Shirtless

So, this one time, Nancy Pearl and Helene Hanff were examining a first edition of Michel de Montaigne's Essays with a bunch of independent booksellers from the Pacific Northwest, and the staff of The Slog, at a used books shop in Seattle that was about to close, while all around them an increasingly heated debate had begun about spiritualism and dogs, when who should come in with Josh Kilmer-Purcell on his arm, but the star of the 1955 television western, Cheyenne, Clint Walker, shirtless.

I know that that sentence doesn't make sense, at least without some kind of a punchline, and no, I don't have one. This is something I've only recently learned, that that sentence does not have to make sense, anymore than I need a good reason to post that beefcake picture at the top of this entry.

It's all about the numbers, baby. Or rather, it isn't, for me at least. Okay. I will explain.

When I started writing regularly, if not quite daily for another blog a couple of years ago, my reasons for doing so where pretty self-evident. It was an interesting new challenge for me, though I hate being challenged nearly as much as I hate using that word to describe any undertaking that doesn't involve pistols at ten paces or putting a man on the moon. Nevertheless, that was what it felt like at the time. I hadn't done any sustained writing, other than correspondence, in the better part of a decade. I'd kept diaries and notebooks, and written all sorts of forgivably bad poetry and fiction in my youth. I'd done a book review, here and there, and a few pieces for zines when that was the fashionable thing to do. Fifteen years ago, I'd even taken a few months off from working full time, for the first and only time in my adult life, to write an unpublishable novel. All of that was well behind me by the time I started contributing to this other blog. I have never not written, it's safe to say, from the time I first learned how to read, but I don't know that I ever did it seriously enough, or produced anything good enough, to fancy myself a writer. I still don't know that I ever will. Nevertheless, to use yet another word I dislike abusing in this way, I came to see the brief entries I was eventually contributing every day as an opportunity to write and, at the same time, make some small contribution to a worthy undertaking, all to do with reading, recommending and selling books, which is, after all, what I do most, and how I earn my living, such as it is. To use one last word I simply detest, blogging seemed a surprisingly natural extension of my job and a way to practice one of my only two remaining vices, gabbing about books, in something like a productive way. Writing to this end quickly became a habit. Yes, obviously I came to enjoy the occasional notice something I may have written brought me, but I also came to enjoy the exercise of writing again, the act of it, for want of any better or less embarrassing way to say that.

Well, inevitably, I fucked that up. Despite my resolve to not abuse the privilege, and keep within the bounds of decorum, I eventually wrote one or two things in which I allowed my own opinion to possibly be misinterpreted as representative of the enterprise for which I was writing. I didn't use the kind of language with which I started this paragraph, or anything like that. When I wrote the bits that would eventually result in a policy change, and the end of my participation in that other blog, a policy change that would have required some more responsible party to have oversight of everything I wrote thereafter, I was sufficiently humiliated and hurt that I came home that very night, started writing here, and resolved never do such a thing anywhere else.

The platform I have here, by its very nature, is quite small, certainly smaller potentially than the one I all but undid for everyone, myself included, before I slipped so ignominiously away in the night. (I would note, happily, that that other blog has since recovered and is now thriving again.) That I expected here to address only the few friends and such of my coworkers as might find me, and if I was very lucky, the occasional stranger who happened by, was a fact with which I was not only perfectly comfortable, but something I frankly welcomed after the debacle I'd made of my last effort. When this new thing of mine acquired my first few "followers," I was touched by the loyalty of my friends. When the first person unknown to me joined, I was thrilled! I never knew, for most of the more than two years that I've been doing this, just who or how many people might be reading what I've written, or even looking at whatever nonsense I happened to post. When anything I've done here receives a "comment," from friend or foe, from anyone other than a spammer, I still get so childishly excited I can barely keep from bursting. (I will always treasure specially, the very first anonymous, semi-literate comment I ever got, attached to my review of a Michael Mann movie, in which I referred to my beloved, Johnny Depp, as "the greatest actress of his generation." The comment, I quote now from memory, in full, reads as follows: "You a fucking moron." How very gratifying, honestly. Can't ask for a more visceral reaction, really. I was as surprised as anyone might be, who isn't John Simon or Lars von Triers say, to find that even a negative response can feel like an acknowledgement.)

I'd never really appreciated just how accessible what I do here might be, until recently a friend showed me how I might look at the "traffic" at this site. By simply clicking on a tab marked "Stats," I can at any time of the night or day not only see if anyone other than myself is looking at what I do here, I might also see just what might be my most popular entries of the past year, the month and the week. Only when something I'd written was picked up by others, and a link was made to this or that piece by real online journalists, through social media, or more recently, by way of the still mystifying business to me of "tweeting," did I begin to see numbers that genuinely astonished me. For a day or two, I felt an unexpected pride in having reached an audience that I never anticipated and to which, briefly, I felt a new obligation to be considerably mindful. I was ever so full of myself, for a little while there.

After all, from the look of things, there were actually people from as far as Korea and India who had found me here! Imagine that. What was more, there were as many as a hundred or more people looking in at this or that entry, over the course of many months, and some of the most frequently visited had not even had the benefit of a link from The Slog, or The Northwest Book Lovers site, had not been "shared" from my facebook page with librarians, or "tweeted" by actual, professional book reviewers.

Then, unfortunately enough, I happened to notice how very popular something I'd posted on Michel de Montaigne had proved to be. Montaigne is among the most powerful of my household gods, so the very idea that anything I might have to say about him here might have drawn the attention of even a small battalion of online readers was about the most flattering thing that might ever have happened to me. I don't generally revisit anything I've posted here after I been back a few times to recheck the spelling and correct any howling errors of either fact or form that anyone might have been kind enough to bring to my attention. After seeing so much activity resulting from this one entry on Montaigne though, I naturally had to go back and look.

I was baffled. When I took a vacation to go back and see the old folks in Pennsylvania a couple of summers ago, I'd posted short essays here from some of the greatest essayists who ever wrote, billing each, rather cleverly I thought at the time, as a "guest blogger." This had proved, as even I could appreciate from the few reactions I had to the experiment, an all but total flop. Nearly no one had read the essays I had so painstakingly copied out -- at the time, I did not yet know that most of these were already available online and that I might have simply used the less arduous technique of "cut and paste" to post them here. Live and learn. Anyway, I'd posted an essay by Montaigne among these. My only real contribution to this series had been some very brief introductions, the least of these, titled "Why Michel de Montaigne?" as you might see for yourself at the link, consisted of only the following text:

"Might as well ask, 'why Shakespeare?'"

That's a sentiment with which I am still in complete agreement, but it hardly rises to even a sentence, now does it? So why then should this be among the most popular postings I've ever made? I figured it out. It was the picture. By way of illustration to many of the entries I make here, including most of the daily quotes I post, I have found pictures online that I thought interesting and appropriate and used these, with only a watchful eye as to copyright, as I have no interest in abusing the wonderful resources made available to me by the great folks who bring us, free of charge mostly, the Internet. To illustrate my lame introduction to Montaigne, I had selected a lovely image of the first edition of Montaigne's great Essays. it was that, that rare image, gathered from I no longer remember where, and not anything I did that drew so many curious eyes to this blog. Once I'd finally tripped over this obvious fact, I went back and began to look seriously at all the other entries that consistently drew visitors to this little chop-shop of mine. Turns out, people really like looking at pictures.

Also turns out, among the most frequently used words in Internet image searches is "shirtless," thus the enormous popularity of another, considerably longer if no more memorable of my entries, all to do with my husband watching old black and white westerns every Saturday morning on his new computer. For that, appropriately enough, I'd found a particularly comely snap of Clint Walker -- you guessed it -- shirtless.

So, for this, my first truly shameless and self-conscious bid for real popularity and big numbers, I have included an anonymous bit of beefy titillation from my private collection, in addition to using every truly popular tag from any post I've ever written, and supplied an opening paragraph of unadulterated nonsense using the same in something like a sentence, just to see if I might really push this thing over the top.

The reality is that this effort is unlikely to produce anything like the desired result. Even if by some truly strange chance it should, what then will I have proved? Nothing really, except that I should never have let myself get carried quite so far beyond the statistical probabilities for this kind of thing, and or my own quite reasonable and contented expectations of what I meant to do by doing this.

To anyone then who clicked through hoping to find either Clint Walker in a posing-strap, or anything equally satisfactory, only to find a thoroughly silly bit of chastened navel-gazing, I offer sincere apologies. It was a dirty trick. That's what it was. To anyone who has, for whatever reason, read the whole way to the end of this, or anything else I've written here, I'm still awfully flattered and glad of the company. Thanks again. I'll try to keep things from degenerating to quite such a low again any time soon.

Meanwhile, enjoy the all-but-naked guy. He's pretty special, I think.

All Unmourned and Unknown

Ah, the wonders of "new media." I wrote a piece the other night, in tribute to a neighborhood bookstore that is going out of business to make way for a bank. First bookstore to hire me when we moved to Seattle, just up the street from the store where I work now. Good neighbors. We still visit. Will be missed. The piece I wrote got picked up by the local newspaper blog-of-record, and brought me an unusual number of readers, and the bookstore where I used to work some additional attention. All to the good.

The editor who linked to my post is one of the last literary gents hereabouts with any real influence, an admirable critic and reviewer, and an amiable fellow altogether. I'm glad to claim his acquaintance. He's been very kind to my brief efforts here, a good customer at the bookstore where I work, and, in my experience at his periodic shindigs/salon for the local literati, librarians, and booksellers, etc., has proved himself an excellent host. A good man, is Paul Constant.

However, in his entirely too flattering introduction to my post, he said a couple of things at which I initially took some umbrage. (Always just there for the taking, I find, but that's as I am.) Before citing what I'd written as an exception, he bemoaned "the inevitable maudlin goodbyes to bookstores that are closing" and suggested that the more usual valedictories tend to "overstate the importance of the bookshop." That last statement particularly, if specific, seemed to me perhaps a bit insensitive, and if meant generally -- as in the importance of bookshops to civilization, literature, etc. -- then downright pugnacious.

Paul is a newspaperman. A rare thing, nowadays, perhaps even rarer than a real bookseller, and as much if not more to be mourned for their passing into history. In addition, he is a genuine force for good online, as a contributor and editor at The Slog. He regularly champions, in print and online, the independent bookstore, and is always quick to note any loss in the local scene. He is not shy of the barricades.

I ought to have kept all this in mind as I read, but I'm afraid I assumed a rather alarming subtext to his comments, perhaps not immediately discernible to a less tetchy reader. Mr. Constant has made no secret of his growing impatience with the enemies of new technology, and with the blinkered nostalgia and sentimentality that tends to loudly gasp and sigh and drown-out with the gnashing of teeth, among the print-reactionaries, any and all sensible discussion of books and the ways people now buy and read them. I myself could justly be accused of having contributed something, in my own small way, to thoughtless, gloomy din now surrounding this subject. An increasingly unstable livelihood would seem to have made alarmists of us all, in the bricks-and-mortar book business. Nervous, to put it nicely. However innocent he may have been of any such implication, I thought I heard a shushing in there somewhere.

Now I've had some time to consider, I really must apologize to Paul for reading so far into what he wrote. Hardly gracious of me, under the very appreciative circumstances. I now doubt that he meant any such thing. Rather, he was perhaps, quite rightly, I think, all too gently chiding all of us with some interest in books and bookshops who have made a habit of mourning, for failing so frequently to distinguish the casualties of economics, or in this case real estate, from the general trend to The End of Civilization As We Know It.

It seems, not a sparrow falls, but the faithful see signs and wonders predicting the end of days.

The trend, it's true, at least in so far as my own prospects of a sure and comfortable retirement are concerned, are not frankly what they might once have been. Likewise, I should think, for most booksellers not tethered to a headset and a keypad somewhere in the deep, dark bowels of Amazon, though even there, there must by now be a few unquiet nights. In traditional publishing, at magazines, and newspapers, among stationers -- if such is even still an occupation legal to list on a passport -- anywhere that people earn their daily bread, and digestive-correcting-daily-yogurt, as we tend to all be getting a little older, there is an uncertainty that has made Casandras of us all. I know I am lucky to still work where I do, and intend, should things go entirely to Hell, to pin my hopes to the university's football franchise and will willingly learn to fold tee shirts, if that's what it takes to see me through to my dotage. And if there were a way to shake the loose change from a Kindle or an iPad, believe me, I'm not be too proud to shimmy like my sister, Kate.

The longer I've pondered all this tonight though, the more I've come to share Paul's point of view when it comes to the general tenor of the common bookstore obituary. Even as our old enemy, Borders Books and Music, totters on, hour to hour, refusing even now to pitch into the plot we've been tending with such anticipation for years, we independents, new and used, still rush to the bedside of any fading peddler, however remote from ourselves and what we do, and chorus the "Lacrimosa," loud and long as we can. It's become about as noisy and insincere as the paid ululation at an Irish banker's wake.

The truth is that not all bookstores deserve so many volunteers to unhitch the horses and pull the hearse. As a life-long customer and long-time bookseller, I can tell you that there are, or were anyway, as many or more bad bookstores as good. I've shopped in dozens, in cities far and wide, domestic and foreign, and I've worked in more than one. If no one remembers them now that so many are gone, that is just as it should be. Any public fuss made at the hour of their passing was wasted.

I will not name names, or speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose experience is roughly as mine will remember going into many a seedy, filthy little shop, run by illiterate junk-dealers, full of trash and frequented, as Orwell so perfectly put it in his "Bookshop Memories," by "decayed" persons "smelling of old breadcrusts." Anyone who has had to work in such holes, and for such questionable characters as Orwell's "McKechnie," from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, will admit to a shiver of traumatic recognition when first that novel was read. How these shady, rag-and-bone operations survive has always confused me. Disorganized, dirty, and cluttered with unclaimed stock, how is it their tenants pay the rent?

At the opposite end of the economy are all the fussy little parlor-shops of the snobbish antiquarian kind, where every customer off the common street is eyed disdainfully before being grudgingly admitted by a buzzer that unlocks the bolted dutch-door. When I lived in San Francisco, there was an anonymous commercial hive of these precious dealers; each with his little room, empty of all but a case of carefully soaped leather bindings, each with a tiny white paper-tag, the price so discreet as to be invisible, if no less shockingly inflated when at last deciphered. What trust-fund, or remittance-money, I've always wondered, finances these antisocial aesthetes in their sepulchral little whitenesses?

Fewer now will remember the first iteration of the blandly uniform company shops that once proliferated like mushrooms, from strip-mall to strip-mall across America, but I can still close my eyes and picture the deadly bright cheeriness that pervaded all such places; a matter of policy, devoid of any intent but moving merch come Mother's Day and Christmas. There was a time, in my rude youth, when I was dazzled just to see so many books in one place, but, having been just last year in a surviving example, the empty, antiseptic atmosphere, the underpaid, elderly lady left to run the place with no help but one bored teenager, the smell of desperation and forgetfulness, drove me from the place as from beggar's blanket display of discarded magazines. Too sad.

As to the listing retail giants who once were perfect imitations of the great bookstores, down to the deep stock of backlist fiction, leather armchairs and high shelves, that business model has long since been abandoned as unprofitable -- well before, in fact, the coming of the online merchants and the big box bulk retailers. The first branch of Borders Books and Music I was ever in was beautiful. No other word for it. For some time thereafter, every time I went into one of that company's "superstores," I made note of exactly the same definitive, three volumed edition of a standard life of Otto von Bismarck. One day, it was gone, from all of them, never to return. I would guess this happened not long after the original owners sold their company, or when it was sold again thereafter. Like their slightly healthier twin, Borders now is a just an overdecorated coffee shop, full of cheap children's remainders, loud music and brightly painted mugs, all with inspirational sayings suggestive of the superiority and sexiness of "girls" who read. Sad, really. Sadder still, the independents who would still imitate these now empty imitations with bland corporate signage, and shelves crowded with chotchkies where the books should be.

How many silly little specialty shops have I been in and passed out of speculating if, when next I pass that way, it will be a bagel-dog stand or a pet supply store? Some dear soul's dream of a Kinder Korner or Tea & Titles -- to just, I hope, make up a not too implausible sign above the belled door -- I never wish them ill, but I do wonder that the write-off for their husbands' taxes will prove worth the heartbreak.

I'll stop. Just one last word on the dozens if not hundreds of badly managed, poorly stocked, or overstocked, independents in unlikely and unprofitable places: down blind alleys, up deserted streets, tucked above dance-bars, marooned in remote woody cottages, or dockside at abandoned fun-fairs, and all, all with no better business plan than the way most of us would seem to be able to manage a mortgage. Best to look away.

And yet, for all the unmourned and unknown, there are great bookshops worth frequenting still, in every city at least worthy of the name that I've ever been in, and in many a town too. We still in the trade may be forgiven for making so much of the passing of such as these at least, I should think. I know Paul would agree.

Better of course, as doubtless Mr. Constant would insist, those of us still in the trade put away our hankies and work to keep the best of our bookshops open. He'll do his part. Best we do likewise.

A Stranger Doodle

An unlikely fellow reader of one of the few blogs I visit every day, and yet, he might explain some things I've read in the "comments," on The Slog.

A Caricature

With Nounou and Nada and Nell

Back I went, tonight, to yet another gathering of the locally bookish, the latest iteration of Paul Constant's "Get Lit," this time held at the wonderful Richard Hugo House. The bar there now accepts credit cards, so a good time was had, at least by me, on a tab. The premise of these regular congresses of booksellers, journalists, librarians and authors is rather simple, the idea being that any and all that earn their living from books might and ought to get to know one another. As with any such simple idea, it seems that too many think too much about just what this might actually entail and fail to come at all for fear of being asked to do or say something. Timid creatures, it seems, the bookish. In reality, the atmosphere is so casual as to be easily mistaken for a drink after work with the usual crowd. So it is, and not a bad thing either.

I had a cocktail called a "Winter Woo Woo." It was delicious. Friends had various beers and soft-drinks, red wine and a share of the cheese and crackers at our table, as well as a bowl of wasabi peas.

Various coworkers from the bookstore, and one writer and reviewer, a great friend to us at the Used Books Desk, joined our table and we all chatted merrily enough about books, our personal lives and disappointments, the upcoming Seattle Bookfest, and various sundry other things all to do or not with books.

I stepped out a few times, to smoke and admire the boys playing soccer in the park across the street. It was a beautiful night, if already a little colder than it has been so far this October, and I was delighted to witness two handsome young men pull their wreck of a car into a very narrow parking place indeed, then step out of the car and into the cold, where they proceeded to strip down to just the thinnest T-shirts and the tightest jeans, tossing their coats and scarves behind them into the car, before shivering off down the block, presumably to the nearest dance bar. When I related this story to someone at the party inside, as an example of the ongoing commitment of gay men to fashionable discomfort, even when faced with what might have been a long cold walk back to their car, it was pointed out to me that teenage girls might well be the only other population so committed to suffering for beauty's sake. Later, starving, I stopped for a burger at Dick's and saw this observation confirmed by half a dozen nymphets with quivering, ice-white bare midriffs, all their little boyfriends sensibly bundled in coats and scarves.

The topic most on the minds of those present at Hugo House seemed to be the potential move of The Elliott Bay Book Company to new digs. This story had been first mentioned publicly by Mr Constant in The Slog, and then reproduced, and sourced rather rudely in the Seattle Times Sunday Edition, as having come from a "tabloid." Rumors of this move had evidently been circulating for some time, though I hadn't heard of it until I read Mr. Constant's piece. Before I left, some employees of that admirable bookstore came in, and the topic revived, though I don't know that anything was said on the subject that hadn't been said earlier. Evidently, those that know anything much more about this business have yet to be heard from.

I can't say that any such change of location sounds a very good thing to me, as it's present home is a lovely and welcoming space, and in my experience the only reason any such move is undertaken is usually because of financial pressures, a lost lease and such like difficulties. Everyone present clearly wished the bookstore well, but there was some discussion of the wider implications should such a linchpin of the local trade be forced into a less attractive and historic location.

Thoughts and prayers, as would be said back home, are with them.

There was one note in the conversation I did not much like. When reference was made to the somewhat excessive language in the Times story, which referred to the bookstore as "a local institution" and, as I remember it now, "an icon," not only the reporter's choice of words, but the idea of a bookstore qualifying as a landmark was dismissed as risible. "It's a business," someone present said, as if those two things were mutually exclusive, and then someone said, "It's not like we're talking about the Space Needle." The difference, to my mind, between The Elliott Bay Book Company and the Seattle Space needle is the difference between a beautiful, working, commercial and cultural venue that has served our community for better than thirty five years and a piece of, yes, iconic local kitsch. I would miss the latter, useless thing terribly should it disappear tomorrow, but the potential loss of a great independent bookstore should give all of us considerably more pause than it seemed to do in a room full of men and women who make their livings from books. Should the landscape some day soon be without such independent bookstores, great or small, the effect would be far worse, as I see it, than if the city failed to maintain it's more famous architectural follies, no? I don't remember much in the way of literature, art or poetry finding a public by way of amusement parks.