Shakespeare and Co. Booksellers

I really love this piece by John Lahr about Harold Pinter and his play, The Homecoming. It is an astonishing example of career retrospective, profile, and theater review, rolled into a single piece. I can’t remember ever encountering anything that combines all these separate strands so elegantly. Lahr, of course, has been writing beautifully for years. (He is the son of the great comic actor Bert Lahr.)

From the same issue, I very much liked this piece of fiction by Junot Diaz, and also this, about Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish.

It is interesting to consider that what we think of as Raymond Carver might not have been Raymond Carver at all, or at least not what Raymond Carver intended.

The Retro/Missoula Jay Rummel art show (which includes the fully-restored neon sign from the old Smith Hotel) will continue on display in both spaces.

Is William Kristol really going to write a column for the New York Times? That is one messed-up piece of news.

Boston Globe, here I come.

We have this.  And this.

And this.

As well as a slew of new Penguin classics.

The new Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, goes on sale January 2nd.

Last night, I see this chiseled into the wall at the rear entrance of the spanking new James Bar, in Missoula:

We are the people our parents warned us about.

– Jimmy Buffet

So I go to my usual spot (I don’t have a usual spot, but let’s assume I do) next door at Al’s & Vic’s (or is it Al & Vic’s?), and say: “How many ‘t’s in Jimmy Buffett? It’s two, right?”

And so we achieve closure, almost, with 2007.

We are the poor spellers our parents warned us about!

THE TYRANNY OF THE CHISELED WALL IS NOT YET FINAL!

Oh, also: If I’m going back for more, do I need to get a new plate?

Bob Woodward’s got a new book coming out in June. Yay. If you can read three paragraphs of his prose, or even one, you have my, um, admiration. On the bright side, as I look at the 2008 catalogs, I see much to celebrate. (Michael Pollan; Nicholson Baker; Samantha Power; Chuck Klosterman; Jhumpa Lahiri.)

It’s been a very good year. I feel extremely lucky. I am thankful for so much. Here at the shop, I am gratified that we made some improvements: got a sidewalk sign done, built up our selection of magazines and journals, got the joint open seven days a week, put up a blog, etc. We also resisted point-of-sale software for yet another year (it was not difficult) and still do almost everything in this shop by hand. We still do not maintain a computerized inventory: if we can’t find it with our eyeballs and the knowledge in our heads, then I guess we can’t find it.

I am tired, but looking forward to 2008 with great happiness and anticipation.

Thanks for your support.

It’s a Wonderful Life is, to this day – and I’ve seen it perhaps dozens of times – fascinating. At its simplest, it is about “how one man’s life touches so many others.” The Capra formula. But the other night the thing that struck me for the first time, after all these viewings, is how much fun Pottersville is: bars everywhere, show-houses, music spilling into the streets. And this is Christmas Eve! It’s just about the liveliest downtown you could ask for. It is interesting to me that Capra saw this as the banker’s (Potter’s) triumph. A descent into rampant Sin, I guess he was saying (the movie seems to be, up to this point, about real estate, and now it’s about morality) … although that isn’t how it went with Mary Hatch… But I ask you: has anyone ever bought Donna Reed, with that perfect face and perfect figure, as a spinster? Even as a mousy librarian she still looks pretty damn good. What Capra should have done right there, if he wanted to turn everything on its head (in what became known on the set as the “unborn sequence”), was made sexy Violet Bick into the librarian and proper Mary Hatch into the hard-partying barroom tart. (Donna Reed, I’m going to guess, would have eaten that right up.) Imagine how horrifying a vision that would have been for George. Also, why was Bailey Park transformed into a graveyard – instead of into a more opulent subdivision? Wouldn’t a banker want a subdivision? You could argue that sedate Bedford Falls is more of a banker’s paradise than Pottersville is. Pottersville, which, in its unholy trashiness, seems completely of the people, something that arose from the bottom. I think a nightmarish vision of unrestrained capitalism would look quite different nowadays from what Capra envisioned.

Anyway, the other thing I took away from the movie the other night is how little George Bailey, for all his expressed regard for the ordinary working people of Bedford Falls, really trusts them. He doesn’t. He doesn’t trust them to take care of themselves and he doesn’t trust them to take care of him. He’s condescended to them all these years, and it has poisoned his soul. He never wanted to be a part of that crowd at all. Stewart is brilliant in the role.

We now possess several copies of At the Same Time, a collection of some of Susan Sontag’s final lectures, essays, and speeches. I am so excited, and so confident in her writing, that I threw it on the “favorite” shelf.

Other birth-wet arrivals:

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe by Donal O’Shea

The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics by Michael Shermer

I have a message for you, potential customer, the one sitting in front of your computer, thinking, “Damn, if I just get one more book, I’m finished.”: we’re open until 7:00 tonight. Extended holiday hours, etc. It’s your lucky day, and, apparently, my chance to use eleven punctuation marks in a single sentence.

We now carry N+1 and The Indiana Review.

They are $11.95 and $9.00, respectively.