Liquidation and Sons

Bookstores kind of piss me off, but not for the obvious reasons. Understand that when I say "bookstores" I generally mean the giant megaplex repositories generally attached or adjacent to shopping malls and/or an Olive Garden. And since Borders went tits-up, I guess I just mean Barnes and Noble. Fuck both those guys.

Small, independent booksellers exist, I know that. But I'm not sure those are better. They're either locked away in some smarmy hipster enclave and only carry slightly used copies of Bret Easton Ellis novels that I'm supposed to enjoy ironically or they're in the ethnic parts of town and heavily specialized, meaning half the books are in Tagalog and the rest, I have to decide how much I really want to know about Eskrima or killer recipes for pancit with fish-heads.*

So I go into Barnes and Noble because I'm too much of a snob for the latter and not nearly enough of a snob for the former. Plus it's close to my house. And also sells croissants. So thereabouts is an approximation of what my principles are selling for.

But typical of the paradox that vexes me, what sensible person, considering it independently as we sit here together now, we rational, educated, attractive people: who goes into a bookstore to buy food? Of any kind? How well is that really going to be executed? I understand they're surrounded by a wealth of reference material on how to make and prepare quality dishes, but I don't know that the Starbucks-branded in-store cafe is really giving the staff the materials, space or latitude to express themselves to the limits of their culinary abilities. I think instead the ham and cheese bagel in the glass display case was doomed to so blunted a peak at the moment of its conception (at a meeting of marketing sub-managers) that the end result could only be the equivalent of a gastronomic stillbirth.

And yet it's still faster than going to a whole nother place to find food if I'm already there, so I'd still consider eating it.

This ties in to my very first complaint about all Barnses and the Nobles so intimately tied to them: I walk into this enormous space, the entire field of my vision is filled with books and I smell... coffee? All of them smell exactly the same way. As this is becoming the one and only place Americans can or will go to find a book, for me at least, it's resulting in this weird, acquired associative synesthesia where when I get home, I'm disappointed to the point of rage that my copy of whatever Cormac McCarthy novel doesn't actually smell like a cinnamon dolce latte.

I get where it comes from though because smell takes up a lot of space. And those are some big spaces, especially when primarily what you're selling is American do-it-yourself bullshit pseudo-intellect in the form of corporate crafted ambience. It takes a lot of fucking ambience to fill what is essentially a warehouse. But an espresso machine, soft yellow lights and some mismatched overstuffed chairs between the New Biography and Health and Sexuality sections seem to work a treat.

Mostly what I'm hit with the weight of, right when I breach that second set of impractically tall double doors, is how much totally unreadable crap gets through the editing process to be published. It's not just the bargain bin, it's the ghost-written celebrity unauthorized tell-alls, the giant sections of "Romance" and"Self-Help"... And there have to be five hundred books for sale that are just derivative works branded with the Star Wars name. I'm sure some of them are better than I give them credit for, reflecting surprisingly subtle work by up-and-coming writers making their way, but can they all be good? All of them? Half even? And yet there they are, corporeal, real, realized. Reminding me yet again that publishing success has less to do with talent or toil and more to do with the ability self-market.

Oh, and the propensity to actually finish things one starts.

Yes, we're talking about me now again. I guess what I'm saying, once again, is: thanks for reading.

I don't really hate Barnes and Noble. I go there all the time. But never to buy anything to read, my God. That's what my Kindle is for. Even their whole stores are centered around this axis of the Nook sales kiosk. They know. I go there now out of a sense of anthropology and pre-emptive archaeology. If you had the chance to visit the Colosseum, to see a real lion eat a real Christian, knowing what you know now, you'd go to. I missed out with Borders. I don't intend to make the same mistake again.





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*The answers to these questions are, in reverse order, less than you'd think and just enough to avoid significant jail time.