Bookshop Man, Part 2

It was a gutwrenching struggle, every day, to open the store. On some days he couldn't do it at all, couldn't bring himself to let customers, strangers, come in and wander among his treasures. On those days he would sit in the back, in the way back, with the most valuable books. He would flip carefully through them, reading not the words of the stories but rather the notes people had jotted on yellowed pages over the years.

Today the sign went over, Closed to Open. A book would have to be sold; rent would have to be made. There was no place for his books in his small apartment, where he spent increasingly little time.

He saw passersby outside, any of whom could come in at any moment and take a book from him. He felt his heart pounding and tried to calm himself with a deep breath. He went behind the counter and stood, his eyes closed.

Once, it had been a business -- a bittersweet one, but a business nonetheless. He made a good profit at first, but money began to interest him less and less. The wares of a rare book dealer cannot simply be ordered through a catalogue; they must be tracked down painstakingly one by one, negotiated, bargained for, won. Each of the books in his shop told not one story but two: the story on the pages, no different from the stories sold at Borders or Barnes & Noble. But then there was the second story, the story of the book itself. Where it had been, who it had belonged to, how it had come to be here. These were the stories he loved most. To sell a book was to part with its story forever.

He felt relieved that for the first two hours no one came into the store, but then at 11 a.m. his heart sank. A man wearing a suit and a long trenchcoat bounded into the store. The owner opened his eyes. The man nodded at him and disappeared into the stacks.

The owner stood nervously behind the counter, fidgeting with his computer, checking on eBay auctions. Finally the man came back.

"You don't have an oldish copy of Catcher in the Rye, do you? I looked under Hemingway but I didn't see it."

The owner lowered his eyelids. "Salinger," he said, "Salinger is the author of The Catcher in the Rye."

"My bad," said the man. He turned around to go look under S.

"It's not on the shelves," said the owner. "All I have is an old first edition. It's in the back." He spoke with a pronounced quiet that was meant to dissuade the customer from asking any further questions.

"Could you grab that for me?" said the customer, undeterred. "My step-kid just got published. I wanted to get him a present. I'm kind of in a hurry."

The owner felt like screaming. He came out from around the counter and with a key from his pocket, unlocked the back room. He turned the dial of a large black safe that stood as tall as he did. The first edition Catcher in the Rye lay inside in a mylar bag. He turned it over in his hands. It was beautiful, was in near-mint condition. How could he sell it, after all it had taken to obtain it? He would say it wasn't here. That's what he'd do.

Suddenly the customer poked his head into the back room. The owner, startled, hugged the book to his chest.

"Perfect," the customer said. "Looks great." He held out his hand.

The owner looked at the man's fingers with distaste but gave him the book. He closed the safe and the back-room door and followed the customer to the front, telling him the story of this particular copy even though he was sure the customer wouldn't care; it was enough for the owner to hear it himself, one last time. The customer was digging out his wallet when his cellphone began jingling. He put up his finger to cut off the owner's narration.

"I have to take this," he said, and dropped his American Express card on the glass counter.

"Oh--" whispered the owner. He stepped behind the counter. "Before you do-- What did you say was the name of your son's book?" He opened his Amazon browser to get an idea of who the book's next owner would be. He had hopes of someone respectful and worthy.

The customer flipped open his little silver phone. "Oh--school paper. Bridges Middle School." He put his phone to his ear. The owner scowled and looked from the book to the credit card.

While the man talked on the phone he made himself at home by leaning against a bookshelf. The owner picked up the credit card and watched the man. As he chatted he pulled the book from the bag. The owner felt his blood grow hot and he clenched the credit card. And then -- goddammit! -- the customer, preoccupied and laughing into his phone, licked his thumb and began flipping through the book as though it were a TVGuide!

The owner slammed his fist down on the counter. "No!" he said. He bounded away from the counter and charged like a wildebeast at the man, snatching the book away from him. "I can't sell this to you! I promised it to someone else!" He deftly slipped the book into the bag.

"I don't know--I'm being accosted," said the customer into his phone. "He's pu--"

"Get out!" said the owner, snarling. He stuffed the credit card in the pocket of the customer's trench coat, grabbed him by the arm and guided him to and through the front door. "I'm sorry," he said, closing the door behind the man. "We're closed!"

He flipped over the sign, wiped sweat from his brow with the edge of his cardigan, and spent the rest of the day in the back, with the books.

Committing Friendstercide

Yesterday I deleted my:
-Livejournal,
-Friendster profile,
-Crisis on Infinite Blogs! blog,
-Story of Ben blog, and
-several unused email addresses.

It feels good. I've always been at odds with my Internet presence. I try to keep it reined in as much as possible, but still it can get out of control. There is Friendster and MySpace and Facebook, all which do the same thing. There is Livejournal and blogs and blogs and blogs, none of which anyone really reads. E-mail addresses for work and personal and for all the secondary sites I've registered at. Part of me would like to remove myself from the Internet entirely, but that's not exactly practical. I kept my MySpace profile, for instance. I do want to be at least a little searchable.

But enough with the glut of online self-expression.

Bookshop Man, Part 1

In through a peephole came a beam of sunlight. It revealed itself in the dust in the air and fell onto shiny brown loafers. Two copper faces of Lincoln peered out through yawning slits in the tongues of the shoes. The ankles going into the shoes were argyle; brown twill pants revealed just too much of them. The pants were ironed with a sharp crease that faded up toward the thigh. The belt was simple and had several holes to spare. The cardigan that flapped against the belt was brown also and hung unbuttoned. Beneath it was a yellow shirt, buttoned to the throat, its collar stiff -- the cardboard that came under the collar had been meticulously reinserted after each washing.

The man's salt-and-pepper hair was styled in a combover even though his hairline was still strong, as though he were preparing for an eventuality. His eyebrows were bushy, the same color as his hair, and his eyes were steely and opaque.

His nose was thin and straight; beside it ran the glistening path of a single tear that had made its way from his eye into his stiff, graying mustache. He stepped toward the door, steeling himself, and turned the sign that hung there carefully and slowly from Closed to Open.

He was a dealer of rare books, and this was his shop.

A Writer Writes

Last week I read an article on Slate about a blogger who gave up blogging in order to focus on real writing. It was so exactly what I feel about this blog that I promptly had a crisis about LCiN. The ex-blogger writes,

Blogging had been the ideal run-up to a novel, but it had also become a major distraction. I would sit down to start on my novel only to come up with five different blog entries. I thought of them as a little something-something to whet the palate—because it was easier, more immediately satisfying, because I could write it, and post it, and people would say nice things about it, and I could go to bed feeling satisfied. But then I would wake feeling less than accomplished because a blog wasn't a whole story told from beginning to end. I had shelves lined with other people's prose while my best efforts were buried on a Web site somewhere, underneath a lot of blah-blah about American Idol and my kitty cat.

I have never written anything for any other reason than merely to scratch the itch -- no, it's more than that: feed the monster -- that I have to write. So I've always wasted it. I get jittery and distracted and grumpy if I don't at some point during the day or week put pen to paper. I've always kept a journal, and a page of venting about my day was enough to satisfy the monster. However, the monster cannot be tamed. He cannot be whipped into submission and forced to be productive. A page or two, or an email, or a blog entry, and he simply goes away, and writing anything more becomes impossible.

During my week off from blogging I started writing a book that's not going to go anywhere and a novella that could. But neither of those is as tragically satisfying as clicking the "Publish Post" button... the button I can click right now.

Mmmmm.

Don't I Know You?

When I was walking to work this morning I saw someone wearing the same shirt as me. I hate when that happens. My instinct is to look away and pretend I haven't noticed, or in some circumstances I'll change routes altogether to avoid walking with the person.

It's even worse when the whole person, not just his attire, looks like me. There was a kid at Emerson who looked exactly like I'd look if I were six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier. I saw this guy everywhere, and each time it was as embarrassing as if I'd been walking around in my underwear. When I had to pass him closely I'd put my hand over my face to obscure my features. I wondered if he noticed me. Was he as creeped-out by me as I was by him? Did he think I had plaigarized his looks? Did he wonder if my parents also looked like his?

It's very disconcerting.

Creative Living Projects

This woman buries plates with impressions of her teeth in them around Los Angeles.

And I was worried that everyone was braindead and sitting in front of the TV (like me).

Overheard in the Discovery Channel Store

Kid: Can I get something?
Father: No, we're going to the circus in a minute.
Kid: Oh, right, I can get something there.
Father: Um, that's not what I had in mind.

Got Milk?

I guess the promotional movie tie-in is inevitable at this point. I remember when Lord of the Rings came out, my dad, a big fan, shunned any evidence that it was a movie and not some captured footage from another time or dimension, including actor interviews and DVD featurettes.

I, for one, enjoy behind-the-scenes stuff because my default presumption is that everything on-screen is CGI. To know that the Shire and Edoras were actually built from the ground up, and that the fields on the Kent farm were actually plowed and acres of corn meticulously planted, brings fantasy into the real world for me. I guess if the price we have to pay for such amazing detail is seeing Superman with a milk mustache, it's worth it.

The S-shaped marshmallows in the Lucky Charms, however, have got to go.

No Wonder That It's Mary That We Love

I was sick last week so I rented Mary Poppins to comfort me. Sometimes I like to watch movies I loved as a child because it's so much fun to relive the things you adored and also fun to see things that you didn't pick up on as a child. I wasn't planning on my Mary Poppins viewing being this way - I just wanted to relax and to see the scene where they jump into the chalk drawing. Turns out there were many things I was surprised by.

Firstly, I never realized as a child that she shows up to fix the family, to get the dad involved with his kids and wife and stop him being such a jerk. I always thought she arrived for the kids, just to play games and sing songs.

I liked that the men at the bank were represented as scary and money-grubbing.

Mary is actually very full of herself (with good reason though, I suppose).

I never caught the fact that Supercalifragilisticexpealidoscious was something you say when you aren't sure what to say.

Another thing I'd never noticed was how Burt - the chimney sweep and the dancing/singing guy who accompanies them into the chalk drawing - is in love with Mary. In their songs, he makes advances on her but she delicately turns him down each time, saying how much she appreciates having a friend like him who would never take advantage. I never noticed that he was telling her he loves her. I guess I was distracted by the dancing penguins.

I understood the words in the songs much better. I used to think they were singing very different things ... lyrics that made little sense.

And I understood the accent better. The maids have those lower-class British accents. During that chimney sweep scene (which I loved to) when they all come down into the house and are dancing, and then the father comes home, one maid shouts "It's the Master!" and they all incorporate that into the song and sing "It's the Master. Step in time! It's the Master. Step in time! Never need a reason, never need a rhyme, It's the Master. Step in time!"

As a child, I always thought they called the father "the monster" and I was actually a little disappointed last night to realize they were saying master. As a kid, I thought it was hilarious that they called him the monster, and even funnier that a whole crew of chimney sweeps would readily chime in on it.

I always liked that the mother was a sufferagette. I liked her Votes For Women song as a kid, but what annoyed me when watching it last week was that she goes to protests and her friends get arrested for the cause and all that, but she is completely submissive to The Monster, obeying and placating him no matter what.

As far as Mary revamping the father's life, it seems to be her plan from the beginning. At one point, Burt tells the kids that a handshake from a chimney sweep is lucky. I imagine that Mary must have allowed all the sweeps into the house because they would shake the father's hand on the way out, which they all do, causing the daughter to point it out and tell her father he will be very lucky. He then loses his job but realizes the value of his children. That's what the movie is about.

Melting Pot

I walked through this on my way home from work today. It was really pretty nice. Very low-key and a lot of goodwill. I'm not sure how I feel about this whole illegal immigration debate. Yes they may not have gone through the paperwork to become legal citizens (my own great-grandfather was for a time an illegal immigrant until he went through some ridiculous hoop to become legal), but they seem happy with this long and quite difficult path toward citizenship the Kennedy/McCain bill offers. But anyway, what I do know is that it's nice to see people value being American.

I'm going to quote another blogger because I think he says it better than I can:

Flag, and flags, and flags, and flags, and flags. You simply could NOT take a photo and NOT capture an American flag. And I have to say, this was the first time in years that I was proud to find myself in a sea of American flags. I was actually proud of my country again, proud to be American. A couple of years ago George Bush had deadened my pride in my country. It's ironic that it took a crowd of non-Americans to bring it back.

Big Bio

On my lunch hour today I bought a 1,200-page biography on John Steinbeck. It was expensive, but it's something I can have forever. (It'll take me that long to read it, anyway.)

I feel like a big book, especially a big nonfiction book, is something that becomes a part of your character, something you lug around and people ask about. "How are you coming on the book?" they'll say. A person reading a humongous biography is seen as quietly ambitious and slightly eccentric.

Imagine being the kind of person someone would write 1,200 pages about?

A Lady's Craft

On Saturday night Mike and I are going to see the Boston Babydolls, a 40's-style burlesque performance. The local troupe has been in changing locations over the last six months and this is their last scheduled performance in Boston.

Burlesque is, simply stated, a striptease. We are paying our $12 to see a stripshow. But there is something... maybe not classier, but definitely more high-brow about a burlesque dancer than there is about a pole dancer.

Burlesque performances aren't about coming onstage naked and putting every crevice of your body five inches away from the faces of strangers at the rail. A burlesque dancer has a clever costume and a gimick. She undresses sensually or comically.

This past fall I went to Ladies Night, a small Boston craft fair that takes place once in the spring and once in the fall. Local crafters set up tables with their handmade jewlery, clothes, purses, pillows, and artwork. The Ladies Night I attended had a fashion show by an aspiring designer. Then there was a burlesque performance. The women weren't hot in the sense that most women who take off their clothes are, but they are fascinating nonetheless.

One performer came out wearing a goofy costume that made her entire torso into a birdcage. She wore the big birdcage (with bird inside) and kicked her stockinged legs and her high-heeled tap shoes. She held large feathered fans in her hands and twirled them around in front of her as she danced to a campy song. As the performance when on, she slowly pealed off the bird and birdcage costume, and, at the end, she was left wearing a tight, sexy cat suit with tail and ears.

Her performance had been a sexy simulation of a cat getting the canary. It was charming and hilarious. It reminded me of the showgirls show we saw in Las Vegas. The women there did end up in little more than thongs, but it wasn't cheap and seedy. Some of the Vegas performers dance behind a screen, so you saw only their silhouettes. Others used the huge feather fans that are a burlesque classic, swinging the fans in front of their bodies so you never see anything, even though you know they are naked behind the pink feathers.

Somehow, the tease has been removed from striptease.


I'm hoping this performance is as fun as those I've seen in the past. If only because it starts at midnight and I'm staying up for it even though I'm not feeling well.

Blogcentennial! Our 100th Post

Sitcoms make a big deal out of the airing of their 100th episode, so I thought I should make note of the fact that our three-month-old blog has already hit a landmark post count.

Let's Call It Nothing was once called Esther's Porn Stash, which, although deliciously funny for us, proved to be less than practical. It didn't take long to come up with an alternative, and the new name fit.

We've discussed movies, music, TV shows, politics and current events. The kind of things that might give us prestige if we were actually gunning to be a journalistic blog.

We have covered other less headline-worthy stories like office attire, waiter-stalking, recent purchases, co-worker awkwardness, and -- who could forget! -- our Bathroom Discourse series. The kind of things that might give us street cred as humorous literary types.

We've also spent a little time on the kind of things that define us as twenty-somethings in this age of the newly coined "quarterlife crisis."

This blog has even been the creative push to start spin-offs: Foster Cats and Crisis On Infinite Blogs.

Some of the things I've enjoyed the most have been the very small things.

Thanks to all our regular visitors who've made this blog a lot easier to keep going than Ben and I originally suspected. And here's to 100 more!

Overheard

Woman standing outside Starbucks: My clothes are tight, that's how I know I need a shower.

The Message Rock

In the town I live in, just off the road that cuts the county in northern and southern halves, there is a rock whose flat side faces outward from a hill.

It's near the high school and the dirt parking lot to a reservoir, which maybe explains why it has been employed to relay people's messages to the world.

"GO PATRIOTS" with a perfectly accurate spray-painted Patriots emblem has been emblazoned on the rock. Other messages I've seen include "Happy Birthday, Mom!" "Cougars (a local high school team) Rock!" and "R.I.P. Marie."

I've decided to start taking pictures of the rock. The message changes at least once every two weeks. I've been desperate for some kind of project and this kind of thing fascinates me. It reminds me of the things in Weird NJ - abandoned houses or creepy old statues or bizarre landmarks that my friends and I used to drive to see on weekends when we were in high school.

I wonder how it started? What was the first message on the rock? I wonder if anyone is ever caught and arrested for spraypainting the rock. I wonder if the rock is a landmark to people around here.

Stay tuned for more rock messages.

123456

Anyone stay up for this?

1:02:03 a.m., 04/05/06.

A matter of life and death

You can tell by the stark, gray text that appears at the top of Boston.com, that something is up, that news is breaking. It's both frightening and exciting, the unformatted and mostly unedited text that looks like something you could've whipped up in Notepad. What is important enough that the Globe editors would throw this eyesore onto their page without taking any time to go over it?

Yesterday, it was an accident. A scaffolding collapse at a construction site. Crushed cars. Three people dead. 136 Boylston Street. It didn't sound familiar. 136. I knew the Little Building was 80. I knew the Walker Building was 120. That's terrible, I thought. I clicked the full article for more info, and when I read "Emerson College" and "new dorm," the whole thing went from being terrible to oh shit.

And that's when I thought of the man in the car, on whom a crane had fallen as he was driving along, probably killing him instantly. He was a doctor; his body wore scrubs. I thought of his family, who at that point probably didn't even know he was dead. And I thought of the school, my school, and its blighted new dorm.

But none of this until I knew it was Emerson. That's what grabbed me. That's what changed this news from a random headline to something that ruined my day.

Last week someone I went to high school with died, and to be honest I didn't feel anything. I was criticized for a lack of compassion -- I had known this kid -- but it just felt like a headline to me. Sure, it was terrible. Of course it was. And I was sure his family was upset. But just because I had a vague recollection of what these people looked like, from soccer games when I was ten, that didn't make my heart go out any more than when you hear of a random shooting on the news.

In contrast, a few weeks ago a boy checking the mail got hit by a car and killed. He was wearing Heelies, the Heelies I raved about in the early days of this blog. Gliding along and then bam. I cried reading the article.

Why does some tragedy hit us, and some rolls right past, and some even seems funny? Sometimes, does a part of us, a part we would never ever admit to having, think that maybe, just maybe, some people deserve it? That our emotions can be let off the hook by the idea that, hey, they had it coming? Who deserves it? Someone who overdoses on illegal drugs -- do they kind of deserve it? More than a freckle-faced boy who gets hit by a car? A Haitian immigrant fording the Gulf of Mexico in a washtub -- if he drowns, does he kind of deserve it? More than a middle-class husband with a couple of kids in his backyard pool in your town? Your heart would go out to one more than the other. Sunday on the news: three people were shot in a drive-by in Roxbury. Next story: an eight-week-old baby needs a new heart. The heart story won me over. The poor baby. Because the part I won't admit to having thinks, Roxbury is Roxbury; that stuff happens.

What determines who gets, if not our compassion, then our attention? I felt worse about New Orleans than I did about the tsunami. Why? Who gets our attention? Our own nationality first? Our own race next? Our own class third? And then what? Do we dish out compassion based on how much the victim deserved it?

Is there a magic formula for what can shake you up the most? Something you relate to most?

Does it all come down to how much of ourselves we see in a tragedy? The more we see, the more we let ourselves feel? Do we let down the wall between ourselves and the headlines? Maybe the wall isn't the default -- maybe a shared human experience is enough to make us relate to everyone. Maybe the wall is something we actively build for our own self-preservation. How could we get through the day if we thought about everyone? 5,000 people killed in an earthquake in Iran. Up goes the wall.

A man in a car, a doctor, driving along; and suddenly, a falling crane. Everyone drives along. You drive along. The wall crumbles.

When I was walking home from work yesterday, I couldn't not see the remains of the accident. The trees in the Common are still winter-bare, and through them, there was the new dorm missing its scaffolding. All of the 5:30 dog-walking people were facing it, every person, in ones and twos and small groups, scattered throughout the Common between the hill and Charles Street where the fake snow once was. Every one of them facing in the same direction, looking at that new dorm.

Across the city, in Roxbury, shots rang out in another drive-by. Four passersby killed. The dog-walking people saw this on the news when they got home, and over dinner, it was the dorm accident that they talked about.

Hemming and Hawwing

The right leg on a pair of my work pants, brown corduroys, came unhemmed in the wash.

Usually when something like this happens I just toss the article out, but I liked these pants. I went to CVS and bought a needle and thread. I've never sewed anything before in my life. First I had to figure out how to use the threader. That was simple enough.

Next, how does one secure thread to needle? A little knot was enough to hold it. The main problem was how then to secure thread to pant. I didn't worry about this at first, to my detriment. I worked the needle in and out, pinching a bit of fabric betwixt my fingers. This was creating significant loops of thread between punch-throughs. Enough to nearly stick one's pinky through, if one were so inclined.

I learned to draw the needle and thread entirely through the fabric, and then to avoid unsightly loops on the outside. I did half the pant, rib to rib, put another knot in it to hopefully hold it. It wasn't until I did the other side that I figured out how to tie off the thread. Anyway, suffice to say that one side is far better than the other.

It's funny how we learn, and how practice results in improvement. I've always been bewildered by the notion of practice, how simply repeating something over and over can make you perform better. How does the brain work like this? Is it carving new routes through itself, like a path in the woods that gets worn down from repeated trampling? In the case of my sewing, I simply learned tricks as I went along. It's the things where there's no tricks involved that baffle me. Riding a bike, for instance. Do it enough and eventually you'll just get it.

Well, I'm wearing my pants. And I think my craftier readers will be proud.

Warm Welcome

Just as I was leaving for work this morning, one of the cats puked on the welcome mat. It couldn't have been anywhere else in the kitchen, not on the wood or the linoleum where I could've cleaned it up with one single swipe. No. It had to be on the rug. I did a preliminary chunk-swipe and then covered the ground-in stuff with Fantastik, stepped over the frothy spot, and went to work.

It's starting to get really creepy

What is with this new Republican ad? (Click here for a direct link.)

First it does some fear-mongering, then it shows some top Democrats saying that Bush has broken the law with the wiretapping, and talking about censure and impeachment (and actually, weirdly, makes them sound pretty good saying it).

But then it gets scary.

The ad doesn't say that Bush has not broken the law. It doesn't refute anything. Rather, it mocks the Democrats for even raising the issue in the first place.

"Censure? Impeachment? The President is taking the necessary steps to keep America safe."

Basically: "And if those steps include breaking the law and/or violating the Constitution, so be it."

This ad gives me chills.