Monsieur Curt… elevatory thoughts as always. The point you raised about the inexpensive versions of classics is a fine one. I should have included this. In most UK corporate book stores they do not stock these versions of books, since they would squeeze the profits from their cash registers. This is a shocking state of affairs. Most classics, since they are free online, should be sold at reasonable prices for the poorer reader. This is another reason why the corporate book store induces chunder. Be well. A tetchy pleasure.
Journal, Diary, & Blogging / Corporate Bookshops
A dolorous man, in the sagging swansong of his life, stands hunched over the canon of Dean Koontz with a look of semi-perverse disgust. A crinoline mugwump with satchel eyes and Weltschmerz lips scrutinises the oeuvre of Martin Amis with marked contempt. A bun-headed student in an acrylic sweater funnels ten-pound notes into the till and passes occasional comments on the richness of detail in Kazuo Ishiguro’s early work. I stand before the classics shelf, agog at the £12.99 price tag on a minor Dickens work. This is a hateful place for the reader.
The corporate bookshop takes the most rewarding (and only truly enjoyable) recreational pastime and intellectual sustenance available to Man and spits in its face. While local libraries suffer from poorly stocked shelves – rotting SF sections stuffed with snot-filled Philip K. Dicks, miniscule classic sections with a lone 1975 edition of an Anne Brontë collection, inscrutable self-help trash from the pen of suicidal loners – the bulk of material consists of Stephen King and Dame Barbara Cartland tosh, all covered in liberal dollops of wispy fan-boy jissom.
The corporate bookshop is engulfing the beauteous infinity of the library. In the 1970s, the reader never fully ‘owned’ a book, they mined its riches (or plumbed its voids), then passed the experience onto another. The cycle of reading pleasure was straightforward. Then, around May 1996, the marketing board of UK stationers WH Smith identified the need to provide books to more people than merely the shy middle classes. The following dialogue took place at 4:13PM that afternoon:
“Wouldn’t it be altruistic of us to establish a hyper-modern all-inclusive approach to the retail of books, charging acceptable prices for the classics to promote a positive attitude to reading among even the poorest families?” asks one optimistic junior.
“Take him away to be stoned,” replies the boss.
And so now we have Waterstones. Barnes & Noble. Bookworld. The anti-libraries. Contemptuous depots for the banal and commercial. Places where enthroned editions of cipher autobiographies outstare re-rebound editions of Joyce, in turn molested by critics and doctored for easier student dissection. We have five foot stands devoted to the excruciating exploitation of puberty and wizardry among pulchritudinous brats (JK Rowling), to milking the supernatural for every mediocre and overwritten drop (Stephen King), to mangling one of the finest paintings through a prose-bomb of eye-scraping proportions (Dan Brown). And so on and so forth.
Reasons to avoid the corporate bookshop are as follows. They are overpriced. You can get books for half the price on Amazon. Libraries are easier and cost nothing. They never stock the books you like. The staff are depressingly jejune. The atmosphere is one of sterile consumerism.
The average customer at one of these shops is identifiable by the following behaviour. He enters with dead-headed optimism, ignoring the shelves of classics or challenging literary novels, walks straight to the popular potboilers section, orders a frappuccino in the overpriced café and sits in a spring-loaded armchair discussing the various banalities of plot and structure with two wooden friends, then leaves with a hole in his wallet. Someone must put a stop to this unambitious climate of the piddling paperback pissoir. Avoid the corporate bookshop at all costs!
The corporate bookshop is stomping on the humble pleasure of reading. Get to the local library. Withdraw a 1978 edition of Pale Fire with a bogey in the sleeve. Withdraw a tattered copy of Under the Volcano and fail to understand a single word of it, then approach it from the boozy purlieus of eighty vodkas and suddenly see the sulphurous light of Lowry’s bedevilled genius. Who cares.
Get to the library! Bomb the corporate swine!
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derekosborne reviewed Version 1 -
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As far as expository writing goes it is a competent piece. The opening paragraph is excellent. Your focus wavers a bit in P7, where you start off by announcing reasons to avoid corporate shops but then digress into observations of library environs. Your conclusion is obvious, but throughout the piece there is a consistent complaint with what one will find in a library these days. It begs the question in how do we fix the libraries.
Since you have invited us in your notes to weigh in on the wisdom of your “little offering” I shall do so. I truly hope this piece was tongue in cheek. Corporate book stores and what they offer is the antithesis of elitist, literary snobbery and how often one can force the reader to grab a dictionary. However, that is our audience. Without the gallery, even Shakespeare knew he would starve. It was this high minded, empty crap that led me to leave academia and become a carpenter. True, there is an artistic need for true intellectual pursuit (we know it when we see it), but if Art is the direct experience of the Self or the Artist when exposed to the work, all I have seen here is another saturated intellectual taking out his or her frustrations in life through the belief that information for information’s sake is the saving grace for us all.
Well done, your rant produced my own.
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Curtastrophe reviewed Version 1 -
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“sagging swansong of his life” is a great phrase. I’d copyright it if I were you. What proceeds however I think could just be shortened to ”...hunches over…” The word “Weltschmerz” is one of my favorite German words. Right up there next to “Schadenfreude”. I believe if both words were taught to second-graders in all 1st world countries (along with the correct way to spell and pronounce them) future generations would benefit. “richness of detail” could I think be expanded upon—it’s like commenting on the delicious flavor of a culinary dish. What makes it delicious and/or the details rich? The thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph is perfect in that it sums up the overall message of the piece entirely. Nicely done.
available to Man / to humanity
“The cycle of reading…” I’d reword this as straightforward implies linear; not cyclic.
”...approach to the retail of books, charging acceptable prices for the classics to promote a positive attitude to reading…” The humor in this is obvious, but there are the Modern Library line of paperbacks which are fairly inexpensive comparatively with the hardcover and/or out of print editions. Sure they sell them at the mega-mart, but I’ve seen them in local bookstores also.
Libraries are great! Much love for them and I agree that their use by the masses has declined as corporate bookstores have popped up next to every Starbucks which are now on every major streetcorner in the world. (Figuratively speaking.) BUT, by purchasing a book one in a way becomes their own library. I’ve lent books to friends and vice versa. These books that I buy will be later enjoyed by Curtastrophe hellspawn and in turn, perhaps their own offspring. Buying books isn’t bad. The majority of the masses will always follow the current. Perhaps this little manifesto will change some people’s minds the next time they walk by a smaller, independent bookstore. Maybe you could organize a group of monkey-wrenchers and have them print this out and deposit it between the pages of the current bestsellers. Dan Brown included.
As always, an enjoyable rant.
-Curt
littlegreenpills reviewed Version 1 -
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Haha, really good satire. If anything, it’s almost too subtle – although whether that’s a criticism is another thing – and there are a couple of opportunities you missed. The inspiration from A Confederacy Of Dunces is evident throughout – the trenchant refusal to use a simple commonplace word where a more obscure and affected one will do, and the way the narrator sets up his imagined adversaries as pitiful strawmen so he can revel in the ease at which knocks them down, are all redolent of Ignatius.
There isn’t a great deal I can really suggest to improve on this, except in a couple of places. Pale Fire and Under The Volcano are legitimately great works with lasting appeal, and I think it would bring the bitter contrarianism of the character home if you replaced with them with some famous and flimsily transgressive counterculture pap; might I suggest Ham On Rye or Tropic Of Cancer.
DCAllen reviewed Version 1 -
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You draw the corporate bookshop nicely, but where’s the library in all this? Your rant is just as much about the benefits of the library, so why not describe its pleasures? (More in the comments. Wink. Wink.) Seriously, right there at the end, you could balance this piece out by taking the reader inside the library, maybe even tying in/alluding to the types you begin with in your first paragraph.
Proofreading notes:
book, they mined (should be a semicolon)
I think there’s a better word than shy to describe the middle classes in the UK.
five foot stands = five-foot
You could lose _. It’s obvious what you’re referring to, with the exception of Stephen King, maybe. Oh, but please _do pooh-pooh Dan Brown. Horrid writer.
They never stock . . . (The closest antecedent for they in this sentence is libraries. I would reverse this so that “Libraries . . . comes after ”. . . consumerism”. Voilá, no antecedent problem.)
hockeyslife reviewed Version 1 -
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Very good writing, indeed, although I must say that I don’t agree with all of it. Not all corporate bookstore customers are like the ones you describe. I do, in fact, head for the shelves of challenging literature and classics and I buy them because I can have such a wonderful book in my possession and only my possession – free to read and enjoy over and over again. However, this is not to say that I don’t understand the point you’re making. I like the way you have written this piece: by giving us examples of such customers and pointing to modern-day references and writers. The tone of your work was clear; it was almost like I could hear your voice. Wonderful work.
ParticoRomulus reviewed Version 1 -
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As usual you manage to demonstrate mastery in the use of both the broadsword and the stiletto. I couldn’t agree more about Barnes and Noble and such. The last time I made use of one was to nurse a slight hangover in their coffee shop after a beer festival. I didn’t read though, I just watched people. You describe them quite well.
My only criticism has to do with omission. While you make a positive case for the library (and briefly for Amazon) you never get to the ‘independent bookshop’ you cite in your ratings. If there are any of them left in the British Isles, you COULD explore that as a triangular counterpoint. It’s not needed though, just something I’d like to see. I don’t know if more positivity about a third subject would help or hurt your tone.
drbailey reviewed Version 1 -
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Dear Stranger,
A rant to be sure, but founded in concern. I wonder if you’re a library science person. I’m a lover of the library as well, so I’m not in complete disagreement with you on this one.
Barnes and Noble is distasteful, expensive, and incredibly efficient at pumping out what the masses will buy. But efficiency is boring. If everything was efficient there would be no creativity. Efficient food tastes terrible, efficient reports read dryly, efficient sex would be boring, and efficient bookstores are wrapped in aseptic packaging.
It is nice to go to a book store or library to meet new people. I think a person is more likely to socialize with others in the book store than library. But when I think of book stores I’m usually thinking of used or independent places. I wonder what you think of those? It’s not entirely clear from reading this.
As far as the prose goes… you kept my attention, which is a difficult thing for non-fiction writers to do. One thing that contributed to this was throwing in the dialog in the middle, and the dark humor woven through it.
I think some people might think this opinion is harsh and et cetera et cetera, but it is an opinion piece after all.
Hope any of this helps you in determining how your message was related to one reader.
Stay Cool,
D.R.
P.S. I’m also from the states, so our views of book stores may be vastly different. But i’m thinking a corporate, sterile environment, much like any barnes and noble.
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