No Nature Yet

I've got a meeting tomorrow.  Well, a lunch, really.  Better already.  Nothing bad comes of a good lunch, I find -- so long as we're not talking about my waistline, and we are never talking about that, ever.  Lunch means food and conversation, so already the whole ugly business of agendas and talking points and well reasoned arguments, while still important, will at least be properly sauced with peanuts and peppers and giggly, girlish chatter.  (We're thinking Thai food.  I will of course be the giggler; nervous habit.)

I am not good at meetings per se.  I'm popular at meetings, mostly, but that's not quite saying the same thing, is it?  At some of my other jobs and on committees and such,  I was known to lighten the atmosphere.  People enjoyed that -- again, mostly.  Not bosses always, but the common folk.  I've got the common touch, being so common myself, you see.  If not kept in check though, I've been known to bring more heat than light.  I blame my brief participation in the Optimists Club Forensics Competitions, when I was all of fourteen.  (I wonder if they still have those, the Optimists?)  There I learned valuable lessons about the rules of debate, rhetorical devices and the power of relentless jingo.  (If things aren't going well, remember, there's always a way to work in a stirring reference or two to motherhood, the founding and Our Sacred Flag.)  Good lessons, so far as they went -- second prize I think, at the county competition -- but as I never really dreamed of becoming an Eagle Scout or an alderman, the debating style I learned there has not proved specially useful in, say, a discussion of budgets, or nominations for the best wordless picture book of the year by a Northwest "writer."  Worse, during my last abrupt go at college, I was surely one of the very last Rhetoric Majors.  It couldn't have been but a week or two after I'd signed up and declared for Rhetoric; that noble art of persuasion, that the Department changed it's name to "Communications," and I found myself unhappily in a supposedly scientific pursuit to which I was intellectually and dispositionally most unsuited.  Still, I got just enough of Demosthenes to ruin me forever for "communicating" rather than talking, etc.  I probably should've stuck around and learned a little more of the lingo, and earned a degree.  Would have helped, I do not doubt, when talking thereafter to MBAs, CEOs, and all other such lettered ladies and gentlemen.  As it is, in the company of my betters, I tend to sound more argumentative than I mean to, meaner than I am -- honest -- and less persuasive than pushy.  (Some of this can't be helped now.  Say the word "teams" in reference to anything other than the Olympics or the current season of Project Runway, and I make a face.  Try as I might not to.  Not pretty, and people notice.  That's bad.)

At the few meetings to which I am still nowadays invited, I've learned to bring a pencil and paper.  It's not that anyone really thinks I'm taking notes.  Everybody knows I'm actually doodling rude caricatures and basically making faces on paper, but at least it keeps me fairly quiet.  That's good.  When I do talk, I try to be a team player.  ( - )  Like I said, I don't get asked to a lot of meetings anymore.

And that's fine by me, honestly.  If by some miracle I actually find that I have something constructive to contribute to the conversation, may I just say, in my own defense, that I'm at least as happily surprised as everybody else.  Otherwise, most meetings tend in my experience to be about receiving information rather than making anything like a speech, for the likes of me I mean, and that has proved a most valuable, and hard earned lesson.  I do listen.  Whatever I might be drawing, really, I am listening.

Tomorrow's meeting will be different.  In the first place, I asked for it, and in the second, as I've said, lunch!  Then I will also be in the company of charming women.  That is hugely good.  I like women.  In everything other than bathing suit modeling, I actually prefer women to men.  I may have just put that a bit broadly, but that really has been my experience.  Let me just tether that statement then to a more defensible truth: I like these women.  One of the two is a very dear friend.  The other, though I don't know her well yet, I'm pretty sure may be. Win, as they say, win.  No better start to a good conversation than congenial company.  I can be sure of a hearing, and I'm already curious to hear their opinions.

Our topic will be reading, specifically reading aloud, and the possibility in the near future of more of it from staff, and specifically me.  Not just me though.  That will be one of the points I'm rather hoping to make, but leave that for now.  Any of my friends familiar with this enterprise, or with my obsessions generally, will already know that there are now few causes dearer to me than this.  I love old books.  I love the great poetry and prose that are as much our common heritage in this country as liberty, hotdogs, "muddin'" and motocross. All the things on that list already have their enthusiasts and defenders in the wider culture, and even, I should think in the bookstore.  (Okay, those last two I take from my own redneck relatives, but it's perfectly possible someone working in the bookstore goes "muddin'." )  I'm not such a narcissist as to fancy myself responsible for bringing Shakespeare to the otherwise benighted.  You've only to look at me to see I'm not so grand as all that.  (Sadly, I'd not look out of place at the races, though appearances to the contrary,  I don't drink beer or know the words to any Toby Keith songs.)  However, I do have something very like a mission -- call it a purpose for want of a better word -- and while the best and safest way for me to pursue this has proved to be right here, in my own, safe little corner of the vast Interwebs, I confess I am not entirely satisfied just talking to myself.  Now and then, when they'll let me, I break out.

Think of it this way: picture a girl with a big voice and a genuine love of the song stylings of Ella Fitzgerald, but too shy, and too often discouraged from letting loose on an unsuspecting crowd 'round the family upright, but who still enjoys the Karaoke bar after her third dirty martini.  Not exactly that, but near enough the point.  Well, now and then, having wowed her equally tipsy girlfriends with a swinging rendition of "A-Tisket, A-Tasket," she dreams of a bigger platform, not Carnegie Hall, mind you, but a proper "set" down to the VFW Hall on a Saturday amateur night.    That's me.

The real problem here is that I can't sing.  If I could, nobody at the bookstore would have to worry I might take the mic and rock the joint out.  Not that a great singer wouldn't be welcome, but I hope I'd have the sense to pick a proper occasion, around the Holidays, maybe.   What I do do, what I love doing and feel passionate about making happen, is talking about great books.  I get to do that sometimes, at my job.  That's a wonderful thing.  As our current ad campaign's tag says, "I'm passionate about books."  (Great tag.)  That's also the primary justification for nearly everything I do here: writing about reading, reviewing books, drawing caricatures and cartoons, discussing the state of the business of literature, gabbing away into the empty.  Another way to express this enthusiasm, another nearly lost part of of literary heritage, I believe, is reading aloud.  I do that here as well.  I do it every Christmas at the bookstore, and nowadays, even elsewhere, and shockingly, even for pay, potentially.  I should like to do more of it.  I should like to see more of it done at the bookstore and by more of us, the booksellers, enthusiasts all.

And we have done.  We've done "Scary Stories" at Halloween,  and "Dead Poets' Nights" in April for National Poetry Month.  We've read dog stories.  We've read Twain and Blake and Wodehouse and Helene Hanff's 84 Charing Cross Road.  I've read Dickens and Audens and Longfellow and Damon Runyon and Edward Lear.

I want us to do more.

I know I've gone on and on about this many times before.  To anyone who's read what I've had to say here on the subject already, or listened to me preaching about this in my cups, I apologize for the familiarity of my sermon, but here we are, and the opportunity, I feel, is new and there's a very real chance again to have another go.  There are new ears, it seems.

New problems, probably as well.  My present obsession seems to be 17h Century poetry.  You want something like a hard sell?  Forget my dream of an evening spent reading aloud the last chapter but one of Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop in it's entirety -- 'cause that, my friends is a neglected, and much abused masterpiece, I'm convinced and very much in need of another hearing, even if only with my poor voice to do it, and only my most loyal and patient friends to listen.  Think of the kind of crowd one might expect when offered an evening of George Herbert's sacred poetry and maybe a few lines of Abraham Cowley or Henry Vaughan to perk up my drowsy auditors -- both of them, if I'm lucky.

"Well, then; I now do plainly see,
This busie world and I shall ne'er agree"

That's from Cowley's The Wish.  You know it:

"May I a small House and a large Garden have!
And a few Friends, and many Books, both true,
Both wise, and both delightful too!"

How exactly though am I to sell that over green beans in special sauce tomorrow?

But this isn't about me, altogether.  Reading aloud, and the need of putting great poetry and prose into the air, that's the point.  That's the hope.  That's the proposal.  I've said it before, and I'll say it again tomorrow, words require breath to live.  If we truly believe in literature as a force for good in this world, and that is the reason I firmly believe that we still go to work in a bookstore and people still come to us for their books, then the profession of our faith requires, at least now and then, the unique communion that is only possible from reading aloud and listening together to all that is great and good in those books we so stubbornly  insist on selling.

So tomorrow, over delicious Thai iced teas, I'm really hoping we might put our heads together and find a way.

"No Nature yet, or place for 't to possess," maybe, but at least the possibility of creation is present, even in a meeting, no?

Wish us luck, my dears, and  bon eppetit.

More Big Heads

After yet another staff meeting, there was quite a crop of melons. I recommended doodling big heads a few days ago, to pass the time in meetings. As can be seen here, I've been doing just that this past week. I don't say that these have any special artistic value. I don't generally go in for this sort of caricature, though I appreciate it's masters, such as the late David Levine, of the NYRB. Obviously, a better grasp of anatomy, among other things, would be a prerequisite, as well as more recognizable subjects, or at least historically consistent costumes, etc. When I do my literary caricatures, I tend to get a little too involved in my subjects' faces to leave much room for the rest of them. Now and again, a hand pops up, once in a great while, I'll attempt a full figure. Takes more time than it sometimes seem worth doing, mostly, considering the audience for my more concentrated efforts, namely folks at the bookstore and my few visitors here. Unlike my more usual doodles, these were not taken from life, but wholly imagined. I find it best not to draw coworkers very often, specially when crowded 'round a conference table. I will do, but there's too great a chance of displeasing people sitting right there, which can be embarrassing for all parties, so I tend to keep such doodles from life, at least those taken at meetings, to myself. Safer just to invent grotesques, I find, than to suggest that any might be participating in team building, not that any do, of course, in so bucolic a setting as a bookstore staff meeting. Other than me, I mean.

The Rising Damp

I have a meeting to go to tomorrow morning. I admit, I am not much inclined to regret the meetings I've missed. There was a time, now far off, when, given the chance to sit for an hour at work, whatever the discussion carried on around me, I was thrilled by the novelty, but now I sit a good part of every day, a fact evidenced by my wide and warty squat. Given a choice nowadays, I would just as soon sit at the Used Books Desk, a toad content just to be out of the water and dry, and count on the regular and even sometimes welcome interruption of my meditations by sellers, coworkers, customers, and anxious seekers after the rest rooms. To retire to the comparative quiet of higher ground in the less public interior of the store, to sit at a conference table under threat of spreadsheets, agendas, flip-charts, and discussions of inventories, projected sales, alterations of the floor plan, and all such like weighty matters, puts me at risk. I do not begrudge the time. I'm not really bored by such talk. I actually enjoy meetings. I just wish my mouth wasn't so big.

I am not so shy of expressing an opinion, at a meeting or otherwise. Some wiser souls are. Bless them. They are content to sit. I never can tell if they listen, but they seem to. I never can seem to stay quiet, try as I might. Opinions I have, and so long as I need not substantiate them with numbers, I have all the confidence in my voice of the untrained but natural tenor at a baseball game. That is the problem. I can sing, but I'm unable to harmonize. I do not blend.

I am deeply envious of those that can. All of my working life, I have confidently answered when asked, contributed when called on, said my piece and then some. I do not brag of this. It is a fault that ought by now to have been corrected, if not by experience, from the supposedly edifying effects of which I would seem to be immune, then by the more than twenty years of gentle coaching by my dear A., himself not just the survivor of, but once, in his prime, the very master of the business meeting. A.'s storied career in, as he still describes it, "a government job," took him from the work-floor to the conference room well before we met. By the time I attached myself permanently, A. was already a man of some responsibility in The United States Postal Service. He is the veteran of many a "restructuring," lived through and even rose by means of many a committee, planning session and regional and or national conference. He learned from seminars and willingly undertook training. He has not only the intelligence and instinct for this sort of thing, he has also the endurance, good manners and tough-minded, thick-skinned, durability of the true manager and bureaucrat. I use that last noun advisedly and with genuine admiration, as his example has shown me that it is just such much maligned swimmers in the brackish waters of government who are most responsible for, in his case, the mail getting through, but also for keeping the lights on, the buses running and all the rest of what we call daily life in these United States. (When Rome fell, it was not the glory of Empire Romans missed, it was running water. "Remember who can get you what you need," A. tells me. )

As someone who understands the actual operations of business and bureaucracy, A. has tried to tutor me in not only the language of compromise, but also in the politic of meetings. Get yourself onto the agenda. Agree whenever and wherever possible, without concession, even or specially when not required to do so, as this shows you are listening and an encouraging sort. Phrase what you can as a question. Address individuals rather than the group. Some of this I've actually tried and A. is, as always, right.

"Be nice," he says to me.

And I have improved. It has been some time since I made anyone cry at a meeting. Some of what I hoped might be and thought ought to be done has happened, because I listened to my sage and savvy husband. So, come the morning, I will try.

Meanwhile, I ruminate.

The book business has changed radically while I've been in it, and is changing still, and at a rate of acceleration that has left most of us dizzy and fretful, some of us even frantic, myself sometimes included. This is not an atmosphere in which the bookish thrive. We tend to the contemplative and cozy. We are all about the slower pace of pages turned in reflection. We all of us, booksellers, at least at my rate of pay, keep a treasured fantasy; of reading for a living, or rather, making a living despite doing little else, a cat prowling somewhere nearby, like-minded souls begging our pardon for interrupting us to pay. I don't know anyone who does this. I know many booksellers, I've met many cats in many bookshops, but I can't imagine that even the cats nowadays don't worry now and then about their next meal. I think this dream of the quite little bookshop largely myth, or at the very least quaintly antique. My own hope is that bookselling may at least see me into my retirement, but I no longer have any illusions as to how hard we will all have to work to see the business last even so long as that.

In even my moments of darkest pessimism, I am convinced still of the value of what we do. I have never doubted the value of books. To books I owe not just my livelihood but my life. And I allow myself, most days, to think that what I know of books, and of readers, and of the business of selling books will be enough to see me out of this world if not rich, then certainly well fed. But I am increasingly convinced that the survival of the book business is dependent on our willingness to engage with this new culture, this supposedly "post literate" society that rises up around us like a flood, threatening if not to swamp independent bookstores like the one in which I work, then at least to erode and damage what is best in such places and make of them something unrecognizable, something ugly and empty, hollowed out but for the clutter of rescued treasures, irrelevant. I begin to believe that we must recognize the movement around us and find a way to accommodate it, rather than waste our resources in just resisting it. Time seems to be moving faster now than it did. Perhaps I'm just slower, but hopefully not so slow as to stand by dumb and watch what I love go under. Without losing sight, as booksellers, of our fundamentally retrograde belief in the ultimate superiority of the printed book, I think even we might still be brought to understand something of new technology and still recognize that any and all of what is new may just be, for us, the means of doing what we do in a different way. Books are our business. I think that is worth remembering. If we must print our own books, so be it. If the books we sell must be used as well as new, remainders and reprints, both high end and low, rather than "front-list" and "back-list" of yesteryear, then we are still booksellers, whatever the change in our stock, vocabulary and terms of business. Our business is to sell books. We are not antiquarians, warehousemen, librarians or "information providers," but neither are we in the business of selling just so much interchangeable, reducible "product." I think that is worth remembering too.

I feel powerfully that we must be willing to democratize not just our inventories, but our process, our promotion, and our priorities, utilizing the same flexibility and creativity now required of us all in our schedules, assignments and accommodation of the unfamiliar, and in a like spirit, adapt the business to new methods, nurture experimentation, exploit the eccentricities and weird specialization to which we booksellers seem, as a class, uniquely prone. We must, I think, accept change without insisting that it must be done without undue disquiet to ourselves, that it be entirely external to our habits, gentle to our vanity, respectful of position, custom and usage. I think the day is not far off when we must face the fact that we can not continue to sell books while still ordering new books as we always have done, answerable only to the taste and discretion of our buyers, shelving books just where they have always been, insisting on established practice as somehow being perfectly compatible with radical innovation, protecting not our traditions, but our individual bit of higher ground.

I think we'd better learn to swim.

Books are not at issue, much as we like to bemoan their fate in this new and supposedly "paperless" world -- a laughably savage joke when every computer comes with a printer -- but bookselling as a means of making one's living is increasingly precarious, and I can not see how we are to continue doing it without being willing to challenge not the value of books, of owning and selling books, but to challenge not just some, but all of the assumptions of how we do this. I think we must stop climbing over one another, stop grabbing hold of one another in blind desperation and pulling ourselves down rather than holding one another up, and concentrate our energies hereafter not so much on just staying afloat, but moving. I think this means we will have to worry less about the discipline of the crew and the chain of command, about the rules of salvage, the looming pirates and the circling sharks, and more about putting our energies to better use, staying close, relying on one another. I don't think we can afford anymore to spend quite so much time treading water while we argue about who is meant to be in charge of what, or who is responsible for our predicament, at least among ourselves, and that we must stop worrying quite so much as we do about just the exclusivity of our privileges, who has which responsibility, what qualifications or training, the right to claim a special expertise or be addressed by title.

But then, that is the kind of useless talk that makes me a pain-in-the-ass at most meetings and does no one, specially me, any good. So you see? See how easy that was, once I got started? And with no provocation, just a little nervous tension about what I understand will be tomorrow's agenda, and off I went as if I was rehearsing a sermon instead of trying to gather my thoughts for a potentially productive meeting with people I actually like and respect, a meeting moreover to which I am actually rather looking forward. Thank the Gods I have A.

"What could you possibly hope to accomplish by saying anything remotely like that?"

Right again.

AS he will remind me shortly, I'm damned lucky to have a job, and to have such an understanding and indulgent management, who, despite past experience, are still willing to try to get some kind of practical use out of me, and something other than opinions and metaphors high, wide and insufferable, in answer to the simplest question. Good people. Damned lucky I am to work with them. Lucky also to have so many good, less bellicose coworkers willing to give me warning looks, elbows and kicks when such grandiosity begins to cloud my arguments. People still willing to listen to me on the rare occasion when I do have something useful to contribute.

Okay. Enough. I think I'm ready to go to a meeting now. Kick me as needed. I'll be good with that. I've got something I want to say though, just here, while I can:

Beware the rising damp.

All I'm sayin'.