Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

Friday night and it’s been a good week for reading. Edith Wharton and such. Some other things to smile about:

* Josie’s birthday (Dec 1). Happy birthday, girl! XO.

* The voice of Ray Scott (country singer).

* Snow.

* The voice of Al McCoy (radio announcer for the Phoenix Suns).

I’m blathering; tired. Here’s a writer:

She seemed sincere — or genuine — I mean that she seemed to be thinking what she was saying while she was formulating it, somewhat uncertainly, hesitantly, with a sense of spontaneity and of effort too (the effort of really thinking, nothing more, but which is something that is becoming less and less common in the world, as if the whole world nearly always resorts to a few set pieces available to everyone, even to the most unlettered, a kind of infection of the air.) — Javier Marias

Jim Valeo, President, PAC board of directors, quoted in the Missoula Independent, Nov 29 issue:

“First of all, in this world, we learn from our mistakes.”

Could’ve fooled me, but thanks for the lesson.

“There is no debt on our project.”

I don’t think you know that for sure until you build it.

“You need to understand very clearly that unlike anything in this town - Playball, the aquatics center, the art museum - nothing was done in this fashion.”

I very clearly don’t know what this means.

“If the city sees the positive impact we’ll make and wants to give money to us, we’re not going to not accept it.”

Translation: two nots makes a non-not so it means not-not, or yes.

    It was a place of brilliant sunlight, never undappled. Shafts of lemon-gold brilliance lanced down to the forest floor between bars and pools of brown-green shade; and the light was never still, never constant, because drifting mist would often float among the treetops, filtering all the sunlight to a pearly sheen and brushing every pine cone with moisture that glistened when the mist lifted. Sometimes the wetness in the clouds condensed into tiny drops half mist and half rain, which floated downward rather than fell, making a soft rustling patter among the millions of needles.

– Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass

Context: There is a debate in Missoula about raising/spending at least $60 million (or more) to build a Performing Arts Center on a patch of city land. The supporters argue, in part, that it will help to make downtown businesses prosper.

Concert-goers aren’t shoppers. Who are they kidding? See, this is the kind of cause-effect fallacy put out there by people who aren’t on the ground, the way - for example - I am. If you’re a retailer, as opposed to a wine bar operator or a sidewalk pretzel salesman or an economist, you know that evening events don’t do that much if anything for your sales, that day or the next day or ever. All of those people going to that show have already forked over $50 to $150 for a ticket to whatever it is they’re going to see, and they’ve had to drive all the way in from Stevensville or Mullan Road in the Tahoe, and maybe they’ve got $10 left over for parking and a soda pop, or maybe they budgeted $20 for dinner, and they got off work at 5:30 and had to pick up the babysitter and the show’s at 8:00 and they’re in a hurry. They aren’t going to stop to buy a book or a shirt or a piece of crockery. Are you nuts? Maybe the restaurants and the bars get a bump from it, but retailers, not really. What a concert culture promotes is the culture of entertainment and concert-going, which is already (duh) massively promoted on TV and radio, and so it’s just more oh my god oh my god Keith Urban! this whole semi-globalized money-sucker. I guess this is what some people are shilling for when they talk about Missoula being on the cusp of becoming the cultural mecca of the Northern Rockies. Or maybe they just want the touring production of Wicked to come to town. So let’s say you build the thing, $65 million and 47 contentious traffic studies later (”We’re gonna need more lanes, people! It’s just not enough.”), and someone in San Clemente says to his girlfriend, What’s it say? And she says, I’m looking at this Kentucky Fried Chicken Performing Arts Center website and it sucks. It doesn’t say what’s playing or what the phone number is. I can’t believe this. And he’s flipping through a magazine and says, They got one of those up in Costa Mesa. We could go there.

To be continued.

It’s the first one I’ve watched.

Mitt Romney really is totally nauseating.

‘Martin, Martin,’ Murray Hamilton says, with his big, watery, liar’s eyes. ‘My kids were on that beach too.’ What the hell does that mean? It’s a great line because, as with all tyrants, Vaughn’s last line of defence is the protection of innocence and the abuse of the propaganda value of children. … Whenever someone’s waving children in your face they’re probably hiding something, or trying to bend your soul.

– Antonia Quirke

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead. “It’s like being in an exhausted receiver,” he thought. Four or five years earlier he had taken a year’s course at a technological college at Worcester, and dabbled in the laboratory with a friendly professor of physics; and the images supplied by that experience still cropped up, at unexpected moments, through the totally different associations of thought in which he had since been living. His father’s death, and the misfortunes following it, had put a premature end to Ethan’s studies; but though they had not gone far enough to be of much practical use they had fed his fancy and made him aware of huge cloudy meanings behind the daily face of things.

- Edith Wharton

In what might have been my dream, I was going to ask the woman behind the counter to make me a coffee drink on her $75,000 espresso machine, but she was totally on the phone.

So, there I am, running up Higgins (was I asleep?), and ducking into the new store and OMG. That couch must be at least $50,000. (”If you have to ask …”) I count 17 pillows on it. There is a 40″ candle with five wicks; the price is $400.00. This place makes the Red Rooster Trading Co. look like Walgreens.

Not that it’s wrong. It’s great! All I know is what I see. Me, in my class-war goggles. I’m not saying it actually proves anything. What do I know?

In other news, I have not yet gotten my invitation to join the new Social Club, and I’m wondering, have they been mailed? Has anyone else gotten his?

“People always say they’re trying to establish a sense of community here, as if it didn’t already exist.”

– Walt Young (photo by Kevin Moloney)– New York Times

Addendum: What I like about Walt Young, besides his obvious eloquence, is how, in the photo, he looks both thoughtful and like he could jump up right now and kick somebody’s ass.