The Book Shopper

Book Selling Is Not Easy

Over at Destination: Books the companion-other-side-of-the-counter  blog to The Book Shopper, I recently posted an article about "les bouquinistes" the Paris book vendors who have been selling reading material in book stalls along the Seine River since the Middle Ages. The pandemic has crippled their business because of the lack of tourism and the restrictions placed on local citizens. There are links that can take you to the complete story including fine photos of French booksellers. 

This same article has a brief write-up of Shaun Blythell's popular, The Diary of a Bookseller (2018) which is a daily account of selling second-hand books in Wigtown, Scotland. Blythell's book, though entertaining, is not an idyllic portrayal of bookselling  because there are many of his descriptions of hauling and processing boxes of books (some covered in cat hair)  and the challenging Scottish weather. Dealing with cantankerous customers and staff is never easy either. 

For more about reading, bookstores and libraries check out the books available on a shopping list compiled by Emory's Carlos Museum Bookshop.   It even includes this blog's namesake, the book that started it all. Impressive.

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Fortunately, the cover photo is not a book selling stall or some bizarre Book Jenga game, but rather a sculpture in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. My older daughter Cynthia Browne took the picture several years ago.

Into the Spinning Void

While reading Vladimir Nabokov’s 1953 humorous novel Pnin about the teaching life of a Russian émigré in a fictitious small New England college town, this line stood out among the many noteworthy passages:

 “With the help of the janitor, he (Pnin) screwed on the side of a desk (in his new office) a pencil sharpener – that highly satisfying, highly philosophical implement that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of a soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.”

This reference to the Ticonderoga pencils and those old pencil sharpeners brought back memories of the classrooms of my high school (built in 1912) that mounted similar sharpeners in the back of each room near the “cloudy blackboards.” Also, my father had a similar one mounted in our garage where I could grind a pencil to the finest point of procrastination before tackling my Algebra homework.

Museum Trips

Nabokov’s evocative prose provided additional respite, as I visited the online Made-in-Chicago Museum of Manufacturing to look for pictures of pencil sharpeners. (Thanks to the curator Andrew Clayman for granting me the permission to use the photo of the Giant sharpener made by the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company.)

The MICM took me back to a trip  I made last year to Berlin, where my older daughter Cynthia took my longtime partner Denise and me to the Museum of Things (Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge), which is dedicated to 20th and 21st century product culture.  We spent considerable time there on chilly wet day, soaking in the archive of the German industrial design association Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907. Items ranged from tape recorders and furniture to toy soldiers.

 

Book Shopping Novelty

While at the Museum of Things I purchased  the miniature book The Shadow on the Wall (Schottenspiele) (2014), which has illustrations of how to make shadow animals, which is a new game I like to play with my three-year old grandson Myrick.

Moreover, it is skill I can practice in the spinning ethereal void of 2020.

Tyranny, Voting, and Making Love for the Last Time

This passage comes from Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017):

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czech and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance*. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in the country's history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person making the vote. 

Timothy Snyder is History Professor at Yale University who has written several books on the Eastern Europe, Germany and the Soviet Union. In this short, compact book On Tyranny, Snyder provides terse lessons on how to combat tyranny in our daily lives and what tactics fascist regimes employ to undermine  democracies.  For example, in Lesson 6, Be Wary of Paramilitaries, Snyder describes how the Nazi Party in Germany rose to power during the elections of 1932 and 1933 with help from the Schutzstaffel (SS), which began as a paramilitary organization.  These groups "first challenge the police and military, then penetrate the police and military and finally transform the police and military," writes Snyder.

Although he has been around a while, I only heard about Snyder recently through my longtime friend and blog subscriber Bruce who recommended that I watch a YouTube interview  with Snyder while Snyder was promoting his latest book Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary (2020) . In the Politics and Prose interview, Snyder also talks about the upcoming election in a scary yet calming manner.

 

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*For more about the The Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism photograph visit last year's posting "European Book Experiences."

Star Essays

To motivate myself to write more essays, I recently finished Brian Dillon’s Essayism: On Form, Feeling and Nonfiction (2017). As a long-time subscriber to Cabinet magazine, I am familiar with Dillon’s byline as an editor of the quarterly, which sadly is ending its gorgeous print version and going strictly online. A few years ago, while browsing at Printed Matter, Inc. in New York City  (Aaah those were the days of book shopping – browsing sans mask with the smell of old books and cats in your nostrils instead of hand sanitizer) I stumbled across Dillon’s Objects in the Mirror: Essays (2011), Oddly enough, I think I recall that the book was shrink wrapped, but I took a chance anyway.

I ended up writing a short, favorable review of Objects and posting it on Amazon, which is a rarity for me, since I have only posted six reviews in my life which explains my reviewer ranking at #17,428,947. I am hesitant to provide free content to the richest man in the world, but if I really admire a book and it suffers from lack of stardom (less than 5 reviews) I will sometimes oblige. As you know, the big publishers control the marketplace. This year’s fad is All Things Trump and the staggering number of  books and the numbers of readers' reviews illustrates this: Michael Cohen’s book 2,307 reviews, John Bolton’s book 25,503 reviews, but both are paltry compared to the numbers of  Dr. Mary Trump,  (the "angry" niece) whose reviews total 44,914.

In comparison, two recent books about Melania Trump totaled to 2500 reviews, and she has a long, long way to go to beat Michelle Obama’s Becoming which has over 58,000 ratings. Oddly enough, 89 % percent of reviews of Becoming were 5 stars with only 3 % one star. No surprise, except in the first six reviews, Amazon listed the 5 one-star reviews with insightful critiques such as “snoozer” or “poorly written” ahead of penta-starred reviews praising the book.

 I am skeptical of the veracity of these numbers. I ask myself, "What's the point of adding another review to the a book that has already thousands of review?" I have no special insider information except to say we live in a world of bots. (Be mindful that every time you verify existence to CAPTCHA, you are telling a robot that you are not a robot.)  Here at The Book Shopper Blog, I rate the books on how many index cards I need to make notes. I figure if one goes to the trouble to write something on a note card -- you're engaged!

On Essayism

This tight collection of short essays is not a how-to book on writing essays, but rather it examines the qualities found within essays that characterize the form. Dillon sets up each piece with a short title (IN CAPS) to quickly clue the readers in. For example, the second essay entitled, “ON LISTS” Dillon points out that making lists is an acceptable literary technique used by the likes of William Gass and Joan Didion. Thus fortified, I will resort to the same strategy (except this is blog posting not an essay) to enumerate some of the topics explored in Essayism. They include:

ON COHERANCE. Dillion reveals one of his secrets to writing a good essay: “Find the proper guiding metaphor.” He provides an example from the philosopher Theodor Adorno:

Properly written texts are like spider’s webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw themselves all the creatures on the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them.

Fortunately, if you cannot unearth the spot-on metaphor, Dillon thinks you can still write a good essay.

ON ATTENTION. For the record, Dillon admires essays that “pays the minutest or most sustain attention to one thing, one time or place, one strain or strand of existence.”

ON FRAGMENTS. Dillon discusses the concept of fragments. He explains how fragments have played role in history of knowledge. Fragments can be relics from an ancient civilization or the surviving passages of the Greek and Roman authors.  It is acceptable, to Dillion because disparate fragments can be put together and if not well, it is also permissible “to say many contradictory things at once.”

ON CONSOLATION. Throughout the book Dillon confesses his own bouts with depression, bordering on suicide, but the tone is more melancholic than desperate. He follows his own principles: “I distrust writers who write straight away about their depression or other mental pain…But why this doubt or scruple? I tell myself it is because I want from writing, from literature a more conscious and conspicuously worked evidence of distance and thought, transformation of the raw material.”

But Dillon does not limit himself in this book as a primer on essays, but rather he weaves narratives about his own life and an examination of some the essayists (including a thorough Readings list) whom he admires. If you like essays, expect your list of reading material is going to grow exponentially.

I give it 3 index cards.

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Book Shopping Notes: The easiest way to get a copy of Essayism or other Dillon books is to contact Mark Burell (mburell AT emory.edu).  Mark is the manager of the Carlos Museum Bookshop on the campus of Emory University and is responsible for my copy of Essayism.  The photo of Printed Matter Inc. is circa 2014, before they moved to their current larger and cleaner location.

Quote of the Day

"...there was no end to stupidity, and nothing so dangerous."

        W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (1992)

Remembering Recommendations

This year I started keeping a personal list called Suggested Readings linked off the main menu of the blog’s homepage (unbeknownst to you email subscribers) where I keep track of books that have been recommended to me and the source of that suggestion. It can come in handy for ready-reference, but there are other proven methods as well, such as this offering from the Angry Algonquin blog.

This is in contrast to thinking that this blog is just a personal recommendation engine to others. The Suggested Readings list illustrates that book recommendations are coming in much faster than I can read them and that regular blog readers -- well, they kind of know what interests me. 

Post Gravity’s Rainbow

It was relief to finish Gravity’s Rainbow (See the essay, “A Screaming Comes Across the Sky”) and begin knocking off some smaller fanfare like the short Graham Greene novel, The Ministry of Fear (1943). This suggestion came from a writer friend and subscriber Jim, who encouraged me read this book set in Britain during The Blitz. (Considering that Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is set in World War II Europe made it seem more timely.) The Greene book had an Alfred Hitchcock feel of humor and intrigue – like another Greene novel, The Third Man, (1949). Set in postwar Vienna I read The Third Man earlier this year and topped it off by watching the film classic based on the novel staring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. Thanks, Jim, for encouraging me to look at an author I heard of, but never read.

Nothing Ever Dies

A big shoutout goes to my friend Maggie who suggested that I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book of essays, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (2016). I had already read Nguyen’s book of short stories, The Refugees (2017) and the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer (2015), which I wrote about here. Nothing Ever Dies dovetails well with these works of fiction and inspired multiple index cards of notetaking. The book is filled with insights into the relationship between war and memory and most specifically with the War in Southeast Asia.  (Nguyen argues that referring to it simply as  the Vietnam War makes it too American focused and diminishes the deaths of the 400,000 who died in Laos, the 700,000 who perished in Cambodia, which includes the genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and the 3,000,000 civilians and soldiers who died in North and South Vietnam from 1965-1975.)

Nguyen, who was born in Vietnam in 1971, came to the United States as a refugee with his parents after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.  He gives us numerous examples of how the war is viewed and remembered from a Southeast Asia perspective. This outlook varies greatly from the United States in terms of books, art, museums, memorials, and motion pictures (e.g. Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now which Nguyen satirizes in The Sympathizers).

Mixed in with his first-person accounts of his trip back to Southeast Asia to research the book, there are black and white photos that he took while visiting museums, cemeteries, and memorials. It gives the book a kind of W.G. Sebald look and feel. One contrasting set of observations are from outside of Ho Ch Minh City ("or what many still prefer to call, for reactionary, sentimental or simply lyrical reasons Saigon,” writes Nguyen). The first description is of the Truong Son Martyrs Cemetery built by the victors and features a towering grieving mother for the martyrs who won the war. Nearby is an almost forgotten South Vietnamese cemetery covered by little more than graffiti-ed gravestones and desecrated tombs. Nguyen deliberates on who controls the narrative of the Southeast Asia war. There are the victors of course, but what about the defeated South Vietnamese who stayed in the country and the South Vietnamese refugees (and the Hmong in Laos) who fled the country? Or is it the defeated superpower who controls the memory of the war?  

This is well-written book presents many ideas and deserves a thoughtful reading, which are too numerous to present here. One takeaway is that there is an ethics of remembering. Nguyen writes:

“Regardless of whether those we remember are saintly or all too human are saintly or all too human, the ethical force of remembering one’s own reinforces the shared identities of family, nation, religion, or race. In the ethics of remembering one’s own, remembering those of one’s side, even when they do terrible things, is better than ignoring them altogether. Nothing is worse than being ignored, erased, or effaced, as the losers of any war or conflict can affirm. In memory wars, a victory is had in simply being remembered and being able to remember, even if one’s self and one’s own appears troubled, tortured or even demonic.”

Another takeaway is that this book begets other recommendations. Maggie asked if I am interested in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003), which Nguyen hails as "the only major work that focuses on the life of a (Vietnamese) peasant."

Oh no, the list never ends.

 

Photo Credits: The photograph at the top of the posting is from the Hanoi Military History Museum, which includes this sculpture made up of airplane parts from a B-52 bomber. And if you're wondering about the photograph that graces the email, that picture was taken at Last  Book Store in downtown Los Angeles in 2017. My longtime partner Denise Casey was the photographer.

Essay on Gravity's Rainbow

Every summer for the past four years, I have written a long piece for the Tropics of Meta or ToM for short.  In their words, ToM "offers a fresh perspective on history, current events, popular culture, and issues in the academic world. Founded in 2010, ToM has published (online) over 1000 essays by historians, social scientists, artists, activists, and creative writers both within and outside the academy, giving voice to communities across the United States and the world."

Regular readers of this blog know that I like reading history and thinking about history, and in ToM's section called Dog Day Classics they've published my longer  book review essays about the Vietnam War, The Korean War and the grisly Algerian war for independence from France. This year I used my extra pandemic reading time to revisit Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow which I first read 40 years ago and believed influenced my worldview, (maybe to my detriment). I was also became more interested in the end of World War II after visiting Berlin last year and reading Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945  (2002). Gravity's Rainbow is set primarily in Germany at the end of war in 1945 and one of the "main characters" is the V-2 rocket. 

Photo Credits:  I have always had a soft spot for the original Viking edition artwork by Marc Getter.  The book photo comes from Thomas Pynchon wiki page which can be helpful along with The Gravity's Rainbow Support Group Page, which is linked off this blog's main page.  The gritty photo of the V-2 rocket comes  the photo book The Military History of World War II (1986).  Note how this is rocket is being fired from New Mexico in 1946. That's right. Obtaining the technical and engineering rocket expertise for the V-2 was extremely important to the United States after World War II (a major plot point of the book.) 

Hiroshima and Hersey

Next month there will be commemorations* for the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). One writer who is synonymous with that fateful day, which hastened the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II is John Hersey (1914-1993). This isn’t the blog’s first posting about Hersey, who is one of the more underrated and unheralded American writers of the 2oth century. He is best-known for his book  Hiroshima (1946) where he used narrative techniques normally found in fiction (a precursor to New Journalism)  to describe the accounts of six survivors of the blast. Equally impressive is the way Hersey captured the rhythms of the Japanese speech patterns in his prose.  It reminds one of a Haruki Murakami novel.

Hersey was born in China to missionary parents before moving back to the United States at age 10. He spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese and was able to put himself through Yale University based on his intellect and hard work. He became a war correspondent for Time Magazine and spent time in Italy and the Pacific.  In 1946, The New Yorker commissioned him to write a piece on Hiroshima.

In this book, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (2011), the critic and scholar John Sutherland lists the authors who will still be read 100 years from now and why. One of those authors is John Hersey.  In Hiroshima, Sutherland  admired Hersey's ability to overturn, “ the monolithic image of the subhuman ‘Jap’ promulgated during hostilities. The description of physical effects of the ‘Bomb’ were horrific: melted eyeballs, bone-rotting radiation sickness, and  -- the image that went around the world –- a victim whose only relic was a shadowy profile on a wall; the rest of him vaporized.”

In other words, at that time  the book came out, many Americans still hated the Japanese for their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but if you've read Hersey’s account of the grisly suffering and death you could not have had anything but the deepest sympathy for the civilian population of Japan.

A Bell for Adano

Based on his experiences while he was a war correspondent in Italy. Hersey wrote A Bell for Adano, which was published in 1944 while World War II still raged. Set in an Allied occupied coastal village in Sicily, an Italian-American major is assigned to be the head of the local government. The major must win the trust of the villagers who have been under Fascist rule for years.  This is not a blood and guts kind of story at all, but one that focuses on the civilians that were caught between the retreating Fascists and the townspeople’s new conquerors – the Americans.  The major has a tough job, especially dealing with his superiors (one  based on General George S. Patton) but he is a decent man and goes the extra step  to replace the local church’s prized bell that was removed for scrap metal  earlier in the war.

Like Hiroshima, A Bell for Adano is a not a lengthy book as Hersey is economic with prose.  The book was awarded the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1945.

Key West Tales

Hersey kept a winter home in Key West, Florida which was a popular hangout for many writers including Ernest Hemingway, who as a "celebrity" novelist, war correspondent, and macho man overshadowed Hersey. (Not that long ago, I reread Hemingway’s A Sun Also Rises and I much prefer Hersey's work.)

Hersey’s final book was a collection of short stories entitled Key West Tales (1994). His stories show tremendous range in subject matter with some measure of wit and  since the collection is lighter in tone and subject matter Key West Tales is suitable for reading while on vacation. (See the posting “Better Book Trips of 2016"). One memorable story is “A Game of Anagrams” an account of a weekly word game between three egotistical poets and a novelist as they vie for word one-upmanship. In the story "To End the American Dream," Hersey pays "tribute" to Hemingway by portraying him as a bar brawler, but also balances his portrayal by showing how Hemingway cares about his sentences and his writing habits.

It is no surprise that Hersey went easy on his rival.  The critic John Clute (who I believe wrote the entry in the Sutherland book) summarized in Hersey's life that in everything he did, had  a "stylish decency if not a nobility."

* My longtime partner Denise Casey took the photos of Hiroshima when she visited Japan in 2005. The photo at the top of the posting  are the ruins that were purposely left as a reminder for future generations and the photo at the end of the posting  is Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. Thanks, Denise. 

Something For Late-Night Readers

Do you like to stay up late at night reading, but get tired of holding the book long before you get sleepy? Then check out the revolutionary Buchor Model C, a device that allows you to lie in perfect repose and read your book without having to hold it.

Der Buchor Model C*was invented by a German sound engineer-artist for his scholarly night owl partner who likes to read well past midnight. By attaching a music holder to a microphone stand via a strong and adjustable grip head, der Buchor Model C allows for hand-free, gravity defying reading. Your book attaches to the stand, and thin clips keep the pages flat for easier reading. A small lamp with an environmentally-friendly LED bulb clips onto the stand, much healthier than the blue light from a laptop or a phone.

Der Buchor Model C   is not available at any store or online. It’s free! You just have to put it together from materials you have lying around the house (if you are a resourceful artist or innovative sound engineer). Reading late at night has never been easier. Accept no IKEA-like knockoffs and you can throw that disgusting Pillow Pad away.

* known originally as die Bucheule 5000 

Sun Salutations

Several of my recent reading choices in the past six months have been a direct result of my subscription to The Sun Magazine out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Sun Magazine is a monthly literary publication of essays, fiction, poetry and photography. Each issue has an in-depth interview with a person who presents a thoughtful perspective on a timely issue whether it is political, cultural, or environmental.  Here is list of recent interviewees that may interest you as well as their books.

Interview with Leah Penniman in the July, 2019 Issue

Penniman is an author, educator and activist and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, which is not only a working farm, but "a training ground for aspiring people of color who come there to learn about sustainable agriculture and reclaim a connection to the land severed by centuries of trauma and oppression.”

I read her Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land  which is a rare blend of black history, activism, and practical advice for those interested in community gardening and tips on growing better fruits and vegetables. It inspired me to contact their publisher Chelsea Green to carry some of their books at my Destination: Books popup.

Interview with Paul Chaat Smith in the August, 2019 issue

Smith is an American Indian essayist, activist and cultural provocateur. Smith’s book Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong (2009) is a series of essays expanding over 10 years. Smith ruminates about various related to Indian history and art, his own heritage, and portrayal of Native Americans. The Sun describes his style as" a combination of smart-aleck, freewheeling with thoughtful scholarship." After reading Everything You Know I put the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington D.C. on my travel list and so maybe visit Smith who is one of the curators there.

Interview with Astra Taylor in the November, 2019 issue

Her book Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (2019) gives a history of what democracy really means and how it came to be so threatened here in 2020. It's a thicker book that can occasionally ramble, but it does cover the history of democracy and looks at many of the current systemic threats to democracy. She admits that democracy is a flawed form of government but worth saving.

Since Sun Magazine has temporarily removed its paywall these interviews are available to read online. However, the magazine is gorgeously printed on fine paper with extraordinary black and white photography throughout so you may want to consider subscribing. You will never have to worry about the magazine piling up because you probably have like-minded friends that are always willing to take them off you hands.   

Available at Destination: Books

All three of these slightly used books are in my Destination: Books online store where I often place books that I don’t want to read again, but deserve to find a good homes instead being dumped at Goodwill or in the purgatory of one of those Neighborhood Little Libraries. Regular readers of the blog may recall that generally I do not mark in books or eat sticky foods while reading.  I prefer to make notes on postcards instead and I readily avoid anything that will get stuck in my teeth except kale. I keep a small inventory with additional descriptions and ordering information at the Destination: Books catalog page.