A Brief Defense of the Dull

A couple of years ago, just before the Lost Time, I completed a work-related survey. It did not go well. Not that I was unenthusiastic about the work I do -- I like my job, like the people, and I respect the venerable institution in which we do what we do. I consider myself lucky in this. I know that not everyone is so lucky. I also know that not everyone with just a high school degree and a book-habit is likely to find such an accommodating employer hereafter. Bookstores are getting to be as rare as haberdashers and shoe-repair shops nowadays. So when I say the survey did not go well, I don't mean I had anything much to contribute in the way of "negative feedback." (Ghastly phrase. Something to do with guitar-amplifiers originally? Anyway, chillingly mechanical when applied to humans. Noise.) It was not the subject of the survey that put me off. Nor do I have an issue with surveys. It's true, I have no interest in finding out which Gilmore Girl I'm most like, and I don't answer the land-line at supper-time, but I don't mind answering a few written questions now and again about something that matters to me. No. It was the language used in the questionnaire that put me right off.

You probably know the sort of thing I mean. Not my first rodeo either. Business jargon as usual perhaps, but shocking to see it deployed in a bookstore setting nonetheless. Begin then with a loaded question:

Q: "A coworker comes to tell you that the Revolution has arrived and says, 'It is time to burn this mother down!' What do you do?"

Just here I should point out that this was not an actual question on the survey I completed. The tone however is not far wrong. Pause for a moment and consider what kind of interactions our inquisitor seems to think go on in the break-room and or in the staff restrooms. Had a lot of jobs. Worked in a lot of bookstores. Never had this conversation. To my knowledge I've never worked with an actual Fidelista from an early Sixties episode of Mission Impossible. To my knowledge. So to call such a question merely loaded is to understate the case, but then, as you can see, understatement was otherwise not a feature of the survey.

By way of answers, there seem always now to be five. I have only just learned via the Intertube that this model is known (more rightly than they knew) as a "closed-ended question." The survey employed something called the Likert Scale -- named for the creator of this model, American social scientist Rensis Likert. (Pictured above, leaning on a library card-catalog, to give a rough idea of how long this sort of thing has been around.) Evidently a "psychometric scale" of this type is not meant to solicit suggestions or practical information, but rather to "measure people's attitudes." Glass houses, may I say. Anyway, the answers to the above question runs something like this:

1) Our blood flows through our veins only to be spilt for the Glorious Leader!!!

2) Give me a gun and I will shoot the traitor dead.

3) I would ask my immediate supervisor to shoot the traitor dead.

4) I am unworthy of mercy and long for death.

5) I will one day watch the world burn, and I will laugh.

Now that first answer in particular does not in any way seem to address the question being asked, but this answer, or something very like it, seems to be the first choice for every question. Hmmmm. But then, none of the answers that follow are recognizable as polite conversation, are they? Nobody not in a re-education camp has ever talked this way. And whatever the question, I've noticed that the two final options seem to be there only to weed out potential insurance risks and or actual sociopaths. Come on, survey-makers, who picks:

4) Yes, I am fascinated by box-cutters.

or

5) I am responsible for the death of many small pets.

Who ticks those boxes?! 

These surveyors, please note, are never directly confrontational. Clearly the problem isn't me, it's Lauretta in accounting, or that new kid in receiving with the covered tattoos and the shifty eyes. It is always a coworker or worse, a "colleague" who's makin' trouble, the bastard. The willing survey-taker is never  cast as the provocateur in these scenarios. Just another dumb bunny led by bad company on a merry dance down into the netherworld of theft, drugs, and unjustifiable revolutionary violence, that's me. It's all about being influenced. Also note, no one in these surveys is a good influence. The nearest they come to decency is the narc and the snitch. ("Betty saw Joe light a spliff in the parking lot and asks you what she should do.") Who doesn't love a tattletale? But remember, other people are always the occasion of sin, so even agreeing with the obvious lackey might be wrong. There are no right answers, only measurable attitudes. Best not to talk anyone at work then, I guess?  That would seem to be the underlying message. Maybe don't talk at all. By the time one gets to the end of the survey, it would seem one is not safe from the dreaded influence anywhere. Communism, delinquency, disloyalty, everywhere. Honestly, after I took the survey I kind of thought we might all be better off if we never left the house. (That was me. My bad.) Still, one has to eat, and capitalism is presumably an absolute good in survey-country, so maybe I can just hum the National Anthem all day. That won't be weird, right? (But I'm good, right? I mean, I took the survey like they asked. And just so you know, in case I failed to make this clear, dear surveyors, I swear I don't burn things down or randomly shoot pigeons for fun, or plot the violent overthrow of... stuff. I'm just another harmless old dear in a bookstore, takin' another perfectly harmless survey, right? Right?! Did I get it right?! I will never know. All such surveys ever say at the end is a rather chilling, "Thank you, Mister Bond," just like in the movies, right before someone cold-cocks James and suspend him over the sharks.)

Seriously, who writes these survey questions?! Who talks this way? Who ever did? Who thinks we common folk talk this way on our lunch breaks? What person who has actually ever had a bookstore job thinks we talk on our lunch breaks? Even before we all had phones, we read books in part to avoid lunch conversation. And what genius with an MBA thinks that these wretched surveys will tell them more about us than they tells us about them? What might be learned if we were to be asked a civil question about a plausible hypothetical? (Q: "What would you do if you saw someone taking change from the till? Kicking a customer? Running with scissors? " A: Tell. Who wants to work with violent, sticky-fingered dolts? Thanks for asking.) Mostly what the content and format of these anonymous surveys and self-evaluations and the like tell us is that we are evidently not to be trusted. The clearest message from whichever consulting chop-shop cobbled this nonsense together is that someone thinks someone needs to be keeping a better eye on someone, like maybe the humble if clearly unstable masses. What their research must show is that maintenance workers, retail cashiers, and book clerks are all just waiting for the opportunity to murder all the graduates of the Harvard Business School in their sleep. How hard must it be to be them, poor darlings. One eye open, Scooter. You too, Midge.

"Conflict is viewed as the active striving for one's own preferred outcome which, if attained, precludes the attainment by others of their own preferred outcome, thereby producing hostility." - Rensis Linkert

Indeed.

Anyone else remember Chick Tracts? (It seems they still exist, by the way, like colonialism, the John Birch Society, and syphilis.) Amazingly, the late cartoonist/publisher/childhood-nightmare-goblin Jack Chick only passed to the boozoom of Abraham in 2016, aged ninety-two. He invented his evil brainchild, Chick Tracts back in 1960 with Why No Revival? He followed up that blockbuster with the much catchier A Demon's Nightmare in 1962.  If you haven't seen these things, congratulations on having grown up in a better world made possible largely by unions, feminism, democratic socialism, and the blessedly pernicious cultural influence of fags and Jews in Hollywood. (You can thank us by voting in off-year elections and frequenting your local, independent bookstores when you buy your copies of Karl Marx and the latest gender-fluid wizard fiction.) If you grew up anywhere near a Baptist missionary society, you will remember Chick Tracts; those little cartoon booklets warning of the various routes to Hell in boldly draw black and white. They were obviously designed to fit in the back pocket of a child's dungarees and or to be left atop the urinals in low places. The thrust of nearly every Chick Tract was that Catholicism, television, secularism of every stripe, the Easter Bunny, basically anything that wasn't straight-up fringe-whacky Baptist fundamentalism was all part of the vast, Satanic conspiracy to lure the unwary off The Path to eternal life in the great-church-basement-Sunday-school-in-the-sky and straight to cartoon H-E-double L!

In the world view of the classic Chick Tract, nothing not Chick is harmless. Nothing. Santa Claus? benign old Coca-Cola ad-copy, or just another lie from The Pit? Well, you teach an innocent child that those Christmas presents came from the North Pole and not from the bloody suffering of Our Lord and Savior and you are just lying to them babies, sewing the kind of doubt and that eventually makes atheists. (I am reminded of Shirley Temple explaining that she ceased to believe in Santa Claus when he asked her for an autograph. Pretty sure Shirley didn't end up a godless communist.) The truth is important to the true Chick Tractarian, so long as they remember there's just the one: the devil gonna get ya if you don't watch out! As dear Richard Hofstadter put it, "... many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination." Could be Santa. Could be a UFO. Probably Satan. The late Mr. Chick was the paranoid imagination of American fundamentalism, writ small, in words of no more than two syllables, and with helpful illustrations throughout. Seems that in addition to overthrowing capitalism as mentioned above, the overriding goal of the rest of us is to be "a snare unto thee," Jack. 

"In truth, Jack Chick was the Leni Riefenstahl of American cartooning. Like the Nazi filmmaker who made Triumph of the Will, Chick was an artist of genuine skill who put his talent in the service of an odious ideology." - critic and journalist Jeet Heer

One used to be able to differentiate the conservative from the crazy. The conservatives were an overtly, proudly dull lot. Nothing more straightforwardly coded visually, in conversation and attitude than a genuine, old school Republican. I speak here of my experience growing up in a small Republican town in western Pennsylvania, back in the day. My Republicans taught school, sold insurance, ate at the diner and left a nickel-tip. They generally looked just like Democrats but smoked better cigars and kept their shoes clean at work. They still missed MacArthur if not McCarthy. They were polite in public, however they spoke to one another while golfing or at the Elks Lodge. They drank as much or more than Democrats, but they always used a glass. The only Lincoln with which they were much concerned was purchased once a year at the dealership. My people were not of them, but neither thought anything much of breaking bread with the other or working together at the poles. When we mocked them it was as much for their reserve as for their politics. Republicans then, bless 'em, were boring. That was the point of them. That was the summation of their policy and of their personalities. Taxes are too high. Things used to be better. Change is bad. Got it. Real Republicans were uniformly, reliably uninterested in and uninteresting to the rest of us. Not a few were perfectly nice people, otherwise. Some still are. (The old school Southern Dixiecrat was an altogether more colorful and overtly dangerous beast, and luckily avoided by me except on the rare occasions that the Texas relations came north.) 

So whence this surprisingly wide-spread conviction now that people like me, people who work in a bookstore and drive a twenty-four year old car with a "check engine" light that never goes off, just another queer ol' liberal, that I am looking to overthrow the existing capitalist world order and end Christianity? I mean, I wouldn't necessarily mind either terribly, but why would anyone think I'm likely to do it? Are revolutions and anti-clerical riots and religious massacres usually engineered by homebodies who spend their evenings frying chicken and reading the letters of Edward Fitzgerald? Even when I was marching a great deal more than I hope ever to march again, I still usually took the bus home before dark. In short, I am nearly as dull as a genuine Republican and probably always was.

I still remember one lady in line at the bookstore for the big release day of one of the Harry Potter books. Big crowd, much enthusiasm. This was when I was living and working in Orange County, California, or as we called it in my house, The Land of Exile. (See where this is going yet?) Everybody was just so tickled by the sense of occasion and pleased to see all the wee ones dressed up in their wee costumes and even I had to admit, it was kind of a fun day. Due to limited supplies -- it was a small bookstore -- each customer was limited to two copies.

"I wish I could buy EVERY COPY!" the smiling lady shouted. Applause. (Surely, you know what's coming by now?!) She inevitably continued, "So I could BURN THEM ALL!" And only then, when she had a copy clutched to her empty rib-cage and was braced for her inevitable martyrdom, did she begin loudly explaining, for some reason directly to me, the dangers of witchcraft on impressionable young minds, the power of Satan hiding in Harry's cupboard, etc. The crowd groaned and tittered. Nobody moved. Of course she didn't buy a book. They never do. Eventually she just let the book fall from her white-knuckled hands into my lap, stopped shouting just long enough to catch her breath, and was ever so gently shown the door by a coworker. I am pleased to say she was roundly, if rather shyly booed. 

Even then, even there the crazy lady was notable for being unusually vociferous in public.

You'd have thought that after the Byzantine Emperor signed on, and later European colonialism plundered the globe, the Christian church as a body wouldn't insist to this day that the lions are snapping at their asses. Hard to spot an actual Pagan outside of a Renaissance Faire now or an atheist in say, Congress, but it seems the heathen are just waiting around every corner to make some faithful soul bake a "gay" wedding cake, and really, isn't that just another kind of crucifixion? That anticipation of persecution seems to be baked into Christian (and American) exceptionalism. Jesus is King, Capitalism is the only workable economic model, and America is the best country on Earth, and yet I am evidently trying to spoil everything. Me. I get it, sort of, because every story requires an antagonist, and in this world view I guess that's me. I'm gay, working class, I read actual books, I'm married to an actual black man. Scary, right? Some people need that. Fear seems to be the corollary to their faith. What are these fundamentalist Christians anyway without their sense of constant peril and potential martyrdom but just so many Episcopalians at a picnic? Likewise the billionaire capitalists scream like pinched babies every time anyone tries to part them from a nickel they earned -- fair and square -- from factories full of cheap child labor overseas and or the intellectual wage-slaves in Silicon Valley. Socialism! I guess if one has even the rudiments of salvation in hand, and or a proper stock portfolio, it can all be snatched away. The SUVs, heaven, golf, tax-shelters, the flag, The Bible, guns, real estate earthly and celestial, it can all be had by the likes of me the minute I get in there and wrestle it from their cold, dead hands. (Never a wrestler, me.) Their father's kingdom has many mansions and I evidently want to tear them all down and put up abortion clinics and gay bars. (Cool.)

Clearly I am the problem?

When the Holidays roll around again and The War on Christmas resumes, as a retail worker I will be right back in the trenches, lobbing faith-neutral Season's Greetings and getting the full force of many an aggressively pointed "Merry CHRISTMAS!" right in the face. And I will deserve it. I will have had it coming, for taking the you-know-who out of you-know-what. By foolishly assuming that the population of a mid-sized American city in the twenty-first century may not all have been saved, id est, washed in the blood of the lamb, aka numbered among the saints, etc., I will once again have struck a nerve if not a death blow to The Shining City on the Hill and all who sail on her. I obviously subvert the American way.

And come the height of the shopping season, when I am busily hustling the goods in a retail shop, and ringing up team-approved sports gear, and selling cookbooks by television millionaires, and locating the latest James Patterson for Papaw, and finding socks with irreverent slogans for that hard-to-buy-for sister-in-law, in my heart of hearts I will somehow be subtly undermining the 1% and the Republic for which it stands. When I am pitching in at the wrapping counter in order to get grandma's unwelcome present of papal sayings and the latest Ann Coulter off in the mail on time, I will also be pining for Mao and counting the hours until the next meeting of the gay coven. (Have you ever met any of the actual queer witches? Wax, tarot, cat hair.) 

Nope.

See, I am not nearly so dangerous, or interesting as the Right would have me be. None of us are. How could one do, honey? Maybe once upon a time, but now? Now the dull Republicans have gone the way of the dodo and the cuckoos are in charge. Compared to that shit-show, my crowd is downright upright and maybe even (gasp) a little boring. Maybe just me. Like Iris Murdoch's aging writer in The Black Prince, "I seem doomed to quietness," and I am very much reconciled to my fate. The nice part of not being terribly invested in paranoid fantasies of gold hoarded up in heaven or at Wells Fargo is that one is free to enjoy more of the real world, no? It's not always so nice, reality, but as Groucho said, "it's still the only place you can get a decent meal."

So come The Holidays (provocative!) I will still be working, offering Season's Greetings, selling books. I will still be driving my ancient car and cursing at the slowness with which they are repairing the West Seattle Bridge. I will read Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory aloud. I will listen to Johnny Mathis and read Dickens and I will again "honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year long" and I will doubtlessly fail as I always do.

I will try not to let the triumph of paranoia and dithyramb of the dolts and the demented drown out the carols and shatter the punchbowl. I will not be much of a problem, whatever those assholes think. It ought not to matter to them what I do, but weirdly it seems to. My existence is evidently enough set them aquiver with suspicion and rage. So be it. It seems even in my dullness my life is now a radical act. In my utter predictability, even in a cheery mood I am a provocation and a spur. Cool. Maybe it's time to make more noise? Let's nettle 'em. Who knows what we might yet do to absolutely ruin their Christmas just by enjoying our Holidays. I plan to decorate gaily. Ours will be a fully interracial Christmas dinner. I might take some paid vacation and not spend any money or do anything on black Friday. The nearest I'll get to church will be my library. Yeah, I'm going to read more than the one book. None of the ones I do read will probably have a single passage in red. I will be mixing textiles, maybe eatin' shrimp, and watching Santa Claus Is Coming to Town without irony. I might even light a cigar, in memory of my beloved, brilliant Groucho, but also in tribute to all the noble dull who went before me. And maybe, just maybe I will try to do more to live up to my reputation. Maybe add a little of The Internationale to my Christmas music mix. Maybe a Beatles tune? You say (I) want a revolution, Well, you know...

Trading Those Fevers for Tranquility

"The heads of strong old age are beautiful

Beyond all grace of youth." 

-- Robinson Jeffers, from his poem, Promise of Peace

For a minute there, I was a kid again, or at least the youngest person in the room. That hadn't happened in a very long time. When I was called back from furlough I was younger -- by just a bit admittedly -- than the majority of my coworkers. It was a startling turn. I've spent my working life in retail, and most of my life in independent bookstores. There have always been older and wiser heads than mine in every bookstore where I've worked, but there were always kids too, at least people young enough for me to call them "kids." 

Traditionally young people take bookstore jobs. The pay is low, the hours sometimes odd. The work is physical and mostly done on foot. Books in mass are heavy and shelves are often low. Quiet as a bookstore can be, when we are lucky there will be many people in the shop, many questions, bustle. The holidays in retail start early and even in the age of electronic orders and daily home deliveries people still go out to shop and do not always know what for until it's put in front of them. That's the better part of the job, the part you have to like to be a bookseller, otherwise you might as well be stocking groceries or unloading trucks at Target -- both perfectly respectable things to do, I hasten to add. Books make the work and books make the work better. Makes sense then that a young person -- a literate and culturally engaged young person -- would take a job in a bookstore. Some of 'em have even been straight out of high school, others a bit older but still younger than me by the day. What else is one meant to do with an undergraduate degree in say Eng. Lit. or French? Turns out that older people keep these supposedly temporary jobs, some of us anyway, and the ones that do, the ones who stay, are booksellers. Don't know when exactly that happens, and it doesn't happen to everyone who works a long time in a big store. There are other roles, other work with just as much skill required and dignity owed. In this fragile peace with the pandemic, back to work after more than a year, I looked up one morning and all around me I saw naught but gray heads. This has changed since, but at the time it was very strange, like going to work in an actual metaphor for print culture.

My first work in a bookstore came about when I was still a child who simply wouldn't leave and did not have enough money for the books I so desperately required. Sweep up, stack boxes, take out the trash and earn credit, buy books. (The job hasn't changed that much now I think about it and neither have I.) Thirty six years ago, when I was twenty-three I took home my first paycheck from a bookstore and haven't worked at anything else since. I remember thinking my bosses terribly adult if not actually old at the time. When I became a boss myself I was still in my early twenties and I felt a bit of a fraud despite having been told all my life that I was older than my years. (That stops eventually, blossom. One day the years caught up with the mug.) When a decade or two and a few bookstores later I ceased to be a boss I finally looked the part but didn't want it anymore. It was a great relief to never make another schedule, review or submit a budget, work without pay, or fire people. 

As I've noted, those who stayed during the peak of the pandemic and most of us who have been slowly coming back to the bookstore are all of us old hands. Perfectly sensible. Despite this brave new cybernated and systematized economy, those of us who know books from way back, book folk as it were, seem best suited to bookstores just now. The hours are limited, the customers loyal and familiar, and we remember where things are -- or at least where we think they ought to be -- and we know the where and the way things ought to be put and what might sell during the Holidays. (Though every year the day after Christmas there are those big stacks of of the books we were all convinced were going to sell like brisket at a barbecue stand and didn't. Yesterday's fish come January first, if I may mix my proteins and or metaphors.) We venerable clerks may have to write down all of our passwords on scratch paper. We misremember the order in which this must be entered before that in creating a  new "customer record." But we know how to find a book for the husband who's a birder. We can guess what your aunt wants to read once she's worked her way through Elizabeth Warren, Louise Penny, and Roxane Gay. I won't say we are wise, but we remember what matters, or at least what we've sold.

I am old enough now to like working with younger people. Not sure when that happened either. I have always preferred the company of grown ups. Children can be deadly dull even to other children and while adults can be frighteningly remote and deeply confusing, they don't ask you "why?' so persistently or hand you as many wet things. Spoiled for choice, I have always liked old people. Old people are easier to understand, even when they aren't easy company. I grew up with old people simple and sly, sweet and not and while they needn't be nice neither do they disappoint much. You can see 'em coming. Know what you're getting with the old straight away: loud or quiet, adorable or irascible, shaky, slow, blind, deaf, dear. On the other hand the young look so uniformly promising, disappointment seems inevitable. It's easy to forget what they are not likely to know, and to be shocked by just how much they have yet to learn. I am for example appalled to regularly meet a college-aged person who does not know the difference between fiction and nonfiction. How does one not understand nouns and modifiers by the time one gets to university? Surely the explanation is in the name? Can't be that many business administration majors anywhere. Takes the shine right off the new penny. When the old are rude or dim, well it could happen to any of us. We're all getting on. The old have earned the right to express a certain discomfort in this world. On the other hand, I'm frankly shocked when the young are unpleasant. Young men in particular were not very nice to me when I was one, but now that I'm harmless and plump, who would want to hurt my feelings? Everybody likes old dogs, right? I forget puppies can bite. Maybe it's as simple as youth is beautiful and thrilling and sometimes exhausting and never much interested in the rest of us. They have every right not to be. Might return my hello though when you come to pay for that Blue Book and #2 pencil.

"They that enter into the world are too often treated with unreasonable rigour by those that were once as ignorant and heady as themselves; and distinction is not always made between the faults which require speedy and violent eradication, and those that will gradually drop away in the progression of life." -- Samuel Johnson, from his Idler #25

On a practical and particularly on a retail level, even the meanest old man can usually be got away from which is not always the case with the middle-aged. It's true that the middle aged professional, male or female, has money to spend and they do seem to read, but they often also have unrealistic expectations of the service required to satisfy their needs and the deference due to them personally. Perhaps it's class more than age; the weight of the watch, the size of the ring. Old people tend to courtesy even when they may have lost the knack of it for want of company. Children are charming and selfish and largely forgivable even when rude. Also? There's usually someone to carry them off when they get fractious. The old can be equally loud and abrasive, but mostly lack the stamina of a roaring toddler, thanks be. I would generally prefer the loudest coot to a screaming baby any day.

Still, it's hard not to admire the young. So pretty! So smooth! So quick! The young are often shy and or largely unaware of their affect. It can be most endearing. With the bookish ones it doesn't usually take much to get them going, even if I do remind them of a chatty old party at the bus-stop noticing the book in their hand. As readers they all seem to have some great enthusiasm -- may not be mine, probably nothing to do with me or what I read, but still thrilling to find. They make for splendid colleagues most of 'em for the just this reason. Proust to Pusheen, when the young love something it is with a passion. Most attractive that, and needed. It is good to be reminded of the time when every book was new and most were still yet to be read. I miss that youthful exuberance just now. Not that the rest of us are without enthusiasms, but these tend to be nearer my own and so all too familiar. Yeah. We can all agree, Maira Kalman is way cool. What's new?

What the young do for me personally is remind me of all I that do not know. They read what I never would. They "follow" things I never knew existed. They are naturally part of things that otherwise flows right 'round me like so much street noise in my fairly quiet and sedentary life. Turns out for example that one may need to know what something called "Minecraft" is after all. They tell me about the new poets and novelists -- say under age fifty -- and how gender is being reconstructed, and how the earth may yet be saved. The young know everything. Why resent what never changes? Go ahead, alleviate some of my obvious ignorance. I could stand some improvement.

The other great charm and danger of the young and of the rising generation in particular is their willingness to not let things pass. Johnson says, "It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious, and severe." Same as it ever was then. I would hope that mine was the last generation trained to not challenge the inequities and prejudices in this world, at least and until we were supposedly of an age to do something about them. Turns out we were usually too late and largely without power or inclination by the time we tried. Perhaps this was always the intention. "Thus is life trifled away in preparations to do what never can be done, if it be left unattempted till all the requisites which imagination can suggest are gathered together," said Dr. Johnson (Rambler #71.) 

The impatience of the young finds expression now in ways I admit I find breathtaking, even a little terrifying frankly, and they do this in public places and with people to whom I was taught to show only deference. Startling, but largely a trend I think in the right direction. (Those of us who came of age in terrible early days of AIDS had to overcome, most of us anyway, an almost ingrained disbelief in our right to stand up for ourselves, to survive. It may seem self-evident. It wasn't, certainly not to me. I had to be taught to expect and demand my own survival and to fight for the survival of others like me and unlike.)

"It has always been the practice of those who are desirous to believe themselves made venerable by length of time to censure the new comers into life, for want of respect to gray hairs and sage experience, for heady confidence in their own understandings, for hasty conclusions upon partial views, for disregard of counsels which their fathers and grandfathers are ready to afford them, and a rebellious impatience of that subordination to which youth is condemned by nature, as necessary to its security from evils into which it would be otherwise precipitated by the rashness of passion and the blindness of ignorance." -- Rambler #50

I can of course afford to admire at least a little the moral inflexibility of the young because I am unlikely to come to their notice and so to suffer much from it. Not all my friends and contemporaries are likely to be so lucky. The high-minded opprobrium of the newer puritans tends to be directed at the authority nearest to hand; teachers, parents, public figures, and of these am I none. Always the way. I count professors among my friends, and high school teachers, and librarians, and for them I worry, not simply because they are my friends but because there would seem to be no one to back them should they be accused of insensitivity, perceived aggression, etc. Happens. Meanwhile the employers of the respectable middle-aged to old seem to have abandoned nearly any standard of objectivity in these confrontations with youth's New Model Army. When challenged nowadays it seems the strategy is to assume the guilt of offending elder, concede the right of youth to their indignation, assign the former to rigorous self re-examination and comfort the later in their feelings. In other words to do as near to nothing as may be done without obvious injury to the institution, same as it ever was.  Meanwhile villains large and small keep at their worst. One hopes the same relentlessness with which the young seek to supress the word "niggardly" will one day take their unremitting and well organized retribution to the doors of greater power. How I should like to live to see that! To see righteousness carried off the campuses again and into the heart of the confederacy, to board rooms, and pulpits, to the hidden dens of the most stubborn resistance and power. In this I wish the young nothing but well. Go on! fuck 'em up kids!

Easy for me to sit and hope for better from and for the young. Harder as always to do anything myself, a point which would doubtlessly be made to me if I weren't such a comparatively anonymous old fart. May happen yet. In the meanwhile, typical of my stage in life, my economic station, and my generation, I try to keep my head down mostly. No one has to explain their pronouns to me. I have learned to ask politely from a genuine sympathy, now that I have a clue. My curiosity is no one's responsibility but my own. I so get that.

There are advantages to looking older. As I may have mentioned, I am now by all appearances completely harmless. Why mourn the sexual tension to which I never contributed much anyway? That I look like Santa Claus is all too true, even after a serious trimming of the beard to accommodate the new masks. It is a choice, though not from any desire to draw attention to the resemblance. I suspect clean-shaven I would be Pickwick. I am nearsighted, fat, relatively cheerful. I sometimes wear a flat hat. I lack the height and the chin for a more gradual and handsome decline into my dotage. Without the full beard my face has all the gravitas of a Matt Groening cartoon. With my full whiskers I could at least look arch, even sometimes wrathful -- though I try not to overplay the part. I haven't much actual fight in me. In practice, clerking in retail, I can ill-afford confrontation. Even after nearly twenty years in the same place and thirty five in the business, my employment is still dependent on the absence of complaint. (Increasingly not unlike my academic friends, now I think of it, though without anything like the possibility of tenure or organized protest.) I must be well liked to eat. Harmless can't hurt me.

 "Such is the condition of life that something is always wanting to happiness. In youth we have warm hopes, which are soon blasted by rashness and negligence, and great designs which are defeated by inexperience. In age, we have knowledge and prudence, without spirit to exert, or motives to prompt them; we are able to plan schemes, and regulate measures, but have not time remaining to bring them to completion." 

Thus dear old Sam Johnson again, this time in his Rambler #196 (all of forty-three years old by the way when he wrote that.) Far be it from me to disagree with The Great Cham*. Actually I am aware of great schemes being planned elsewhere in the building, just not by me. Not my business. Bookstores change or they die. One must trust to those well off the sales floor to keep the enterprise moving ahead. (I wish them well, and not just because it will be another decade before I can retire.) Looking around me I must say a remarkable lot of work is still being done. My fellow clerks all of a certain age all bustle still, if a bit slower. In part this is from want of help. We are fewer than we were and will we hope again soon be not sufficient to the day. Carts get pushed, books shelved and retrieved. "Book have not so much served me for instruction as exercise," said the wise Montaigne. Indeed. We nonetheless do try to keep the place looking lively and new. Displays change, new books come in, recommendations are made, trends followed and or confuted. We may not know as much as the young, but we know what we are doing when it comes to pushing books.

There was a brief satisfaction in being suddenly younger or at least further back on the shorter curve. I was reminded for example that my responsibilities are lighter now than they have been for many years. Not anchored to a buying desk, I find myself shelving books I had no part in ordering, answering questions from customers and not just on weekly unemployment forms, or from my employers. I've enjoyed making displays for the pure pleasure of improvement. I'm glad of a chat about book clubs other than my own. These were things for which until recently I had not the same luxury of time. Time is important to a crew more persistent than quick. Ironically my recent illness played a part in easing my return to work too. There was no one to judge me harshly for moving so slow. The sympathy for my pain was real and without pity, as no one near me was entirely without some symptom of impairment or decline. I'll see your bum knee and raise you a kidney stone. More than any of this I was free in my enthusiasms as the consequences were not likely to put me much in anyone's way. Freshen up the Staff Recommendations? Why sure. Do something to make the poetry shelves prettier? Make a table display from butcher's paper and lots of single copies? Put the cookbooks in order? Get on with it. If it doesn't work it can be put back, done over, tried again. Not a sprint but a... what? Low impact walk for heart health? I did good work with no one to notice until it was done. I liked the simplicity of alphabetizing. Felt good to have a job. I might have been twenty three again, in this if nothing else.

More though is the satisfaction of being one among the majority, one gray head among many.  All around me I found familiarity, empathy and support. We survivors wish each other well and happy. Happy to be back. Discontent, the birthright of the young, tends in time to settle into a persistent if largely harmless pessimism expressed in a gentle growling and far less likely to shout. To a remarkable degree we get along better than ever, perhaps because going along now constitutes a shared and attainable pace. I discover that we are all the easier to like and to please for being gentled by the years. 

It is sobering to think that I am already older than for example Horace or Dickens ever lived to be. My husband being older yet is now nearly the age at which Johnson saw his time out. My mother at ninety has survived all but one of her contemporaries and lived to a greater age than the many of the old ladies she used to see to as a kindness and a duty. I look around me at work and see not a few of my friends either ready for retirement or already back from retirement part-time. None seem unhappy to find themselves so. 

Getting older is fraught with embarrassments large and small, and limitations tend to pile up for want of anyplace to hide them. I don't scare shoplifters anymore. Need help with those boxes? Well, I am not the one to ask. I am not the reader I was either. I don't keep up. I am more like Dr. Johnson now and still "... read a great deal in a desultory manner, without any scheme of study, as chance throws books in (my) way" and not often straight through to the end. I am too old to be bothered mostly. Got it. Time is short. Moving on. Most of the books I read now are older even than me. Been true for a long time. Newness is not much of a temptation anymore. It is not as though I was not always drawn to old things and revered texts. When I was young I felt I was already and always behind in my reading. Now I know that to have been untrue. This proved not an altogether bad thing. I read widely and much. I read a great deal more than I do now. If that was because of a false sense of my own inferiority so be it. Now I am also unconcerned by what other people may have read before I did, or with what other people read generally. You buy books? Thank you. As a bookseller I am glad of the custom. Read what you want. I do, more now than I ever did when I was young. What I want to read at this point is likelier to be in my library than on the shelf at the bookstore.

When I was young I read to have read, to be seen reading, to know what I assumed others knew already. I was untroubled by ambiguity in the text -- and ambiguity was big at the time. I read in pursuit of a better education, a better life. Got it. I read in defiance of my actual education and my limited prospects and with all the time in the world. I read with the confidence that I would be better for all the reading I could do. I am. If I am a bit past it now, I got here honestly enough and where I am suits me better. My reduced ambitions better suit both my purse and my person. I am largely content now my contents have settled.

If as is the case right now I want to reread Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson and to read it with friends and strangers in a virtual book club, this seems to strike no one now as odd and I find myself much encouraged by the enthusiasm expressed by my colleagues young and old. It seems my taste now suits my face. I have the figure now of a man who carries antique volumes of The Rambler in the big back pocket of  his loose fit jeans. What was once an endearing eccentricity now looks entirely right and proper, like... well, suspenders on a fat man, I guess. 

Bookstores are suited to fat men in suspenders. If we are lucky they may also have wise men and women, none of them young who know more: how for example shipping actually works as well as how it ought, how school orders are filled and correctly billed, which picture books might be best for this child or from that grandparent, vendors' discounts and the names of publishers' reps, when to return and reorder, what to read and why. In the best of all possible worlds there will again be young booksellers too to teach us what we don't know and to make the place smarter in every sense.  And when this happens again as I have every faith that it will here I'll be, nearer the middle than either end, sitting on the floor shelving low in biography and telling people young and old and largely indifferent that they really ought to read the essays of Samuel Johnson. Young and old we live in hope, yes?

"It is seldom that we find either men or places such as we expect them. Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction." --  Idler #58

* The title was assigned Johnson by the comic novelist Tobias Smollett and it mystified me for ages. Turns out "Cham" was yet another older and predictably British mispronunciation/misspelling of Khan. (Ah, my beloved British! They do so love bending the world to their own language!) Smollett's jest stuck. The caricature of Johnson as literary despot was popular and not altogether wrong. It was said, I hasten to add, with a grin and with as much affection as fear.

Daily Dose

From The Wrench, by Primo Levi, translated by William Weaver

SADLY TRUE

"It is sadly true that many jobs are not lovable, but it is harmful to come on to the field charged with preconceived hatred. He who does this sentences himself, for life, to hating not only work, but also himself and the world."

From Beating Copper

Daily Dose

From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton

STRUCK

"It struck me as strange and regrettable that in our society something as prospectively life-altering as the determination of a person's vocation had for the most part been abandoned to marginalized therapists practicing their trade from garden extensions. What should have been one of the most admired professions on earth was struggling to attain the status open to a travel agent."

From Chapter IV, Career Counselling

Daily Dose

From The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin

FORCED

"He forced himself to work, but even there he found no certainty."

From Chapter Five, Urras

Daily Dose

From Exile and the Kingdom, by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O'Brien

THE SCENT

"The scent of burning shavings began to fill the shop. Years, who was planing and fitting the staves cut our by Esposito, recognized the old scent and his heart relaxed somewhat. All were working in silence, but a warmth, a life was gradually beginning to reawaken in the shop. Through the broad windows a clean, fresh light began to fill the shed."

From The Silent Men

Daily Dose

From No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories, by Miranda July

EXCITED

"We were excited about getting jobs; we hardly went anywhere without filling out an application. But once we were hired -- as furniture sanders -- we could not believe this was really what people did all day."

From Something That Needs Nothing

Daily Dose

From The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson

THE ONLY

"I was the only customer in the restaurant. In fact, I was quite clearly the only thing standing between the waitresses and their going home."

From Chapter 17

Daily Dose

From The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb 1796 - 1820, edited by E. V. Lucas

BLAST

"Confusion blast all mercantile transactions, all traffick, exchange of commodities, intercourse between nations, all the consequent civilization and wealth and amity and link of society, and getting rid of prejudices, and knowlege of the face of the globe—and rot the very firs of the forest that look so romantic alive, and die into desks. Vale."

From a letter to William Wordsworth, dated April 28, 1815

Daily Dose

From Miscellaneous Essays, by Thomas Carlyle

THE LATEST

"The latest Gospel in this World is know thy work and do it. 'Know thyself:' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee: thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe!  Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan."

From Labour

Daily Dose

From Wintering with the Light, by Paal-Helge Haugen, translated by Roger Greenwald

WORK

"Work takes his hand
and sets it going"

From (He, I)

Daily Dose

From The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy

MONOTONY

"The monotony of his occupation soothed him, and was in itself a pleasure."

From Book Four, The Closed Door, Chapter One, The Rencounter by the Pool