KAPUTT (due homage to Malaparte):
Bookstores Book reviews, writing , my own .
ONE “If I had
planned it, I should not have made the sun at all. See! How beautiful! The sun is too bright and too hot… And if
there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing,” Ludwig
Wittgenstein quote in a biography by Edward Kanterian (Reaktion Books)
TWO
“ …and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin,
painfully trying to tear his body away only, eventually, to deliver himself---
utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials--- into
the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry
air against a background loud with torturers ad flayers of skin,” from
SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, to be published by New Directions in
February, 2012 (these quoted words show why I can write that there is not a
living American writer who comes anywhere close to Krasznahorkai in ability or
in genius.
1-
DEATH is the most mind concentrating word in the
English language… in all languages. To even
begin to write why is to attempt to dilute… but death is never diluted.
2-- The death of a
bookstore has been on the mind here in Manhattan, NY, US. Having lived through the death of New Morning
Bookstore on Spring Street in SOHO--- given what SOHO has become--- it is a little
hard to imagine at one time there were seven bookstores within that area and
New Morning was the one where I worked.
The film director Nicholas Ray lived upstairs from it and was
dying.
3-- New Morning
was owned by the guys who put out HIGH TIMES… it was both very literary and a
destination store for what was new in every aspect of that word. But it died.
The founder of HIGH TIMES blew his brains out… other people ran it… money
problems… the stock begins to shrink… shelves disappear, individual books begin
to be faced out…book stock has to be bought from wholesalers… magazines are no
longer being delivered for sale… smaller presses start to see their books faced
out—since they are really unaware of the lack of credit they advance books and
so become the last in and the last screwed… and then eventually the marking
down of books…
4-- I went through
the agony down to collecting a few of the metal book ends made in the
silhouettes of airplanes.. . hinting at the planes used to airlift essential
supplies from South America or Mexico… the quick money fortunes that bought the
first lofts in SOHO …
5-- New Morning
pioneered the idea of having low tables on which piles of new books would be
displayed, mixing new with the old, fiction with nonfiction… a demonstration of the eclectic taste of the
managers…on Saturday nights the three Old Testament prophets as they were called
would come in: Samuel Menashe, Tuli Kupferberg and Sidney Bernand… I hope
everyone who might read this knows who they are… as they Irish would say, their
like will not be seen again
6-- After New
Morning closed, I worked at the oldest
bookshop in what became the East Village: East Side Bookstore… by the time I
worked for them they were in a tiny shop on the north side of St Marks Place,
next door to St Marks Bookshop. The owner
was a professor at Pace but was dying and after he died his widow kept it going
for a time… the same thing happened… the
stock shrank etc…
7--St Mark’s
Bookshop prospered and then moved across the street to larger quarters, had
some problems and moved again to its current location on Third Avenue after
receiving help from the founder of Rodale who was sadly killed in an auto
accident in Moscow
8-- Currently, the
store’s stock is shrinking, shelves from sections have been removed, books get
faced out, smaller presses see their
books being prominently displayed and one is aware that the shop does not have
credit to order directly from the big publishers and they are having problems
meeting the rent… and for a while that problem has been met with a temporary
reduction but I would think by the time the lease comes for renewal in two years
St. Marks will be but a memory unless they find a rich leftist--- and there are
many many of them--- who is prepared to stake them to a chunk of cash… the
latest estimate from an employee: six months more… I suspect and hope I am wrong but March will see the
end…
9-- The best
bookstore of recent memory was Books & Co. up on Madison Avenue but that
was supported by the heir to IBM though
even she eventually got tired of putting
up buckets of cash… of course
landlords, gentrification, the economy are always dragged into play but the
reality is that we are living through the waning time for the book and
bookstores… even The Strand which according to tax returns still produces
millions of dollars in profits for it owners is now a tourist destination that
is thriving just on that… secondhand books are a shrinking part of its business
and the selling of shoulder bags, candy, cooking gadgets and a myriad number of
other spur of the moment purchases along with well discounted new books is what
is keeping that show going, plus they own the building.
10- I treasure St.
Mark’s but I see my own mortality in it.
The ageing owners who have heroically kept the store going—even stocking
my own books from Dalkey Archive--- have a long and honorable life of selling
books and making available books that would not normally be available… going as
far back as when one of the owners then learning the trade by working at the
East Side Bookshop was arrested for selling the infamous ZAP comic book that
featured incest as a pleasurable activity and as a way to keep families
together… and more recently they even sold THE TURNER DIARIES, a very
controversial book that showed in glowing terms the triumph of a Nazi ruled US…
written by a man who was not being ironic.
11- The owners of
St Mark’s deserve to have that one rich person help them… that is what they
really need… but I have a feeling it is like hoping to find that last seat on a
life raft after an iceberg as done its work and echoing William Burroughs these guys are not going to put on dresses to
save their skins--- for many years the
best-selling novel at St Marks was William Burroughs’ NAKED LUNCH… but now you
can see I have been writing about the past and a past fondly remembered as the
semi-literate youth have other things on
their mind or minds…
12- Books have
been shoved to the side and for a long time when the conversation turns to
books they are quickly exhausted and replaced by the latest movie or movie
available on DVD…
13 --The US has
only newspaper book review section that deserves that title and it is the
rather pathetic New York Times… but I have no real complaints, both of my books
were well reviewed there but when the burden falls upon them as being the sole
book section one is disheartened by the pages of the review given up to best
seller lists and articles of a general interest… so in a sense even they are a
little embarrassed by having to actually run reviews.
14--The Wall
Street Journal on Saturdays now has a large book section but the editor
obviously is interested in non-fiction which seems naturally to revolved around
and around business, war… and eccentric lives… literature is treated in columns…
15—Newspapers
still review books but most are like the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune,
Boston Globe… a couple of books reviewed usually by staff on the newspaper…
there is no personality, no feel that there is much thinking going on… and while
it is true that far more books are reviewed on the basis of whim than anyone
realizes, now all to often it is a simple of matter of seeing if someone can be
cajoled into saying something, anything really, just as long as it vaguely
makes sense.
16—But is there a
future ON LINE? Isn’t that the desperate
hope… blogs, online reviewing sites… I myself read some of these but I still
want those words on actual paper though I will also admit that while I have a
subscription from my sister for The New Yorker I download it and read it on my
iPAd and then the actual print version arrives in the mailbox and is not
usually opened…
17-- For a long time I have noticed the
disappearance of news papers from the subway here in NYC and I have begun to
notice people reading on handheld devises… and they seem to be reading what
looks like novels.
BUT I AM STILL
ANNOYED BY THE CRAP THAT GETS PUBLISHED IN BOOK FORM… So I guess you can say I
still have an interest in books
(I have privileged moments of
criticality)(I especially regret the lack of women and minorities in this book)(To
make matters worse mine is a small canon of only of white men) These words are
from the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archeology at
Princeton University who has published a book THE FIRST POP AGE which is packed
with full colour reproductions but no thinking… a book about Warhol,
Lichtenstein, Hamilton, Richter and Ruscha… the selection of course is
arbitrary but so ordinary… all the complaining or excusing, all so much throat
clearing… I guess if he had at least
mentioned John Wesley, I would not have been so annoyed, but Princeton does
that to its tenured professoriate who it seems spend too much time thinking and
talking about their favorite Chinese and Indian restaurants in the Princeton
area as reported by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill who had the well paid accident of
spending some time among this human society, a place, as Anthony Burgess noted,
even the bank tellers are rude…
18-- HOWEVER there are a few tiny scraps of
interest available: THE POETRY OF
THOUGHT FROM HELLENISM TO CELAN by George Steiner which is published by New
Directions…just mentioning the publisher is designed to show how that word has
changed. The so-called larger publishers
cannot afford to publish a book like… Steiner well understands, “this little
book, the interest and focus it hopes for from its readers--- statistically a tiny
minority--- the vocabulary and grammar in which it is set out are already
archaic.”
And the reason for
that is quite simple: the universities
are controlled by those who write inside the thinking exemplified by the Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of
Art and Archeology at Princeton University
and we all live in a world where the young (8-18) devote
eleven hours of their day to their engagement with electronic media of
one sort or another and where they use a vocabulary of approximately 65 words…
There are these
words by Steiner: “… the “discovery” of
metaphor ignited abstract disinterested thought. Does any animal metaphorize? It is not only language which is saturated by
metaphor. It is our compulsion, our
capacity to devise and examine alternative worlds, to construe logical and
narrative possibilities beyond any empirical constraints. Metaphor defies, surmounts death—as in the
tale of Orpheus out of Thrace…”
