Paper or Plastic: a novella

I"m thinking about bags.

I work in a store. (I sell books.) When you work in a store, bags are part of your daily life. In order to "brand" your store (wait just a moment while I finish throwing up due to having used business jargon), you want to have an attractive bag with your logo on it. The colors of the bag ought to contrast wittily or prettily; the logo ought to be large enough so that the bag serves as a baby billboard; the bag ought to serve as, in other words, a lagniappe for the customer, a little extra that goes along with the purchase.

I have seen people carrying our large shopping bags as good-looking if impermanent totes--around campus, around town--and felt proud. They're yellow with our logo in a handsome navy.

However.

First of all, I sell books. I sell books to people who mostly have backpacks. Or who are going back to their offices, a few steps away. Or who have the currently chic, large-capacity purses. It's not like if they put the book in their purse it's going to leak anything. It's not as if it'll break in there.

Second. There are enough bags in the world already. More and more, we carry our reusable bags to the grocery store. Yes, a trend like this starts with the liberal-educated-intentional-talky types, but it'll spread. Australia, after all, outlawed plastic bags. The Bull's Head (my store) sells dozens of permanent totes including the ever popular "Read or Die" tote and the "I Usually Leave This Bag in the Car" bag. We all know why we ought not to use bags and more and more, we make it a part of our lives to do without them and even if we're totally disorganized like I am and almost ALWAYS leave them in the car, we can learn, right? We can change.

Some years ago, I decided that I would do everything I could to not give my customers bags. To hell with the advertising. I don't care if the store police-types can't figure out whether a customer bought a book or not as they watch them through the security cameras. (The point being, that if the customer's book was in a bag, it would be obvious that yes, they'd paid for it.) (I work at a college bookstore. Often, kids take the "Steal this book" message literally.) But I don't care. I know it saves the store money when I help people decide not to take bags. I don't really care about that either. All I know is this; I'm doing my small part to save the world. This is what I'm doing. I have to use the air-conditioning to make palmetto bugs stay away; I ride my bike to work a lot but I fly in airplanes a bunch; I take long showers--in other words, I overuse the environment just as much as any other American but at least I, in my long years as merchant, have kept a bunch of bags (that would otherwise be there) out of the landfill.

Now: (Isn't this unbelievable? Can you believe how much I've thought about this? ) Now: here's where it gets delicate. How do you advise a customer (who are you to be advising, after all) that they don't want a bag?

If you say, "do you want a bag," they automatically say, "yes." Almost all the time. That's because they're thinking about what to have for dinner and they hear the question and know it's not really important so they just answer yes because yes is easier than no.

If you say, "do you need a bag," then they maaaybe will hear the "need" in there but the whole thing sounds a lot like "do you want a bag" so you get the same reaction. Plus there's the same "no" problem; "yes" is more polite, more socially acceptable, especially if you're not really thinking about the question and it doesn't seem important.

If you say, "do you require a bag," you get funny looks. I don't mind this because I'm older than many of my clientele and when they look at me in alarm, they realized that I've said it sharply but with love. People my own age seem to react similarly. The problem is this: some people can take it the wrong way and also, there's the having-to-say-no problem.

Here's the perfect way to do it:

Are you good without a bag?

It's perfect and here's why.

a. They get to say "yes" which makes them (unconsciously) happy because it's nice to be agreeable.
b. I sound cool even though I'm old because of the slight grammatical foible, that being, "are you good." This reminds me to write about the time that Elizabeth Edwards corrected my grammar. I'll write about that later.
c. It requires attention because it's without the "have a nice day" roteness of "do you want a bag."

I could go on. Seriously, I could truly go on. Like, at length. It's not really an obsession, I don't think; it's more of an expertise. It's pretty much my only one, though, so you'll forgive me.

You Are What You Read

An epiphany, sorta! Okay: bear with the (partially) linked ideas of a messy mind, to wit--you know how there are some of us who take on the accent of whomever we're around? Like Madonna got that British accent? And the adorable owner of the Swiss B&B I stayed in with my family last week who, by the way, had no subcutaneous flesh in his face because he's an extreme sports guy and he's burned it all off by doing insanely dangerous physical things--anyhow, he has this beautiful "European" accent, we were all in love with him, and he turned out to be from Roanoke, Va. But we didn't care. It wasn't fake. It was real. He's a sponge, is all, which is why he can fit into the Swiss culture so easily, I'm guessing, or really any culture.

Okay, so I'm a sponge too. My kids accuse me: suddenly, I'll be saying "y'all" on the phone to the Terminix guy. (You live in a ranch house in NC, you either have Terminix or palmetto bugs. I cannot stand palmetto bugs.) So maybe this explains WHY I CAN'T READ WHILE I'M WRITING. It's not my fault. I'm a natural copycat. One night at a dinner party, I got a little drunk and started speaking with the cadence and manner of a favorite guest. "How kind of you to ask," I said, just as he had not five minutes earlier.

For those of you who have written a large document--a novel, say--you know that this means that I lose custody of my most beloved for a year, two years at a pop. It's not a conscious thing. It's more like a ripping asunder. It's visceral. I've tried everything--reading a genre different from my own, reading Chekhov or Proust because there's no danger of imitation--but it's no use. I can't do it. I can't get beyond a first page. This last time I became deeply depressed. I had to go into therapy, seriously. I didn't know why I was so depressed. But this is it, I'm sure of it. It's as if you'd spent 50 years singing around the house: as you washed the dishes, as you washed your kids, as you washed the dog and then suddenly your mouth was sewn shut. For me, reading was like singing. It's how I defined myself. I'm a reader. Walk into our house: you'll be able to tell.

So, here I am between drafts. The first draft took 1.5 years; I was depressed the whole time. I can't not write the dang thing--I just feel like crap the whole time. Except when I feel wonderful about the whole act of creation thing. You know. That. I wrote a book or two (not including the ones under the bed) but I don't think of myself as a "writer." I just don't. Me? I'm a reader.

An epiphany-let.

Next blog: what I read over my summer vacation. (It's gonna be awesome.)

Blogging

This isn't original but I'm pretty sure there's more blog-writers than blog-readers. So does this mean that for most of us, the act of blogging is simply self-absorption, writ large? Probably. On the other hand, the best way to learn to write is to write. . So, if you think of the writing of your blog as the practicing of your craft, you're good to go.

I went to my first writer's residency earlier this summer. A residency, or this one at any rater, is not like a workshop. In a workshop, you take classes and commune with others of your ilk. In a residency, you're all alone doing you work. I'd always wanted to go to a residency. I had a big book to "finish." I needed some time away from the housedogkidskitchenjobgardendusttelevisionNPRhusbanderrands. I needed to concentrate. I applied, was accepted, packed up my rental car (we've only got one car in our attempts to be green and cheap) and headed up to the top of a mountain.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. For dinner, I hiked for twenty minutes up to the tippy-top of the mountain where there sits a beautiful retreat--a lovely place where groups of people: State Park people from South Carolina! African drummers from Georgia! go and have meetings and take classes and hang out. I ate at the staff table. I am very friendly but also pretty shy. The small talk was difficult for me. After dinner, I packed up some of the leftovers--biscuits, salmon--and headed back down the mountain pretty fast. I was apparently more afraid of making small talk than I was of hiking down a deeply forested mountain holding a plate of salmon. (Here, Bears. Come on and get it.)

As I say, I wrote and wrote and wrote. It was exactly like you'd think it would be. What I liked the best was what I discovered about myself. Apparently, I'm a pragmatist. I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about me me me. I didn't philosophize much. I thought neither about art nor about life. What I did was work. I wrote in the big bed, which I didn't bother to make during the day, because mostly I was sitting in it and writing. I ate when it was necessary and I walked around a little because it was, after all, in the gorgeous mountains. I read minimally, except what I needed to read for my work which turned out to be a book about eclipses and another book about Jewish mothers. Like many of the others who'd used that cabin--you could read all about it in the journals in the cabin; entries by each of the cabin dwellers--I haven't yet quit my day job. So for us hobbyists, this residency was like a cross between a big fat birthday present with a bow, on one hand, and on the other, rescue, pure and simple.

Anyhow, up there I put the last period on the first draft. It was an excellent experience, despite the quantity of cave crickets in the bathroom.

author readings plus a plea for assistance

I have attended literally hundreds of author readings. "Attended" is the wrong word. Hosted, is more like it. As manager of the Bull's Head Bookshop, I've hosted readings for authors who are real authors and authors who know that they are not real authors and authors who are not real authors but think that they are. (This last sentence was after Getrude Stein from her "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," an amusing book.)

Some readings are memorable because of author quirkiness. Dave Eggers, for example, asked our store to provide him with a cot (he claimed exhaustion) and then read from said cot. Chuck Palahniuk's ardent wish that his selection would gross someone out to the point that s/he fainted came true. Ethan Hawke autographed a young woman's stomach, at her request.

Some readings are memorable because of the charm of the author and selection as well as the way s/he reads it. Mark Salzman read from his beautiful "Lying Awake" and then told a wittily self-deprecating story about his cat and some aluminum foil. Abraham Verghese read from his inestimable "My Own Country" and then
listened carefully to the AIDS stories of every tearful person in the long line. Zadie Smith read beautifully from her beautiful book "On Beauty" in her beautiful accent looking totally beautiful. Kaye Gibbons did her first reading ever from her first novel, "Ellen Foster," at the Bull's Head.

I've attended enough readings to want to make mine the charming, not-too-long,
not-too-serious sorts of them. I'm all about trying for amusing. I'm not afraid of a
little well-placed coarseness. (My novel is about a wet nurse. A little coarseness is going to be hard to avoid. I may as well embrace it.)

In light of all this, I'm hoping for some help. I need every synonym I can get my hands on (if you will) for the word, "breast." Every one. All of them. I hope I can depend upon you all for your support in what is sure to be an titillating endeavor. I thank you.

galleys

Galleys arrived today prompting a big dinner out at the Acme Restaurant in Carrboro. Some years ago I attended an author dinner at the Acme. We local booksellers had been invited, by the author's publisher, to dinner in order to meet said author and get to know him and get to like him. I'm usually very prompt, like I have to wait outside in my car til it's time to go into a place so I don't look to dweeby for being so early, but in this case I was way late. I was at home. It was midsummer. 

When I saw the time and realized my mistake, I ran into the garden and cut down all the sunflowers--gorgeous tall ones--to take to the author in a gigantic bouquet as an apology. He loved them. He said they reminded him of the sunflowers that grew alongside the reservation in Oklahoma, which was the subject of a lot of his work. 

Some months later I read in PW that he'd been found to be a fraud, that his whole memoir was one of those made-up kind of memoirs. I didn't care. I loved the fact that even if it wasn't true that he'd spent a bunch of time on a reservation, that he'd had the presence of mind to envision those sunflowers growing alongside the imaginary road. 

My galleys look pretty good.