The Evening Primrose

Clerihew for a Cold Winter's Night

DOROTHY PARKER

The days growing darker
Dorothy Parker
Settled in
With books and gin.

A Caricature

Still Here

Fifteen years ago today I started at the bookstore where I still work. Seems a long time ago and not. The beard has grown and gone a snowy white -- a somewhat dirty snow white but more snow than soot nonetheless. I've grown fatter, and slower, and even less inclined to do anything about either circumstance. I don't necessarily feel any older, but who remembers what I felt like so long ago?

When I started I was shelving books in the nonfiction section, and answering questions and phone-calls at one of two stations that either aren't there anymore or aren't what they were then. Still answering questions and phone-calls on the floor. Fewer of either nowadays, alas. I started doing book returns off the floor a few months later and did that for a couple of years. About thirteen years ago we launched the Used Books Desk and started buying and selling used trade books -- the term of art for anything other than textbooks. We started, my ex-work-wife T. and me, with just a cash-box and some rather vague ideas about how the new operation was going to work. We were however confident that it would work and it did. We had the enthusiastic support of our then manager, since retired, and our boss, who has since passed away. My beloved T. has herself since retired to grown lavender and raise chickens and run about nature with her animals and her real husband.  I'm still here.

While I was away visiting family earlier this month, the desk we made from warehoused bits of other, older configurations, went away in it's turn. Part of it moved with me into an office off the sales floor, the rest went away altogether, presumably back to the warehouse it came from. Where the Used Books Desk was will soon be part of the new Children's Books Department on the first floor of the General Books Department. The second floor will soon (?) be offices. We are consolidating.

I'm not sure just what the Used Books Desk will look like or just how it will operate hereafter, but there is every intention that it will re-open sooner rather than later.  I will have to learn how to make used books work in a new inventory system. I will. The buying hours will be reduced, but we'll make that work too. "The snake that cannot cast its skin..." as Nietzsche rather cruelly put it.

I'd guess that in fifteen years I've trained better than a dozen buyers, from this store and others. I've worked closely at the desk with at least half of those. Still friends with all of them. I've participated in at least two seminars and done presentations on used book buying I don't know where all.

I've done better than thirty readings at the bookstore and elsewhere; of writers from Blake and Cowper to Dickens and Thackeray, Twain and Dorothy Parker, and Capote every Christmas for more than a decade.

I've hosted writers and introduced first time novelists and even Salman Rushdie, twice.

A while back I passed the thirty year mark working in bookstores of one kind or another. In that time I've worked with a lot of booksellers, young and old and I've enjoyed the company of nearly all of them. I can't say I've hated any of them, though there have been some I was just as happy see move on. I can't say I remember all the names, but I'm pretty good with the faces yet. Some I still miss every day they aren't here.

Figure I'm a little better than half way through my working life in bookstores and I sincerely hope to see out my time right where I am. It won't look the same. The faces will keep changing, as will the nature of the job and the way we work. What I hope won't change is what we do every day: finding books for the people who need them. So long as I can still do that, and so long as I'm still able to be where the books are, and in the company of the people to whom books matter most, I continue content with my lot.

See what the next fifteen years look like. Can't wait.

Breakfast at the Bookstore with Brad and Nick #109

Daily Dose

From The Portable Dorothy Parker


AGONY

"Sedulous agony has become just as monotonous as sedulous sunshine."

From The Short Story, through a Couple of Ages

Daily Dose

From The Sayings of Dorothy Parker, edited by S. T. Brownlow

ATTEND

"Attending a party with Somerset Maugham at which guests were asked to complete nursery rhymes:

Somerset Maugham: 'Higgledy piggledy, my white hen
 She lays eggs for gentlemen.'

Dorothy Parker: 'You cannot persuade her with gun or lariat
To come across for the proletariat.'"

Daily Dose

From Dorothy Parker In Her Own Words, edited by Barry Day

THE WRITER'S WAY

"The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, like cleaning out ferry boats?"

From an introduction to an essay collection by S. J. Perelman

Again

And another: another evening together, another reading, another poem, another song, and... another.

Someone suggested to me that I might try giving a talk about doing this, a talk for other independent booksellers, to encourage more people to try.  I like the idea.  In fact, there may be an opportunity to do just that.  We'll see.  The suggestion however was that any such class shouldn't be "limited to just reading aloud."  The idea being that bookstores might welcome advice on creating events independent of author's tours and the more usual things that come our way like professional seminars, and school book fairs and the like.  That's a marvelous idea!  Someone should do just that, someone who understands, for example, organizing crafting classes, or fan gatherings, someone who has the patience, creativity and connections necessary for doing locally the kind of inspired community outreach perfectly represented by that extraordinary event, World Book Night.  As booksellers, we need to have all sorts of engagement with our customers, and we specifically need to cultivate these connections in ways that do not depend exclusively on the talents we are lucky enough, some of us, to have come our way from publishers large and small, and authors, local and national.

If bookstores, and specifically independent bookstores are to survive in an era of seemingly constant changes in both publishing and reading, we must be not only flexible enough to adapt ourselves and the way we do business to new models and means, but also be willing to experiment, and, yes, possibly fail, but at the very least not to waste the new opportunities that this new era provides us; from self publishing services and design, to utilizing social media, partnering with small presses and existing community organizations, and expanding the scope of what we may do collectively to include more than what we have traditionally done; at trade shows and the like.  The possibilities are, or ought to be, at least as exciting as the change that can often seem more than a little bewildering, else what's a bookstore for?

I would happily participate in any such discussion.  I do dearly like to talk.  I might, indeed, have something useful to contribute.  Form a panel.  I'll show up.

As for the possibility of me doing something of my own, well, here it is.  This is what I do.  I don't really ever do it alone.  Even when I'm the only one up there at the front, I do not, could not do it without the help and support of coworkers, management, friends, to say nothing here of local media, or the wonderful people who force their children, parents and or spouses to attend one of our admittedly rather respectable shindies.  (Though I do endorse any excuse for the introduction of spirits.  Booze and nibbles make it a party.)  That said, what I do, the thing about which I am myself most passionate is this, exactly the thing, it seems, most people, even most booksellers tell me they neither could nor would want ever to do, read aloud.

Nonsense.  The thing I am passionate about -- appearances to the contrary -- is not the sound of my own rather reedy and unmusical voice.  Years ago, when I was still in drama school and thinking I would one day be an admittedly rather diminutive, gap-toothed Hamlet, I had a voice class specifically to learn the proper way of speaking verse.  That meant Shakespeare.  I had a marvelous teacher.  He was no Romeo himself, by the look of him, by the way.  What he did have was a marvelous, musical baritone that made everything he said, from Othello's asides to ordering lunch, sound like a hot bath feels.  It was magical.  I worked very hard in that class.  I learned how to scan a line, to mark a speech, how to listen.  It was marvelous.  I loved it.  It wasn't very long after I'd been up on my hind legs doing, I believe, Richard the Third's first great speech, "Now is the winter of our discontent..." before my teacher gave me the critique that still stings to this day.

"Brad," he said, rather gently, in that deep, rich, Shakespearean voice of his, "you make everything sound as reasonable as an annual report to stockholders."

And, scene.

When I abandoned the theater shortly thereafter, it was no fault of his.  I saw how professional actors, most of 'em, lived.  Sobering.  Not all that long after that, I became a Rhetoric major, then met my beloved and left school altogether to pursue opportunities in fast food, banquet service, video rental and eventually bookselling.  I like to think that I finally found my métier.

All this autobiography is offered just to show that whatever talent I bring to this business of reading aloud may best be described as more the result of practice and an almost missionary enthusiasm for the sound of the language, than any particular gift for spellbinding.  I have to work at it, still.  

I do believe however not only in the importance of reading aloud for the full appreciation of literature, but also in the very real possibility that while not everyone can do it in public, more can do it than will probably ever try.  My experience of organizing and creating readings at the bookstore has shown conclusively that while there are people who will never read a word when anyone else other than their own small children will hear, there are in fact more potential readers for such events than anyone, including myself might ever have imagined had we not tried.

It's true that I have not just invited, but also cajoled, begged, bullied, and frankly blackmailed not a few people into reading aloud with me.  I've been lucky enough to work with more than a few people with more natural talent than I ever possessed, which has been thrilling.  Actors, musicians, comedians, singers, public performers of every stripe, I've found will often end up, if temporarily working in a bookstore.  Great good luck, that, for the kind of thing I try to do.  There have also been just as many people without any such inclinations or experience, with natural voices no better than mine, and personalities considerably more retiring who have been surprised to find that with the right material and in the friendly and supportive setting of the bookstore,  the experience was not only educational but even fun.  

(If you're one of the people reading this who might be shaking your head in disdainful disbelief, I might collect the necessary affidavits from the now scattered readers who have come and gone; from booksellers and students, and members even of the general public who have surprised us all with a poem, a story, even a song, but I doubt even that would convince you.  I leave you in peace, though I'd be willing to work on you.)

This latest reading presented new challenges to both of my fellow readers, neither of whom was comfortable reading verse.  One of the greatest pleasures for me in doing these readings has been working with forms that might challenge us in new ways.  The rehearsal process, however abbreviated by scheduling difficulties and or other commitments has actually proved to be one of the real joys of doing this.  I am an enthusiast of poetry, but neither a practitioner myself, nor, as my teacher pointed out long ago, a very musical sort of guy.  I haven't, as I've already suggested, a gift.  What I do have is a dogmatic conviction as to the best way to read and hear poetry and that is frankly to speak it.  I'm not saying that it mightn't be better for everyone concerned to hear the poet him or herself reading the stuff they wrote themselves, but then that is not always true, as anyone who has ever attended more than one poetry reading can doubtless attest.  Some great poets were pretty miserable readers.  (My theory being that too many poets, even good poets, either read too little themselves or listen too little to anyone else.)  

I've been nattering on for years to anyone who will listen, to anyone specifically who claims to neither read nor understand poetry to try putting voice to the words, even if it is just in the snug seclusion of some safe corner of their own homes, or alone in the woods.  Doesn't matter where or when or even to whom one reads poetry aloud so much as it matters to say the words and hear them said.  There's pleasure, and meaning in that, and more to follow the more that's done.  Part of the pleasure specific to poetry, but common to all great literature, is in the sound.  Literature is meant to make a noise, and not just in one's head, if for no other reason than to make better sense.

And so I'm back to what it is I would do and would like to do for other people perhaps similarly situated in independent bookstores, in need of some occasion to share with the communities, large and small in which they happen to be and which they mean to serve.  This business of making an event from the very stuff we love, from the books we sell and the people who like us love them, is as simple as starting with the sound, however tentative, however unfamiliar, of one voice raised.  There are children's booksellers doing "storytime" all over the map, you know there are.  Is it such a leap then to start from there, from reading as nearly every mother, every parent or grandparent already does to our children to reading to our friends and patrons and peers?  Is there any reason to think that reading one poem and inviting others to read one as well, and then another read another, and so on, might not easily enough become something other, something more, something new, for being nevertheless as old as the sound of human stories as far back as humans go?  We have the stories already, all around us!  We already love them, our poets, our writers, living and dead.  

All the words need is breath.

It's worth mentioning again just here that these readings are popular, in their modest way, with a minimum of notice and with as little by way of requirements as a chair, a book and someone willing to read it out loud. 

I'd be happy to help anyone who's interested.  I can.  I've done it before.  I mean it when I tell you that if I can, so can anyone else.  If you don't believe me still, I'm willing to work on you.   

Just ask.

Light Ladies

Scratch

I grew up with a grandmother who baked bread.  I watched my mother roll out enough pie-crust to cover us all twice over.  Now I live with a man who has really only the one rule: no box cake.  I know from scratch.  It's always better, always.  (Though I will say, having once made an angel-food-cake from the jump, it ended up tasting just like I'd made it from the mix, so there's my one exception.)

I am not one of those who find turnips the sweeter for having weeded the patch.  I don't believe in painting my own house, or paving my own drive, or plumbing my own pipes.  There are good reasons to pay people to do what's disagreeable and hard.  But then I dislike chores, and yard-work -- or gardening as my earthier, Zen friends call it.  And no one should assume from anything I say here that I'm ever going to craft an "artisan" pizza or fold my own dumplings.  I live in a city.  Cities exist to provide their citizens with a good and affordable slice and access to professionally prepared dim sum at reasonable prices.  Taxis, dim sum, and a decent French bakery and as far as I'm concerned you've got the building blocks of urban living.

What scratch means to me is making something from love.  I know that has the ring of a spiral-bound cookbook on a butcher's block table, and I apologize for the homey truism, but only love is worth the working of something from naught for no better reason than the joy of the doing and the sharing of it when it's done.  People get paid to paint and pave and plumb, and yes, people get paid to grow and weed and bake, and well they should when they do it well.  But what I do from scratch, I do for love.

It is the very definition of the amateur, and I embrace it.  I am an amateur in most everything I do but what I do for a living, and even that -- even for the little enough I make doing it  -- I can safely say I do without much hope of worldly reward.  I sell books.  They have to pay me to do a lot of what it means to do that, but I keep doing it despite all that because I love working in a bookstore, putting books into customers' hands, recommending books, writing about books, buying and selling and reading books.  All for love, nearly.  No lie.

And so to reading aloud.  It seems I've made a mission of this.  I do it now, in the bookstore and out, all the time.  I read into an inexpensive and now already out of date little camera nearly every other week and post the results, unless they are truly not good, here and elsewhere on the Internet.  No one pays me to do this.  Few enough people ever look at these things or listen to so much as a single poem, but some do.  That matters.  I organize and participate in readings at the bookstore, celebrating everything from William Blake's birthday to Christmas.   I've now read hundreds of poems aloud, short stories by the dozens, essays, letters, excerpts from novels.  I've lectured and hectored more now than a little bit to get other people, other readers to do likewise, with me or on their own.

I believe that literature when read aloud is changed in a fundamental way from what it is on the page; the mystical and largely solitary communion between author and reader, to something larger and yes, communal when words come off the page and go out into the world in all their music and noise.  Someone said once that language is thought with breath.  Well our common literature is the sound of our best minds, alive and breathing again when we read it aloud.

It takes, frankly, some seriously hard work to make a reading for the bookstore from scratch.  Even so light a thing as the reading we will be doing come Tuesday -- a celebration of light verse and song -- requires ten times the reading of what will eventually be in it.  To make such an event from scratch, as it were, needs careful selection, editing, training, rehearsal, conversation and thought.  When it works, such an event should seem as effortless as a well made cake; nothing too fancy, mind, but a good, simple and sweet thing that satisfies without exhausting anyone's appetite for the thing being read.  A good reading should make the listener hungry.

The simplest rule for such a reading is to begin it with what one loves and go from there.  I love the poets we'll be reading come Tuesday night, I genuinely do.  I love Dorothy Parker, and Phyllis McGinley, and Stevie Smith.  I love the lyrics of the great Dorothy Fields, who will hopefully feature in two songs that night as well -- performed by two accomplished musicians from the bookstore staff, not sung, mind you, by the likes of me.  (No one needs to hear that.)

It isn't enough that I love what I mean us to read though.  Even if I was the only one reading, and I'm glad to say I won't be, that would not be enough.  Unlike the readings I do for the Internet from my battered old armchair here in my office at home, the readings I do at the bookstore depend very much on the support and participation of all the wonderful people who read with me, who introduce us and make the promotional materials, who send our listings to the newspapers and promote us via social media.  To make an actual public performance of anything, even something so seemingly simple as an evening's reading of light verse, means dozens of people, not just me working away to make a proper evening of it, and all of us one way and another working from scratch.

What makes such evenings matter, and in their way matter more, at least to me than the evenings of visiting writers reading -- as grand as such events are -- is just that special magic that comes from people, ordinary readers, coming together with whatever talents, large and small that we all may bring to such a foolhardy undertaking and making, as it were something from nothing; nothing but books, and the reading of them, from perhaps a little screw-top wine and some snacks, from a few chairs in a line and a table down front, from work, and enthusiasm and effort and yes, from love.

Scratch.  Nothing better, I think.

Deadlier Than the Male

Betty Friedan killed Phyllis McGinley.  Back when the Second Wave was just coming ashore and the Women's Movement barely was, Friedan published The Feminine Mystique.   It was 1963.  In that landmark book, Friedan brilliantly critiqued what she saw as the deadly complacency of the suburban housewife.  Most prominent among the "housewife writers" Friedan made the special target of her righteous scorn?  Phyllis McGinley.  It is entirely possible that if younger readers encounter McGinley at all now, it is only in Friedan's book, and that is a damned shame.

Already a bestselling writer and regular contributor to magazines from the Ladies Home Journal to the New Yorker, by 1961 McGinley had already won the Pulitzer Prize for for poetry for her book, Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, published with an introduction from no less a light than W. H. Auden.  In 1965 she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, the last female poet to have appeared there probably having been Gertrude Stein in 1933.  In 1964, McGinley had published her bemused answer to her critics, A Sixpence in Her Shoe, a book of essays on her "domestic profession."  It was likewise a bestseller.  She had by then become what Ginia Bellafante in The New York Times called a "reluctant polemicist."  And that, so far as subsequent critical opinion has been concerned, was largely the end of her.  McGinley died in 1978.

Time rolls on and over the controversies of yesteryear.  Perhaps now we're far enough out from the sort of either/or feminism that made McGinley anathema to women like Friedan.  (And hopefully we have likewise gone beyond the critical insistence that the only women worth championing are just the suicides; the Plaths, and Sextons, and poor ol' Virginia Woolf, the invalids like Alice James, and the shuttered eccentrics like Dickinson.  From the Brits at least, there would seem to be a growing critical interest in popular women writers with major biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and Aphra Behn, for instance, and more recently, even Georgette Heyer!  Now for the American academy to do more of the same.)

Because Phyllis McGinley is delightful.  No other word for it (as Auden himself found when he wrote his introduction.) There are the now almost antique charms of her suburban pleasures, in poems like her "Lady Selecting her Christmas Cards," or "Man with Pruning Shears," or "The 5:32," or "June in the Suburbs," with it's "rose-red golfers" and "pilgrims, touring gardens," all of which bespeak the qualities of un sourire désinvolte -- or the lazy smile --- of the contented housewife.  But she is also, for contrast, as sharp-toothed as any better-remembered satirist, as in:

The Demagogue

That trumpet tongue which taught a nation
Loud lessons in vituperation
Teaches it yet another, viz.:
How sweet the noise of silence is.

Or:

The Old Philanthropist

His millions make museums bright;
Harvard anticipates his will;
While his young typist weeps at night
Over a druggist's bill.

The qualities of her best barbs, and much of her best verse, is exactly that of Herrick and like wits, in the canon as much for their seemingly easy way with rhyme as for the gentle cynicism of their sentiments.  No easy thing, that species of ease.

Ultimately though it is as a poet at ease in her time and happy in her circumstances that she is now both dismissed and neglected by the very critics who might otherwise long-since have made note of her as a sister to Dorothy Parker, if no one else -- herself only lightly taken up as unavoidable by students of American poetry in the 20th Century.  The reputations of both women suffer as a result, I think, of being gifted, in their different ways, with an arched eyebrow where a scowl has become the expected thing.  (Neither, it might be said as well, were much exercised by modernity or innovation in form.  If anything, Parker now seems to me the more doggedly old-fashioned in this way than McGinley; it's Dorothy Parker after all who can't resist a sonnet or avoid L'Envoi by way of farewell.  But not every artist has to reinvent the means to make good ends, does she?  And again, that may have been a symptom of a fevered self-importance finally passing out of literary criticism now that theory has contracted to the common-room parlour-game it always rather was.)

It's now more than one hundred years since McGinley's birth, and thirty-five since she died.  A woman raised in difficult economic circumstances, who lived through the Great Depression largely by her own wits and a poet who not only earned more by her poetry than her husband did from his Madison Ave. job -- it was Phyllis' money that put her daughters through college -- but who also saw all her books bestsellers, deserves, I think, more respect than she's been shown.  It's time to remember that popularity need no longer be a bar to appreciation by new audiences well past the day of judging our mothers for staying at home.

It's also time to remember that poetry can be light without being either trivial or trite.

Phyllis loved a party, hers are remembered fondly by any number of the literary lights she once entertained in her lovely suburban Connecticut home.  She poured, I'll bet, a generous scotch.  Time to return the favor to her sparkling shade and lift a glass to one of our best again.

Daily Dose

From Complete Poems, by Dorothy Parker

IN THE MEADOW

The buttercups that brushed my knee
Their golden dreams have whispered me,
But how am I to murmer back,
For gold is lovelier than black?

Coda

Wisdom

Pour Prendre Conge

Daily Dose

From The Poetry & Short Stories of Dorothy Parker

YOU CAN

"You can always tell that the crash is coming when I start getting tender about Our Dumb Friends.  Three highballs, and I think I'm St. Francis of Assisi."

From Just a Little One

For a Lady Who Must Write Verse

Daily Dose

From Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker, compiled with an introduction by Stuart Y. Silverstein

PROMISE

Love beyond my maddest dreaming
You have sworn you'll show to me;
You will guide me to the gleaming,
Reeling heights of ecstasy.
Dizzier joy than else can reach me,
Fiercer bliss and wilder thrill,
All of this some day you'll teach me,
Y-e-e-s you will!

Daily Dose

From Complete Poems, Dorothy Parker

FAUT DE MIEUX

Travel, trouble, music, art
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme, --
I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass my time.