Adventures in Bookselling

Today something odd happened. Which in and of itself isn't odd--strange things happen around here with alarming frequency. However this doesn't make them any less bizarre.

This morning a customer handed me book which she claimed was defective. The title: You never Call! You never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother. I glanced at the cover, the binding, no scuffs or tears or anything that might suggest botched manufacturing. I began to think the lady was pulling a fast one on me, trying to get another 10% knocked off the price for no good reason. I was about to skim through the pages but was intercepted by the somewhat impatient costumer, "It's on the inside," she says.

Hidden between pages 224 and 225 was a thin card with this inspiring, no so subtle bit of proselytizing 'literature' on it:

Jesus answered and said unto him, "Most assuredly, I say unto you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." (John 3:3, 10:1, 14:6, 6:47-51; Acts 10:38; Rev 1:8)

I have to admit, it made me chuckle. That someone would go this far for so little. Really? A born again advertisement/condemnation in a history of Jewish mothers? This type of book sabotage is unfortunately not uncommon. I once had to go through the entire History of the Middle East section and fix every title having anything to do with Islam because some kind soul had turned each book around so that the spines were facing inward. A stupid prank all in all, but a bunch of the books were actually mangled in the process, probably not a big concern of the prick who did the job. So yeah, I was now a bit concerned other books would be very lazily vandalized.

But upon further exploration I found that the card wasn't simply stuck in the book, wedged down so it wouldn't fall out. It was actually pierced by the threads of the binding. Apparently the printing facilities for this particular press have at least one passive aggressive anti-Semite working very not-so-hard to get their message across to as small as segment of the population as possible. People sure have an odd way of following the edicts of their God. I just wish so many of them weren't so annoying about it.

Gary Snyder, You Asshole.

I keep noticing this odd subliminal phenomena and wonder if I am the only one. I've tried this a couple of times with mixed results. The most recent time was unintentional and happened last night. I was sitting on the couch with a novel when I started into a conversation with the Croft. The book's back cover was facing up and the words of praise in bold ink were visible, but only if i looked down. I was looking at the Croft, but when i spoke to her I began to use words that aren't normally found in my vocabulary. Most notably, I said the word 'Marvelous.' 'What a strange thing to say,' a part of my mind pointed out, and then I looked down and not one but two bold Marvelouses revealed themselves.

My question is this, was my brain suggestible to the words I wasn't even looking at directly? Was the fact that these words were in my cone of vision, just not being actively read have something to do with the fact that i used marvelous in a sentence? Jus how impressionable is the mind? Because this definitely is not the first time this has happened to me. Its really best that I don't even have so much as a newspaper nearby when I talk.

All this started me on a paranoid line of thought that wondered just how much every little thing I see and hear effects me deep down. Are all those shitty pop songs I've heard over the years secretly informing the way i write? Do the thousands of advertisements I've seen in my life have a sinister influence on my sketches? And does the repetition of these cultural ephemera add to their suggestive power? Because I've read the line "Read the Poet Gary Snyder, a True Elder, A Modern Age Thoreau" on the wall of the men's restroom at work so many times it has become some sort of mantra. I have no desire to read Gary Snyder, am not even sure what a True Elder is and am pretty sure Thoreau is a modern age Thoreau.

But i can't get it out of my head, I'm stuck with it, seemingly forever. Deep inside, where the knowledge of how to start a fire in the wilderness or tie a sheepshank knot or something useful and potentially life-saving, or a romantic memory might lay to make me smile on a day where things are going fairly shitty there lay that stupid bathroom graffiti. Far from wanting to read Gary Snyder, suddenly I hate him. and Thoreau. And my True Elders. Whoever the hell they might be.

organized retardation

Yesterday around lunchtime i received a series of depressingly scary messages from the Croft. It seems she had a bit of a run-in on the bus while traveling to work. It all started innocently enough, as most things do, with hermaphrodites. After tearing through some sort of Sedaris, I recommended Croftie read Middlesex next. Dutifully she carried said novel into the public sphere where an apparently harmless looking woman engaged her in crack-pot conversation.

Turns out harmless blond woman was sexually assualted by a hermaphrodite. Who was a member of a clandestine team of 'group stalkers.' Now group stalking is one of the silliest things I've ever had the misfortune of learning about. Simply put, there are bozos out there who are neurotic enough to think they are being stalked not by one person, but an organized team of individuals who have apparently so little to occupy their time that they single out random people and systematically ruin their lives.

They move in next to you and turn their televisions up really loud, especially when you are, get this, thinking about them! They walk by you on the street and when they are very close they will do something innocuous like hold up a pen. Because if people keep holding pens up in the air next to you its obviously a malicious plan to drive you crazy. Here's the thing, if you are noticing this type of behavior, theres' a fairly good chance you are already halfway to crazy-town.

But here is where things go from garden variety to batshit crazy. Not only do these organized stalkers mess with your mail, and work their way into your friend groups turning everyone against you, but they have strange telekinetic powers of mind control. They can mind control your pet and make them afraid to get off your bed. There is also something to do with a plot to burn your infants and American Airlines is behind everything, and the number 666--also, the terrorist attack on the World Trade towers. It's all linked, and you, the victim of organized stalking, are so important that each of this seemingly endless string of retarded conclusions is a direct effort to target you. Its a global, bizarre postmodern breed of paranoia. It's also laughably funny, if it wasn't the describing the symptoms of larger, more realistic problems like clinical depression or carbon monoxide poisoning.

Back on Topic (Finally)

Lest you nay-sayers out there in the peanut-gallery start calling foul, here's a post ruminating (tangentially) on one this blog's three titular heads. Above is a video link for as long as youtube supports it, NBC is tenacious about protecting their dear intellectual property which is asinine in and of itself. These videos function as free advertising! The more times I laugh at some dude punching another dude just before the second dude eats something the more likely I am to tune in to SNL some night. Okay, so that last bit won't actually ever happen, but still. This is the first time I've even thought about that "Great Saturday Evening Institution" in like, long times.

The premise. As detailed above, the video is mostly a sequence of shots of everyday folks, who might be SNL regulars (*shrugs shoulders*), just about to bite into a slice of pizza, an apple, a french fry, etc. And then just before they hit pay-dirt Andy Sandberg lunges into frame and delivers a punch right in the face complete with a big yellow 'Punched!' description on the screen before Sandberg dances giddily. Equally effective is the music which deedle-deedles along until the big actions where it swells right along with the punches.

Very simple = kinda brilliant.

Why is this brilliant? Perhaps a better question would be, why is it not? You have random, senseless violence which is somehow augmented by the fact that the people being hit are just about to eat. Random punches would be funny--hitting unsuspecting diners is hilarious. Unrefined, maybe. But hilarious. And the dances that follow could easily be mortally stupid. But Sandberg enlivens them with more than enough dumb enthusiasm. And i don't mean dumb in the negative sense. This is dumb in the most positive sense.

One of the parts of me that finds this the most funny is the part that wants to simulate it. How fun would it be to run down the street and do everything normal behavior warrants one should not? Punches to the face occupy the high end of this spectrum because not only are you doing something unwritten behavioral codes forbid, like laying down in the middle of a busy sidewalk or peeing on a shop window, but you are interrupting the normal behavior of others, right at the precise moment where a person expects it least. Not to get all philosophical or anything but this is a Althusserian's dream come true. These actions are funny because they are fundamentally ideologically unexplainable.

And that is why, I would argue, that children, and those of us with very child-like sense of humor (er, guilty) will find this immensely funny. because everything adults do, everything in the real world that is so straight-laced and boring and horribly mundane is deflated. Children haven't been 'hailed' into the system yet, to go back to Althusser for a moment, and thus either don't know the codes or haven't bought into them yet. The only thing they know is that adults are boring and deeply unfunny. Adults punching each other in the face for no reason just before they eat, however...

And the punches make a fairly logical progression from least absurd to most. We go from one random man being struck to several in succession to a pair of foo-folks seated together in a cafeteria being 'double' punched to a punch-out and 'full recovery' by Mr Jon Bon Jovi to a man who temporarily escapes his punch-doom by answering a call on his cell phone. That last bit perfectly shows all that philosophical nonsense i was blathering on about above to be true. This isn't just random violence, but violence instrumented through a very child-like field of logic. It makes sense that Andy cannot punch the cell phone talking guy because that would violate the very basic child-logic rules. Cell-phone dude isn't just about to eat, therefore no punch. The same set of rules that make Andy murder the guy who 'figures things out' and tries to defend himself. If that guy had only just got punched and played along, everything would be fine. But instead his disruption escalates the violence.

Likewise, when Andy is forced to up the ante, the world reacts in turn. Just how boring are adults/regular life the world over? So much so that they are mindless zombies. And Andy must now flee from them across the globe through various stock footage shots of Paris, etc. Yet Andy has a trump card, he knows that he simply has to reverse things back to his own set of rules. How do you stop a marauding pack of killer zombies from eating you? You do the zombie dance, naturally.

Believe in your dreams, indeed.