We like stuff that hurts.

I went camping with my brother and his family. On night 2 of heavy guilt-free forest-drinking around a fire, my brother asked me what compels me to read poetry, and I thought to myself (YOU! You asshole, bought me my first collection of Emily D. when I was 8) and, well I did say that out loud I had to follow it with something a bit more eloquent; and here is the ugliness that unfurled.

"Mike, I like to read poetry because you can get away with a lot of weird shit."

"Like what?"

At this point I pulled out this poem I had written (a solid B minus at best) about eating dinner with a blind guy with blue prosthetic eyes, that always landed on my cleavage. I suspected their inauthenticity. My brother said and I quote:

"That is just messed up, why would anyone want to read about that? That's sick"

I chewed on that. Then I thought about a poem my pal Shawna had me read, and how it hurt to read, in the best "scratching an itch" kind of way:

Half Hanged Mary

by Margaret Atwood

7 p.m.

Rumour was loose in the air,
hunting for some neck to land on.
I was milking the cow,
the barn door open to the sunset.

I didn’t feel the aimed word hit
and go on in like a soft bullet.
I didn’t feel the smashed flesh
closing over it like water
over a thrown stone.

I was hanged for living alone,
for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,
tattered skirts, few buttons,
a weedy farm in my own name,
and a surefire cure for warts.

Oh yes, and breasts,
and a sweet pear hidden in my body.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.

8 p.m.

The rope was an improvisation.
With time they’d have thought of axes.

Up I go like a windfall in reverse,
a blackened apple stuck back onto the tree.

Trussed hands, rag in my mouth,
a flag raised to salute the moon,

old bone-faced goddess, old original,
who once took blood in return for food.

The men of the town stalk homeward,
excited by their show of hate,
their own evil turned inside out like a glove,
and me wearing it.

9 p.m.

The bonnets come to stare,
the dark skirts also,
the upturned faces in between,
mouths closed so tight they’re lipless.
I can see down into their eyeholes
and nostrils. I can see their fear.

You were my friend, you too,
I cured your baby, Mrs.,
and flushed yours out of you,
Non-wife, to save your life.

Help me down? You don’t dare.
I might rub off on you,
like soot or gossip. Birds
of a feather burn together,
though as a rule ravens are singular.

In a gathering like this one
the safe place is the background,
pretending you can’t dance,
the safe stance pointing a finger.

I understand. You can’t spare
anything, a hand, a piece of bread, a shawl
against the cold,
a good word. Lord
knows there isn’t much
to go around. You need it all.

10 p.m.

Well God, now that I’m up here,
with maybe some time to kill,
away from the daily
fingerwork, legwork, work
at the hen level,
we can continue our quarrel,
the one about free will.

Is it my choice that I’m dangling
like a turkey’s wattle from this
more than indifferent tree?
If Nature is Your alphabet,
what letter is this rope?

Does my twisting body spell out Grace?
I hurt, therefore I am.
Faith, Charity, and Hope
are three dead angels
falling like meteors or
burning owls across
the profound blank sky of Your face.

12 midnight

My throat is taut against the rope
choking off words and air;
I’m reduced to knotted muscle.
Blood bulges in my skull,
my clenched teeth hold it in;
I bite down on despair.

Death sits on my shoulder like a crow
waiting for my squeezed beet
of a heart to burst
so he can eat my eyes

or like a judge
muttering about sluts and punishment
and licking his lips

or like a dark angel
insidious in his glossy feathers
whispering to me to be easy
on myself. To breathe out finally.
Trust me, he says, caressing
me. Why suffer?

A temptation, to sink down
onto these definitions.
To become a martyr in reverse,
or food, or trash.

To give up my own words for myself,
my own refusals.
To give up knowing.
To give up pain.
To let go.

2 a.m.

Out of my mouths is coming, at some
distance from me, a thin gnawing sound
which you could confuse with prayer except that
praying is not constrained.

Or is it, Lord?
Maybe it’s more like being strangled
than I once thought. Maybe it’s
a gasp for air, prayer.
Did those men at Pentecost
want flames to shoot out of their heads?
Did they ask to be tossed
on the ground, gabbling like holy poultry,
eyeballs bulging?

As mine are, as mine are.
There is only one prayer; it is not
the knees in the clean nightgown
on the hooked rug.
I want this, I want that.
Oh far beyond.
Call it Please. Call it Mercy.
Call it Not yet, not yet,
as Heaven threatens to explode
inwards in fire and shredded flesh, and the angels caw.

3 a.m.

wind seethes in the leaves around
me the trees exude night
birds night birds yell inside
my ears like stabbed hearts my heart
stutters in my fluttering cloth
body I dangle with strength
going out of the wind seethes
in my body tattering
the words I clench
my fists hold No
talisman or silver disc my lungs
flail as if drowning I call
on you as witness I did
no crime I was born I have borne I
bear I will be born this is
a crime I will not
acknowledge leaves and wind
hold on to me
I will not give in

6 a.m.

Sun comes up, huge and blaring,
no longer a simile for God.
Wrong address. I’ve been out there.

Time is relative, let me tell you
I have lived a millennium.

I would like to say my hair turned white
overnight, but it didn’t.
Instead it was my heart;
bleached out like meat in water.

Also, I’m about three inches taller.
This is what happens when you drift in space
listening to the gospel
of the red hot stars.
Pinpoints of infinity riddle my brain,
a revelation of deafness.

At the end of my rope
I testify to silence.
Don’t say I’m not grateful.

Most will only have one death.
I will have two.

8 a.m.

When they came to harvest my corpse
(open your mouth, close your eyes)
cut my body from the rope,
surprise, surprise,
I was still alive.

Tough luck, folks,
I know the law:
you can’t execute me twice
for the same thing. How nice.

I fell to the clover, breathed it in,
and bared my teeth at them
in a filthy grin.
You can imagine how that went over.

Now I only need to look
out at them through my sky-blue eyes.
They see their own ill will
staring them in the forehead
and turn tail.

Before, I was not a witch.
But now I am one.

Later

My body of skin waxes and wanes
around my true body,
a tender nimbus.
I skitter over the paths and fields,
mumbling to myself like crazy,
mouth full of juicy adjectives
and purple berries.
The townsfolk dive headfirst into the bushes
to get out of my way.

My first death orbits my head,
an ambiguous nimbus,
medallion of my ordeal.
No one crosses that circle.

Having been hanged for something
I never said,
I can now say anything I can say.

Holiness gleams on my dirty fingers,
I eat flowers and dung,,
two forms of the same thing, I eat mice
and give thanks, blasphemies
gleam and burst in my wake
like lovely bubbles.
I speak in tongues,
my audience is owls.

My audience is God,
because who the hell else could understand me?

The words boil out of me,
coil after coil of sinuous possibility.
The cosmos unravels from my mouth,
all fullness, all vacancy.

I love this poem. I'm reading The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson, and I am becoming suspicious of why we are drawn to violence in art.

I don't know.

I just know it feels like a greater violence to be coddled and comforted and lulled into a soup for my soul.

I don't know.

I just know I like to read the ugly, it feels better.

Creepy. Isn't real beauty kinda ugly? There has to be something scary and vulgar to make it lovable, right?

Thoughts on literary masochisms?

Best part of my job.

I was lucky enough to play ambassador to the books this evening.
She came in the door and walked right up to me at the counter and told me that she wanted to read. On the bus, for starters, but hopefully, in the future, even more often than that. She hadn't ever met a book, in the course of her casual and frustrating reading life, that could hold her in its grip. Maybe I can find one a place for her to start? She knows that she wants in. She wants to find out why people read.

THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN TO ME AT MY JOB.

Maybe once or twice a year I am presented with the opportunity to introduce someone to reading, but the novice usually approaches books, and me, with embarrassment; almost apologetically. None of that with this woman. Perhaps in her late twenties, she told me she had only ever enjoyed biographies about people she already wanted to learn more about. Now it was time to experience reading for other purposes. She seemed unsure of what those purposes could be. But she told me about herself, what she does, what she wonders about when she sees books in other people's hands. She wondered why everyone seems to read the same books at the same time, and how all the other people find their way among the millions of other books there are to read.
And how did I start reading?

I told her a little bit about how I choose my next book, but that it was different for every single person. And the only way to know what you like is to gamble. To allow yourself the room to be disappointed maybe by this book; but to let disappointment guide you to the next one.
She loved to play soccer, I gave her Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. An obvious step is the best step when it's your first. She obviously is someone who thinks a lot about people, and about what makes them do the things they do, so I gave her This I Believe. I tried to sell her Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, because she said her boyfriend is English, and I only ever need the very slightest of provocations to try to get Lucky Jim into someone's hands.

It sounded like she wanted to form a habit.
Welcome to Booksmith: your local, independent pusher.

The Great American Ne'er-do-well

If pressed, I would have to describe myself as "risk averse". I'm a born worrier, I was yielded by two prescription-strength worriers, it's a trait that runs deeper in my veins than red blood cells. I am always looking before I leap, sometimes never leaping but instead peering into some hypothetical chasm of worst case scenarios. It's held me back, sure, but its the same instinct that also sees me to work on time, secures that steady "C" grade point average my mom is so proud of, that doesn't let me fall in love with the wrong person (well. almost). I'm a planner, always keeping an eye out for the next available pitfall in order to avoid it, or at least, escape with minimal damage.

In 2006 I went to art school, and met a whole bevy of people that were the opposite of risk averse. Summer after summer I would watch them vacate the city, in painted vans and rusting two-door lemons, with trunks full of sleeping bags, drugs, and whiskey. I stood in the driveway and waved at them as they drove away, squinting into the sun with a feeling of "better them than me." Fall came and they'd come back, straggling into town, one by one, with empty pockets and festival stories of horrors and triumphs.

Reading "Gonzo" is similar to hearing those festival tales. Polaroids and photographs of Hunter Thompson's extensive travels peek out from the pages with little to no description, no key to name the characters until you reach the end. Only in the very last pages of the book can you go back, matching names to faces, putting time into context. Its one long experience, the scroll of a wild man who lived all over and then some. I think my favorite thing about Thompson is you can never quite tell if he's good or evil; he is always both, will first smash the bottle over your head only to help you bandage the wound later.

A book like this will, of course, give you the unshakable feeling that you've missed out, gravely, on the possibilities of life. The pictures of Thompson, in his trademark bermuda shorts, nursing a something-on-the-rocks in a highball glass while musing over a typewriter under black and white palm trees from the past will no doubt give you pause. For me, however, it's just a pause. I never claimed to be a Thompson; I wouldn't even have been able to be in his acquaintance. We can't all hit the road, throw caution to the wind and embrace the unknown. I mean sure, it was a different time he was living and writing in, but beyond that; some of us can never see past today, and that is an excellent way to live. Still, I see tomorrow. I can't help it, it fills my line of vision and I cough and sputter until the smoke clears and I remember where I am. This book, and others like it, are magic to me. Bona fide dark arts. Something to wave at while you squint into the sun, displaced from time for a moment. Just a moment.

Puppets?

Waiting in line to get a book signed is great...if you're a reader over the age of, maybe, 10.  That's why, for the little guys, we do more than just book signings.  I would not say that we are simply entertaining your kids, but opening their eyes to broader aspects of literature and stories.  Check out this video from David Hyde Costello's event for Little Pig Joins the Band. 

No, there are no giraffes in the Little Pig story (but there was in I Can Help).  It's quite an amazing puppet, isn't it?

The heart of great author talks is when an author gives more than a simple book signing.

When they talk about experiences or show other art forms they have delved in to, it gives an insight into their life and soul in a different way that their book could ever do.  Thoughts and creative objects, such as this giraffe brought to life -- no longer confined to the page -- inspire the imagination! Not to mention readers and listeners as well.

Thank you to all you wonderful authors who go beyond your written words.

Destination Literature, or "You Are There Reading"

One of our booksellers, Jes, is reading Moby Dick this summer. So when her family happened to go to Nantucket for summer vacation, Jes packed Melville. When she returned to the Booksmith, she told me excitedly about a beached whale she encountered while beach combing. I was jealous. When I read Moby Dick for the first time last summer, I was forever wanting to see just how big those beasts were. Jes had other convergences of literature and life as she explored the island, from which Ishmael and his companion, Queequeg embark on their fatal adventure. Jes may not have seen any white whales off Nantucket, but she was still thrilled to be reading Moby Dick there. "I was eating chowder, they (Ishamael and Queequeg) were eating chowder..."

I recognized Jes's Nantucket experience as what author Anne Fadiman calls "You Are There Reading" in her essay collection Ex Libris. "You Are There Reading" is exactly what it sounds like, "the practice of reading books in the places they describe." All you have to do is pack a copy of Thoreau's Walden on your next trip to Walden Pond to find out what Jes, Fadiman, and all of us here at Booksmith are so excited about.

Destination Literature is our newest section at booksmith that promotes "You Are There" reading like never before. We've culled our shelves and distrubuters to bring together an exciting collection of travel literature, as well as great international fiction, mysteries, and essays. The books are shelved geographically by continent and country, then alphabetically. Almost every bookseller here has at some point been stumped by a customer looking for a title by its location on the map. I don't think we'll have that problem anymore. Yesterday I found an Estonian title on our shelves. (Jaan Kaplinski's The Same River). Traveling to Zanzibar? We've got you covered (Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley).

Shelving our Destination Literature section has been an adventure in itself; I can't imagine what browsing will be like. Something close to traveling the world, I imagine. I was shelving in "Spain" when a customer asked me for George Orwell's book on Catalonia. I pulled Homage from where it stood, a few inches away from us. "That was like magic!" he said, in an accent I couldn't place. I hope he reads the book on his way to Catalonia, to really see some magic, that of words becoming world.

Arranging the books geographically has tested my knowledge of the world, and I have to admit to keeping at Atlas nearby as I shelve. To what region of the world does Estonia belong, anyway? (I shelved it in Europe, between England and France.) Let us know if you'd like to see a particular author or region represented on our shelves.

One book had me completely stumped. I stood in the aisle, leafing through Ali and Nino by Kurban Said. The book, a novelization of one of Scheherazade's tales, is set in Azerbeidshan. To which continent, I wondered, did this country belong? I opened to a map in the book, but was still at a loss. Azerbeidshan, I learned, is located between the Black and Caspian Seas, east of Turkey and south of Georgia and Armenia. We had decided to shelve Turkey under Europe, but Azerbeidshan appeared to be just as close to Asia.

I decided that I would have to read the book in order to determine where to shelve it. On page one I read, "Some scholars look on the area south of the Caucasian mountains as belonging to Asia, while others, in view of Transcaucasia's cultural revolution, believe that this country should be considered part of Europe."

I had happened upon a professor lecturing students on their responsbility to establish the country's national identity. As I shelved the book (under Asia), I felt that peculiar thrill--perhaps not quite as intense as the joy that comes with "You Are There Reading," but something like it--that of seeing the impact of what I was reading on the larger world. This, I believe, is the true value of our Destination Literature section. The books shelved here have the power to bring the world to you, or to inspire you to go out into the world. It's a section for the armchair traveler as much as for the daring adventurer.

So come visit what Lisa likes to call our "Venetian Canal" of Destination Literature, located between aisles two and three of the store, a section worthy to be called a destination itself.

surprising volumes

There is a wise man in one of Douglas Adams' books who lives in a very strange house on the beach in California. He's the one to whom the dolphins gave their only parting gift when they abandoned the planet before its destruction. The house is an insane asylum for the world, and its builder employed some architectural wizardry to give one the impression that the exterior was an interior, and only by passing through the front door could one enter the real world, where things make sense. I don't recall right now what the "outside" (inside) of the house looked like, but the literal exterior of the house was crown molding and lighting fixtures, mind-bending junctions of wall and ceiling, wallpaper and chairs.
The building was an insane asylum to house the entire world, and the one man who knew beyond a doubt that the world had gone mad - and that therefore he must live outside of it if he must live at all - had built it in brilliant desperation.

There is of course the Wardrobe in which the Pevensies find Narnia. Even better, in the sixth and seventh book (if you are reading them in the original and good order), there is the Garden on the other side of the Stable doors. It is larger inside, and larger again inside that, and again inside that...like an onion whose layers are paradoxically greater in circumference the deeper you peel.
Further up and further in!

Borges' aleph, which contains the entire universe. Fellow bookseller Jodie just came up with that one. There is a story I must read now.

I'm in the studio thinking about this as I look at the equivalent of the blank canvas. I'm collecting ideas on the topic of : larger within than without. The hidden enormity, hopefully good, that cloaks itself in the tiny shell of the everyday.

Let me know if you think of anything along these lines in books you've read.
Thanks!

Misery loves company, but its a terrible hostess

I had an awful and exhausting day today and I'm too exhausted to write anything here, my dearest internet surfers.

This is all I really want you to look at right now: What You Will Be Reading At Every Stage of Your Life (caution: some mildly spicy language involved. Ask an adult for assistance, kids!)

Also, be careful what you read in the laundromat. I just totally alienated myself by reading "A Stolen Life" stuck in a dreary room with a bunch of monotonous machines. The book is plenty alienating itself, (a real life Emma Donaghue's "Room") you don't need to mix it with the boundless ennui of laundry.

I'm going to go drink champagne on a balcony now. It's a thing I gotta do.

Night Brookline.