My favorite place to write is at the local bookstore. Sure, I could write at home, but there are too many distractions. Writing in a cafe can be difficult due to the noise level and it carries the prerequisite of purchasing a coffee or other such item, a habit I’ve been trying to significantly restrict. The library does not sell nor allow snacks or beverages, and at times it can be downright intimidating.
At my bookstore (did I just say my bookstore? Why, yes I did. That’s how I feel about it.), I can settle in to my table by the window, plug in the laptop or whip out a notebook and write away while noshing on my brought from home snacks and beverages.
At my bookstore I can focus. It’s familiar enough to feel homey, yet there are no nagging obligations. I can turn off the phone, I don’t have to look at the dirty dishes, if the bathroom needs to be cleaned, it will be done by someone other than me.
And my bookstore has air conditioning. It’s been in the 90s lately, and this little girl from Alaska has no air conditioning in her apartment and is having some difficulty managing the heat gracefully.
I went to my bookstore to escape the heat and get some work done and discovered that my bookstore is being remodeled. Books piled up on carts rather than bookshelves. The shelves pushed around in strange configurations. A huge 3000 square foot area is cleared out and empty save a few piles of rubbish.
This huge cleared out area is the area in which my table used to sit next to my window, where I would occasionally look up from my writing to watch the toddlers play in the playground outside. The window had paper taped over it, completely blocking the view. Many of the tables were piled in a corner, others were pressed into service as book display. The chairs were lined up along the railing looking out into the walkway like the chairs lined up outside of the principles office.
Discombobulated.
That’s the word of the day. I was discombobulated. I came to my bookstore for relief and found more frustration. I stood there looking around, wondering if I should sit in one of the chairs and wait for the principle to call me, or figure something else out.
I spent some time wandering around the bookstore and marveling at the way the books had been rearranged. I found Accounting and Bookkeeping books put away in the nature section (In my mind, accounting and bookkeeping both go against nature). In the Database/SQL Server section I found Breaking into Acting for Dummies, Three Theban Plays by Sophocles, and Pygmalion. In Regional Gardening, I was intrigued by The Boss of You: Everything a Woman Needs to Know to Start, Run and Maintain Her Own Business. I grabbed The Boss of You and retired to the store’s cafe.
I usually avoid my bookstore’s cafe because it is obscenely loud and it can be difficult to get a good seat. The baristas are curiously slow; so slow in fact that I find myself staring at them, not impatiently, I’m just completely mesmerized. There is no hesitation or confusion in the baristas, each movement is long and slow and languid and completely controlled. When she calls out my iced latte after setting it down in front of me, I’m startled back to this reality. I still need to find a table.
I sit at the one empty table, pull out my notebook and pen, and crack open The Boss of You to see what I think of the inside of this book. While perusing the table of contents I feel eyes on me. I notice over the top of the book that the elderly man with very long fingernails at the next table was staring at me while pit mining his nostrils. He stared intently and worked intently for a while, looking away only long enough to admire what he had produced so far, wipe it on the table, and then return to mining and staring. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Then he went back to reading his magazines. I immediately swore I would never read another magazine (we’ll see how long that lasts) and from now on I will bring hand sanitizer to my bookstore with me.
Any hope of concentrating was gone. I left the book on the table and took my iced latte and notebook and went home. The Boss of You will have to be read and reviewed another day.
I read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones the first time in 1990. I was twenty and had just decided that I want to be a writer when I grow up. I had never imagined such a book: a writer writing about writing. It’s a simple concept, I know. But it blew my mind. I devoured every word and then went back and read it again. I was so full of hope and ambition and passion. I went out and bought myself a big beautifully bound journal in which I would practice my craft.
I went to a bustling cafe, sat down with my big steaming cuppajoe, got out my new pen and stared at the blank page while I waited for a jewel of inspiration. Nothing. Nothing in my head was worthy of that fancy journal. Crap. Drivel. Cliche. Not a single thought that tickled my brain or twitched the nib of my pen was good enough to commit to paper. How the hell do writers do this? Everyday?
Damn.
I missed the basic premise of the book: just do it. Don’t wait for it to be perfect, don’t repaint your walls to create the perfect writing room, don’t wait for the soundbites that everyone will still be quoting 50 years after you’re gone. Just write. You find the good stuff in editing.
Eighteen years later I reintroduced myself to an old passion that never died; the dream of making a living as a writer. It’s different this time. I write every day. Most of what write is crap, and that’s a beautiful thing. I celebrate the shit. I write in spiral bound notebooks that pile up and clutter our apartment. I write, I doodle, I daydream, I do timed writes, I write even when my head is completely empty. I write when I don’t know what to write. Sometimes I just write “I don’t know what to write” over and over until my pen writes something else. It’s not glamorous, it’s not inspirational, it’s not perfect. It’s just writing down the bones.
I re-read Writing Down the Bonesand this time I got it. You have to be willing to be not perfect. I still have times when I find it critically important that I reorganize my files, or transcribe an entire spiral bound notebook into my computer, but on closer inspection that usually means I’m procrastinating and I’m afraid I might write crap. So then I sit down and write crap anyways.
In the few short months between my trip to Alaska for a family reunion in August and my trip to Alaska for my father’s funeral in October, I read Sarah Vowell’s book Take the Cannoli: Stories From the New World. The book had been sitting on my shelf for nearly a year before I finally picked it up and started to read.
The first essay in the book was called “Shooting Dad,” a coming of age story of sorts: a progressive minded young woman grew up in the middle of nowhere in a house full of republican gun fanatics, yet finds her way home to a reconciliation with her father during an outing that involves his cannon. Hmmm, could be the story of my life.
My dad was famous around town as the guy with the Moose Gooser – A cannon that he kept at the house and packed up to take to every home game and most away games of the Palmer High School football team, the Palmer Moose. He was obsessive about that cannon and spent hours loading the shells by hand before each game.
I went to one game with him to watch him fire the cannon. That was this August and it was his last game. I read Sarah Vowell’s essay a month later and it was exactly what I needed to hear. No matter how extreme our political differences, he’s still my dad. And I love him – and I miss him.
The story is as funny as it is touching and well worth the time to read it.
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This afternoon we hopped in the truck and tootled our way over to the Ballard Library for a reading and book signing with Marjane Satrapi. Marjane Satrapi is best known for her books Persepolis, Persepolis 2 and Embroideries.
I was shocked at the turnout. We spent the first part of the talk standing in the doorway between a tall woman who was kind enough to occasionally turn around and summarize what was just said, and the old woman who kept pressing her cane into my toes – I’m sorry I’m as far over as I can get, I’m not standing in your way just cuz I don’t like old people, I literally can’t move.
I spent the first few minutes of the talk wondering why I was actually still standing there. Aside from the fact that my husband really wanted to be there, I couldn’t see a damn thing, I was being jostled around by people with absolutely no manners, packed in like sardines with lots of people and let me make this very clear – I hate people. I had my eye’s closed straining to hear Ms. Satrapi over the chatter of the people behind me talking about how they couldn’t hear, when I was shoved again, this time from the front as people were trying to make their way out. I let the lady with the cane in ahead of me and after a few more people left we were able to inch our way inside the room and so was able to hear most of the second half of her talk – which was the question and answer section. I didn’t hear most of the questions, but her answers were illuminating anyways.
She has another book coming out in the fall that will be called Chicken with Plums and Persepolis will be made into an animated feature film, it will be black and white and the role of her mother will be voiced by Catherine Deneuve.
She made it clear that she didn’t have answers to questions about Iranian foreign policy or nuclear weapons “If I say I support Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons, then I am siding with the Islamic Regime; if I say Iran should not have nuclear weapons, I’m saying ‘Please Mr. Bush, invade my country.'”
When asked about the American war against Iraq she mentioned that 80% of the world’s population live under evil dictatorships, but few of the other countries have resources of interest to the United States. As far as the Islamic fundamentalists are concerned, she said that fundamentalists of any persuasion, whether it is Islamic, or Jewish, or Christian, or Secular (yes there are secular fundamentaists too) ARE the problem, the fundamentalist point of view precludes thought and reason, and especially learning.
Ms. Satrapi grew up in revolutionary Iran. The revolution occured when she was 10 years old, and Iraq attacked a year later. The Shaw was an oppressive dictator. The Iranian Revolution, like the French Revolution centuries earlier, overthrew and evil government that oppressed the people and had to go. Unfortunately, in both cases, the government that rose up to fill the void was just a different kind of evil. On the topic of democracy she said “Democracy is a cultural shift more than a political one. It will take time. You cant force democracy.”
The world is full of idiots and that wont stop. Often the idiots are more alike than different. George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have more in common than just a messiah complex. On the topic of dictators, she was careful to specify that it was not a comment against men. “Dictators are raised by their mothers. Their mothers teach them how to be.”
Ms. Satrapi currently lives in France with her Swedish husband. She speaks 6 languages and is a huge supporter of education. Continuous learning for everyone is the most important thing. She also believes that the more you travel the better a person you become because you can shed the brainwashing by experiencing the truth. The more points of view you can understand the better a person you become. She finds that often, in France, she is the defender of Americans to the French, because she has been to America and experienced American people despite the brainwashing against americans she experienced as a child in Iran and in France.
She talked for quite a while, and there was a lot that she said that I missed, but I would stand in a croweded room to hear her speak again in a heartbeat, and you can bet I’ll be getting Chicken with Plumbs as soon as it hits the stores.
So lately we’ve been buying a lot of books and they’re starting to stack up. This afternoon Mr. H and I looked at each other and around the book pit we call our home and decided that we can’t bring another book into this house until we take at least two boxes of books out.
I started with the computer books and that was easy. Why on earth do I still have a copy of WordPerfect for Windows 97 when I don’t even have WordPerfect installed on any of my current computers? Then there’s several variations on C++ the easy way which I never actually got around to learning. And Windows 2000 Professional Server for a computer named HAL that spontaneously combusted several years ago. Ah the memories. Chucked them and most of the other computer books in a box and made a nice little space for more computer toys.
Now on to the rest of my book collection, because that only took care of one box. Which of my childred to cast aside… There are the textbooks – although most of them are outdated and most used book stores wont take them, but we’ll give it a shot at least for the books from classes where I hated the professor. Well that topic was fascinating though so I’ll keep that one. And I wrote all over in this one, and well we’ll see if they’ll buy these four.
Then I hunted around and found another 10 books that I thought I might be able to part with to complete filling the second box. Don’t get me wrong. There are quite a few books in here that you could remove from my house and I wouldn’t even know they were gone. There are books that are completely uninspired that I started reading and will probably never, ever finish. There are books that I will probably never actually start reading (in addition to the textbooks). But this was a big emotional event for me and I think 2 boxes of books is enough gut wrenching for one day. So we packed up our books and took them down to half price books.
They said it would take 20 minutes to come up with a quote, so while we were waiting we did some browsing. Mr. H found a copy of the Holy Bible printed in Persian in the Arabic section (can’t expect these guys to be able to distinguish Arabic from Farsi). That’s a pretty rare, and a pretty cool find. Is it wierd that it turns me on that my husband can read to me from the bible in farsi? It’s like the scene in A Fish Called Wanda where she keeps telling him to talk to her in russian…I wandered around and found a book by Dave Eggers I hadn’t read yet “how we are hungry” well I can’t not get that. I love, LOVE Dave Eggers. I would have married him but then I met my husband and dave eggers still doesnt know I exist. And dave eggers probably couldnt read to me from the bible in farsi anyways.
I looked a little further and found a book called “No Touch Monkey! and other travel lessons I learned too late” by Ayun Halliday. I had never heard of the author or the book before but I opened it to a random page and laughed out loud – turned to another page and laughed out loud again. I’m really looking forward to reading this one.
The total for the two boxes of books came to $13.75 and our purchases cost $17.30, which means it only cost us $3.55 to unload those books and now we have space to bring home even more books.
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. The book had been sitting on my shelf for nearly a year before I finally picked it up and started to read.
