Music in the Bookstore

The first bookstore I ever worked in was very old-school in a lot of ways. Although the owner wore baggy old jeans and a torn tee shirt, had hair down to his waistline and was bushily bearded, he would stand for nothing other than classical music as the soundtrack of his rare book shop. Of course, "rare" is stretching it a bit. Like most used & rare bookstores, he had his share of old paperbacks, outdated diet books, and other 20th century detritus (in fact, he taught me as much what NOT to stock as otherwise). Oh, but  he did strive towards his own vision of what an antiquarian bookstore should be.

This vision included a certain odd snobbery in the realm of music. My boss would tolerate nothing other than Mozart, Bach, Purcell, and other established masters of polite strains and stately processionals. Rowdy sorts like Mahler and Stravinsky were not welcome, although occasionally Beethoven was given a chance during particularly slow periods. I'm not sure whether my boss actually preferred this music personally, or just thought it was more conducive to browsing by the book-buying public (which, in this case, actually consisted more of punkish students than the highbrow, monocle-wearing types my boss longed for).

My second boss mostly adhered to the same policy of classical music only. He relented a bit, though, on the weekends, when he was known to allow Broadway show tunes and even folk music. Still, we did have to maintain a certain decorum in our choices. Joan Baez, yes; Phil Ochs, never.

I've always told people that one of the main reasons I wanted my own bookshop after many years of working for others is the ability to choose my own music. Of course, officially the music is just for my ears anyway because of  right-of-use issues. But I can't help it if the music wafts from my office into the adjoining book rooms, can I?  Anyway, in my own shop I cut loose with a vengeance, playing everything from rhythm 'n' blues to the Bonzo Dog Band and Cab Calloway. We have actually had people dancing the Lindy in the aisles and have been told more than once by toe-tapping customers that we play the best music they've ever heard in any kind of bookstore, rare & rarefied or not.

And, strange as it may seem, we even like to play classical music from time to time.

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Technology and Reading

I've been reading a lot about the e-reader Kindle lately. You've  heard of it. It's available from Amazon.com and lets you read text on a screen. After many years of trying unsuccessful to sell the book-reading public on such a device, Kindle has finally seemed to have won the battle. The corporate salesmen have succeeded in mediating even our reading, of making us believe we need to make even reading a technological event. 

You all should watch a documentary I just saw called "I Need that Record." It's a sad, yet inspiring, elegiac account of the disappearance of independent record stores in the US, with commentary from some very perceptive people in the music industry. What people miss about record stores is not the ability to get a record *immediately* but the ability to browse through a collection of records carefully chosen by someone who cares about music. 

Record stores are eccentric spaces where you might find the most marvelous things fortuitously, things you maybe weren't even looking for in the first place or had never even heard of.  Independent bookstores create those same kinds of spaces, especially bookstores that carry offbeat, unusual, out-of-print stuff that you won't find on Amazon, via Kindle or not.

Don't get me wrong. I do see the point of e-readers if all you do is read trendy bestsellers & trashy novels. But if you want to have a real personal library with some depth and permanence, a library that is a reflection of your individuality and your curiosity, I suggest you find space in your home for some bookshelves. Books last for generations, e-readers are nothing more than plastic junk which will be replaced when the corporate gods decide what the Next Big Thing is that they want you to spend your money on. There's already a Kindle 2.0; I'm sure you'll be needing to keep replacing this mechanism periodically in order to keep up with the Joneses. Right now a Kindle is $139 a pop, plus whatever groovy case & "accessories" you want to add. How many used (i.e., recycled) books could you buy with this money? Quite a few, and probably for less than their Kindle counterparts.

These e-readers, along with their downloaded text (which you don't own, by the way, in the same way you own a book), will wind up in the landfills of the world. I have a vision of people hundreds of years from now trying to figure out this civilization and having nothing to go on but indecipherable pieces of plastic. But the corporate coffers must be filled, and they apparently have found a whole lot of true believers.

It's the same situation as WalMart putting the mom & pop shops out of business. And it's nothing to be proud of or happy about. It's a sad state of affairs that the little shops with real personality & love and passion for books are going away, like lights going out one by one across the American landscape.

No Longer Among the Missing

Okay, so I haven't written here for a while. It was getting to the point where I thought, eh -- this thing will wind up floating around in dead cyberspace like so many others.

But then I read by chance in an old Dickens journal that he, like the rest of us, had trouble managing even a diary. Dickens! The guy who could come up with novels and articles and Christmas specials and correspondence and just about anything else at the drop of a hat, and at length -- Dickens had trouble keeping up a simple diary.

So I refuse to feel ashamed or embarrassed. I shall persevere.

The problem with some of us who write these things, I think, is that we believe we have to come up with deathless prose and profound insights every day of the week. That, of course, is impossible. Even Tolstoy must have had his silly days.

All I really need to do is write what's important to me on any given day. It might turn out to be important to someone else, too. Whether it's a book or a song or a feeling or an experience.

A lot has happened in the past several months, both in the nation and in my own little bookseller's life. Take a look at my Facebook postings and you'll see what I mean.

But this isn't Facebook. This is something else -- my own little nook where you're invited to come in and visit any time.

Yes, It Can Happen Here

It's easy to write off Sinclair Lewis these days as outdated and irrelevant. His novels are clogged with antiquainted, cringe-worthy slang. His premises seem quaint. Why, in 2010, would we be interested in reading about that blustery failure Babbitt? Or the alienated souls of Main Street? Or Elmer Gantry and his unholy rise and fall? These are characters so squarely set in their times that they can no longer hold any interest for us.

But of course I lie. Despite his awkward, somewhat embarrassing dependence on slang, Lewis's characters have as much life today as they ever did. Much of what Lewis wrote was satiric, but it was a rather tender satire that understands the underlying humanity of its subjects. Their situations are human situations, which recur again and again, achingly recognizable. Babbitt is attending a Tea Party this weekend, shouting slogans he doesn't quite understand, while Carol Kennicott wistfully searches for soul-mates on the internet and Elmer Gantry rants from his weekly show on the Inspiration Network. When we read Lewis, we not only recognize the characters, we empathize with them. We sometimes pity them. And we realize we don't live in such different worlds after all.

Which brings me to the book I'm recommending today, Lewis's It Can't Happen Here. One of his lesser-known, lesser-read works, it was published in 1935 in the middle of the economic crisis we remember as the Great Depression. Lewis depicts a populace largely uninformed but angry, its rage confused and looking for focus. In steps a folksy populist by the name of Berzelius ''Buzz'' Windrip, who is elected President of the U.S. by promising to bring back American Values and who, with the help of Big Business, promptly begins to dismantle the government and its bill of rights, saving the goodies of power for himself and his corporate friends. This is, in fact, a depiction of fascism taking over the U.S. from within its own borders and with the apparent approval of much of its people. Lewis depicts its inexorable advance with a precision that is utterly believable. There's a war declared on Mexico in order to distract the citizenry with patriotism. Dissidents flee, eventually, to Canada. That's not the end, of course, I won't reveal the end except to say the book is not entirely hopeless.

Neither is this country. Not in 1935, not now. What we need is more people to read books like this, to recognize the symptoms of the power-hungry and manipulative, the fake populists who would try to turn a people's hurt and confusion into a war on democracy itself.

Back to the Source

That Glenn Beck has attempted to hijack Tom Paine's legacy for his own purposes in the book Glenn Beck's Common Sense -- a collection of right-wing platitudes supposedly "inspired by Thomas Paine" -- is appalling. What an arrogant son-of-a-gun.

But perhaps the publication of this absurd little book is not an entirely bad thing, after all. Glenn Beck may be cunning in his scheme to co-opt the legacy of America's most radical Founding Father, but is he smart? 

A renewed curiosity about Tom Paine, even if brought about by Glenn Beck, may have an effect that Mr. Beck did not anticipate. People just might take Tom off that dusty shelf and read his own words. Or venture into Meetinghouse Books and ask if we have any secondhand copies on hand of the original Common Sense.

This could happen. I'll bet it does. Or am I just being a cock-eyed optimist?

A Valentine for My Sweetheart

My sweetheart Ken is the most unpretentious of men, and he would blush to read this -- but I want to tell you all how lucky I am to have him by my side. He's a good man, a kind man, a very smart man, my pal & my love & my jolly comrade through the years. And no matter what dire straits we happen to be in, we can always somehow make each other laugh.

We'd known of each other through mutual friends, but had our first real meeting all those years ago as we both were leaving the Boston Public Library, books clutched in our hands. That was the first good sign -- Ken and I both love books. That day I also discovered just how curious he was (still is) about the world. I could never understand people who have an interest in Just One Thing, or who have decided their heads are full enough and no more ideas need enter. But Ken is curious about everything, and wonders about everything, and challenges conventional wisdom when conventional wisdom needs to be challenged. Not only do we make each other laugh, we also make each other think. And for that I'm also grateful.

I'm a lucky girl, together with my sweetie. The two of us don't have to travel far to know that life is an adventure.

Reasons to Be Cheerful

We've just gone through Hell Week what with the Massachusetts election, the Supreme Court decision, and the final farewell to Air America. I was so depressed I crawled into bed and watched movies all weekend. Old movies, with Aline Macmahon and Guy Kibbee and Barbara Stanwyck. This cheered me up somewhat.

Still, I needed a reason to crawl out of bed again. I cast about for hopeful signs. I looked out the window and all I could see was sheets of rain. My cats were spooked and my husband was out doing the laundry. Then I looked at the stack of books by my bed and noticed something. A number of these books are recently published titles intended for what is called the "young adult" market: Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock, Jo Walton's Farthing, M.T. Anderson's Feed and the first Octavian Nothing.

The next time you go to a bookstore, check out the YA section. There are so many interesting books out there today available to young people: challenging works, novels of ideas. They're good reads, too. What makes me most cheerful is that young people are choosing to read these thought-provoking works. It also makes me very hopeful for the future.