blobs of sweet pink grapefruit spit leaping from my jabbing spoon,
and the page's surface puckers at its acid touch.
this breakfast has just bought this book,
once borrowed from the bookstore.

the new coffee-maker purrs, mark says, or it sounds like the sea.
it's the sea, i say,
but it's in the near distance.
against the breakers' soft background
we are sitting on a covered cottage porch
on a rainy day, the eaves plop,
plop plop,
plop plop,
plop,
each in their tiny puddle in the mud.

break room escape...maybe hawaii, maybe vermont, yes hawaii.
warm, wet, high on a mountain.

back up to the registers,
back up to rain through the windows,
back to books.

Lace Up kids

I'm here to comment on the interesting things that come up in the children’s section here at the Booksmith. This week’s selection is Lace Up! put out by DK publishing.

Okay, so it’s not a great work of literature, but it is pretty cool! Every other lacing card sets and books, on learning how to tie a shoe, are quite boring. If I wanted to connect the dots, I’d get an activity book, thank you. But this book has a pop up shoe! Don’t worry, this fake Converse shoe is actually pretty durable. Lace Up! also has other lacing games in it, as well as teaching you how to properly thread a button.

Come in and check it out!

We don’t just sell children’s literature, we sell…life skills.

-Emily

Your local children’s book expert (come bug me for recommendations any time!)

Girl Power

It's your friendly Events Director here with her first-ever Blogsmith post. Howdy doo?

I'm thrilled to pieces about tomorrow night's event with Marisa Meltzer. She's coming to talk about her new book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music.

For those too young or old to remember, the soundtrack to third wave feminism in the 90s looked and sounded something like this:

And by the end of the decade, it had somehow changed into this:

Meltzer -- a NYC-based journalist and coauthor of the phenomenal How Sassy Changed My Life -- explains what the heck happened, tracking how the phrase "girl power" went from a counterculture rallying cry to a way to sell stuff. Although the decade ended with Britney Spears imploring someone to hit her, baby (one more time), the 90s changed the world of girls for the better, influencing the current generation to rock in record numbers.

This book is great (and I'm not just saying that because I was a teenager in the 90s, though that helps). It's great because it's a thoughtful cultural analysis sprinkled with interviews of awesome ladies. Anyone with an interest in music and/or feminism should drop by and hear what Meltzer has to say.

Monday Afternoon Wake Up Call

[ 116 ]

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat - some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

- Fernando Pessoa
The Book of Disquiet

This week, Pessoa & I were reunited. I have read this book. I have memorized certain passages. I have bought during good times and sold it during my bouts of poverty. I have left it on trains. I've brought it to airports and greyhound stations. I've waterlogged several copies. I have loved and hated this book at various stages and at varying intervals. Welcome home, you rascal.

Babies and Books

This is my first ever blog post (is that what it's called?).  As the senior member of our blogging team at age 61 with 29 years at Booksmith, I'm reflecting this morning on all the wonderful folks who've worked here with me over the years.  As it is stated on our bookmarks, 9 couples have met here and gone on to marry.  Bookstores can be very romantic places, you know.  Many of those couples now have kids.  Just last evening, one of our assistant managers and her husband and son welcomed a new baby boy into the world.  And, mind you, she was at work on Friday morning.  Such is her passion for and dedication to her bookselling life.  She's the third person within the year among our crew to have her second child.   I love that our work environment includes a big family element.   I'm convinced the world of physical bookstores will go on so we need this next generation of booksellers in the wings.

Besides the parents in our midst, the group of about 30 of us includes artists, musicians, poets, authors, dog raisers, gardeners, woodworkers, handmade book makers, comedians, social workers, film critics, athletes, naturalists, librarians, animal activists,  and environmentalists.  The store has always been known for its personality and humor.  Well, there you go!

Going back to the physical bookstore concept, I'm mindful of what an experience it is to know our ever-interesting  cast of players.  To my mind, there will never be a substitute for mixing, in person, customers and booksellers and books.   For all the buzz about ebooks and devices for reading them, I aim to keep this live, tangible place thriving for all who know and love it.

Bookselling on a Saturday, meditations on weekend labor in a grammatically suspect, run-on-sentency- postmodern- meanderation

Most people, when prompted to comment on my line of work, and the hours that I generally keep, tend to squirm when they hear that I work on the weekends. I understand why they think that this is a travesty, but I want to take a moment to draw a sketch of why book selling on a Saturday in Brookline is the best time to work.



((If you've ever worked in a coffee shop, or cookie shop, deli, or the like...there are most likely certain smells which cause you to be throttled back in time to that particular job. Olfactory triggers are fantastic for time travel. Sometimes it makes it hard for baristas to go to cafes without being triggered...(this is a phenomena I like to think of as the labor- trigger)))...



I just came back from NYC, where I went to St Mark's bookstore in the lower East Side...and what an amazing bookstore they have. ..seriously, funky and chic...to the 9's...anyway....while I was browsing it dawned on me that I still love being around books during my free time...is it possible that the "labor-trigger" doesn't apply to booksellers?

(don't worry I'm getting to my point soon)...



Today is my first day back to work, and it also happens to be a Saturday. I spent a good portion of my shift at the register. Helping people enjoy their one solid chore-free, work- free day off. The people who work 9-5...you come and see me on Saturday...you stay for a while, you browse...you ask about the music we're playing...(Angus&Julia Stone right now)...you ask us for book recommendations...(Jason Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt) and you are smiling when you get to me at the register. The shift is full of exchanges, and time takes on a lithe- acrobatic quality; and before I know it...I'm walking home. Saturdays are my Monday...

I wish I could return the favor, show up at your office on a Monday...walk around and be the cool stranger who informs the rest of your day with my appreciation for your line of work. But I won't, because that might be creepy...and I do have some boundaries...

For sure for sure for sure...an independent bookstore is more than a market, it is a cultural theatre, an actual agora,...not an ambient assemblage of pointing and clicking on a pixilated purchase...when you are here... you are a participant in a cultural moment, a shared space...the blue light of your Internet Explorer puts the world at your fingertips, there is no denying that...but you can't put your fingertips back on the world...

I work on Sundays too.
Bring your dog.
I'll be at the register.

tyranny of knowing

"...it's as if they become tyrannized by what they learn..."

This from a customer at the front register just now, near the end of our conversation about Gary Wills' newest, Bomb Power, in which he examines how the birth and evolution of the nuclear bomb has changed our government, and the office of the Presidency in particular, forever. The discussion began when he asked me enthusiastically whether I had read The Politician, which examines the train-wreck of John Edwards' life (and the lives of all those close to him).

I had high hopes for Edwards. I've kept that book at well more than arm's length, not just because of my basic distaste for tell-alls, but because he was the politician who stood up and stated repeatedly that poverty is the greatest threat to America, a belief that I too have held for most of my life. Since moving to Boston as an undergrad I've felt a mounting swell of disgust at the casual dismissal that most city-dwellers display to the homeless.

And I'm not sure that, despite everything we now know, despite every last sordid and spectacular detail, he wouldn't still have made a good President, even with all of this hidden in his closet. The question of "why do we want to know?", indeed demand to know, these awful things is moot. We will always want to know.

"The only thing I really learned from the book is that people are really complex." That's the other thing this astute customer said to me. People are really complex. People are really complex, and then we get them ironed flat for election day, and then we outrage ourselves over their surprise! humanity.

Not knowing is a blessing, or a curse. The truth might set you free if your aim is to better understand reality, but for those whose worldview is already fixed, the truth is a tyrant destined for the guillotine. Hence the agonizing over an America that "just isn't the same one I grew up in", over gay marriage, over Don't Ask/Don't Tell, chastity pledges, global warming, on and on and on.

John Edwards' laundry list of betrayals to those closest to him, I don't need to open those pages. The nuclear bomb, though...there's a book we all need to read.