Persiflage

Return of Overheard at the Bookstore

Me: Thank you for calling Bookstore, this is Laris, how may I help you?
Phone Dude: Uh...yeah.  You're holding some books for me.  What are they?

Confused twentysomething guy: Hi.  I'm looking for a book about a talking backhoe and a girl named Mary Ann.

Sorority girl: Do you, have, like, a cafe here?
Me: Yes.  It's upstairs.
Sorority girl: Does it serve lattes?
Me: Yesssss.
Sorority girl: And, like, coffee?

Miss Officious

Last week, I looked into the face of Crazy and lived to tell the tale.

She strode up to the information desk in a maelstrom of words, clutching to her breast a copy of Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat," which she claimed to have read eleven times.  Now she wished to purchase copies for everyone she knew.  How, she asked, would she go about that?

I told her that if she wanted, say, twenty copies or less, we could sell them to her on the spot.  If she wanted more than that, we would have to order them.  It would take approximately a week for them to come in.

"No, no, no!"  She squawked.  "That's not what I meant at all!  How many books come in a box?"

"Um, what?"  I asked, not seeing how this was relevant to ...anything.

"What is the matter with you, young lady?  Are you handicapped?  I said, how many books come in a box?  When you get them!  From wherever they come from!"

"I don't know.  We get boxes of various sizes, with all different books inside, rather than boxes full of copies of the same book.  And we charge by the book, not by the box.  So, the packaging from the distributor is irrelevant, and it's actually more convenient for you.  You get to choose precisely the number you need."

"Why are you trying to make this so difficult?  I ask you simple questions, and you insist on giving me sassy, wiseass answers.  HOW MANY BOOKS COME IN A BOX?  I want to buy a box of books!  How many books come in a box?!"  Spittle was gathering in the corners of her mouth, and she'd begun stomping her foot to emphasize her "points."  It was like standing half a foot from the Alpha Elephant, thirty seconds before the stampede. 

"But, that doesn't matter," I said.  "We can order any number of copies for you.  And we don't sell things by the box.  If you need them boxed up after you buy them, we'll find one that'll hold everything."

"This is everything that's wrong with Bookstore.  YOU are everything that's wrong with Bookstore.  I have been shopping here for forty years!  Forty years, and then they hire people like you, people like you who RUIN EVERYTHING!  Snotty, officious people like you!  HOW MANY BOOKS ARE IN A BOX?!  HOW MANY?!  Why won't you answer this question, missy?  Miss OFFICIOUS!  That's what you are, sassy little MISS OFFICIOUS!"

[Internal monologue: Because it's a state secret, and then the book police would drag me off for interrogation, torture, and near-certain execution.]

By this point, she had attained a pitch and volume impossible for anyone else in the store to ignore.  My manager, my white knight in shining armor, swung into duty and told her that she couldn't continue to lose her shit in the middle of the sales floor.  It's bad for business.  Crazy Lady told him that I was not only officious and sassy, but also rude, racist, and borderline retarded.  Oh, and also that she didn't want to look at my "nasty face" anymore, so I was "off the hook."  As I walked away, she made strange hissing, spitting noises at my retreating form.  Hex, or voodoo curse?  What's your call?

There's No There There

Featured at the bookstore this week is "Aruba," the new offering from famous disappear-er Natalee Holloway's father.

Something is very wrong with this title.  Not right!  Quite wrong!  Maybe it's the lingering dissonance between the shiny, happy, sun-swept, coconutty-smelling images that the word "Aruba" continues to bring to mind and Dave Holloway's fervent efforts to depict the place as a floating crack hovel of corruption.  (As opposed to, you know, all the scrupulously ethical floating crack hovels.)  Maybe it's my underlying distaste for the "blame the place" mentality.  Maybe it just seems too much like a tabloid header, and my subconscious intellectual elitist rebels at the desecration of precious feature space that could be utilized in alerting the general public to the 100th anniversary of Samuel Beckett's birth.

Regardless, if "Aruba" is a whomping success, publishers should certainly consider a series of like titles:

"Dakota" by Yoko Ono

"The Wall Outside the Washington Hilton" by Nancy Reagan

"Dallas" by Jackie Kennedy*

"Memphis Motel" by Coretta Scott King**

"Balcony at Ford's Theatre" by Mary Todd Lincoln***

*My perceptive and intrepid factcheckers inform me that dear Jackie O. is no longer with us.  However, such a trifling detail will surely serve as no major impediment to the ghostwriters.

**Ditto.

***Ditto.  Obviously.  Please don't take my History degree away.  I....need? It?

Lobsters Basket

Oh, my God.  When I said that manga was taking over the world, I was referring only to the ubiquity of manga culture, with its newsprinty, backward-flipping books and its raving, squeaky tweeny fans and its big-eyed kiddie porn characters, inhabiting a world where skirts hitting below the upper thigh are outlawed as treasonous.  I did not mean to imply that manga, itself, was making a bid for Earthly domination through the traditional inter-species apocalyptic battle.

But now scientists have discovered this "furry lobster" in the waters near Easter Island.  And it looks just like something straight out of manga.  And it makes me wonder.

In a few days, we're going to be hearing about how this "amazing crustacean" is also capable of shooting laser beams from its defunct eye sockets, aren't we?

A Risky Scheme

Finally, I've come to understand what those Christian types mean when they talk about hating the sin, yet loving the sinner.  I've been experiencing the less-common variant of hating the book, yet loving the title.  That's the same, right?

In other news, on the completion of this post I will immediately set for myself a rigid course of abandoning all of my worldly obligations and responsibilities to embark upon the composition of an equally erudite volume with an opposing viewpoint.  The title, of course, will be "Lockbox".  I'm hoping our publishers will be able to reach an agreement whereby these important works can be made available to you, the public, in a boxed set, perhaps in time for Christmas '07.

Let Me Count The Ways

Even though Valentine's Day isn't a big book-buying holiday, we at Enormous Chain Bookstore are giving it the old college try.  Throughout the store, we've filled tables with fruity candy, chocolates, terrifyingly enormous heart- and lip-shaped cookies (Why would anyone want a lip-shaped cookie that is ten times larger than their actual lips?  I ask you.) and assorted pink things.  Since we're also, on an apparently** unrelated note, selling wind-up fish these days, we seem blithely uncommitted to a "back to basics" approach to bookselling.

It's interesting to see what people are buying.  One guy purchased the entire "Sex and the City" series on DVD for his girlfriend, and proceeded to announce that he'd probably find something else to wrap up for the holiday, since he wanted to give it to her immediately, "just because."  I couldn't decide whether he should be nominated for the title of World's Most Thoughtful Significant Other or whether it was the type of situation where his heiress girlfriend had just discovered his penchant for underage Asian male prostitutes.

On the other end of the spectrum was the fellow who purchased a card, a copy of "Skinny Bitch" and a tome entitled "1001 Ways To Please Your Man."  Which he requested that I gift wrap.

Who needs to say, "I love you," when instead you can say, "Honey, how about taking ten or fifteen off the ol' hips?  And, by the way, our love life has been unsatisfying of late.  Here are some unsolicited tips as to how you might fine-tune your technique."

Methinks V-Day in that household is going to go down about as well as it did in mine the year my dad bought my mom a Dustbuster.

**I say "apparently" unrelated, because I would immediately get down on my knees for anyone who bought me a wind-up fish for Valentine's Day.  As long as there was also an expensive dinner involved.

You Monkeys You, Give Me Back My Money!

In recent days, legions of readers have called the bookstore, demanding refunds for "A Million Little Pieces."  A few callers have threatened to sue if we refuse to humor them.  Restraining my impulses to educate the general public on the nature of a viable tort claim (duty! breach! causation! damages!), I have politely informed them that we refuse to negotiate with literati terrorists.  (Little do these people know that in the name of customer service, our sycophantic managers stretch the boundaries of the return policy to the extent that they'd probably be willing to take back books written on vellum; forget about a two-month-old paperback.)

I've been pondering a list of things for which I feel I'm far more legitimately entitled to a refund:

>11th grade Advanced Placement history.  We spent three months on the French and Indian War, and proceeded drift into dream interpretation.  No, not an analysis of Freud's seminal work, but interpretation of our own personal dreams.  I got a 4 on the AP test, and remain bitter, ten years after the fact.  You cannot expect an untutored sixteen-year-old to successfully analyze the influence of John Maynard Keynes on the policies of Reaganomics, damn it!

>My law school apartment.  Based on the vagaries of the heating mechanisms and the shifting wind direction, the climate vacillated between 85 and 55 degrees, with no stops at intermediate variables.  Also, the shower mold quite possibly constituted an independent ecosystem, and my Styrofoam ceiling was in a state of consistent disintegration, leaving a film of toxic snow scattered across my furniture and belongings.  The only plus was the reassurance of the near-constant police presence, due to the impressive persistence of the wake 'n' bakers across the hall in the face of oppressive legal consequences.

>The McDonald's birthday party I hosted, circa 1985.  How did my parents convince me that being permitted to consume a hamburger constituted major partytime celebration?  Besides, I'm pretty sure Grimace was wasted.

>"The Red Badge of Courage".  The teaching of this novel in high school English classes is one of the primary travesties of the American educational system.  When it was assigned in the ninth grade, I so desperately sought methods of procrastination and avoidance that I voluntarily completed an extra-credit assignment for my algebra class.  And I was the kid who read all of the books on the "suggested, but not required" summer reading list.  Slow learner that I am, I gave attempted to give this book a second go-round in college, based on a romantic interest's contention that it was his all-time favorite.  I ditched both it and him before page 30.

>Several meals at L'auriol Plaza in Washington, DC.  The food is nondescript, the service is lackluster, and there's not even a chimera of ambiance.  And yet, I keep returning.  Have they managed to turn their tacos into heroin delivery devices?  What gives?

By my calculations, the universe owes me something in the vicinity of $17,970.  Pay up!  I am not afraid to resort to utilization of the judicial system for the enforcement of my rights.

James Fraud

Among the lawmacho, there's a pronounced tendency to inflate one's youthful indiscretions in, ahem, certain situations.  When comely undergrads slither into view, a bookish lad whose milky white noodles of biceps would be sapped by a strenuous afternoon of cite checking is often overcome by a desire to portray himself as a- reformed, of course!- tattooed and black-leather clad deviant badass.  In his prime, no suburban mailbox was safe from the wrath of Lawboy!  (My memory lingers on a particular evening when a classmate described to me, in a lengthy dramatic monologue, an incident wherein he called his second grade Hebrew school teacher a jackass bitch.  The account was peppered with agonizing detail to the extent that it became evident that he subconsciously viewed this as the crowning glory of his life to date.)

While reading James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, the author's exaggerated braggadocio triggered repeated flashbacks to the lawboy bar scene.  Rather than the "open and honest" memoir Oprah applauded, Frey's tale felt to me like so much pasteboard hyperbole.  I imagined him reveling in his newfound bad-boy image and giggling gleefully to himself over the slew of naughty words he was getting away with uttering in public.

As The Smoking Gun reports, my nose-thumbing disdain proved prescient.  I think this episode raises interesting questions regarding the truths we require in literature, fictional and non.  It also provides my friend Emily with one more brick of evidence in the wall of her pet theory that Oprah's book club is inherently perilous and must, for the good of society, be dismantled.  Carry on, Emily!  America needs you!

Overheard At The Bookstore Redux

Woman On The Phone: Someone told me about a book of poetry that sounds very interesting.  I don't know the author.  And I can't remember if the title of the book is "A Few Years Ago" or if the book was just published a few years ago.  Can you find that for me?

Customer: Do I have to pay to sit in your soft chairs?
Me: No, luckily for you, this is one of our non-totalitarian locations.

Customer [at the registers, looking very confused]: Is this the library?

Customer: I need to find some famous book by Aristotle Schwartz.
Me: Who?
Customer: Aristotle Schwartz.  I'm taking this class on great books, and it's required.
Me [thinking...thinking...trying to think like a crazy person...]: Are you sure your professor didn't say, "Aristotle's works"?
Customer: Oh, hey!  Yeah, maybe!

Overheard At The Bookstore

One of the highlights of working retail during the holiday season is the receipt of customer-bestowed nuggets of wisdom.  Here are a few that were too good to keep to myself.

Customer: Do you have that book about how to be beautiful?  By the really famous author?  Like, maybe, in your fashion section?
Me: Uh...Zadie Smith's On Beauty is actually a novel.  She's quite lovely, but I don't think she includes any helpful hints.

[Via my manager]
Customer: So...Ulysses.  Would you recommend that for a beach read?

Customer [Holding up a copy of 4000 Easy Wiccan Spells]: Is there a money-back guarantee on this?  If I can't do them?
Me: Well, we do have a very generous return policy.

Customer: I was looking in the Poetry section, and I can't find anything by Ovid
Me: Oh, we shelve Ovid in the Classical Studies section.  I can show you.
Customer: Why in the hell would you do a dumbass thing like that?
Me: Because...Ovid...was...a classical...poet.
Customer: Not the Ovid I'M looking for!
Me [internal monologue]: Oh, right, you must mean STANLEY Ovid.  From Muskegon.  My mistake!

Customer: Did you know that George Sand and George Eliot were married?
Customer's Friend: Really?!
Customer: Yeah.  One of them was a woman, but I can never remember which.