Colleen's Comic-Con Etiquette: An Illustrated Selection

Pilgrimage

I have a friend, about as good a Catholic, in his way, as he is a tap-dancer, who none the less has been repeatedly on pilgrimage, to one holy place after another. He is an accomplished traveler, a devoted hiker, and a sociable fellow, so even when walking off time in Purgatory, let's just say sin is never far from his thoughts, or kept entirely out of his sleeping-bag. (As I remember it, sin is most often Spanish.) I can not say I will ever understand walking to any purpose beyond arriving, and by no means, at either salvation or even a higher purpose. More likely, for me, would be lunch. Like many a fat, lazy sensualist before me, I prefer pleasure to drop into my lap, -- be it a boy, baked goods, or a book. But if I once went, before marriage to a good cook, no small distance, and might go some small distance still, for either of the first two, experience shows I will go much further for the last. The idea of ambulatory meditation then is not completely beyond my godless ken. I will travel great distances, walk many a dusty aisle, kneel, bow and stretch my arms up to heaven, so long as I am in the presence of good books. Ever the materialist though, I have a well established prejudice against public or institutional libraries; the rule is too strict, the discipline foreign to me, and the reward too ethereal. My bibliophilia is too materialist a devotion for such abstract edification. As a reader, as a communicant, I am very low church indeed, preferring my instruction to be without mediation, my contemplation private. I distrust the doctrine of transubstantiation even as to books. Any book I love, must be mine that I might know its mysteries. I'll have no librarian's priestcraft, thank you, or trust that I may take communion only at some consecrated table in a temple. Better my armchair, in my house.

My pilgrimage then is mapped from bookstore to bookstore. (I've visited such cathedrals even as the Library of Congress with an awed resentment, suspicious of the Romish pomp, respectful of the preservation of artifacts, but distrustful of the privileged access, and the actual utility of books more dusted and recorded than read. I've known many a librarian to recommend trash before treasure, and many a library that has discarded the rarest gold, to make space for baubles, bangles and bunk.) I've been know to give directions to even the least bookish destinations with bookstores as my only landmarks, as these, with good taco stands, are often the only reason I've had to venture abroad in even the cities where I've lived for years. When asked if I'd been, while in Portland, to a great museum there, a favorite of a friend, I had to admit, the idea had never crossed my mind. Not with Powell's just a block from my favorite hotel there, it being my favorite hotel, of course, because it is just a block from Powell's.

To any not lucky enough to have been, Powell's City of Books, is a Portland, OR institution. Established in 1971, by the father of Michael Powell, after working one summer in his son's shop in Chicago, what started in a storefront, has grown into a bookstore full worthy of the boast in its name. I have been in great bookstores in many places. I have walked all the floors of The Strand in New York. I have been even to London's Charring Cross. Powell's is the equal of any bookstore I have been lucky enough to be in.

Beyond its size, and it's perfect blend of new, used and bargain books, it is besides a place respectful of every preference and purse. I might admire a rare edition of Lamb, or a rare volume, beautifully made, of Cowper's poems in the Rare Book Room -- as close as I'll ever come to owning such a book -- but I might also, as I did, buy a homely, stout and sturdy edition of Cowper's poems, from open shelves, in the poetry section, for all of eight dollars. From Powell's, in fact, I have my copies of Lamb's letters, and Thackeray's, and my Complete Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott, retrieved for me, and the dust blown off, from a kind young clerk in a suburban branch of the company. Much of my Dickensiana I had from Powell's, purchased online from their simple and efficient website. For none of these, or any of my many treasures gathered from their stock, have I paid anything more than a fair price. For much of what I bought from Powell's, I paid considerably less than I might have anywhere else.

It is then this for which I am most grateful to Powell's: that I might come to them, as I've just done this past weekend, and in as many hours as my feet would let me, I might not only walk among great books, but walk out with them, and still have the means to make a good supper.

This latest trip brought me much I am still astonished to have found, and found I could afford! Books on Johnson, and a book on Mrs. Thrale, two books by James Agate, the great British theatrical critic, a great fat volume of the Best Loved Story Poems, dating from the mid-century-last, and Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare, perhaps among the few books by Lamb I've never owned. In all, I came away with three bags full. Quotations already begun, and more to follow.

When I go to Powell's, when I take friends, always at their request, for the place may deserve but does not require my evangelizing, I am mindful always that such rare places are not often afforded the respect so unthinkingly paid, most often from complete ignorance of their contents or conduct of business, to even the most pedestrian or pawky public libraries. The snobbery that persists in seeing honest business as somehow inferior to the apparent, if hemmed and hobbled democracy of publicly funded institutions is perhaps the last vestige, ironically, of the old oligarchical disdain of commerce. The great libraries, after all, have most often been founded as much as monuments to the bloodiest of barons and the worst bastards in history, as reserves of learning, and the least and greatest, the newest and the oldest extant, are still funded, at least in part, by the charity of bored belles and dead collectors in hope of a secondhand immortality, and by the basest of political and bureaucratic populism -- near ev'body likes a library, on principle, even with no one in it. Independent bookstores, great and small, and booksellers, I would argue, have supported more genius, and provided even the least proud with more beloved books, than all the libraries in this country's history. Lincoln may, of necessity, have borrowed his first books, but the first thing he bought as soon as he earned the money to buy them, were the books he loved. No great man, or humble reader, ever died regretting the books he had in delinquency from a public library. It is the book I buy, to read and reread at my pleasure, that comes nearest to being mine.

I owe far more than I've ever paid, to Powell's Books. My means are not equal to my admiration, anymore than they can ever satisfy my acquisitiveness, though I do what I can with what I have. I send this poor valentine then, against my bill.

Seeing the Sights

I was selected for three juries to date, but served on only one, both the other cases having been settled before the jury could hear them. The legal case I did help decide was not a complicated one, being a simple charge of drug possession, and as nothing ultimately was asked of us but to decide a matter of fact, rather than intent, the length of service was not onerous. I was much impressed with the seriousness with which even so straightforward a case was decided by my fellow jurors. There was a genuine debate, not only as to the particulars of the arrest and the resulting charge, but also as to the conduct of both the prosecution and the defense. Both lawyers were quite young, obviously inexperienced, doubtlessly overburdened, and we the jury found neither specially sympathetic. Neither then could claim the case as either a personal success, or as a high-point of jurisprudence. The defendant, a homeless man, himself an addict, who found drugs in the street and pocketed them, in plain sight of a police officer and other witnesses, was a pathetic figure. The jury asked the judge, not inappropriately, that he be treated with leniency, despite the fact that we had just convicted him. After we were dismissed, with thanks, by the judge, she encouraged us to discuss our impressions of the trial with both attorneys. Nearly all of us did. The defense attorney was taken to task for seeming to find little or nothing in the law that might have allowed us to find other than we did. Instead, she spent her time before us suggesting one unlikely scenario after another to explain he client's actions. None was as plausible as that presented by the cop on the stand. He had considerable experience of the defendant, seemed in fact to know him pretty well. There was no suggestion from the cop that he felt anything but sorry for the man he arrested. Impugning the policeman's character, when he seemed to like the defendant, and knew more about her client than the attorney did, did nothing for her case, or ultimately for her poor client. It was the young prosecutor however, who received the worst of it from us, despite having proved his case. I was far from alone in finding his presentation ridiculously overzealous. He had only to establish the facts with the more than ample evidence. He chose in addition to anatomize the defendant's character, suggesting a preposterous criminality and danger from the few sorry possessions in the man's shopping cart; holding up a few rather mildly pornographic gay magazines, for example, as proof, presumably, of the defendant's degeneracy, when they were clearly intended as something to be sold by the defendant to feed his habit, as were all the other sorry oddments in his cart, other than his few clothes, blankets and the drugs he'd found. Yet the prosecutor repeatedly brandished these magazines as if they proved some larger point. The irrelevance of all this, while evident to the jury, went unchallenged in court, as I remember it. We were having none of this in our deliberations. The one middle aged man on the jury who timidly suggested we might want to have a closer look, was shouted down. I've never forgotten what one of my fellow jurors, a woman of a certain age, told the prosecuting attorney about waving those magazines around:

"The only thing shocking about that stuff was watching you wave it around, with that sneer on your face. That was embarrassing."

I don't know what ultimately happened to the man we convicted. His was not the kind of case or conviction that makes headlines. I don't even remember his name, poor soul. Neither of the attorneys, I should think, remembers him any better than I do. I do hope the young prosecutor remembers what that lady told him after the case was done.

I went out wandering my last late night in Portland. I very much like the neighborhood where my regular hotel is, not only for its proximity to Powell's Bookstore, but of itself. There are always high and low on those streets, as there ought to be in a real city; fine and fancy places, full of well turned patrons, sitting on caned chairs, at tiny tables, eating gelato with dainty spoons, drinking coffee after midnight, and in the same block, or thereabouts, low gay bars, shaking with loud music, loosing happy drunks out into the street to hail cabs or to stumble, in affectionate knots of new friendship, merrily home. I liked the look of all of them, for the happiness evident in an unlikely, drunken hug, or the quite contentment of an attractive couple sharing an ice on a hot night. I like streets to be peopled when I walk them, specially at night, specially when I am myself alone.

I walked a good while and peeped in here and there without once stopping to partake of anything on offer. I was not hungry, but for faces, and didn't need a drink. I was, however, offered one. Just 'round the corner from my perfectly respectable hotel, are two others whose patrons have fallen away from such things and come at last to rest among the wicked, the disreputable, the poor and the pathetic. I confess, I avoid the block whereon these hard times seem to have settled permanently. There are drunks there of a less happy disposition, with less occasion to celebrate, than I elsewhere encountered. The wreak of misery rises in the heat around those doorways, and resignation mixes with despair and anger in every snatch of conversation one is likely to catch, avoiding beggars, on those sidewalks. My mood was such though, after my walk, that I did not notice where my walk had led me coming back, and so I stopped, to light a cigarette, just on the very street I usually disdain to enter. As happens whenever a cigarette is lit in such company, someone asked me for one of mine. Now, in Seattle, on the street where I work, I have long since learned to meet all such entreaties with a stern refusal -- as otherwise I would give away every one I had before I could light my own. That last night in Portland though, I was feeling expansive after my walk. I ponied up. A party of three or four forlorn men were arranged on the sidewalk, across my path, so to each in turn I offered a smoke. All but one took what was offered, and all expressed thanks. And one old party, his red face a bleary map of dissipation, wearing a dirty pink shirt with the word "Bitch" emblazoned on it in sequins, in his turn, offered me a swig of beer from his brown paper bag. I declined, as politely as I was able. It took some time to pass my lighter around before it came back to me, and in the interim, I was asked my name, and gave it. Two of three introduced themselves to me. The one in the colorful shirt tickled my hand as he handed the lighter back. Great friends, we might have been, had I had more than cigarettes to share. I wished them all a goodnight, as they did me, and I walked the block to my hotel.

Just at my corner, before the entrance to my hotel, a car was idling, quite a big, nice car, and quite a handsome, and handsomely dressed man of middle years, with a watch the size of sundial, idled against the car. I had to finish my cigarette before I went in, so I idled awhile too, not so near as to suggest conversation, but near enough to see that I was closely observed. Still feeling quite right with humanity, I returned the gentleman's gaze, and even said "Hello." Just then, what I can only assume to have been my new friends from up the block, evidently had some falling out, as there as a series of loud curses, ending in a shout and what might have been a slap. Something was pitched and broke. Then, silence. I turned back to the man on the car and shook my head a little, receiving a look of genuine disgust, before he looked down again to stare at his grotesque watch for some time, obviously impatient to be gone. As I finished my cigarette, my back now politely turned to the car, its owner and his watch, the woman for whom he seemed to wait, I correctly guessed, came out of the private entrance of a condominium, just up the street from the entrance of my hotel. She looked rather grand, if styled younger than her years might warrant. I turned just in time to see her skitter up to the car, and to hear the man curse at her, for keeping him waiting. She apologized as he opened the passenger door for her and she slid in.

"Why, in Christ's name, do you live down here?!" he asked her, not waiting for an answer, or closing her door, before he walked around to the driver's side.

"Nothing but drunks and queers," he added, smiling at me, before getting into his car and speeding off.

The only thing shocking that last night in Portland was the persistence of a sneer I hadn't seen in years. That was embarrassing.

Among the Believers

One of the ways the college in my hometown raises money during the fallow months of summer, is by renting the campus out to conferences and conventions. The college is a small, Presbyterian institution that started as a teacher's training school which grew and prospered. It is still a conservative place, made briefly famous in a Supreme Court case some years back, when the college won the right to maintain sexually segregated dormitories for it's unmarried students, despite receiving federal money. (Should give you some idea of the atmosphere.) It has a beautiful little campus dotted with Georgian revival brick and local stone, wide lawns, wooded walks, and a picturesque bridge across a charming creek. In high school, my friends and I used to picnic and just hang about in a small, walled garden near the chapel. It boasted a lovely railed view down the side of the hill to the creek, a sundial and a surprising degree of privacy. Whatever the garden's name actually was, the gate to the garden had two stone pillars, crowned with what looked like artichokes, and so we called it accordingly. Many a high good time was had there, and many a sultry, dull day was wasted. More than one experiment in romance was made on the grass behind the walls of the Artichoke Garden. Curiously, no one seemed ever to much notice us, and we were seldom hassled by security, in the summer. Some of my friends from town worked as waiters during the summer conference season. The little garden was a convenient place to meet. Again, rather oddly, no one attending the various conferences and religious meetings seemed ever to stroll out and about when we were lolling on the grass or draped across the memorial bench. They might have passed unnoticed, but none came in.

I went for a walk on the campus when I was home this summer. There were, that week, Baptists everywhere. A conference of Baptist youth or some such was in residence. It was a Sunday afternoon. Church services had apparently just concluded. I was a little conspicuous in a beard, shorts and sandals, but no one challenged my presence there. In fact, as I walked among them, I felt a familiar, if all but forgotten, incorporeality. I was made to remember just how we local mongrels moved so freely among the faithful all summer; we simply did not exist for them. We moved among the Saved, but were obviously of the World: boys and girls both with long hair, wearing cut-off jeans, smoking cigarettes, laughing. To acknowledge us, even in passing, would have been to break the spell of that specially sanctity that comes with retreat. We might be thanked for a ladle of mashed potatoes in the cafeteria, but the courtesy, and the contact, were strictly a function of habit and utility. I don't even remember a single soul trying to save even one of us.

I didn't search out the little walled garden, as I'd planned. It was a very hot day. There were entirely too many well scrubbed, buttoned up Fundamentalists milling dreamily about in long pants, short-sleeved dress shirts and somber ties, even the little boys. The girls I saw that day all had their hair swept modestly up and were all in long skirts, even the little girls. When I was a teenaged interloper, thirty years ago, I'm sure there must have been just such people wandering about with just such Bibles, visibly bristling with annotating notecards and colored tabs, but this trip, they rather put me off my nostalgia. I cut my walk short, got back in my car, and drove back down the hill to town, where I had happier errands to run.

Being this week at a booksellers convention, I was reminded of the indifferent, yet off-putting Baptists I encountered again just this past July. As I was strolling through the vendors' show, I happened to hear a representative of small, specialty press telling a prospective buyer from small Christian bookstore in a remote western place -- I made a point of reading the buyer's badge and noted the location of her store -- that all of this publisher's romances were, "designed to appeal to wide audience of women," but that the buyer needn't worry that the novels, despite their slightly suggestive covers, would actually "shock anybody."

"The values are all there, believe me."

That emphasis is mine, but it does convey something more of the sound of the pitch as well. I didn't linger long enough to hear any response from the bookstore owner. My presence was not acknowledged, save for one cold and suspicious glance from that rep, when she saw my badge and knew I wasn't among her customers. I might have been no more than a passing shadow at that moment, so pass on I did. I wondered as I wandered thereafter just what the assumption was that was being made about the potential readers of those books. Working where I do, I am unlikely to have much occasion to sell such books, though I have no reason to think we wouldn't, happily. Working in a major independent bookstore in a large city, I have the luxury of indifference to any opinion not directly effecting the sale of a book. We can judge best by our sales. Ours is not a store that needs much to worry about our customers' values, as such. Our stock, proudly, represents the widest possible divergence of opinion; religious, political, and cultural, and we may trust our customers to decide entirely for themselves what book, and what kinds of books, they wish to read, or ignore. As independent booksellers in a big, liberal city, we are not often questioned about the values in the materials we sell, and seldom concern ourselves with the morality of either our books or their readers. I understand that not all booksellers are situated so, or would choose to be. But I do marvel at the almost conspiratorial tone of that rep.

The broad hint in her recommendation, at least to my ear, was that the only means of avoiding the potential of offense to that bookseller's customers was in assuming not only a commonality of religious opinion, literary taste, and delicacy of language, but of danger. It would seem that the only way to successfully sell books to the ladies most likely to frequent such a bookstore in search of romantic fiction, or so at least that publisher's rep seemed to be suggesting, was to make sure, beforehand, that readers were well protected not so much from the temptations of the flesh, as these books were being sold as adult romance novels after all, but from any consequent exposure, either surreptitious or even unintended, to any book, or even hint, that might cause the bookseller's customers to question her commitment to orthodoxy. Now that was a little shocking to me; that a bookseller, even in such a specialized niche, should need such reassurance.

What, exactly, would be the consequences anticipated, should a book not so thoroughly vetted as to its conformity to "the values" presumably shared by its author, publisher, seller and reader, fall into the hands of some unsuspecting Christian woman in a small western hamlet? Does anyone suppose, first of all, that she would be so corrupted by reading an ill-considered romance novel, one that did not presumably recommend chastity before marriage, that she would then abandon hearth and home, become some newly liberated, sexually wanton predator, wandering the village streets at night, propositioning random strangers? I can't imagine even the most reactionary paranoid assuming any such influence for a book in contemporary culture, not with all the grave potential for sin elsewhere. Thin edge of the wedge, I suppose, but pretty thin nowadays, I should think. No. What was being suggested was nothing to do with the danger to anyone's soul. It was an appeal to commercial self interest that was being made. It was the customer, rather than the devil and all his works, who was being used to frighten the bookseller off from any but the safest, most obvious choice of stock, the bookseller who was being reassured, and warned to trust no one not entirely of like mind, even among her customers. Romance readers, evidently, can turn on you. Best not to stray too far from tables that feature biblical advice, even in their less obviously evangelical titles, if one is in the business of Christianity, if one doesn't want to risk being judged harshly, or even put out of business by one's fellow Christians.

I have very little contact, as I've said, with the particular audience of readers at whom these romances are aimed. I can't help but wonder about the lives of the women in that bookseller's community, about just how many of them might indeed be shocked by anything that might be found in even the most salacious romance novel, or by a local independent bookstore selling such books. I do wonder just what they would do, should they find a black sheep among the white. The rep may not have been entirely cynical in suggesting it might be best, for an independent business woman, to avoid antagonizing the sensibilities of one's community.

One of the most shocking things I've recently witnessed as a consequence of the well-organized and coordinated efforts of the Wild Right to demonize their opponents in the national discussion of health care, has been the indifference with which the vast majority of the rest of us have dismissed these latest examples of willful ignorance and fanaticism as laughable. It would behoove us all to remember that, for such people, we do not quite exist. For them, we are but the shadows cast by the sinful, secular chaos that whirls around them and from which, only their God and the strong shield of their faith protects them. We are confusion, abstract and sinister. Humanity is vested, for them, in the conception of the soul and the damned -- all of us -- constitute a challenge, an ongoing opportunity to evangelize, but ultimately, for those who refuse salvation, a source of corruption, temptation and a judgement. The great irony for the fanatic, is that the democracy that protects them from persecution for their beliefs is also the greatest danger to their sanctity. They must be ever watchful, even of romance novels published by a presumably godly press, and of the shadows that lengthen all around.

We ought not to just laugh at these people, though history has proved the power of sense, science and ridicule in reducing their numbers and sway considerably, because the joke may turn out to be on us, not because they are right -- they are wrong -- but because they do not take lightly any challenge to their insularity, and they have powerful friends. Moving amongst them, even briefly and in passing, no matter the happy or familiar setting, no matter the infrequency with which I am confronted with that failure to reflect in the eyes of true believers, I find the chill can still wipe the smile from my face.

Killin' Convention Time

Just a brief greeting from the lobby of the Portland Airport Holiday Inn, where I am actively killing time between my meeting and the dinner hour. I am at a convention of booksellers. The convention is, again, being held at a hotel seemingly miles from anywhere. Last year, I stayed here and at one point, walked out and around, making a roughly three mile circle, looking for something, anything, that might justify leaving the parking lot, after a second day stultified with heat and boredom and a very limited menu at the hotel's only restaurant. I couldn't find so much as a Slurpy. Very hot, very depressing, that walk-about. This year, I decided to stay instead at a hotel in Portland proper, and just drive over the bridge for my meeting. I picked a place, about a block up the road from Powell's Bookstore. I've stayed at the Mark Spencer Hotel many times, usually on trips bringing house-guests down to go to Powell's. I like the place fine. Moreover, last night I was able to take a Portland friend out to dinner at a lovely little place, a boite, I suppose? where I started with a delicious sidecar, where my guest had one of those fancy-pants-local-brewery-beer, and where we then had fabulous plates of rabbit with "hen's liver" and various other rather high end vitals. It was everything I could have asked of a meal, not in a suburban wasteland/convention center, but in a real city. And such a lovely city, Portland. Our great meal was followed by a long and digestively satisfying stroll about the town, the air being perfectly balmy, the company wonderful and the neighborhood interesting.

Today though, I'm back in the land of parking lots, warehouses and wasted hours smoking on a stone bench by the entrance. I've been to the actual trade show, I've eaten lunch with some of my delightful fellow committee folk -- I had a very generous Cobb salad that I remembered well from last year in the Holiday Inn's only restaurant -- and I've completed my work for the day. It was fun getting to see familiar folks on the committee, and to meet the newest members, good people all, but now I think I am just about done with conventioneering, at least for the day.

I have the bag with me of the few books I actually recommended to my committee, but I don't need to read any of these again. I have the New York Times from my hotel this morning, still need to get through that, and I have The Oxford Book of English Prose, the original edition, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch. Thanks be for that little book! With hours to go and miles before I sleep, dear Q's selection of the best prose has been a respite and a refreshment after all these nominated, Northwest books. I don't think I could stand another snow-shoe walk, moose sighting, metaphor for rain, or argument for the preservation of mosquito habitat. Enough! Instead, I will go sit in my car, eat melting chocolates, smoke, doze and read a selection from John Arbuthnot's Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus. Don't know him or it.

And so, escape, if just for an hour or two, to civilization again.