Bookriot!

The Seattle Public Library Sale is held twice a year in a hangar in what was once a local naval base.  It's a three day event with the price of books declining as the event wears on, but most anyone in the book biz lines up outside the place before opening.  It's like the Christmas sale at Wal-mart, except book sellers are too polite to trample workers fighting their way to the items for sale.  We've been attending this sale for many years and we see regulars of the other stores sitting on the curb huddled around their stacked boxes they will fill as the huge hangar door slides open.  A grungy lot, generally, old guys in hats and beards clutching cloth bags, the motley crew of used book stores in the University District and here on Capitol Hill, Russian families, the legions of Central Americans who pick for the conveyor & warehouse on-line retailers who buy only because the electronic device they carry tells them to, often not even knowing the title.  When the appointed hour ticks to being close the line outside the place -- often many blocks long -- tightens up as people get up, put away their coffee thermos, clean up their donuts or bagels and cream cheese and shuffle toward the big doors.  An excitement ripples through the line as the people in back don't know the doors haven't actually parted.  We do "grabbing exercises:" thrusting our arms out and back in counted form whilst limbering and exercising our grabbing muscles, standing in horse pose as a mock team spirit hurrah before setting forth.  Once the line begins to move in earnest it speeds as it approaches the entrance, when people whip past carrying their cargo of empty boxes and dash to their favorite section.  The room is laid out by general category.  Within the first 15 minutes the aisles build with bodies pouring through the books on the tables and then moving to the boxed books on the floor until it is difficult to move your now filled box through the bodies, now becoming close and often full of the odors of stress and excitement and pastries gone south.  The aisles get clogged with baby strollers and shoppers with huge backpacks and people butt-to-butt scavenging under opposite tables, spreading their finds on the floor.  Having been to many such events by this time I've noticed several book sale archetypes.  Firstly, and most dangerous/annoying is the strapping young tech book buyer.  This type only wants late model texts and technical books he can sell for real money, often to students and profs, who are used to paying the grossly inflated prices of the latest editions.  He is exclusively male, and often slightly overweight, pale but determined, smart but narrowly focused and single-mindedly rapacious.  He will approach a box, whether someone else may be dawdling through it or not, with both hands and lunge into it as if it were filled with so many bricks he is winning a prize to be the quickest to remove.  For his prey can be easily spotted: shiny covers, square corners, large and 500+ pages, no d.j., bright graphics.  Anything else is flotsam.  Once a box is looted of anything meeting his criteria he quickly leaves the now tousled box and goes to tear open another, elbows and arms flailing ahead of the methodical scanning of the large Central American families/teams.  Next there is the Homeless guy who buys only for retail stores.  This is a frugal business because as everyone knows, stores pay hardly anything for books, often only offering trade for the books they take in, but this buyer looks for only the late, bright and perfect, though it may be a novel or non-fiction.  Ex-library books hold no interest for him, and he is nearly as driven as the tech-book buyer, but because the margins are lower, not quite as insane, desheveled, wearing a cast-off jacket from the late 80's and worn tennis shoes.   Then there is the mean, mumbling beer-bellied older guy in fatigues, who knows all about the business and deeply resents being in competition with anyone who's been engaged in the trade for less than 37 & 1/2 years.  This type does not move that quickly and when asked anything is willing to pontificate at length, but with a scornful bluster and a dismissive frown towards all who deign to get in the way of his front side protrusion.  He mumbles because what he has to say is important, even if all the fools of the world refuse to listen.  There is the skinny high cheek boned crazy Chinese man with terrible breath.  He searches only for copies of Sweet Valley High that he has yet to collect.  He wields a cane, more to gesticulate and point with than for support, and has a long hand-written list of the eighty or so S.W.H. he has collected , crossed with a wavy line through those that his grand daughter (supposedly) is now reading.  His breath smells like six root canals festering with detritus as he expounds at length in very broken English on the completion of his list.  He likes encyclopedia sets too.  Such sales attract a wide audience, to be sure, and this list can go one for a long long time, but these are a few of my favorites.

--Sean

Ushering

I ushered a few days ago for the Seattle Arts & Lectures talk of Laila Lalami.  A year or so ago, I ushered for SAL for a couple of seasons.  Then I changed my email address, so I didn't get the email for "ushers needed."   But now I'm back on the email list again.  I didn't know anything about Laila Lalami, but the description said she was from Morocco and she looks pretty glamorous in her author photo:  heavy eyeliner, pretty face, black wavy hair.  SAL happens at Benaroya Hall, the fancy new symphony building downtown with Chihuli and Starbucks, northwest bigshots, both in the lobby in the forms of a giant chandelier and a coffee stand.  I arrived about 10 minutes ahead of the 6 pm scheduled usher arrival time, and bought a small cup of bitter, icky Starbucks coffee, finding no other option nearby.  There was a gelato place across the street, but it was closing.  Then I went back into the lobby where Elliott Bay Book Company had a table, and a woman I recognized from there who used to work at Red & Black Books Collective (a feminist bookstore that was on 15th Ave. in the eighties and nineties, but closed, followed in that location by another short-lived bookstore, Pages; now it's a funky dollar store full of made -in-China crap), named Karen.  She recognized me too, and we re-introduced ourselves.  She said she had read Lalami's short stories and her blog and that she was trilingual, speaking French, Arabic, and English.  The table had other Moroccan-themed books by other authors, I noticed, but not Paul Bowles.  Then, the ushers were called to order, and I went inside the big Benaroya auditorium with the others and we had a logistical meeting while Laila Lalami and the director of SAL practiced using the microphones on stage in front of the giant pipe organ.   They sat in some armchairs and Lalami showed her slender stockinged legs.  As far as I can tell, ushering at SAL is a piece of cake.  There is some bureaucracy:  before you begin your career as an usher, you have to attend an orientation run by Seattle Symphony volunteers who can be really uptight; then when you're working,  you must sign in, wear a name badge, and deal with usher politics-- there was some whispering about rude emails from the office and mix-ups in scheduling.  All I've ever done is stand in an aisle by the wall, which hardly anyone goes down, and keep the peons in the "main" section from venturing into the rows up front reserved for the "patrons."  People seem to buy series tickets, so all the patrons have been there many times before and boldly stride to their front-and-center seats with no help from me, yet dutifully flashing their "P" marked tickets as they pass.  The tickets are pretty expensive, $30 or thereabouts, I think (I tried to check the website, but now we're between seasons, so the info wasn't there), but the patrons pay even more and they're quite catered to with special receptions and "meet-and-greets".  I was noticing how most of the audience literally had gray hair, which I have too. The program started with two school children reading horrendous poems.   One was an 11 year-old girl, and the other was a tiny boy and both were quite fearless and cute.  Then the SAL director came out and introduced Lalami and thanked a list of sponsors.   Lalami's talk was about her experience as a journalist in Morocco right after college in her first job when she learned she was supposed to "keep her integrity" and take bribes as a matter of course.  She later went to grad school in the U.S. and meanwhile Morocco got a new king who was supposed to be an improvement over the previous king, his father, but in reality there was a crackdown and imprisonment of journalists under the new monarch. She read a list of names of thirty imprisoned journalists.  After the talk, there was a question period involving the armchairs and people asked Lalami how she dressed in Morocco. She said she dressed the same as here (which was very stylish and femme).  We had Laila Lalami's novel in stock, Secret Son, so now I'm reading it.  I'm enjoying it; it's a pretty character-based, straightforward story involving family drama: the narrator is a bastard "secret" son of a wealthy father and poor lower class woman who raises him, telling him his father is dead.  The boy finds out the truth that he's sired by a rich businessman father, who, it turns out, never had a son, only an inferior daughter, and the son confronts him. (That's as far as I've gotten.)  I like the scenes of the Casablanca slum; the run-down school full of social/political factions; the movie theatre, tea shops, streets.  Plus, the narrator sounds like a hunk:  blue eyes, black hair, aquiline nose.

Sean and I also saw Peter Carey read from his new novel, Parrot and Olivier in America at Elliott Bay Books. It was the first reading we've attended in their new space.  The readings room is in the basement and noisy water pipes gurgled directly over Carey's head, so he incorporated many glares and exaggerated, but humored, reactions to the noise into his presentation.  Carey explained that one of the influences on this book was his reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and that he understood de Tocqueville's concern about anyone being able to rule here.  He mentioned the current decline in reading as evidence that "Culture is crap."


Reading Notes

I've also finished several complete books!  I read Plaintext (University of Arizona Press, 1994), essays by Nancy Mairs.  These are a collection of personal essays written by a 40 year-old woman with MS who has been depressed and suicidal for much of her life, and who is a feminist.  They were very honest and thoughtful; she admits at times to not liking her husband and child and saying she wouldn't raise her foster son if asked to do it again.  The prose is clean and insightful.  But much of it is a little too personal; a lot of going over teenage love affairs with excerpts from journals of the time:  "I feel so inadequate, so small.... If something doesn't happen, I'll scream.  I am so empty, so hungering.  I know that deep within me lies something but I see it in comparison with the talents of others & it is so pitifully small." Yow.

Then I read a book of short stories by a young Vancouver writer, Nancy Lee, called Dead Girls (McClelland & Stuart, 2002).  The stories were all linked in that they featured a backdrop of serial killings of street women.

Inherent Cigarette

We purchased a dozen or so really beautiful foreign language children's books recently.  They're all in excellent condition, and each has a bookplate inside from a language education center's children's literature collection, with the name of the country the book is from neatly printed in pencil at the bottom.  I can usually recognize Czech because I was in Prague for three weeks a few years ago-- so at least I'm familiar with the look of written Czech and a lot of really beautiful children's books of fairy tales and myths have been illustrated and printed in what is now The Czech Republic; a few of them have passed my way before.  But in this purchase there are also books from Finland and Slovakia, and I'm grateful to have those penciled notes, as I wouldn't recognize the languages. A helpful clue to finding out what language a book is in is to check the place of publication.  Helsinki, Bratislava, Prague, cool.  Though of course a book published in Prague could be in any language.  Certain parts of almost all books are the same; the copyright page, for instance, where I can almost always find date and place of publication.  Not always.  Sometimes there's no date.  Sometimes no place of publication.  A good reference book that describes and names all the different physical and printed parts of books is ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter.


I was trying to identify a children's book in Czech  by Jacques Prevert, the French surrealist, poet, and writer of screenplays.  I couldn't really figure out right away what the title was, because the words of the title were written in a tricky way, with two horizontal lines of  type, apparently two words, which were bisected by two diagonally slanted lines of type, presumably two words.  I couldn't tell which order the words went in, because the arrangement was, to me, ambiguous. (A lot of architecture and graphic design books have titles which are difficult for me to decipher because their cool graphic quality was given more importance than their meaning by the book designer.)  I looked at the cover of the book, then the title page, but they both had the title written in the weird slanty way.  But when I turned in a few pages, the first lines of text in the book, apparently poetry, matched the title words, so now I had the order:  Pohadky pro nehodne deti.   A book search of this title on Amazon and Abebooks produced nothing.  So I tried different versions of the title, shortened.  Then I used a translation program, and it translated the title as Pohadkny Nehodne for Children - now I had a partial translation.  So then I Googled the title and came up with a bunch of results in Czech.  I translated the first one, using the "translate now" button, and it came up with a Wikipedia article on Jacques Prevert translated by computer into English.  It looked so pretty, like a real Wikipedia article, but the English was absurd, perhaps fitting for a surrealist. 

About Prevert's life, and then his death:  "In 1948 he fell out of the French windows (on the spot where it was previously installed machine gun) . He was in a few days in severe coma . Prévert injuries caused serious neurological sequelae.  Died from lung cancer. Inherent cigarette he became fatal."

Finally, I found the French title in the printer's imprint, which was hidden at the back of the book:  Contes pour enfants pas sages, or Tales for Naughty Children.

Out with the Old

Our neighbors' old truck, which has been parked, unmoving, alongside their house for many years has suddenly acquired a very dapper appearance.  I think its about to read The New Yorker.

We are running out of space in the bookstore, with about 12,800 books in our database, and thirty or so boxes of books waiting to be described and priced.  Tim, who is Pistil's official shelver, has been pulling books off the shelves that he's noticed have been sitting there forever to make room for the new, and he's also re-arranging as he goes.  Somehow, like magic, he manages to fit more books than should be possible on to the shelves.  When the Seattle weather becomes reliably sunny (ha!), I plan to do a big cull of a few hundred older titles and have an outdoor book sale.

Reading Notes

I just finished reading a novel by  Mischa Berlinski called Fieldwork, which as the title suggests is the story of an anthropologist, but also involves a bit of a murder mystery.  The narrator (who has the same name as the author, though the story is definitely a work of fiction) is a journalist living in Thailand who becomes caught up in investigating the story of a missionary murdered by an anthropologist, both of whom are involved with a Thai hill tribe (one converting and one studying), until the anthropologist becomes the lover of a native man and participates in a mystical corn ritual, leading to the murder and her downfall.  Several stories interweave and overlap:  the story of the narrator and his  teacher girlfriend; the story of the missionary family, the story of the anthropologist, and a look into a different culture.  The journalist/narrator throws in excerpts from anthropological history and  memoirs and the whole thing makes for an absorbing, enjoyable read.

I've also been reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which is an account of what will happen to the physical world after humans are gone.  Once I hiked to a hot springs that was formerly reached by a paved road.  The road had been closed for ten years or so, and it was completely falling apart and disintegrating; barely visible in places, covered with greenery.  Seeing that was pretty cool. I've only read forty or so pages thus far of The World Without Us (and I'm not sure I'll read the whole thing), but reading about how nature (microorganisms, plants, animals, and the effects of weather and time) will basically take back the human made world, no problem, is actually pretty heartening to me.  Here's a couple of sentences from the chapter on what will happen to Manhattan:  "In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate.  Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract; joints between walls and rooflines separate.  Where they do, rain leaks in, bolts rust, and facing pops off, exposing insulation.  If the city hasn't burned yet, it will now."  Yippee.

And I've started Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.  I've read a lot of similar-themed food books in the past few years (and food movies-- I highly recommend Our Daily Bread, a European film which has no commentary, only a depiction of industrial food production at work), including In Defense of Food (also by Pollan), so it's more of the same important information.  Namely, don't eat processed foods.

Reading Fits and Dribbles

I'm back to my old "bad" reading habits:   picking up books randomly, reading a bit, then losing interest and starting something else.  I've tried several novels--  Immortality by Milan Kundera.  This seemed not to be a novel to me, but scenes of contemporary characters interspersed with authorial discourse on the nature of immortality, the kind famous people get for being famous, along with some imagined scenes of conversations between Goethe and Hemingway.  I was somewhat interested, but not enough to keep going after about a third of the book.  I also started In America by Susan Sontag, whom I've never read.  This was the story of an actress and her friends who are planning to move to America in the 1870's to start a new life.  The first chapter was amusing because the narrator (who seems to be the author) crashes a party and warms herself, invisible, by the fire while eavesdropping on the characters of the subsequent chapters, trying to figure out what their stories are.   After this, the story gets pretty sappy (though again, I only read the first third).  For instance, one of the Polish crowd's scouts sent ahead to find a place for them to start their Utopian community is sailing first class on a luxury ocean liner.  He's an aspiring writer, and goes down into the bowels of the ship to experience the riff raff.  There he visits a prostituted girl (her father is her pimp) and feels so bad about her predicament, that he only penetrates her thighs...  Let's see, then I read the first chapter of After This by Alice McDermott, which I liked.  It was a realistic day-in-the-life depiction of an unmarried thirty year-old woman who works as a secretary right after World War II.  Then suddenly in the next chapter, she's married with several children... damn!  For whatever reason, I like the gritty day-to-day details and it disturbs me to suddenly jump forward in time.  Though of course it happens all the time in fiction.  Now I'm reading (or at least starting!) The Magic Kingdom by Stanley Elkin.

We have been buying many books recently.  We've added about 600 new titles from a recent estate purchase, and we have about a thousand more new books to be valued and catalogued waiting in boxes in the wings.  Our shelves are already full, with no more room at all in the oversized book sections.  This means culling old stock and getting ready to have an outdoor book sale at the first opportunity.

Meanwhile, in our neighborhood Elliott Bay Book Company will be opening tomorrow with a street party celebration.  And Open Books on Madison Street is closing its doors.  Book-It Repertory Theatre, a company that produces plays based on books is having free readings this weekend, a Novel Workshop.  I'm planning to go to the Alice in Wonderland reading for sure.  And the Seattle Public Library is having their big book sale in an airplane hanger at Magnuson Park.  It's crowded, dirty, and filled with non-readers scanning ISBN's with their electronic devices telling them which titles to buy for the evil megalisters based on robot pricing, but hey, there's lots of cheap books.

Found in Books

Found most often in book are bookmarks--those advertising bookstores, or decorative bookmarks of one sort or another.  Then there's the bookmark of convenience--ephemera either forgotten or tucked away between pages for safekeeping:  napkins, grocery lists, to-do lists, homework, recipes, money, a silver certificate, poems, love letters, condolences, tickets, boarding passes, snapshots, drawings, pressed flowers, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, postcards, comic strips, invitations, a valentine, calling cards, membership cards, coupons, letters, prayer cards, business cards, a motion sickness bag, lottery tickets, pamphlets, a page torn from a calendar, a sheet of music, a report card, envelopes, photo booth strips, doodles, notes, a quotation written in inexpert calligraphy on an index card ("There can be no rainbow without a cloud and a storm--"  The Wind in the Willows), receipts.  Some recent favorites include a bunch of hotel receipts, diplomatic invitations, and calling cards from Paris in the sixties found in a set of nice hardback Proust volumes and a poem written in ballpoint on a page torn from a spiral notebook found in You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense:

Fuck Suck Shit  Piss Fuck Suck When you feel Your life Is Zero Charles Bukowski Becomes Your hero

In an earlier post I wrote about making collages from Golden Book publications.  Here is a link to some wonderful postcards made by sometimes Pistil shelver (or un-shelver), Andrew Bleeker:  Alice Blue Review

Reading Notes

I am about two thirds the way through The Best American Short Stories 2009.  So far I've not made any great discoveries of writers whose work I want to pursue.  The two stories I like best are both set in China:  "NowTrends" by Karl Taro Greenfeld, and "A Man Like Him" by Yiyun Li.  I'm also reading the current issue of Harper's Magazine, which has a great editorial about Haiti.

Okinawa revisited

As co-owner of the store, I have to be the level-headed one around here (just kidding) and for me, this means reading a lot of non-fiction. Fiction is great n' all and more fun to write than non-fiction, mostly, but I find the world itself more fascinating than the world as interpreted. I have a bias as well: so much of fiction is either genre, which though not always, by its nature is corny, or "classic" such as the Brontes: gigantic tomes of complex social interaction and character studies spending near-lifetimes examining the minutiae of the trappings of the well-to-do. It's interesting for a bit, but who cares really? I have this bias to the gritty. Yes there's plenty of gritty fiction to be found, but I'm making sweeping generalizations here.

Thusly, I just finished reading the Okinawa Program, subtitled How the World's Longest-lived People Achieve Everlasting Health. The book's got a forward by Andrew Weil, someone I've come to trust regarding health advice generally: he's low-key, writes well and I've never seen him compromise for financial gain. The early chapters start with how this book encompasses a 25 year study, and how the subjects lives under the Japanese were very well documented. Many studies concerning aging focus on people who may or may not have good records indicating their true age. This was not the case here. Then there's lots of evidence laid out about their general health: many charts illustrating how disease rates for Okinawans are significantly and amazingly lower than that of the U.S. So how is this accomplished? Firstly, diet: Okinawans eat very little processed food, a great many fruits and vegetables, whole grains, soy products, good fats, fish, low glycemic index and high-fiber foods and foods with flavonoids -- mostly from soy foods: tofu, tempeh, miso, soy milk and textured vegetable protein. Omega-3 fatty acids are high on the list, derived most commonly from fish, but one can eat flax seed, walnuts and black currant oil also. Water intake is high, via tea and alcohol is low or nonexistent. A good many specific foods are listed also, as well as their western counterparts and there's a section on healing herbs that are commonly used. But it's not just what they eat but how: the authors suggest grazing instead of large, heavy meals, and eating a low calorie diet generally: such that the percentage of fat on the body remains low.

Then there's all kinds of lifestyle differences between Okinawans and Caucasians. Okinawans stay physically active much later, they walk, do martial arts, garden. Manual labor is considered a crucial and integral part of normal life. Older people will often work into their 90's. Older people are thought of as more valuable than in the west, and people lead lives that are a good deal more stress-free than is common here. There's a thing called Okinawa time, something I can relate to strongly myself. There's a whole section in the book on how stress kills and what to do about it: relaxation methods, attitude changes such as not being pissed all the time, the importance of mellowness as a means of respecting your body. The book ends with a lot of recipes and a thick series of appendices, the last of references. It is not the end-all to eating and living healthy, Weil, I notice says things about carbs -- bread in particular and the false "whole grain" breads in particular this book says nothing about -- but I found it to be a very well documented solid and useful read. As I approach my 1st 50 years in this mortal coil I'm making plans for my next, and the days of debauchery, frantic hijinks and sleepless grind are giving way to flax seed oil yoga and long massages. Not so bad, really.

I also came across a thin volume called the Palm Leaf Fan by Kwai-yun Li, written by a Chinese resident of Calcutta. I read about 1/2 of it; very slice-of-life stories taking place in the 1950's and 60's. I'm fond of books like this that illustrate very different cultures from a street-level perspective. This one had some good stories, but the author was a bit too good of a girl for it to hold my interest through the book. Bowles, it was not.