Bookstore as seduction

If I were an adulterer, Politics and Prose would be my downfall. Yes, the actual bookstore. I'd begin in Poetry and then Fiction. After Religion and Memoir, I'd slide down, breathless, to Remainders where I'd lie, cheap and spent.

I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life

So said George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company, the famous Parisian English-language bookstore. Whitman died this week, at the age of  98. You can read his obituary here. I visited Shakespeare and Co. nearly thirty years ago and still remember it like a dream.

Thanks to T. Clear, I watched this fascinating video about Whitman and his bookstore -- if you're interested in literature and Paris and strange casts of characters, watch it -- the end is particularly wild.

Tolstoy at the bookstore

Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya

I had stormed out of the house, the other night, miffed and annoyed and needing a break. And damn if I didn't jump in the car, the decidedly unsexy, unfreedom-like car, without my cellphone because who cares if they get nervous and wonder where I've gone and whether I'll be all right and I certainly couldn't go back inside and get the phone, I'd lose my face so I drove and drove some more. I grabbed a copy of The Best American Essays, edited by Christopher Hitchens in the Barnes and Noble and took the escalators (why so much glamour in a bookstore?) up twice to the coffee cafe and there I ordered an iced tea and a dried up scone in a paper bag and sat down to read and continue saving my face. I read the first essay The Murder of Leo Tolstoy and quickly lost my way in it, laughing aloud, wondering who the writer Elif Batuman was and then remembering that I'd downloaded her book onto my Kindle months, if not years ago. My God, it was good, I thought and I was happy to be away, reading something weird and wonderful and when I got to the last page I looked up and saw a man come shuffling into the cafe, not a homeless sort of man but an old man, nonetheless, and it seemed so strange that late at night to see such an old man in a bookstore cafe wearing a tan Mr. Rogers cardigan with a dress shirt and pressed navy slacks (not pants, but slacks) and belt and white, sensible sneakers with thick soles and a balding head, a few strands of white hair falling over large half/aviator, half/square glasses, carrying 2 white plastic bags stuffed with something, I didn't know and a copy of Merriam Webster's Dictionary and a Glamour magazine. Had I conjured him? He ordered and paid for a coffee while I continued to read about Tolstoy's wife and their thirteen children and whether she had indeed killed him, she couldn't take it anymore, I suppose, and those crazy, crazy Tolstoyans who lived around their master, creating a cult and taking everything he wrote away from her but then he wrote Anna Karenina, a desperately dramatic novel about another crazy woman who so wanted to save face that she jumped in front of a train, and who doesn't love some Anna Karenina? and then the old man did nothing strange so I grew bored with him and finished my tea and left my place, scone crumbs on the small, round table and went home.

A bookworm can dream --

There's No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

Culture Vulture

I felt a bit like a vulture yesterday, swooping down and into a local Borders bookstore that is closing and had a big sale on its remaining merchandise. I wandered the fiction and poetry aisles, lured by the 30%-50% off signs, and picked up copies of Yeats' The Tower, Gary Snyder's Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, and Lucille Clifton's Voices. Then I walked across the street and ate crispy onion rings dipped in barbecue sauce at The Waffle while reading Anne Roiphe's memoir Art and Madness on my Kindle (another blow to local bookstores) and then I walked across the street again to see the Danish movie In a Better World. I did all of this after breaking down in my house and running out the door in tears, leaving my children (one disabled, one covered in pox and the other just a pain) with the babysitter who had come to watch Sophie. I gunned my car to Hollywood with the accompaniment of violins, and after four or five hours came home, feeling only slightly chagrined and much relieved.