just on principle. My sister has two small kids and felt her mind turning to jelly—a book club is perfect for her, because she doesn’t have the time or other resources to choose reading material for the couple of hours a week she can spare. (I did read The Red Tent on my sister’s recommendation and did enjoy it, but it adheres to the above formula perfectly.)

I hope my powers of discernment never deteriorate to the point where I can’t figure out what to read by myself, from reviews, or through the recommendations of intelligent, literate friends, many of whom I’ve never met but whose words I read daily in blogland.

The irony is I participate in a pre-digesting activity myself by sitting on the committee to choose next year’s Campus Community Book Project. The irony is that this committee has tremendous power and weight (hey, we do a lot of work for it outside our regular jobs; there has to be SOME payback). I sometimes wonder whether the book project shouldn’t be, instead, the whole campus being the committee: everyone reads all these books and then we vote…

Bloggers Do The Berkeley Bookstore Beat

Today we travelled by train to Berkeley to meet up with bloggers Chris from Creek Running North, Siona from Nomen est Numen, and Maria from Alembic. Our aim was to visit Berkeley bookstores, of which there are a plethora, too many to do in a day, but no matter. We first walked up to Cody’s on Telegraph Avenue, the largest and most famous of Berkeley bookstores, where we browsed for an hour, several of us emerging with more books than intended. Siona brought her own lunch so we wanted to eat outside, so we picked up take-out Indian from a restaurant on Telegraph (walk 500 yards in Berkeley, you’ll find an eatery that meets the needs of the moment) and had our lunch by Strawberry Creek on the UC Berkeley campus. The Indian food made for a messy picnic, but was very good. Meanwhile the Cal marching band was warming for the football game later on in the afternoon. (A bit of Aggie Pride here—I think the UC Davis Marching Band-Uh is better).

Chris had to leave early, but the rest of walked down Shattuck to the used bookstore Pegasus, where I found a book on line-and-wash (our third art book purchase of the day). Our return trek netted us an office supply store (complete with Clairefontaine and Rhodia notebooks, as well as Lamy and Stypen fountain pens—Maria bought a Lamy pen), as well a decent espresso place by the BART station.

Too many things to do in Berkeley as usual. No chance to visit art stores, alas. We even found a very intriguing new restaurant half-a-block from BART—Ristorante Raphael, kosher Italian vegetarian food. But we were full from our Indian meal, so it will wait for next time.

These blogger bookstore outings are quite fun. Perhaps we should all next go on a field trip to Powell’s!

El Diccionario del Besbol

This resource came in handy this evening, before attending my Spanish class.

From the National Baseball Hall of Fame

Fearing Safety

It is a luxury of someone (white, educated, well above the poverty line) living in a democracy (at least for now) that I can expect pretty much expect to live without fear of being arrested unless I do something stupid. I live in a place where I can leave my car unlocked, both at home and at work if I should by some chance drive to work. My commute doesn’t take me through a war zone, unless you define the Solano County Mosquito Abatement Squad in those terms.

I’ve been reading, on the recommendation of Maria from Alembic, who had it from the London Review of Books, Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer and intellectual of staggering vitality. When I compare my life with hers, I see no hardship, no rigors, no wars. I see a privileged life as the daughter of an expatriate, endowed with two passports which expands your choices enormously of where to work (especially since they’re both “desirable” nationalities), where the obvious planting of oneself in opposition to the prevailing culture confers yet more privilege (sometimes points can be gained from being a Brit, even a stuffy one).

Going to the Code Pink Counter Convention in Davis’ Central Square tonight, I am filled with a mixture of fear and despair. Fear for the ignorance that might, just might, get Bush reelected. Despair because the world in such a scenario looks much worse than it did in the 70s, when it looked pretty bad, all those nights I stayed up arguing with my father about the Bomb.

We must not be safe. We must avoid hiding behind our gated communities, real or imagined, and feel as though all this is outside our sphere of influence, interest, or humanity. We must keep looking for a way to make our own existence more precarious—for the safety of all.

This is for the Ecotone Wiki’s joint blogging topic, Making a Safe Space.

What’s Goth?

One of the more interesting (used here as a synonym for frustrating) things about my burgeoning logocentric connection with my mother is her awareness that she lost twenty-five years of American popular culture and language by living in Spain and came back to find that her mother tongue was no longer, well, current. And she assumes mine is. (Even though I lost almost the same amount of time and didn’t even grow up here!)

So, for instance, on Sunday when we had lunch on a figged patio in Sonoma, she asked what “goth” was.

The answer to this question is different now than it would have been ten years ago. I flounder. Do I describe the former or the latter? I try and explain as best I can, but she’s never even really seen one (I decide we should start with the noun goth rather than the adjective). So I’m reduced to selecting body parts like some demented early Renaissance poet, when it would be so much easier just to point one out in the street. They are thin on the ground in Sonoma, though, upscale chichi pseudo-Tuscan hamlet that it is. Goths, even their latest watered-down suburban incarnation, tend to be “urban.” Dressedinblack. Edgy. Or edgy-wannabes. (I gave up trying to explain what edgy was a couple of years ago.)

She tries so, so hard to find all this out on her own, surrounding herself with reference books and, when she gets really daring, online resources. There’s just one problem: all the definitions use words that themselves need defining in relation to the culture. She feels at sea in the country whose passport she carries, an immigrant from a past where words meant what you thought they meant. I’m sympathetic but ultimately can’t really help her; she tends to listen hard and then decide this, too, will elude her.

It was much easier when she asked me later on to remember specific sweeties from my grandmother’s sweetshop in Lancashire from the early sixties for a story she was working on. That was easy: Smarties. Sherbet fountains. Jelly babies. Dolly Mixtures. Gobstoppers. Liquorice Allsorts. Toffee. The smell of that wood-panelled paradise came flooding back, mint mixed with tobacco mixed with citrus sugar, along with assorted memories of inedible things in the boarding house where we were staying, such as blancmange in the shape of a bunnyrabbit (poor bunny, said my four-year-old Californian self, refusing dessert). Memories of double-decker buses filled with the warm fug of cheap cigarette smoke and wet umbrellas, everyone going somewhere in the rain that never stopped. Memories of grandma in her hospital bed, breathing, breathing…

Psst!

This is one of many hundreds of words in the Dictionary of All-Consonant Words, part of several such collections at the Strange & Unusual Dictionaries home. After all, you never know when you’ll run out of vowels.

(From LibrarianinBlack)