essays Archive

0

Notes on a Shitshow

By
Tom OHare
– July 14, 2012

Josh and I followed the directions the GPS woman gave. We’ll call her Elsie, because that’s what Maura called her, and because it’s a silly enough name that it allows me to rightly mock her when she makes mistakes. For example:

Elsie told us that the fastest way to the Walmart Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport was to take backwoods roads in bumfuck Arkansas. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to bumfuck Arkansas, but despite its vast picturesque qualities, meandering through dirt roads speckled with crumbling houses with plastic over their windows, brokedown station wagons in their “driveways,” inevitably evokes Deliverance-esque feelings of unease. It’s the perfect place for anything to go wrong. Josh mentioned that if we were to get a flat tire, we could very well be in some deep trouble, and even though I reassured him that I have changed a goodly number of tires in my day, I secretly agreed with him.

Elsie, of course, directed us to go over a bridge that was barricaded with concrete dividers that would allow only the slimmest vehicles to pass. I got out of the car and motioned for Josh to go through — slowly, slowly. We could have made it, but on the first attempt did not, and so I ran back to the car, over the little backwoods creek bridge, to consult with him.

“We can make it,” I said, “but I don’t know about that rock formation up ahead.” Josh agreed. I ran over the bridge, rickety — a bridge for pioneers and four-wheelers, not motor vehicles. The rock formation was foreboding. Sure enough, there were four-wheeler tracks, but equally sure enough, there was absolutely no way we could make it past the second obstacle. I jogged back to the car. We backed up and changed direction. Elsie got upset and told us to “Turn around as soon as possible,” in her vaguely British lilt, thinking, as is her wont, that her selected route was surely the best one. When we finally made it clear to her software that the bridge she had directed us to was impassable, she recalculated her route and directed us the rest of the way to the airport on paved roads.

Unbeknownst to us, our flight was the last leg of a four stop trip that began God-knows-where and ended in Newark. There were significant delays in Waco and Houston, pushing us back to 9:30. I had Josh watch my stuff while I went outside to smoke cigarettes and fume at the Arkansas sunset, the rows and rows of parked cars, pinks and oranges bouncing off the windshields. I went back through security and had “dinner,” which consisted of a shot of bourbon and an IPA. I went back down to Gate B and our flight had been delayed until 10:30. Josh and I went to the only proper restaurant in the establishment, ate chicken, and proceeded back to the waiting area.

I told Josh I’d be at the bar drinking. I wrote emails to Vin about apartments and ordered a Bud Light with a shot, ever counting the calories. Josh frantically texted me: “Get down here.” I settled up on my company’s dime and rushed down the escalator to see what the fuss was about. Long story short, the United rep made it clear that our best bet for getting home that night (this night? You’ll pardon me, I suppose, as I haven’t slept a wink) was to re-book, fly to Chicago, and make a connection there for Newark. “You sure we should do this?” I asked Josh. “The guy basically said that our original flight is canceled,” he replied.

The original flight wasn’t canceled, just delayed another half an hour, but that’s beside the point. At least now it is.

Step one: fly to Chicago, O’Hare.

Step two: wait on the tarmac for 45 minutes for our gate to open up so that we can unload.

Step three: run like a motherfucker to Concourse C from Concourse F to see if the flight to Newark has been equally fucked up by nationwide delays that we have a chance to get onboard.

And that’s what we did. We power-walked and jogged through O’Hare with our fellow 20-or-so passengers trying to make the same connection. An older couple tried to take a shuttle from Concourse F to C, to no avail, as it was out of service. We heard them complain at the bottom of the stairs and abandoned them. They were not our friends, and they were not our responsibility.

Step four: land in Newark at 4:15 in the morning, five and a half hours late. Take a $99 cab ride home to Brooklyn. Bill it to the company Monday morning first thing.

It’s good to be home, but it’s time to go to bed.

3

On Centrism and Civility, Briefly

By
Tom OHare
– May 12, 2012

I was having dinner with my friend-and-sexual-associate not too long ago, and we got into a discussion about civility versus decency, which, if you’ve read our Inflammatory Writ, has been a hobbyhorse of the proprietors of this website for a while now. Her point was that people are more likely to take you seriously if you don’t use bad words and argue in good faith, and mine was that some people simply aren’t worth arguing with — since their minds will never change — and can simply be told to fuck off.

I understand that this opens me up to criticism from the right along the lines of, “Fuck off, libtard,” and I’m perfectly fine with that. I think that’s a legitimate criticism, all things considered. But I only think it’s legitimate because it fundamentally expresses the truth: to wit, the right-winger and I will never agree on certain issues, and there is basically no point in discussing those issues with each other. So, “Fuck off”? Gladly. Why waste each other’s time?

My audience, however, isn’t (I hope) on the fence about issues like LGBTQ rights, or global warming, or the military-industrial complex’s negative effects on American foreign policy, or the disaster that is deregulated capitalism. If you are, can I please request that you kindly fuck off? We have nothing to talk about. These issues are urgent, and I profess absolutely no regret for being earnest in my advocacy for the far left position I take with regard to each. The Overton window either moves left or right, after all. I confess to hoping that I do some small service on behalf of making our national discourse more amenable to left-wing political views.

Which brings us — AS ALL THINGS DO — to William Lloyd Garrison, who expressed my position considerably more succinctly than I’ve been able to do so here:

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD. [Bold added.]

I’ve got “never give an inch” tattooed on my left arm. In one respect it is an ironic statement on the foolhardiness of brooking no compromise — which is, I would argue, the central theme of the book from which it was derived. That is, I don’t think Kesey was endorsing the notion that one should never give an inch, even if his protagonists lived and died by the slogan. But in another respect, it speaks to the meaning of core principles. What do you stand for? To what extent are you willing to back it up? And most importantly, where do you draw the line in the sand?

Ultimately, like it or not, you have to draw it somewhere. You don’t, of course, if you’re trying to make a living in the Tom Friedman/David Brooks version of the universe where intellectual consistency means a pay-cut. But you do if, like most of us, you’re simply trying to be a decent human being. To do so requires staking out positions and making arguments, regardless of how popular or unpopular they make you. Believe it or not, I have considerably more respect for a principled bigot than a pundit who tries to play both sides of an argument and ends up defending that bigot. While the bigot and I may never agree about anything, at least I know that a gentle “Fuck you” adequately expresses my point. With the pundit, one is tempted to mistake smarminess for an argument, when in actuality it’s simply a ploy to mask cowardice and intellectual dishonesty.

Taking a stand is important. Knowing what you believe in is important. Having principles is important. And, crucially now, making compromises is important, too. But with compromise, you always have to be playing the long-game, and you have to have an idea of what audience is worth playing games for. There are simply some people you’ll never be able to reach. In the meantime, never give an inch.

3

Happy “The LA Riots Began 20 Years Ago Today” Day

By
Tom OHare
– April 30, 2012

I was born in 1983, so just about the only thing I remember from the LA Riots was the famous In Living Color sketch seen below (which I would wager Hulu paid for rights to in light of the anniversary, as it’s nowhere to be found on YouTube). That this is my only memory of the riots was almost inevitable: I was eight years old when they happened and barely self-aware. But I think it also points to the fact that we never know how history will be written. World historical events are happening all the time, and though I can think of dozens and dozens that I’ve lived through off the top of my head (while assuming that I would be making the opposite point prior to, y’know, actually coming up with the list, and thus changing my mind somewhat, if not entirely, as demonstrated below), I never can tell what will be important to generations hence. What will my children’s history teachers tell them about my formative years? Will they even get that far? (Lord knows, in my own American public school education the entire latter half of the twentieth century — which is Pretty Fucking Important — was always sequestered to the last week and a half of the term, during which time most of us were thinking about summer vacation or Christmas presents, not the Cuban Missile Crisis or Vietnam or the rise of modern conservatism heralded by Nixon and Reagan [Needless to say, we never made it as far as George H.W. Bush, as being alive during the time of his administration we were presumed to have understood its ramifications.].) Am I to be their historian? I may have minored in the subject, and I may have even focused on its American aspect, but as much as it pains me to say it, I am fundamentally cynical about the whole endeavor. I know things change. I know things get faster, better, smarter. But we don’t. Email doesn’t make us more productive, it makes us more casual. Google maps doesn’t make us better navigators, it makes us considerably worse! And Siri! Don’t get me started on Siri. I’ve already seen your handwriting, and it’s atrocious. Soon you fools won’t even know how to type.

Which is of course all very hyperbolic and overwrought, as is the intention; I’m not the Luddite I sometimes claim to be. I mean, I have a blog, for crying out loud. I have an iPod, too! But for me the questions remain. How do I explain a road atlas to my children when they will never have to use one? How do I describe the transition from the 40-hour work week to the always-connected work world — how do I explain that it wasn’t always so? How can I communicate what it was like on Barack Obama’s inauguration night, in the penthouse of some schmancy hotel in Seattle for Chris Gregoire’s (D-WA) reelection party, having earlier cried (drunk) listening to Obama’s acceptance speech as it blared over loudspeakers and was projected on the big screen in a ballroom of said schmancy hotel; chandeliers and all, women with manicures in evening gowns, men with hair product and hair parted and expensive cologne and wearing tailored suits (me in a sweater over a button down, Dockers and sneakers). Then 46th floor, early for Gov. Gregoire’s party, not giving a damn about some silly state pol whose reelection gala we were ostensibly there for when a black man — a black man! — named Barack Hussein Obama had just been elected President of the United States of America. A fucking dude named that, who looked like that! In this country! And eating her hors d’oeuvres before anyone else had arrived, drinking the red wine and Red Hook, looking over Seattle, rainy and purple in the evening light, chewing on Nicotine gum, because Washington state, like damn near all of them in this godforsaken country, just can’t get sanctimonious enough. And how to explain how hopeful I felt as a Young American in an election determined in large part on the backs of other Young Americans. And how hypocritical as a young, white man to take any sort of credit for it at all. Then not caring. Not caring because we had done something for once. And I was too happy right then and there, if you can forgive me for it.

And yet how difficult and complicated things have been ever since.

Twenty years from now, when my children are teenagers and dilettantes, I only hope that they’ll be able to acknowledge that I might have something or other to say about the whole thing. About my history, about what I was aware enough to experience. I don’t know what they’ll be asking about, but I can’t say that I care. All that matters is that I have something to say. This is how history is made, after all.

Anyway, here’s that video I was talking about.

(Sorry about the ad if there’s an ad.)

1

Day 5

By
Tom OHare
– April 20, 2012

Robin is OCD, or has OCD, or whatever the preferred nomenclature is for people with obsessive compulsive disorder. At our first book sale, last September in the basement of a church where I do most of my work, she told me as much.

“I just, I go down there, and everything’s out of order and all over the place!” she said, visibly exasperated. Robin is short, wiry, and birdlike. She has a white mid-sixties Beatles’ haircut, thick rimmed shields for glasses, and she never looks you in the eye when she talks. She walks with a pronounced limp, but I’ve never asked her about it because I don’t want to come across as rude.

“We didn’t have time to organize it,” I explained at the time. This was last September, Indian Summer, a sunny Saturday afternoon, and I was telling Robin the truth. The day of the sale it was Marc and me, a chapel filled with chairs , my dungeon on the other side of the church basement stacked to the ceilings with books, and eight hours to set the whole thing up for opening night. We did not concern ourselves with putting all of the Harry Potters with the other Harry Potters. We concerned ourselves with hauling ass.

Robin was having none of it. “Listen, when I go to a book sale I don’t want to be looking all over the place trying to find what I want. That’s just crazy! I’m OCD, and I swear,” she said, shaking her head, “I just want to go around organizing everything! It’s like a madhouse down there!” At the time, I took her complaints to be a minor annoyance on an otherwise beautiful late summer day. But my boss, manning the cash register, had heard it all downstairs before me, and she had signed Robin on as a volunteer for our next book sale.

These days, Robin devotes her time to the kids’ room. She spends hours upon hours putting, say, the Full House collection of Mary-Kate and Ashley stories in chronological order. She has an R.L. Stine section, a parenting section, a boardbook section arranged according to the genus and species of the title animal. Which is to say, it is under control in the kids’ room, because Robin is on top of that shit. When we had a group of twenty Raytheon HR volunteers come in to physically put all of the boxed books on the shelves… when Robin came in the day after that, with everything misplaced and disorganized and crazy — but, crucially now, on the shelves – well, she just about fainted. And then she spent the next three days in that little 8×12 box, putting everything in its right place for the sale.

Today I put a rock between the back door and the doorjamb, not just because it’s nice out, but because Robin can’t handle stairs well and the rear entrance only has one little step. She’s due to arrive at noon, and I’ve been clearing out bins all morning, boxing things up for her to fiddle with. She doesn’t ask for much. None of the volunteers do. When my boss and I sat down with them for the first time and asked them what they might like to make their volunteer time a bit more pleasant, they were only so extravagant as to request a radio. I haven’t heard them listen to it once.

“Hey, Robin,” I greet her as she walks in. “How are ya?”

“I’m good, Tom. How are you?”

“Oh, you know. Books, books, books.”

She laughs, awkward.

“I’ve got three or four boxes waiting for you in the other room, and I’ll have another one for you before I take off for the day,” I tell her.

“Great. I guess I’ll get right to it, then,” Robin says.

When I bring the last box in for her a little while later, I notice that “The Te of Piglet,” companion/follow-up to “The Tao of Pooh,” is sitting on a table beside her purse. “This is actually an adult book,” I say.

“Oh, I know,” Robin says, trails off, and turns a bit red. I realize that she’s planning to take it home with her, and that she probably feels like she’s just been caught stealing. Let me put it to you like this: if you come to my bookstore and alphabetize books for free for fifteen hours a week, you can have a “Te of Piglet” whenever you please.

“You should check it out, I’ve heard good things,” I say. “‘The Tao of Pooh’ is supposed to be good, too.” I head to the door and wave. “Have a good weekend, Robin. Thanks for all your help.”

0

Day 4

By
Tom OHare
– April 19, 2012

I get to the main office/occasional-impromptu-bookstore around half past one. Rose is in the back room, consolidating tattered mass market paper backs into those cardboard trays beer sometimes comes in. You know the ones. The book sale we hosted last weekend kind of went bananas, and the three rooms we’ve taken over on the first floor, to flood with shelves and boxes and tables full of books, are a mess. Rose is a volunteer, probably in her 70′s, five foot nothing, round but nimble — an avid walker. I don’t really need her to be sorting through mass market paperbacks. I’d just as soon throw them all away — there’s certainly no dearth of them. But she’s restoring a semblance of order to the place, which is appreciated. And when I get to the point where I do need her to do something, she’ll do it. I couldn’t really ask for much more from a volunteer.

Rose once called me on a Friday night at around eight o’clock, just around dinnertime. I was in New York City for the weekend. I was, if you can believe it, eating dinner because, as mentioned, it was just around dinnertime. I was, moreover, eating a dinner that my, um, “friend” had prepared for me — the very first meal she had ever cooked for me, as a matter of fact. So, of course: phone number I don’t recognize from an area code in Massachusetts while I’m on a date? I better answer that call!

“Hi, Tom, it’s Rose.”

Rose, Rose… who on earth is Rose? Ohhh. Rose. ”Um, hi… Rose? What’s, uhm, up?” Waving to pretty lady across table, This will only be a second, promise.

“Well, I was thinking, I can get you all the leftover books from the library sale in Marblehead. Do you have a minute? You aren’t eating dinner or anything, are you?”

“No, yeah, no, it’s fine. I ju–”

“Well, what we could do is…”

It was only a couple minutes later, when Rose said something about how we could discuss her plan to get books “tomorrow” since I was “going to be at work” (she was thinking about stopping by the office to help set up the book sale, anyway, and why not kill two birds with one stone, right?), that I realized she probably didn’t really keep track of her weekdays all that well.

“I’m actually in New York City this weekend, Rose.” I made sure to emphasize how very weekend it was. “I probably won’t be back at work until Tuesday. But we can definitely talk about it then.”

“Oh, is today Friday already? Well, how about that, you’re right.”.

In the end the two of us did end up making the NYC-dinner-date-interrupting trip to Marblehead to salvage thirty boxes of unwanted books. I chauffeured in the company dump truck. “When you said you had a truck, you really meant it,” Rose said as she opened the door. I have rarely feared more for a person’s life than watching Rose try to climb into the passenger seat that day. It was like watching a grape trying to do the monkey bars. My plan was that if she let go of the oh-shit handle and started to fall, I’d grab her arm and hold her up. It’s only now that I realize I probably just would have dislocated her shoulder if that’d happened. Or, like, ripped the entire arm right off. You can pluck a stem from a grape pretty easily, after all.

So today, when I’ve finally finished sifting through a giant blue laundry hamper full of books and magazines books and three ring binders and books and video tapes and CDs and books, I ask Rose if she can give the mass-markets a rest and put all the non-fiction books I’ve boxed up onto the appropriate shelves in the non-fiction room. “I’ll wheel them in on the dolly and put the boxes on the tables. Can you just go through them and plop the books down where they belong?” (The volunteers have established a weird genre-bending, pseudo-Dewey decimal shelving system for the non-fiction room. I let them roll with it because it’s less work for me, and because it seems to make them happy. It’s all about the illusion of control, I guess.)

“Sure, yep. I can do that,” Rose says. And that’s exactly what we do.

1

Day 3

By
Tom OHare
– April 18, 2012

I pull into the parking lot of Marc’s condominium complex at quarter past five, turn the car off in front of the handicapped ramp, and phone him. I let the phone ring two times and hang up. This is our system. When the phone only rings twice, he knows I’m downstairs waiting for him. I see him through the double doors in his little lobby —  a cane, weathered ball cap, untucked, unkempt shirt, full white beard. As he gets closer I can make out the slightly curled upper lip, and his twitchy left eye. I unlock the door. He gets inside the car.

“Here,” he says, “I brought you something.” He hands me a 50th Anniversary edition DVD box set of some old sci-fi series I’ve never heard of, and two CDs by musicians I’ve never heard of either. “I’m telling ya, there’s always something on that bench,” Marc says, referring to the bench inside the lobby where, apparently, there is always something. “It’s a great place to pick up free books and stuff. People move out and they just leave it there.” Marc smiles at me: proof.

“Trisha Yearwood?” I say, glancing at the titles and starting my car.

“Oh, Trisha Yearwood. The country singer. I used to like her.”

I’m taking Marc grocery shopping because Marc can’t drive anymore. He fell into a diabetic coma a few months ago, and collapsed on the floor of his little condo. Marc is a lifetime bachelor who mostly keeps to himself: he laid there on his floor alone and unconscious for six days before anyone finally found him. His blood sugar was in “you should be dead” territory. It’s pretty amazing that he’s not.

Before all of that mess, he finagled his way into my life by way of my current career in books. He met my boss at a farmer’s market, told her that he used to own a bookstore in Cambridge, and said that he would love to talk to us about our book business. She agreed.

When Marc and I first met, it was at a tête-à-tête with my boss and our executive director. My first impression of him was that he was insane. But despite vague pronouncements about how, “What you should be doing is turning this [holding a book] into this [pulling a dollar bill out of his pocket],” I could tell that deep down he knew what he was talking about. I liked him. I thought he could be an asset. My executive director disagreed.

“So, what the hell was that all about?” he said after Marc had left. And it’s true: Marc’s a chatterbox and he occasionally takes a very, very long time to get around to making a point; but he’s also a guy who ran a bookstore in Harvard Square for most of his life. He knows the business, inside and out. He knows Robert Pinsky, for Christ’s sake, he went drinking with John Updike. Frank Bidart still owes him money from back in the days when he still collected books. (Bidart’s since gotten into collecting CDs, Marc tells me, showing his age.)

Marc was the guy who would stumble into my basement office once or twice a week to shoot the breeze or drop off boxes and boxes and boxes of books. I’d hear his familiar slow shuffle down the ramp to my loading area — these waltz-like, deliberate steps, pretending so badly to be reluctant — from around the corner at my desk. Then into view comes Marc. “I brought you something,” he’d say, leading me up to his van with a dolly to cart 1500 free books into the basement. He must have done this two dozen times.

He maintained that he hated books — he literally said this every second or third time I talked to him — but he didn’t hide his hypocrisy very well. Few addicts do. Marc is an old man who spent his whole life with books. Of course he hated them. Of course he couldn’t give them up.

Then one day, I suppose, Marc stopped showing up to my basement office, and that was fine, because Marc can come and go as he pleases. And then one day it became a month, by which time I’d already called our only mutual contact asking about him. He also hadn’t heard from Marc and was a bit concerned. I Googled obituaries. My bosses and I discussed sending the police to his condo to check on him. But we didn’t. I sent him a letter, telling him I hoped everything was okay. It was returned unopened.

During this time, Marc was in a coma on his living room floor, then in a hospital, and then in a rehabilitation center. He was told he might never walk again, so he walked miles and miles of laps around the hallways in the rehab facility. He was told he wouldn’t be able to eat real food again, so he worked with a speech therapist and on his own until he could. He was told he’d have to inject himself with insulin every day for the rest of his life. His doctors are now considering switching him over to a pill instead of shots.

There is the unfortunate matter of the catheter, though, and, if you’ll excuse the pun, Marc’s still pretty pissed off about that whole damn mess. We’re walking around in the grocery store. I’m putting O’Doul’s into my shopping basket.

“I wonder, if you can’t drink alcohol, if you can have O’Doul’s instead,” I say, to no one in particular.

“Nah,” Marc says. “I don’t want to drink anything that makes me have to go pee.” He squints his eyes, kicks his head left, and raises his eyebrows: You know what I mean?

“Still, you should try to stay hydrated,” I reply.

3

The First-Sale Doctrine, Copyright, and My Livelihood

By
Tom OHare
– September 19, 2011

The other day I wrote some thing about hosting a book sale, hit publish, and moved on with my life. At some point shortly thereafter, Excellent Blogger Ben (who is not quite as excellent as Excellent Blogger Trevor, who recently earned himself a link from Andrew Sullivan, because his minions read us and adore us) chimed in on Ye Olde Gchat, saying, effectively, “Yo, dude. You should change that Marc guy’s name to something else so he doesn’t get in trouble.”

“Why would he get in trouble?” I queried.

“Because he gave you all those as-of-yet-unpublished books,” Excellent Blogger Ben replied.

I changed the name to Jack. But Jack’s not his real name. His real name is Marc. Marc came by work a few days after the aforementioned book sale to hang out, because he’s kind of lonely, and we chatted and I smoked cigarettes, and at one point the discussion veered to the uncorrected proofs he’d given me and that I’d been trying to sell. “But, I can’t really list those online, can I?” I said. “They say right on them that they’re not for sale.”

To this Marc smiled and said, “I could write ‘NOT FOR RESALE’ on my sneakers, but that wouldn’t have any legal impact. You could still buy them.” He went on. “The publishing houses give these things out for free — these galleys, these uncorrected proofs. They send them out to reviewers hoping someone will read it, write about it, and give it thousands and thousands of dollars worth of free advertising. When they say it’s not for sale, they’re just hoping that those words will scare you enough that you never think about selling it.”

“So I can sell them?”

“Sure,” Marc said. “But Amazon won’t let you. They’d just be pissing off the publishers. Why would they want to do that?”

Today, Yglesias points me to the case law to back it up. Turns out, way back in 1908 Bobbs-Merrill Co. v.. Straus established the legal precedent that had long been the common law understanding of copyright, and that the Copyright Act of 1976 codified the the Supreme Court’s ruling into law. As Yglesias puts it, with regard to movie rentals:

By modern standards, DVD rentals ought to be illegal. After all, the prevailing wisdom in the United States is that copying a file you don’t have permission to copy is a form of stealing. It deserves to be called “stealing,” according to the prevailing wisdom, because even though nobody has lost a physical object a rights-holder has been deprived of potential licensing fees. When you rent a DVD — or, heaven forbid, borrow one from a friend — you are depriving the rights-holder of potential licensing fees every bit as much as if you copied a digital file. Fortunately for Redbox, though, we have a longstanding legal doctrine in this country called the “First Sale Doctrine,” which says that once you buy a physical object, you’re entitled to do what you want with it. Thus, back in the heyday of the VCR, movie studios faced a stark choice. Either don’t make a videotape of your movie, or else accept that video rental stores can buy your tapes and rent them out to customers.

This phenomenon has, of course, been somewhat complicated since the advent of the digital age. The ability to freely share files with large groups of people well away from the origin of the “first sale” (if there was ever a sale in the first place) raises a whole new set of questions. Thorny ones. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about books. Because I said we are, that’s why. Because the digital stuff does not pertain to this particular case. Because it’s not all about the Internet all the time, man! There’s other things going on! Even on the Internet there are other things!

“So I guess I’ve taught you pretty much everything I know,” Marc says, a bit ruefully.

“Not really,” I reply. “You might have told me a lot, but I don’t think I took in the half of it.”

He smiles, turns around, starts heading towards his minivan. “Well, good luck.”

“You’re always welcome back, Marc. It’s nice to have the company.”

Marc stops, turns his head so that one eye is facing mine (the weird eye, the one that sometimes spasms ), and says, “Ah, yeah. Thanks. I’m out of the book business, though,” then he turns back around and sort-of-staggers, sort-of-ambles to his car.

I tell him to take it easy, walk down to my basement office, and think about lunch. Marc does God knows what. Whatever he does. He drives to get more books, or to hand out my boss’s card to strangers, or to the farmer’s market, or to the Dollar Store. It doesn’t much matter, because he’ll be back. He’s always back. He doesn’t know how to do anything other than books.

6

The Book Sale

By
Tom OHare
– September 14, 2011

First, a probably-too-long preface, to give you an idea of where I’m coming from: you know those book donation bins that you see at shopping malls, schools, parking lots? I am one of the people whose job relies on those things functioning in a predictable manner. Mostly, I’m in the recycling business, as most of what we get is trash — children’s books, beach reading with tattered spines, James Patterson novels (no offense, but his books just aren’t worth anything used). From my experience, I would say one out of ten books I get is salable. Remember, people have children, and children are voracious readers of 12 page books. And they have crayons. Etc. Remember, too, that a great many of you went to college and decided to throw your textbooks into the Donate Books bin many years after your biology textbook was current. So I’m not throwing away books that people will read, for the most part. I’m taking out their trash. The thing is that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. The guy who threw away the Ultimate Guide to the Alaskan Malamute, which retails at $500? That guy’s trash is my treasure. I comb through your trash on a daily basis, I pull the stuff that is at all remotely readable, and I either sell it on Amazon or recycle it due to my business model’s concerns.

So, so, so. All that said. All that said, there’s also this: I do not work for Got Books, which may or may not be a strictly Northeastern U.S. company, but which is evil nonetheless. I hate Got Books. I am trying to take over their bins one at a time, because I actually work for a non-profit here, people.

I convinced my boss that we should have a book sale and saved up all the thousands and thousands of books that I couldn’t sell on Amazon. Thousands. I work in a church basement, and since churches are generally rather large structures, their basements tend to be big too. I take up about an eighth of the space. But prior to this morning, that eighth was filled, top to bottom, with books.

So we’re having a sale, right? And we advertise the sale. And then the people show up.

How can I describe these people? I can describe them, I suppose, by describing Jack. Jack is a former bookseller from Boston, Harvard Square. Retired now, he stumbled upon my operation on a visit to the local farmer’s market, where our non-profit has a booth that sells coffee and, now (I suppose), books. He invited himself to a meeting with my bosses and I. Neither of my bosses were impressed. He is an eccentric, a man who drives a van filled with empty boxes in case he finds a way to load some books into them. All day today — all day every time I meet him — it was, “I’m out of the book business. Oh, no. I hate books.”

For the past three months, he’s slowly become a more regular presence in my little basement dungeon. I’ll hear the unexpected rumble down the wooden ramp, only to see Jack, who has, of course, come to tell me about a new thought that has occurred to him viz. my book business. “You’ve got to have a book sale. I know a few people who could get you books. You need better books. Let me call my friend X or Y. They can probably get you some books.”

Then, this man who ostensibly “hates” books, will spend several days milking and goading old associates from his glory days into giving me thousands and thousands of the most glorious books I can imagine. Picture it: my normal day-to-day is filled with crayon-colored kids’ books, mass markets, and Jodi Piccoult. Jack cajoles the Harvard Bookstore to give me 16 boxes of clean, crisp paperbacks. He convinces some guy with a warehouse and an addiction to give me 36 boxes of hardcovers, university presses, and cookbooks. “You can always get books,” he says. By which he means that he can always get books.

So, right. This is the type of the person we’re talking about. The addict. As a final example of this addiction, let me just say this. Jack showed up this morning at nine as I arrived at work with three boxes of uncorrected proofs (I now have Joan Didion’s next book, which comes out in two months, e.g.). He says, “Ahh, I just came by to give you these.” I say thanks. I have a whole room to set up, to remove chairs and pianos from, move tables to, tables to stack books on, and boxes to fill, so I go inside quickly. He follows about ten minutes later. Seeing that I’m alone, he — all 68 years of him — helps me move furniture, stack books, re-stack books as the madness ensues, and leaves just fifteen minutes before I do, having been there the whole ten and a half hours with me.

Again, this is a man who “hates” books.

In reality, he is obsessed with them and can’t stand it anymore. He’s drunk with books. He’s never going to go to AA.

It began at four (it continues tomorrow, but that’s another story). By three we had a couple people asking to get in. By half past, there was a line. I had come outside to set up the outdoor “we’re going to lure you in with much better books than the sale on the whole has” table. Almost immediately, a woman asked, “Can we start buying these books now?” Christ on a cracker. I haven’t haggled since India. “Um, hum. No, I’d rather you didn’t.” Did that stop any of these vultures from swarming in to see what I had put out? By no means did it do so. I stopped them from taking any of the books, but I didn’t realize what my hesitance had portended. The woman asked if she had time to park her car somewhere else. I told her she had eighteen minutes. She left. I went back downstairs, told my volunteer not to sell any books, or let anyone take anything, and started moving more books.

Well, my boss went upstairs a moment later, and when everyone began asking if they could go in, she said yes. In they swarmed. A few moments later, the woman who had needed to move her car came back and apparently ran with all her might into the booksale.

Many of them carried sheets, which they used to cover their boxes of pre-sorted books. In other words, they rushed into the hall, cherry-picked what they thought would be worth money, stacked it into boxes, put the boxes under the tables, and covered their boxes with sheets, so that no one else could poach their shit. It was amazing. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything like it.

When I went back and forth from my dungeon to the hall, carting around boxes of fresh books and filling gaps left by the customers/book sellers, a few of them would follow me (and my volunteers, including Jack, who became quite friendly with one voluptuous Russian woman) around the room as I filled in gaps, assessing the books along the way. One of them said, awkwardly, “It seems like you’ve got a fan club.” I said, “What?” in that way you do when you haven’t quite heard the first time, but can figure out if you think about it for a second. She replied, “Never mind.”

This went on for three hours, and though many of the pros left after about two, at the end we were kicking people out, because we were tired and we just wanted to get drunk.

Which we did.

***

UPDATE BY TREVOR: If you bug Tom enough, he promises to start a semi[time period] contest whereby the most thoughtful or entertaining commenter over that [time period] wins his or her choice of book from the featured collection listed at the start of the contest. Now of only we had thoughtful and entertaining commenters. (HA! Reader burn! Best way to build an audience, I always say. Call it the Don Rickles method.)

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Expedition in Boston with My Parents

By
Danny Spitzberg
– August 30, 2011
The Banana Republic near Boston Common has small, untidy stacks of books as decoration around the store. While helping my mom help my dad pick out a decent fall jacket, I couldn’t help but open a few books to discover that they contain nothing but blank pages. The faux-books come in four varieties, with different dimensions, and tan or brown or ivory colored hardcovers.

On one shelf near a rack of pea coats, there was actually a real book, a fiction novel. A quote inside said:

“We have to distinguish between playing by the rules and making the rules”
- George Soros

I didn’t say anything out loud, I just kept looking for decent coats my dad might enjoy and might even feel compelled to pay for. But after getting ice cream (but no coat), walking through the park, and driving home, I looked up the full context for the quote.

A New York Review of Books article captures Soros, investor-philanthropist, citing himself from a book he wrote in 1998. Continuing from the above, he improvises: “…Playing by the rules, one does the best one can, irrespective of the social consequences. Whereas in making the rules, people ought to be concerned with the social consequences and not with their personal interests — in other words, not to bend the rules to their benefit or their advantage. This is a principle which I have certainly observed.”

The original, extended text is a bit more refined… but at any rate, the key insight Soros offers is that democracy is not a partner for capitalism, but rather, a counterbalance.

A few hours earlier, my parents and I went to the Boston Public Library. In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, they had a fiddle duet playing in the courtyard — dancing Bacchus fountain shut off — while an elderly black man in a grey shirt, and red suspenders and necktie read selected poems and verses into a microphone. We ate sandwiches in the shade and, annoyingly, out of the direction in which the tinny amplifiers projected his voice.

The library had a modest exhibition set up, consisting of maps of the United States in the time leading up to the war’s beginning. From what I gathered, the gist of the exhibit was to show geographic disparity underpinning great differences between the north and south. This includes much more than classic images of industry and agriculture, and it is best embodied in the hand-written missives of a plantation man whose family owned land for generations. The 57-year old was quoted as saying, “… they label us slave-mongering demons, but they trap factory workers in a life of debt that never ends. Their workers have no freedom, and my slaves are better treated than any factory girl of theirs. My workers are fed well and kept healthy, while theirs starve and freeze to an early death from their working conditions. And if we have not the right to govern ourselves, they want us to throw away the Constitution of these United States. We have no reason to be united with them any longer and would well be rid of them.”

Stumbling upon Soros’ quote inked 138 years after the landowner’s seemed to bookend a thought: that incompatible political views of freedom will always exist in America — but also, some people will be trapped under any view. Are wage slaves today or yesterday really more free than plantation slaves? And, did the Union army successfully steamroll over the debate?

In a way, my parents carry the tension with them. We saw a black boy in a straw hat peddling a swan boat full of plucky tourists back to the wooden dock where other crew and tourists were setting out for a tour of the duck pond. I said to my mom that the scene looked like a distant time and place before the Civil War, to which she and my dad both replied, “Well, it’s a job.” I never like hearing that, and we launched into talking about why some groups of people are given less of a fair economic hand than others. On one hand, my mom made a comment about black students having less confidence, commitment, stick-to-it-ness, and so on. I tried to string together a reply about many black people finding less access to opportunities through rings of barriers put up by biases. On the other hand, as we were walking out of the park, my mom offered up a story that she said did indeed show bias. A black woman who was a vibrant gospel choir expert interviewing for the music director position at her school was passed over for a clumsy white woman with unimpressive training. My mom found this to be an injustice and a loss for the woman and the students, too. I said, Yes, that’s exactly the kind of bias creeping up everywhere, and not just in major moments in a life, like getting hired for a job, but in more subtle, constant ways that influence a life outlook for the person on the receiving end of things.

I’d say my parents generally play by the rules. But, in doing so, they also enforce the rules made by others. I had picked up one of the blank books and put it down on a table of shirts, but it was gone when I turned around and I didn’t give it a second thought — I assumed someone roving the store put it back on a shelf, neatly out of place. But my dad thought it was mine and carried it with a newspaper out of the store. We all got a laugh, and I got a new sketchpad with a white elephant logo on the spine.

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The Week is Over

By
Tom OHare
– June 10, 2011

I realize that I use this weekly space to talk about my personal life too much, and I frankly don’t care. Because today, before I disclose the most wonderful things you missed on the blog this week, I would like to discuss books. And I would particularly like to discuss the newfound joy I feel when I throw books the fuck away.

It is a very deep metaphor, to be sure!

Perhaps I should preface this with the following, so no one misunderstands: I LIKE BOOKS, AND I LIKE HAVING THEM! But I realized when I moved across the country that I have about a 14 X 14 X 14 box’s worth of books that I’m actually willing to cart around with me to whenever life demands that I relocate. I can read Shakespeare and Plato online; I can, in fact, locate exactly what I wanted to cite or re-read much more efficiently than a librarian, since I can just type in, “All the world’s a stage…” on Google and be directed to a website with a citation and a full quote with my first result. I don’t need Shakespeare or Plato, because they’re everywhere. Do I get the fascinating annotations and notes that come with reading the Oxford edition of Macbeth? Do I get my own marginalia — my underlines, chickenscratch, emphases? Well, no. But I also didn’t go to college to become a book collector, and I don’t read to re-read. I read to read. The number of books — full books — I’ve read more than once is less than one hundred. (Articles, chapters, essays, and passages would number in the hundreds, if not thousands, but those don’t count.) Why should I bring them all with me everywhere I end up living? To showcase my erudition? To maybe — one day, possibly, with a little luck — look something up that I couldn’t look up online?

Again, I’m really not knocking people who feel otherwise. Maybe I just don’t understand the concept of the personal library, in general, never mind the mobile one. Let me explain:

Today I drove a big van — a miniature bus, really (Part of my job — the job that was advertised and the job I applied for, as a matter of fact — is driving old people from Point A to Point B. Driving those Old People Buses is pretty cool, is what I’m saying. Also, I want to have business cards made up that say, “Tom O’Hare: Back-up Bus Driver.” That is all.) — to a lovely old woman’s house in Peabody, Massachusetts. My task? To take 60 boxes of books from her garage, from which boxes I would cull the good books (Pro-tip: lovely old women don’t have any) to re-sell for the benefit of my non-profit organization, while the remainder would be recycled by the industrial fiber recycling people. So I get there with my hand truck and my youthful vigor, and an hour later, the books loaded into miniature bus, driven to book recycling HQ, and Thrown. The. Fuck. Away. Honestly. I’ve been doing this for three months now — dealing with you people’s shit, your discarded books, your personal libraries; re-purposing your trash to benefit the lives of senior citizens — and I have never seen a more thoroughly terrible batch of books than the one I pulled today. Smelly, yellowed, decaying. Were there classics? There were a great number of them. Did I give a single shit when I threw them into the big blue recycling bins along with the cookbooks and the encyclopedias? Not a single shit was given.

“What’s your point?” you’re saying. HOLD ON A SECOND, JESUS.

The point is that books are just words written on paper. They’re not fundamentally different from blogs or newspapers, except for the fact that both of those media lend themselves quite a bit more easily to the process of a) consumption and b) immediate disregard. In other words, you buy a book and you’re expected to keep it. Even after it’s gotten all of the use it’s ever going to get, you’re expected to keep it. Display it. Put it on your bookshelves and watch the gawkers gawk. Even if 90+% of those books will never be touched again, we feel a compulsion to hold onto them. To forefront them. To amass them, even though nobody will ever read them again.

It’s more likely than not that this is a generational phenomenon, which both heartens and disheartens. I mean, I won’t lie: throwing a thousand Reader’s Digest books the fuck out — just, “Oh, this box doesn’t look good,” *crashbangboomgoesthedynamite* all day long — that felt good. Some half-assed novel of some striver from the 70′s trying to make it, just going right into the proverbial dumpster (as I keep emphasizing, we RECYCLE these things). No guilt. Absolutely none. The larger part, in fact, is some sort of odd schadenfreude. As in, “No one will remember you either, pal. Not even now, when we have the chance.” And then, boom. Another box of books, disregarded. Trashed. Junked. Crashing to the bottom of a big blue bin. I can’t explain why it is exactly that I feel so immediately content to hear that sound. A brief, quiet thunderclap of books, hitting the ungodly hollow and solipsistic shell of a big ass blue bin. On wheels.

(When they’re empty, they roll a little bit with each memoir I throw in, which adds a nice thunder-y echo effect. When I’m doing the actual work of scanning the books, I literally shoot baskets all day long — into [practically] un-missable-sized baskets [namely, the blue bins]. My rule of thumb being that if the book has an Amazon sales ranking of over one million, it’s junk [unless it's collectible, in which case I'll try to sell it to another seller]. Anyway, that’s when the shooting baskets comes in. “Oh, this Danielle Steele novel isn’t selling well… Into the trash with you!” Crashcrashblamblam, you get the picture: it’s fun. It’s how I stay in shape anyway.)

Hahaha. Where was I going with this?

Books are the ideas contained within them. When you’ve stopped caring about those ideas, it’s time to get rid of the books. Give them to people who might care, or donate them to charity (not Got Books). I can assure you that you will probably never care again. Just set aside a couple of boxes for the ideas you’re not sure you’ve quit yet, and you’ll be fine.

Here are some ideas that you probably won’t care about forever, but that you might care about right now: