I don’t have a full time job. Haven’t since March of this year. As many people who do work have noted, every day for me is like a holiday – less so than at the beginning of my unemployment – so I’ve been pretty faithful about keeping to a schedule so that I don’t go CRAZY. But today is a stat holiday, Armistice/Remembrance day. I feel all special and day-off/y, even though, well, it’s a lot like yesterday except sunny instead of raining.
My plan for the day includes taking a few hours to read “And no Birds Sang” by Farley Mowatt. Word says it’s a good, candid account of going to world war II. I bought it used at the local bookseller’s, a shop we’ve been meaning to look at for months now.
(it’s the same store where I bought all my textbooks for my first year of university. We read a variety of literature, history, philosophy and had I purchased them at UBC bookstore [as lovely as it is] I would have spent lots more than I needed to. Plus, I got books with character.)
While we browsed the bookseller’s, no less than 6 people came into the shop and I thought, hooray, someone else shops here too, because it was very quiet for a Saturday afternoon and the man who works there seemed quite surprised to see us. But all of these people were hauling bags of books that they wanted to get rid of. The man who works there explained patiently to each that the store was overstocked (which would have been obvious if anyone had taken a moment to look around) and he wasn’t looking to buy. One woman simply left her bag, said “you can have them” and walked out. As though money was the issue. Another man, when told he had some worth buying, at a value of $10 cash or $15 trade, said he’d take them down the street to another store to see if he could get a better deal.
It was so sad! Books are so important. I know that people need money, clean their closets, dump their husbands, whatever and need to get rid of their books. But I can’t fathom going into a used bookstore and not even looking around, not even walking to the end of the store and back, to smell that smell and touch the dust and crane my neck a little or a lot to see the titles and find the poetry section and the self help section and the ‘literature’ section.
Anyway, we made up for all those people and bought 8 books. My goal is to buy more books. I already have lots, but there are still more being made. And I read an interesting piece in the globe & mail a couple weeks ago, in the form of a letter from a writing teacher to her students, suggesting that maybe their ‘workshop’ money would be better spent on hardcover novels so that by the time they’d written their own, there would still be a market for such things.
It’s a good point: people like to get things for free, myself included. But why do we accept things for free that are directly related to the art we most love? Musicians take music, writers take the internet, filmmakers take movies. And then we complain that there is no market for our art, that no one is buying, that we have to take shitty jobs to make a living. It’s tough to spend money on hardcover books, films, double CDs. Sometimes it’s unjustifiable, since the money goes to the film distributers, publishers, record executives. But the overarching message we’re sending out is still: I don’t think this stuff is worth paying for. (but my OWN stuff is, so please buy it) And you wonder why artists are tortured? One side of the brain is trying to convince you that you’re worth it, while the other side is saying you’re not.
Hey – I am totally guilty of this. It’s not a criticism of your practises, whoever you are, but an observation about my own. It’s my b-log, after all. If you want to be the subject of criticism, get your own b-log.
You have to be a friend to make a friend.
Everyone I know is getting a book for Christmas.
I know that my purchasing Farley Mowatt’s book will not yield him any money. But it gave some to the bookseller guy and that is also worth it.
And now it’s almost 9.
I recommend:
for listening:
Rebecca Moore’s Home Wreckordings 1997 – 1999. It’s bare, charged music that she recorded in her own home (yup). It crackles with electricity. It’s so good.
For reading:
Marnie Woodrow wrote a book called Spelling Mississippi that was fabulous. She’s also written lots of short stories and her website has a journal that’s well written and some other fun stuff.