1 post tagged “thankless tasks”

I have a couple more things to say about this, I guess.  I was in a local bookstore where I found a cheap set of the last 4 volumes of The Story of the Stone.  (But as a result of the below— and my own, uh, poverty— I ultimately put them back.  They may still be there.)  As I wandered around with the books in hand, I heard the bookseller deliver a familiar, strident lecture about how much it sucks to be poor in the Bay Area and how little people here talk about money and poverty and crime, and how much he hates the Telegraph hippies, and how he may be poor but is well-educated, etc.  As I said, all familiar.  But there was something about the peculiar, self-satisfied tone: as though any "well-educated person" had a fucking right to expect reasonable rents, clean streets, ample well-paying employment opportunities and an engaged, ethical, intelligent polis.  And of all the possible perversions of this impossible ideal, Berkeley was an especially offensive one.

I've actually met very few booksellers I've liked personally, which seems strange; but the ones I've known have tended to be very harried, irritable, cynical people without any great interest in books, which bring them as much grief as prosperity, and they share in the classic petit-bourgeois mentality on display above.  I mean: yes, the cost of living is ridiculous out here; there's oodles of northern liberal racism (black people: fine, of course; poor loud black people: well my God I try but there's just no common ground you know); you couldn't pay me to work on Telegraph or Haight.  It's all strictly speaking true.  But if your desire for prosperity, safety, community etc. is that strong, it goes without saying that running a Telegraph bookstore is exactly the wrong means to those ends.  If you've made such a counterintuitive decision, why lament it?

I'm now sitting here in front of the computer, supplying responses to my rhetorical questions, about to argue the other side of the debate— which will prevent anyone from commenting, because then this entry will end the way many others do: "I don't know, I don't get it, I know nothing."  Which is invariably unanswerable.  Was there something else in it all that I couldn't pin down?  Maybe the resonating loudness of his speech: may you all bear witness...?  Bear witness, and then buy your Chinese novel so you can say you've read anything written in Chinese, a language spoken by three hundred zillion people and probably some future students if you stay in CA, beyond half of that one Can Xue novella?  (Oh, and the Little Red Book, of course.  My favorite.)  Nah: I didn't feel like being in on it.  I'll wait until I finish volume 1.

Well, so, maybe you want to know about Charles Johnson?  Oxherding Tale is pretty funny, and moving despite the artifice.  The man's got a lot of talent.  He's also got, through a mixture of his own and other people's confidence, a sense of authority with which I think I would be very uncomfortable.  He's written a great deal about his own writing; I feel it's a temptation to be generally resisted.  I have no stake in the fight over black writing waged above, but I will say that it's far from clear to me that journalism is inherently inferior to "enduring art;" nor am I an Althusserian vis-a-vis ideology; nor do I ever write shitty things in library books.  And, unfortunately, I'd still rather read or write creatively than sell or comment as an evaluator.