Franzen on Bezos: 'One of the Four Horseman'

"In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world. But what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel levels?"

--Jonathan Franzen in a Guardian essay called "What's Wrong with the Modern World"

 

(We recommend printing out the full article if you want to really get down into it--its 15 pages long!) 

Bruce! The Winning Story

We had a fine time last Friday, hearing from  Christopher Phillips, editor of the new book Talk About a Dream: The Essential Interviews of Bruce Springsteen. Also in attendance that evening was Michele Lynn, who penned the winning story in our "Tell Us Your Favorite Springsteen Story" contest. As you can see from her story, Michele qualifies as a hard core Springsteen fan, having attended almost 50 of his live concerts. (But hey, there were people here Friday night who have been to over 100!). 

Here's Michele's story, which centers around the first concert she went to:

Growing up in a suburb of New York City, spending summer days at the Jersey Shore, I was a prime candidate to become a Springsteen fan.  I am happy to say that I fulfilled that destiny. 

During my senior year of high school, I had a crush on a boy who worshiped Bruce. So off I went to Korvette’s, a lower-rent cousin of Macy’s and Gimbel’s, to buy a Springsteen album.  I planned to play it nonstop so that when the aforementioned boy called on the phone, the background soundtrack could happen to be Springsteen. 

“Darkness on the Edge of Town” had recently been released so that record, featuring a tough-looking Bruce on its cover, was the one that accompanied me home.  And a funny thing happened – after playing the record a time or two, I was no longer keeping it on my turntable to impress a boy. I was listening to it because Bruce’s passion, music, and lyrics and the band’s musicianship touched something deep inside of me. 

A few years later, during my junior year of college in New York City, Springsteen brought “The River” tour to the Big Apple.  I knew that I had to go to the show with my best friends—identical twins with whom I had spent many hours listening to Bruce, deciding which one of us would marry him, and visiting the holy shrines of Madam Marie’s and the Stone Pony in Asbury Park.

But tickets sold quickly and we were shut out. Not to be deterred, on the opening night of the stand, we took the number 1 train down to Penn Station and walked over to the venue. Students with limited incomes, we found that the scalpers’ prices were out of our league. 

But we were determined. So we flashed our cutest college coed smiles at a hulking ticket taker and asked if we couldn’t just go in and stand for the show.  Our smiles weren’t enough but the $10 we each palmed to him did the trick.  A few minutes later, we found ourselves climbing  to the top of Madison Square Garden and waiting what seemed like an eternity until Bruce and the band came out on stage and ripped into “Born to Run.”

Nearly 33 years later, I still get chills when I remember the power and passion and unlimited promise that song heralded for me, Maddy, and Stephanie.  We stood and sang and danced together for the four hours of that concert and throughout many more Bruce concerts over the years. And every time I hear “Born to Run” in concert—and I have probably heard it live close to 50 times—I am still 19 years old, ready to take on life with all of its joys and adventures.

Oh, and the Springsteen fan who was the original reason I started to listen to Bruce?  He and I dated for some months and even attended our senior prom together. But while my romantic relationship with him is ancient history, my love affair with Bruce continues to this day.

--Michele Lynn

Why I like Colum McCann’s writing

I’ve admired Colum McCann’s writing since I first read “This Side of Brightness” more than 15 years ago, and my admiration has grown enormously with the publication of his last two novels, “Let The Great World Spin” in 2009 and “Transatlantic” which came out just last month. McCann’s storytelling is masterful, and his books are deep and realistic without being at all depressing.

I found a clue as to why I like McCann’s writing so much in an article about him that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in early June. McCann was invited to talk to high school students at Newton High School, just up the road from Sandy Hook Elementary School, the site of the horrible shootings last December. Many of the Newton High students had ties to the 20 children and 6 adults who were killed at Sandy Hook, and a Newton High teacher had asked his classes to read “Let The Great World Spin” to help them deal with what they had gone through.

Here are the last two paragraphs of the Times Magazine’s story:

“In each of the classes in Newton, the conversation eventually drifted to the question of loss, and to the way McCann’s book takes on grief and despair and then offers the possibility for something else. It was impossible to look at those kids and not wonder what their own histories were, and how those histories would shape their lives. Occasionally, their experiences on the day of the shootings or in the months since would puncture the discussion. One girl remembered the younger children on the day of the shootings being gathered together outdoors. ‘I looked around at my peers,’ she said, ‘and they were playing with the kids.’ She thinks of that sometimes, she said, when she’s trying to find ‘a little spot of light.’ In another class, a boy who spent nearly the entire discussion staring down at his desk suddenly raised his head and said that he used to believe the truth that pain makes you stronger, but he didn’t know anymore. ‘For some people pain is what you get,’ he said.

“McCann thanked him for saying that. He was no psychologist, he said, but he believed it was necessary to acknowledge how powerful despair can be. The question was how to get to a place beyond that. ‘You have to beat the cynics at their own game,’ he said.... There was nothing the least bit preachy in his tone. ‘I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says “This is not enough.” But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.’ He couldn’t fathom what they were going through, he said, but he knew that the struggle against cynicism would be the challenge for them, as it is for anyone, for the rest of their lives.’

Reading this, I realized why I feel so deeply about Colum McCann’s books. Not only is he a great storyteller, he is an inspiring storyteller as well. You don’t find that combination very often.
--Tom Campbell

"A book can be where one finds oneself"

"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.

"That kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and part of our own endurance."

From Rebecca Mead's My Life in MiddleMarch, which will be published by Crown in January. I have been reading an advance copy of the book, which is about the impact of George Elliot's novel on Mead's life. I have never read Middlemarch, but I am becoming completely engrossed in Rebecca Mead's book.

Tom Campbell

Be Patriotic. Shop Local!

We've all heard the story of how a new British tax on tea incited the famous Boston Tea Party, where colonists dumped more than 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor. But what you probably haven't heard is that the Tea Party—we're talking here about the one on Boston in the 1700's, not the current group of misguided pretenders—was really all about shopping local.

You see the tax on tea wasn't a tax on all tea—only on the tea sold by local merchants. Tea sold by the East India Company, a 1700's version of a powerful multinational corporation, wasn't subject to the tax. The idea was to enable the East India Company to undercut its small local competitors and drive them out of business. (Gee, this sounds a lot like today—where you have to pay sales tax if you buy a book from us, but you don't pay sales tax if you buy the book from amazon..).

The British government and the East India Company were counting on the lure of cheap tea to overpower the colonist's sense of community and principle, but they misjudged. The colonists continued to support their local, independent merchants and boycott East India tea. Their actions in the Boston harbor and the British retaliation that followed ultimately led to an organized boycott of all British goods. Homegrown and local became the fashion of the day. The Declaration of Independence soon followed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we know that cities with more locally owned, independent businesses have higher rates of community involvement at all levels (including voter turnout) and lower rates of crime and poverty than cities that have few locally owned businesses. Which just makes sense. Its easier to feel part of a community where you know the folks that own and run the businesses. That sense of belonging is hard to come by in a place where all the stores are owned by multinational corporations. And it is even harder to come by where everyone sits at home with their computers and orders everything from a distant warehouse with terrible working conditions.

So...Be patriotic! Make your community a better place! Keep your money here where you live! Shop Local!

And a Happy Fourth of July to all.

(Thanks to the pamphlet "A Declaration of Independents" by Stacy Mitchell for the information about the Boston Tea Party)

Once a bookseller, now deputy director of the CIA

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/13/new-cia-2-pick-used-to-read-anne-rice-aloud-at-her-bookstore-s-erotica-night.html

Maybe I should update my resume and apply for a job at the CIA?

Or should I stay at The Regulator and start an erotica night?

Not sure what to make of all this, but then the CIA has always been a bit of a cipher...

--Tom Campbell

Odd and Unusual!

We've created a new, highly selective little section in the bookshop called Odd and Unusual. (You can find it under the sign of the yellow and blue eyed cat...). If you're an odd and unusual person yourself, or have aspirations in that direction, you might have some fun with the books we're adding to these shelves!

 
Gracing our Odd and Unusual shelves at the moment are books like A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization by J.C. McKeown and Weird Life: The Search for Life that is Very, Very Different from Our Own by David Toomey.


And I've just added one of my favorite odd and unusually good novels to this section. The book is titled The Raw Shark Texts, by a young British writer named Steven Hall, published back in 2007. To tell you about the book, I can't do any better than to crib from a review of the book from the Washington Post by Tyler Knox, who clearly enjoyed the shark as much as I did:

"The star of Steven Hall's rousingly inventive The Raw Shark Texts is its villain -- always a good sign in a thriller. Raymond Chandler famously said, "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." Hall one-ups Chandler by sending in a shark. But not just any shark, a conceptual shark called a Ludovician, which swims in a current of words and ideas and feeds on memory and sense of self. Every time the Ludovician makes an appearance, Hall's novel jolts to life.

Eric Sanderson gasps awake one day to find his memory missing. As Eric struggles to forge a bland and static life, a series of letters, apparently from his self before the memory loss, the so-called First Eric, warns him of the conceptual shark that, with a vengeance as unmotivated as Iago's, is determined to eat Eric's memory over and over....Second Eric doesn't buy it until he spies the figure of a shark within the white noise of his television...

It isn't long before Eric is on the run, dodging the memory eater and searching for the strange Dr. Fidorous, who might just be able to get the damn shark off his tail. At this point the novel takes on the cloak of your typical thriller: a man on the run, aided by a great-looking waif with a killer smile and a bomb in her pocket. Oh, yeah, and there's a cat....More compelling are the journals written by First Eric, the raw texts of the title, that give glimpses of Eric's romance with Clio, the love of his life, who was killed in a tragic accident off the coast of Greece.


...Even as Hall takes great delight in showing off the details of his world with all kinds of loopy names and textual tricks -- including one terrific visual sequence where the terrifying nature of the shark is made real -- his methods almost always serve the purpose of the story. And for a first novelist, Hall has a nice way of hiding telling details until the end of a sentence or a scene, like the stinger at the end of a scorpion's tail.

It's all a lot of fun, yet there is also a surprising emotional resonance in seeing Second Eric, like Beckett's Krapp with his tapes, reading and rereading First Eric's journals as he obsesses over the experiences that the Ludovician has chomped out of his head. And to hear Second Eric's voice take on the snap of his predecessor's is especially satisfying.

Best of all, there is the shark itself, wily and relentless, with its chilling eye and gaping maw, hungry for memory.."

--Tom Campbell