From time to time a customer will approach the desk to make an enquiry and, in the course of doing so, reveal something personal and sad about themselves. I will respond, sometimes with fake bookseller politeness, sometimes with genuine interest and sometimes with a wash of empathy.
(Other times I veer backwards in horror at the nuttiness that can unravel.)
This weekend a middle aged man came in with an enquiry about audio books. I answered him, offered a suggestion or 2 and smiled as he left. He returned shortly after with another similar question. This time he revealed that he suffers from problems with his memory, brought on by shock.
He said that he was mugged several years ago. I won’t go into details because I would hate for him to happen upon himself on-line one day. Suffice to say that apparently the incident shocked him so much that he no longer has the ability to hold new memories. He therefore is unable to continue his work as a teacher. He seemed nice, sad, vague. He says he feels very vulnerable and won’t go out after dark.
We chatted for a while, he was apologetic about taking up my time. I told him it was fine, and it was. It seems to me that if his story is true (and why would it not be) that’s what he is left with. This is him, he is a man who was mugged and now has a problem. It’s the information that he has waiting to spill out of him, he has lost who he was, indeed is no longer able to be that person and function in the ways that he did before. He has become this man as a result of a random act of violence. He wants to tell everyone, because it is huge and important and all consuming. He looks the same as he ever did, retains his long term memory, and is passed unnoticed always. He bears no visible scars of trauma, it’s all in his head, and he says that the doctors deem it a form of neuroses now. He hates that.
Any N’s?
“Where have you put your “N’s?”
“N’s?”
“Yes, N’s” Customer gestures with one arm sweeping across the alphabetized fiction bay of L’s and M’s and, yes, N’s and O’s and P’s.
“There are no N’s,” he says crossly.
I go over and sweep my own arm across in a matching movement. I stop in front of…da dahhh, N.
“Here we are, N’s, just here.”
“Ah, right, thanks.”
“No problem.”
The usual bookshop baloney.
The name of an author of several popular guides to organic gardening is…
Bob Flowerdew.
Tee hee etcetera.
I had to work on the third floor yesterday, not somewhere I feel particularly comfortable as it exposes my awful gaps in knowledge about both geography and art.
A man came in and asked if I had anything on so and so’s dad. Having never even heard of so and so it was even less likely that I’d have a clue about his father. People do always assume that you will know exactly what they are talking about, but it simply isn’t possible. I rarely work on the third floor, and it has usually changed by the time I next go there. Anyway, being the good bookseller that I am I was able to establish this man’s identity, but it took a wee while, and I felt stupid that I hadn’t heard of him.
Fleeting pride was mine when someone else came and said they didn’t know what they were after, but it was an artist that had something to do with Mount Fuji, and I was able to ask if it might be Hokusai. It was, and the customer was impressed. Yay me, something seeped in during the years I worked at the museum.
I usually work on 1st, with the lovely fiction, where I am calm and useful and glad. Or the ground, where the best sellers and biography’s are. Or 2nd, with all the children’s books and health and sci-fi and crime and poetry. These things I can “do”.
The art section and I aren’t wholly compatible. The bay labelled “graphic art” is divided into many sub sections and when a book is sealed and has no words on its cover, and when the computer says simply that it belongs in graphic art, how the fuck am I supposed to know if it belongs with graffiti or packaging or any one of the many other headings?
Of course the coffee shop is on 3rd now, and I felt myself become irritated by the people plucking books from the shelves and strolling into the Costa where they sat, munching on their cookies and slurping their skinny lattes. I was morphing into one of those tutting uptight bitches. Suppressing the yell:
DON’T FUCKING READ THE BOOKS WITHOUT PAYING. WE ARE NOT A LIBRARY.
And breathe.
I amused myself by shelving books in the travel section and trying to guess the country. I am fairly rubbish at it, and shelving took a while. I guessed that one place was in Italy, then Spain, before discovering it is actually a Greek island. Ho hum. I haven’t learnt anything though because I can’t recall the name of it to write here.
So, that was my weekend really, fun huh?
Blogging etiquette.
(This may sound snarky, but truly it’s not meant to be, I am genuinely interested to know what you think.)
If you link to someone on your blog do you expect them to reciprocate? Or is it just a matter that you link to the blogs that interest you and may interest others? If someone says they have linked to you are you supposed to link back? Why would you not link back, would it be because you disliked the blog and so therefore it is a bloggy insult? Is it OK to just link without telling?
Do you prune your links and weed out the ones that no longer seem to be updated or that you don’t care for? Do you get pissed at people for breaking blog etiquette?
I sound a wee bit odd I think, but someone has got cross with me…
This is my head.
Blah blah, here I am, feeling like a big fat fake.
I’m not a writer. Writer’s write. I’m not writing.
Well, why don’t I finish that story about the old woman?
Because I am stuck, even though I know the ending not even I am interested enough to bother.
What about the “mirror” themed story for yet another Mslexia attempt? I have an idea that I could try and make concrete.
I don’t feel well.
I honestly don’t.
It’s not an excuse.
My body is wrong, it’s fucked up. I feel rubbish.
But writing makes me feel alive and worthwhile. I need to do it.
But I’m not.
I have to try to finish a synopsis for my ha-ha-ha-ha-yeah-right-as-if novel.
I want to make a submission to the Not Yet Published book tokens thingy.
I wonder if I won’t. Something else to hate myself for.
My head is full of hot fuzz, and self disgust.
Just in case you were wondering.
Public shame inspired by boob pencil.
Boob pencil (link over there on the right) sometimes transcribes pages of her 1985 diary and posts them on her blog. This struck me as funny and interesting, then I noticed that she had put up a photo of her diary, and I recognised it as being the same style Adrian Mole 1985 diary that I kept back in the day. Ha! Anyhow, I was looking for an old note book the other day and whilst rummaging through the box of old journals and pads found mine. I told Clare that we could swap a day, and she said, yeah, go on, 15th April. Now that I have read my entry for that day I see that not only is boob pencil funny and interesting, she also is very brave, as it takes some sass to expose the truth of one’s teen self. I have decided to transcribe exactly the words I wrote for that day, despite my desire to censor myself. So, here’s mine;
“I finally cried myself to sleep last night and woke up clutching Floppy and peering out of the puffiest eyes I’ve ever seen. It was about 10.30 a.m before Matthew arrived, and just as he got here mum had a go at dad about the way he treated me last night, it didn’t exactly help, it merely made him more resentful towards me. Me and Matthew went into town and I bought “Do what you do” by Jermaine Jackson cos the words remind me of me n’ Si and make me cry, oh wow, heavy meaningful lyrics eh? We came back here, went round to his aunts and then back here once more. In the evening I went down the pub to meet Debesh and RAB minus Joe turned up. I talked to Lisa and told her about Simon, had a quick chat with Duncan/Adam/Jim and then returned to my sulk about Simon. In the end I went and sat with Mark who listened to me winge on and on about Si and how much I cared about him. He kept telling me that I was really attractive thus returning a little of my dwindling self confidence to me. I could get off with him quite easily you know. Simon, please want me.”
Aaaaarrrrggggh! The shame.
Incidentally, Simon is now my husband, so it all worked out OK, phew eh?
The reluctant fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
Hmmmmm.
I feel so stupid.
I read this book and didn’t notice that the female character is called Erica, as in America. Dur! And the main character is Changez. Le sigh.
Anyway, this is an interesting book that is highly thought provoking. It concerns a young Pakistani man who leaves his home country for an education at Princeton and a career in New York when snapped up by a prestigious company that require him to learn to assess other companies worth.
The story is told as one side of a conversation taking place in Lahore between Changez and an unknown American man as they share a meal.
The characters voice is polite, educated and somewhat formal. He relates his feelings at the wealthy salary he was paid, and the standard of living he witnessed. He contrasts this with his family and his home. He is at once seduced and repelled by the glamour and consumerism all around. He falls in love with Erica, but she can never be his, remaining firmly in love with her past. Geddit?
When the news of 9/11 unfolds on his news screen he smiles. A life altering reaction to the event.
It is a formally told tale with sufficient tension building as we wonder how Changez ended up back in Lahore, and what is going to happen when he finishes his oral history. I’m not sure that is as powerful as maybe it could have been, but the voice works plausibly and I enjoyed the confounding of my expectations.
Writer’s block…middle class bollocks.
This is part of an interview with Ray Robinson that I found at
http://www.panmacmillan.com/interviews/
(The link won’t work for some reason when I insert it.)
“I have a very blue-collar approach to my work. Writing isn’t some esoteric art; I don’t sit poised, quill in hand every morning, waiting for my monkey muse to throw some peanuts of inspiration at me. Writers block is a lazy-arse middle-class excuse to read the papers or watch Tricia. Writing, like every other art form, is a craft, and all novelists are apprentices because there’s no such thing as the perfect novel. You have to write your balls (or tits) off, all of your life, and you still might be shit at it. But that’s the thing I love about novel writing, as opposed to short stories or poems; it’s that their size, the sheer amount of words they contain, permits imperfection. I can think of a handful poems and short stories that ache with near-perfection (and by perfect I mean that if you removed a single word they would collapse; think Paul Farley; think Raymond Carver), but this simply isn’t the case with a novel – it can carry exiguous or bad writing if the bulk of the narrative is strong enough.
I try to do a nine-to-five, five days a week, and I find it helps if I leave the flat. I like working at the British Library; I find the diligent atmosphere refreshing. This is always difficult because usually I wake up (mentally, creatively) about 10 p.m. I’m preternaturally nocturnal and I rarely switch off. I find everything inspiring, and like some sick, sad pervert, I have to write for life to mean anything. So no, it’s no easy process. It’s a distorted and voyeuristic way of life with no OFF button.”
I think that has made me feel quite cheerful actually.
Customary customer post.
“Why don’t you have a business section?”
“We do, it’s on the 4th floor.”
“I’ve just been up there, where exactly is it?”
“It’s on the 4th floor, on the left of the till point.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Erm, yes, it is.”
“It must be tiny then.”
“It’s quite substantial actually. Was there a particular book you were looking for? I can check on the computer and see if we have it in stock.”
“No, I want to browse.”
“Well, like I say, it’s up on 4th.”
“Where? There’s the coffee shop, and then the cookery books…”
“That’s the 3rd floor.”
“Oh. Right. There’s another floor is there?”
“Yes,” quietly “the 4th.”
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
He is one of those authors that I have filed in my mind as writing middle-class white man fiction. I imagine him to be slightly fusty. I don’t know what I’ve based this on, perhaps the customers who seem to buy him. I was lent three of his books several years back, and I did open them, but I couldn’t engage. It’s not that I think he’s a “bad” writer, just not for me. Anyway, I’m such a Steven Page fan girl that when he enthused about “On Chesil Beach” and I saw that it was a slim volume I thought I’d give it a go. It’s a read in one sitting book, and at first seems to be a fairly slight tale about a virgin couples wedding night. It’s worth noting how well written it is, of course I know that he is highly esteemed, but really some of the sentences were so perfectly descriptive I was taken by surprise at how he successfully enabled me to feel for the characters. Edward is worried that he may suffer from premature ejaculation, Florence disgusted by the whole notion of intercourse, even French kissing repulses her, so the story hinges on their approaching physical union. It begins in their hotel room, where McEwan describes an excruciatingly stiff after wedding meal, served by two local lads. We are constantly reminded that this was 1963, just before the onset of sexual liberation and these two, in their early twenties, endure all the rules of the time.
My criticism would be that after such exemplary scene setting we are whizzed back in time to get a back story, and then plunged into the denouement. The end seemed hasty and way too brief, in the vein of …and then this happened and then that and then that’s the end.
I shall have to have another go at some of his back catalogue.
Sara Crowley 