The Path of the Bookseller

Video of my 1993 performance piece, Minyan (After Chagall), is now online. It’s a 26 minute dance/theater work, mostly set to a field recording that I made at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Enjoy!

The new device caught my eye at the checkout line. The supermarket in New Jersey had instituted a system for bagging groceries, rather like a lazy susan. Each of the three sides held bags on two pairs of hooks. Cashiers could put items into those two bags, then rotate the device and continue with the next two.

“This looks like a really good idea,” I said.

“No,” the cashier replied. “It’s not.”

“Really?” I said. “It looks efficient.”

“Yeah,” she said. “For some people. For small orders. But it really doesn’t work out. You get a four, five hundred dollar order and it’s a mess. When things pile up, and I’m ringing and haven’t gotten to bagging yet, there’s no place to put them. I have to scan a few things, put them in bags, scan again. And the lady shopping is waiting a lot longer to get to the paying part and getting mad.”

I looked more carefully, not having thought of that. We rarely get such pile-ups at the bookstore. “And I guess it doesn’t work as well if you have more than six bags worth,” I said. Shopping with my mother for a fairly small order, we already had five.

“And most people, they aren’t going to be doing what you’re doing, taking the bags away and putting them in the cart when they’re ready. So I have to stop, go put the bags in their carts for them, then get back to scanning. And they haven’t paid yet, so they’re standing, waving their cards around, and acting like I’m the one being stupid.”

“Hmm,” I said. “One of those things that looks like a great idea until you actually use it?”

“You got it,” she said. She rang up the last item and hit Total. “That’s $46.15. You saved $13.48 with your club card. Thanks for shopping here.”

My mother scrutinized the receipt before paying. “$46.15? If I spend fifty dollars, I get a free box of matzah. Should I get something more?”

“Have you ever found yourself not having enough matzah?” I asked.

“We have eight pounds,” she said. “Yes, that should be enough.”

I gingerly made a U-turn with the shopping cart. As with all the spaces in the store, there wasn’t enough to do so efficiently. While someone had apparently designed the aisles so that two carts passing each other had a couple of inches between them, traffic would halt wherever anyone wanted to stop in an aisle and actually look at a product. And with the large population of senior citizens in the area, the number of people moving extremely slowly, frustrating others who wanted to get around them, was also extremely high.

I got the cart turned around and headed for the exit. “Bye,” the cashier said without looking up. “Have a nice day. Evening. Holiday. Whatever.”

“I hope that you have a good holiday, too,” my mother said. We rolled past the cashiers and out the door, preparing ourselves for the dreaded battle of the the parking lot.

Steven Hart has inspired me to jump on the meme known as 15 Books That Will Always Stick With Me. Here’s my fifteen, in the order that I thought of them:

Samuel R. Delany: Dhalgren. How do people survive in a city where things no longer make sense? This book picks up reality and twists it around, managing to include conversations about everything in the world in the midst of a strong story with characters that you won’t forget (even though the protagonist can’t remember who he is). It may be about the experience of living inside a book. Or it may not. (Actually, I would have picked Delany’s complete works if I could have done so. He’s the single finest writer I’ve read.)

John Cage: Silence. Of course. New ideas on what sound, music, and silence are, still causing arguments and having repercussions today.

Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems 1956–1968. Cohen’s poetry mixes traditional influences (including a strong Jewish strain) with unexpected sensuality. I had heard a few of his songs when I was young, but this book put it all together. Nowadays, I would go for his later retrospective, Stranger Music. And his new CD and DVD. Live in London, are amazingly good: if you’re only going to get one Leonard Cohen album, get this one.

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit. A collection of tiny mind-bombs combining beauty and whimsy in koans for making art.

Robert Silverberg: Dying Inside. A haunting and often funny view from inside the mind of a telepath who is losing his gift.

Michael Nyman: Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. A survey of experimental music, focusing on the British scene in the Sixties and Seventies, much of which became known throught Brian Eno’s Obscure record label. Lots of small scores and good explanations which led me toward much of the music that I have loved and tried to make ever since.

Dorothy Karp Kripke: Let’s Talk About God. The book that my parents read to me most when I was little. In the face of blossoming doubt, I keep returning to its mantra, “God is the good that’s in the world.”

Various Artists: The Bible. Whatever you think it is, however it came to be written, and whatever connection it might have to actual history and theological reality, it’s at the core of the stories that most of us in this culture tell each other to try to figure out what how we see the world.

J G Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition (Love and Napalm, Export USA). Atomized stories of distorted realities, messing with any linear sense of how a story must be told.

William Strunk and E. B. White: The Elements of Style. I’ve given people more copies of this book than any other with the possible exception of Dhalgren. Champions of brevity, long before Twitter.

Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles. Elegaic, beautiful, loving stories of a fanciful Mars and, more importantly, the people and others who land and live there. (I might have also picked The October Country, but Steven already did, and wrote about it better than I could.)

Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories. Explosive, enveloping stories, all touching on how one sees and works within a world where the old beliefs and gods are dying. Gritty, angry, daring work that succeeds because, when you dig down, Ellison cares about people so much.

James Joyce: Finnegans Wake. As John Cowan showed me, this is one of the funniest books ever written. Open to any page and read it aloud. There are whole stretches of it where no one apparently has much of any idea what was going on, and it doesn’t matter. Just open anywhere and enjoy.

Lewis Carroll: Symbolic Logic and The Game of Logic. I grasped onto this book in fourth grade or so. Carroll’s way of taking ideas, showing how they fit together, and mapping them into his peculiar system of intersecting rectangles showed me how to pin ideas down to pages and prove that some parts of the world made sense.

And one anti-recommendation:

Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow. A horrific, terribly-written, misanthropic, grim, slapdash attempt at science fiction. Well-meaning people go in search of beauty only to have it all go wrong. Scenes of torture and mental and emotional cruelty lead to nothing but ugly nihilism couched in writing that is, at best, semi-competent. Some people like this book. I have no idea why. Avoid this, unless you enjoy having horrific imagery and leaden language trapped in your head forever after. It’s the one book that I most wish that I had not read.

So that’s my list. Typing it up and doing the links, other struck me, such as Dante’s La Vita Nuova, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, and Hermann Hesse’s Demian. But I’ll stop here.

I was also surprised that some of the things that I thought that I had remembered as coming from books actually were from magazine articles,online posts,  radio interviews, music album liner notes, newspaper columns, and the like. 

What’s your list??

Joseph Zitt: Improvisation: Proverbs 30:18-19 from Joseph Zitt on Vimeo.

A vocal improvisation based on a biblical text. Phoenix Coffee on Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, OH, 1 April 2009.

I’m quite pleased with this, despite coffeeshop noise and people wandering between me and the camera. But such is the open-mic life. I’ve come to realize that fighting for attention leads to frustration or, worse, slam poetry. So I decided to go somewhat ambient. Those who were there to listen, listened.

“Three things are too wonderful for me;
four things I do not know:
The way of an eagle in the air;
The way of a serpent upon a rock;
The way of a ship in the midst of the sea;
The way of a man with a maiden.”
– Proverbs 30:18-10

I love seeing customers meeting, talking, and comparing what they’re browsing. This is one of the great things about small, community-centered shops. It’s trickier in the Big Box stores, especially those with customers drawn from a wide geographical area or, as in the case of the more tourist-heavy store in which I worked before, around the world.

The online shops have the big advantage, as Dave Winer reminded us today, of persistent user comments. I had once thought of instituting something like this in our store: I would encourage people to write comments on forms like those that we are encouraged to use in the store for Staff Recommendations. But this had the same problems that result in very few staff members writing recommendations: it takes time, has delayed gratification, and most people just plain don’t like to write and aren’t all that good at it.

But I had a bit of an idea-bomb reading Dave’s post. We could do this using widely available technologies:

A customer is talking enthusiastically about a book or other item that we carry. We encourage the customer to come over to a PC that has a code scanner and a webcam. The customer scans the bar code on the item (as for a price check or the more advanced listening stations), and clicks a big button on the screen to start the camera. The customer speaks freely about the item (maybe free-associating onto similar stuff). When finished, the customer clicks the big button to end the recording, which then gets associated with the item in a media database. Other customers who look up the item would then be able to play back the comments. An idle station could also play a random (or less randomly determined) stream of existing comments.

This would, of course, have implementation problems: content (mostly language) that wasn’t appropriate for in-store playback, the need for workers to have time to manage it, and possibly privacy and rights issues if the messages were to be propagated across the company network. (I don’t see the possibility of negative reviews as much of a problem: that people were avidly engaged with the store and its product would be more of a plus than the impact of whether they praised or panned a particular product.)

The odds of our implementing this? Slim. But it’s fun to imagine and drop into the mindstream.