KAPUTT: bookstores, book reviews, writing, my own

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…”