Silliman's Blog

IF YOU LIKE

that, you’ll love
well

almost anything
 

Part of the decline of bookstores may be due to the decline of readers. Americans have never read very much it seems, and when they did read, books may not have ever taken the lion's share of readers which was reserved for newspapers and journals. Now the TV and the internet have also cut into that turf. Most of my students tell me that they have never read a complete book, and have no idea why anybody would. But Amazon.com (I buy most of my books through them), and Barnesandnoble.com, and other online suppliers perhaps have cut out the middle man that bookstores once posited as a hurdle between myself and the books that I need. I like bookstores but I like even better being able to have access to thousands of them through the used books programs at Amazon.com. Now you can sell your own books at Amazon and use that money to buy books. I think this is great! I sell about ten books a week through Amazon.com and buy about 10 or 12 books a week.

The great thing is that you have access to tremendous numbers of readers who will sometimes buy unlikely books for goodly sums. Then you can find books for as cheap as a penny at the same source (add 3.99 for shipping).

I rarely visit bookstores. They are quite far away and they never have what I want. For instance, right now I am reading through critical works on Georg Hamann, an obscure Lutheran pal of Kant's who wrote wonderfully obscure little books. No bookstore within a 150 miles would likely have Isaiah Berlin's study of Hamann, but I was able to get it online for 5.50, and it arrived in about three days. Now I'm moving on to James C. O'Flaherty's study, and again the book came in two or three days at the price of about 12 dollars (it's listed at well above that, new).

I can't just get such books out of the library, because I need to underline and make notes. So I think the online bookstore such as Amazon.com is a very good thing.

I like the internet. It expands access for everyone to everything, including books. Aside from a few mega-bookstores such as Powells in Portland, I never find anything I want in bookstores, so I find them an exercise in frustration.

There ARE a few bookstores in my memory where I actually like the proprietors. There was a bookstore in Seattle that sold small press stuff and was run by a poet named Mike Kettner. I liked going in there and talking to him. But that's very rare. Mostly I would rather deal with an automat and just put the money in, and get the book I want the same as I could get a cookie without having to actually talk to anybody (I find most bookstore personnel to be impossibly rude).

Now I can go around them.
 

The London Transport's rejection of Cranach's "Venus" is disappointing and sort of...surprising.

It's odd because the Tube has always seemed to pride itself on edgy and creative ads, especially when promoting art shows to the younger generations. (Hm...and it's also been famous for its wall-sized advertisements for minceur creams or "sunny Spain" that feature giant close-ups of very tanned and very perfect female bottoms clad in nothing but a g-string. Sexy: yes. Offensive: no.)

I suppose it's even more worrisome in light of the latest from the Archbishop of Canterbury: "...declaring it is probably 'unavoidable' that some limited form of Islamic law will have to be accepted in Britain."

That seems a slippery slope...something about nude women being more dangerous than bombs...?

ps~ Curtis, please come back. The village just isn't the same without you.
 

thanks for the link

i am really bored with life
 

Yes, we are lost without Curtis.
 

tao, this is intern #83

i brought you coffee but you weren't where you said you would be, should i keep waiting here? i'm on my blackberry
 

God,

As much as I love them, it's the same poets over and over. Not you Ron, but poetry land needs to let some of us new folk in.

Also, did anyone else find that Mathea Harvey thing strange? It seemed like Orr was making a big deal of her, but insulting her at the same time.