Another group of poets coming out in support of the Occupy Movement and its emphasis on addressing the growing economy inequality in our country – OccuPoetry.
One of the founders is a professor at UC Davis – the university where police pepper sprayed students engaged in non-violent resistance.
I have been complaining about the struggles of bookstores for some time, but I’ve neglected another industry in a similar situation – record stores.
Anecdotally, I gather that some indie record stores are reversing the slide and building their business through a focus on vinyl records and a focus on the community (hosting events, supporting and promoting the albums of local bands, etc).
However, the one I remember from high school, RTO (Record & Tape Outlet) in Dunedin, Florida, closed down. It was a cool kids hangout, with classic record store geeks both behind the counter and browsing in the aisles (yes – you can be both cool and a geek, as long as we’re talking about music).
And when I lived in Hollywood, slipping down the boulevard to the Virgin Megastore at Hollywood and Highland was a great way to spend a little time, but the last Virgin Megastore closed down in 2009, so that’s gone now, too.
Paul Bowles died twelve years ago today.
I’ve read most of his cold, asexual and deeply alien/alienated prose. And I would offer him up as one of the great short stories of the twentieth century, next to F. Scott Fitzgerald. His novels though, we must admit, do not improve upon his short fiction by length; and his latter writings lost much of that strange and uncomfortable voice that made him best work so compelling (“Pages From Cold Point” – how creepy can you get? I still remember the sensation I got when I realized what was happening, what that unreliable narrator would never come out and say. I won’t tell you what it is – you have to read it). But that best work, ahh… it was something else.
When I was young, I went to Tangiers, but was too afraid to knock on his door. A pity, because apparently, he would often welcome such random guests.
In asking this question, The Atlantic seemed to miss the obvious answer.
Jon Hunstman isn’t trying to win the 2012 Republican primary.
Okay, I mean, he obviously filed to run for president as a Republican in this upcoming election, but it should be pretty obvious that, for months now, he’s actually been executing a different plan than one intended to win the upcoming primaries.
Sure, when he jumped in, he was going for it. He thought that there might be a space for him as someone with more constancy than Romney (not a high bar) and more sanity than Bachmann (also not a high bar).
But he’s not, at least not so far as I know, an idiot.
It’s been quite clear for sometime that he was just not getting traction and that there wasn’t enough oxygen left in the room for him to develop the necessary traction.
And around the time it became clear that he wasn’t going to win the primary, he began to make a series of public, rational, centrist statements acknowledging things like global climate change and the need not to engage in constant, endless wars. He might even have once said that an American without health insurance should not be allowed to die on the hospital curb (which is apparently a controversial stance).
He is betting that in either 2016 or 2020 the electorate will have sufficiently rejected right wing extremism that a moderate Republican in the mode of a Reagan (the real Reagan – not the Tea Party caricature of him), if not a Rockefeller, would be in fashion again within the GOP.
And he probably has a point. Even if a Republican wins in 2012 (which is looking less likely than it did a couple of months ago), the turn to the far right will have to end in the next few cycles – whether from natural evolution (something that, I believe, Huntsman has expressed a belief in) or from a reaction to a painful repudiation at the polls.
I also have conflicted feelings about renting versus buying:
Another lengthy Canto.
This one is about the disputes leading up to the American Revolution, namely the Stamp Act.
He spends a lot of time complaining about taxes and regulations (keeping in mind that “strict regulations” in the eighteenth century allowed for things like slavery).
A reminder that though Pound may be most appreciated these days by liberal lovers of literature, he was, by contemporary standards, very conservative. Sort of a Grover Norquist/Tea Party Republican.
One amusing thing, at least for the modern reader, is Pound’s use of the word “bro” in the very first line of the Canto:
To John’s bro, a sheriff, we lay a kind word in passing
He also inserts himself into the action in an amusing fashion:
Upon which he offered me a retaining fee of one guinea
which I accepted
(Re which things was Hutchinson undoubtedly scro-
fulous ego scriptor cantilenae
(Ez. P)
Even though it is now gone (and feels long gone, too, because the death was so drawn out and because browsing half empty bookshelves during a liquidation sale doesn’t feel like being in a real bookstore), here’s a post mortem on Borders.
If you read all the way to the end, you may be heartened by the comment that smaller bookstores (2500 sqaure feet – like many independent bookstores) should remain modestly profitable into the foreseeable future. Let’s hope that’s true.
Not the bird. The book publisher.
And yes, I remember them, too (though not in Woolworth’s – I was born in 1974, the year he found Woolf in a Woolworth’s).
St. Mark’s Bookshop on the Lower East Side was saved, at least temporarily.
An increase in rent would have forced the iconic bookshop and literary performance space to close down.
Their landlord, Cooper Union, had originally increased their rent to $20,000 per month. St. Mark’s had asked that to be lowered to $15,000 and when Cooper Union refused, an organizing campaign was launched on the bookshop’s behalf.
As a result (one supposes) of the campaign, their new rent was set $17,500 for one year (though after a year, it will presumably go up to the $20,000 that St. Mark’s could not afford in the first place) and their unpaid back rent was forgiven.
Let’s hope that they keep going. You might consider purchasing a book from them, though, in order to help keep them alive. I bought this one.
the coffee philosopher 