Monday, January 30, 2006

why i should quit grad school and open a bookstore


Since everything has already been written.

I ask, why not just have a place where I can look at it all? A bookstore for myself.
It has to be just for me because, thing is, working at a bookstore made me hate the world. Except for my fellow bookclerks, who also hated the world. Bookstores breed a race of curmudgeons -- good bookstores anyway. You know you're in a good bookstore when the staff treats you like shit. Now when you go into Borders or Barnes & Noble and the staff is helpful and friendly you know they don't know fuck-all about books. They might as well be selling cans of tuna. See, they have't been disappointed. Good booksellers are very disappointed in humanity. They are sad that what they love have become just like cans of tuna: products to be stacked and shifted.

And anyway, I just want an excuse to get discounts on all the books I want to buy (my Amazon wishlist has over 300 titles). Like this book by Charity Scribner. I need this book.

1 comment:

CoirĂ­ FilĂ­ochta said...

Join a bookstore
jack in the rat race
become a litterateur
and make your mark
on the world of letters.

Show the philistines
what a powerful mind can do
when wearing a name tag
librarians choose as an
identity badge.

Say it loud and do not falter:

"This is me
Flickerfit. The next Whitman.
Heaney, eat your soul out
spit it back to the well
at Mossbawn
for I will not linger in the byre
listening to the elbow lingo
winking a nod to the silent
conspiritors

but I will show you the latest
Stephen King blockbuster in aisle ten."