Tag: brooklyn

Books are not magic

Books are Magic
Smith Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

May 11, 2017

 

Let’s start with this: BOOKS ARE NOT MAGIC.

 

The dumbest name for a bookstore ever.  Sounds like it’s coming from the condescending idiot who works in a bookstore/library/own head that thinks that reading/writing books makes a person somehow better than…who the fuck knows what.

 

First of all, books are not magic. Magic is fucking magic. Turning straw into gold (Rumpelstiltskin, Bros. Grimm) is magic, like arriving in a shower of gold to rape Danae (Mythology, Hamilton,) or walking through fire with baby dragons (Game of Thrones, Martin), or even giving birth to the son of god while being a virgin (New Testament, Some Old White Jewish Men,) are also magic, and yes found in books, but MAGIC is not real. That’s why it’s fucking magic, and big deal on things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see: Amy and her life as a rat.) and when David Blane stands up on a pillar in front of Central Park (see early Aughts, New York Times), but not books.

 

Books are words (and images) on paper.

Nothing fucking magic about that at all.

 

Ideas can do things to minds and inspire and incite all sorts of things. See the above mentioned “New Testament” and think all the disasters “magic” it has done for the world. (See: president trump, the Crusades, ISIS (the terrorist group, not the Egyptian goddess), and Notre Dame (Paris, France.)

 

But just saying “books are magic” is imbecilic.

 

That aside, I know some of my fury at that bookstore comes entirely from it not being BookCourt. And my anger at them just closing BookCourt, which was the best bookstore in New York city and maybe the best bookstore on this coast, (in CA Bookstore Santa Cruz probably wins, though Elliot Bay is a pretty good ducking bookstore.) instead of selling it to someone or something. Who knows what happened. I wasn’t privy to it, just collateral damage.  Perhaps Emma Straub (writer of the book the Vacationeers, which I found on the street and still haven’t read, blame it on the cutesy cover, the first page seemed like it was good, and whatever that one is about living in Ditmas, which might be that one and the one I found on the street might be a different one, which I checked out from the library and seems like it’s good, too.) knew beforehand that BookCourt was closing (probably, no one would have bothered to try to compete with that bookstore,) and htat’s why she opened up, and it does look like if she didn’t buy BookCourt’s shelves, she certainly had the same carpenter build hers, to fill the void. But stop it with the condescending name.

 

Don’t know when they opened, maybe a few weeks? The shelves are not full, and the shelves are curated only with “literary” fiction, which means Brooklyn writers, even if they’re dumb, but not mass market even if it’s good, and apparently they’ve gotten all the Brooklyn writers (read: half of all fiction writers in America) to come by and sign some of their books, but then they had to brand all the books by putting tacky stickers that say “Signed book at Books Are Magic.” Ug.

 

I was still going to buy a book because I wanted to be a supporter, even though Straub (who was in the store and much taller than expected and apparently not a fan of classic rock and made the cute young girl manning the register nervous by pointing it out.  BTW, it was Joe Walsh singing about his Maserati, which might be overplayed, but is still a great song, (Eagles haters can stfu because I’ll never believe that was your own opinion and you didn’t get it from the Dude.) talked to a group of four year olds like they were idiots and not just little, but the husband, showing off for the aforementioned shop clerk, told a story about some writer having signed a book and some customer being impressed that he knew the writer. He said this to show of to shopgirl (his voice had bad actor in it) and maybe to whomever else was in the store. But come on. We live in New York City. Every other person here is famous, and the ones who aren’t are fuckign recreating sustainable farming or programming the backbones of major software development.

 

Don’t be condescending.

 

  1. I think maybe I’m being a bitch and maybe they’re just book nerds who are uncomfortable with people.
    But still.
    Don’t be condescending.

 

BPL: New Utrecht Branch 5/8/17

New Utrecht Branch 5/8/17

1743 86th St. at Bay 17th St.

Brooklyn, NY 11214

Get Directions

 

Well, this isn’t the Red Hook branch, but there are still fucking teenagers and brats with Tinkerbelle dolls watching iphones with the sound on. The world is over.

Really, little fucker, turn that off.

 

Apparently 60th and 16th street is a Jewish neighborhood. Most of the people on this block are women in dark shaggy banged-wigs wearing unfashionably long skirts with sensible shoes and nude hose, leading around children in matching outfits. Few of them seem to frequent the library. Instead the major section next to the periodicals on the first floor is an area the size of all the books at the Red Hook Branch of Chinese language books. This area has as many people in it browsing as the entire RH branch on a good day, which means this is a well used branch, and the library knows who uses it and what books the neighborhood wants.

 

On the other half of the L shaped room, past the librarians desk is a room with desks and student needs, the regular selection of SAT and AP books, a small wall of Manga and graphic novels, and a large wall of YA fiction. Next to that is a wide DVD library, including a bunch of Chinese language movies. I didn’t check them out.

 

WHAT I READ: AARP Magazine

Feature story on Michael Douglass, “Michael Douglass: On Love, Second Chances, and a Life Well-Lived,” from March of 2016. Not that great of an article, but due to a recent History/Cinematography piece I wrote about the history of the fictional portrayals of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, I have a new found interest in Kirk Douglass, who is about to turn 100, and is the father of Michael Douglass. Mikey as he’s called by his pals, (I know this not due to our long friendship, but from reading this article and a quote from “his good friend, the founder of Rolling Stone Magazine.”) acting has always been smarmy, we think, because of Fatal Attraction, War of the Roses, Wall Street, and even Romancing the Stone, and I refused to see The Wonder Boys for ages because I disliked him , but now that I’m older, I think he really plays a man how a man is: interested in himself and adventure and money and sport and women-as-sport, but women-as-love or women-as-human-equals-to-man only exists for someone to mother them with love and fresh laundry while of taking care of the rest of that adventuring.

new utrech books

WHAT I CHECKED OUT:

MOUREEN DOYLE MCQUERRY, Time out of Time

YA with what looks like a flying dog and a kid who looks like Harry Potter. (I wrote more about this but stupid MacBookAir deleted it, piece of shit that apple products are.)

Rachel Cohn, “Very LeFreak.”

Looks like YA pretending to be about college but is really a Go Ask Alice cautionary tale about catfishing online and not living a real life. Front cover has a Blake Lively beauty but with surf-freckles for extra Manic Pixie Dream girl

 

Nick Lake, There Will BE Lies.

“I am going to be hit by a car in about four hours, but I don’t know that yet.”

Yellow cover. 2013 graphics, but good, with some car lines and Monument Valley in the back ground.

Adi Alsaid, Never Always Sometimes.

“*this is a great one.—Kirkus Reviews.”

It’s set in Morro Bay were Dave and Melissa used to live in the most beautiful house ever. Then they moved to Portland, like everyone else. This is about two best friends, like a whole bunch of other teen novels.

Cassandra Clare, The Clockwork Angel. The Infernal Devices, book One

When I was a kid, I thought fraternal twins were “Infernal twins.”

I don’t know where I learned it, the word infernal or that there were fraternal twins. Everything I knew as I kid I got from a library book; we didn’t watch a lot of tv and other than Kleckner, I didn’t have a lot of kid friends. Don’t know why.

During a hung-over afternoon sometime in the last four years, I flipped channels into whatever movie they made out of part of this teen series. It was terrible, but I could tell somewhere there was a good story. I’ll probably never read this, but as long as I’m library book hoarding, I checked out this new first in a series.

Are there grownup books here? (which are not written in Chinese.) if so I can’t find them.

(When looking for a bathroom I heard there was an upstairs. Also,that it was closed.)