This article seems to suggest that Borders failed because it focused too much on its bookstores. Which is a sad kind of business truth, if it is indeed any kind of truth.
Fortunately, many independent bookstores are succeeding precisely by focusing on themselves and their ability to offer something of value within their physical space.
I love that phrase, ‘cultural dilettantism.’ Yes, I am a cultural dilettante (is that the same as a ‘cultural omnivore?’) and yes, I treasure spaces that welcome the practice of cultural dilettantism. Even Borders was capable of providing that space. Often when accompanying my better half on shopping expeditions, I would take refuge in a chain bookstores like Borders or Barnes & Noble or in a Starbucks. I also actively browse the shelves of my neighborhood used bookstore just to experience the sensation of being surrounded by so many examples of the written store of our civilization’s knowledge or will make an expedition to one of my favorite independent bookstores without a particular book in mind, but just with intention of finding a new book of poetry or a poetry ‘zine or some heretofore unknown to me book of history or philosophy. I will sit in a comfortable coffeehouse just to spend an hour reading from a book and taking some notes away from the distractions of home and television.
I am a cultural dilettante and I must mourn whenever a space for me to practice my particular form of mediation and contemplation (or perhaps mediation between the world and my understanding of it) disappears.
Slavoj Zizek told The Guardian ‘I am a philosopher not a prophet.’
But Zizek also considers himself to be a Marxist and Marx, in his Theses on Fuerbach, wrote:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.
Isn’t that also the goal of the prophet? So shouldn’t that also be the goal of a Marxist, even one who is also a philosopher?
And weren’t many of the most towering figures of philosophy also prophets who changed the world, rather than just critiquing it. I specifically wrote ‘towering’ instead of ‘great.’
I am thinking of Descartes who, more even than Netwon, set the table for a mechanistic view of the world.
Marx himself, of course.
Hegel, who built a structure to contain a scientific sounding determinism (and who set the table for Marx).
If one is truly Marxist (and I, for one, am not) and a philosopher (I am not that, either), shouldn’t thinkers like those above be what one strives for?
I’m not actually here to post a review of the latest book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice heptalogy. I’m still reading it (though I will acknowledge that, yes, it is better than its immediate predecessor).
The publisher noted that sales of physical copies were outstripping those of digital editions. Overall, digital sales are less than 10% of the market, but often on big new bestsellers, the digital versions, which are cheaper and don’t sell out, do better in the first few days.
Not so here.
And it’s a big damn book. Big, heavy, and expensive.
Books of almost cultish value – and I include the Harry Potter series about which I have some ambivalence – seem to demand a physical presence for the diehards who make up the buyers during those first days. An object of totemic presence is required.
Will that be enough to save the physical book?
Both Adam Hasner and George LeMieux will be combing Mike Haridopolos’ FEC filings for donors to solicit for funds now that the original recipient of their largess is out of the picture.
But Haridopolos’ massive, first quarter haul was an aberration. It was driven by groups with an interest in items going before the legislature during the sixty day session.
Those donors had a basic financial interest in betting on Haridopolos and will be less quick to whip out the pocketbook for any of the candidates left standing.
But Haridopolos’ second quarter filing will be of greater interest to the campaign teams of the Hasner and LeMieux. Those donors are more likely to be ideological donors who are more amenable to arguments by the respective remaining campaigns that their candidate is the man who can take down the popular Senator Bill Nelson.
Those donors are less likely to care that neither man can do squat for them in the legislature (though if Hasner has any lingering influence in the lower chamber, he may exercise that to squeeze some money now that Haridopolos is finito).
Mike Haridopolos dropped out. Now he’s just biding his time, waiting for the next legislative session to end and his irrelevance to end.
No doubt he’s calling up lobbying firms, trade associations, and big corporation, trying to patch things up after shaking them down for millions in his brief, abortive campaign the for the U.S. Senate.
And though he might say that he wants to focus on his work in the legislature, the only thing he’ll be focused is how little his titular status as Florida Senate President will mean in his lame duck session. He won’t be the big man in the State Senate anymore. He’ll be the little man who realized he couldn’t even beat a pair of also rans like Adam Hasner and George LeMieux. And though he may not be a bright man, he smart enough to realize how very, very sad that is.
He also knows that Senators Mike Fasano and Jack Latvala will beat him like a drum and that House Speaker Dean Cannon will make Haridopolos into his prison movie plaything. Even Rick Scott, one of the most incompetent governors in recent history, will be ale to walk all over him.
Mike, you deserve some small tribute.
Here it is.
Your campaign brought joy to us all. Everything went hilariously bad early and stayed that way.
That ‘book’ you wrote? That was the gift that kept giving. I still chuckle to myself when I think about it (though Brevard Community College must still turn red with shame every time they think about how they felt compelled to give you $152,000 for that steaming bowl of c–p which was absolutely not a quid pro quo for your legislative patronage).
The amusing way in which Cannon systematically screwed you at ever turn during the last legislative session, leaving you looking like the shallow shell of a party hack in conservative clothing (which, to be honest, is kind of what you are).
We will even miss how stupid your hair looks.
Don’t stay away too long, Mike. Maybe you could run for dog catcher in a large media market next year so that we can continue to bathe in the hoary winter’s glow of your chilling incompetence.
On Sunday, July 17, Adam Hasner (@adamhasner), in his infinite wisdom, decided to post this tweet: ‘Wonder if the Dalai Lama told Pres Obama he would receive total consciousness? #caddyshack #gungalagunga‘
Isn’t that awesome? Making fun of someone’s religious beliefs is super cool!
Adam, let’s talk for a minute, just you and I. Hundreds of millions of people around the globe are members of a religion called Buddhism. And you know how Christians can be Southern Baptist or Lutheran or a bunch of other things and how Jews can Conservative or some are Reformed?
Well, Adam, the Dalai Lama is a holy figure for people known as Mahayana Buddhists. Additionally, most people show him respect, just like they do the Archbishop of Canterbury – even when they’re not Anglican!
Crazy, I know.
My point is, by making that bigoted, ignorant comment (making fun or the United States President for – gasp – meeting with a respected religious leader), you were being an a–hole.
Hey, Adam – I got an idea for you. I’m Catholic, so maybe you want to post some tweets making fun of the Pope!
That’s it! The next time President Obama meets with his Holiness Pope Benedict XVI you can say something like
Obama met with that stupid Pope guy. I wonder if the Pope ‘confessed’ him. #popeistheantichrist #catholicsgotohell
Once again. A–hole.
On my commute to work this morning, I began thinking about what it was that I found unsatisfying about 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.
It’s not a linear narrative, but a series of flashbacks. The longest series of flashbacks consists of episodes from the main character and his interactions with a Bellow-esque professor and intellectual (think Herzog or Ravelstein). A slightly shorter series of flashbacks return to when the main character met his current (live-in) girlfriend. The ‘present’ consists of the time when our hero’s successful book has garnered him an offer from Harvard, his girlfriend returning from a conference and then promptly leaving him, and a debate between our soon-to-be Harvard prof and a famous conservative commentator (who turns out to be little more than a straw man with an aggressive attitude).
Not earth shattered, but I don’t need that in a novel.
What bugs me is that the three parts don’t cohere, except insofar as the all involve the main character. The longest flashback, in particular, doesn’t seem to me to sufficiently inform the ‘present.’ The author seems to be setting up various characters (the Bellow-esque intellectual, the hero’s current girlfriend, his college girlfriend, and arguably the hero himself) to be archetypal, but the roles are too vague, the counterbalances don’t interact enough.
Besides showing off some decent writing, what was the point?
the coffee philosopher 