https://themillions.com/2022/11/on-the-gift-of-longhand.html The Millions [ ] * Find Books * Essays * Lists * Reviews * Q&A * YIR * | * Support The Millions * About * Twitter * Facebook * Instagram On the Gift of Longhand Essays Henriette Lazaridis November 30, 2022 | 2 5 min read My 99-year-old great-aunt Nina gave me her husband's fountain pen when I was visiting her in Greece this summer. A widow for 20 years, and despairing with what feels to her like a punishing longevity, she is divesting herself of important keepsakes, as if to expedite her reunion with her dead husband Kostakis. Nina wanted to give Kostakis's pen to me because I am, as she puts it, the only Lazaridis left. I told Nina that, beyond the honor of being entrusted with the pen, I would take pride in using it in my work. What mattered most to her was that I accept it as an emblem. Together with his pocket watch, which she also gave me, it was my uncle's trademark, as much symbols for him as the orb and scepter of a monarch. I'm a longtime longhand writer. I'm old enough to remember writing by hand when it was the only choice. Then I fell to the seductions of these newfangled things called laptops, like so many others. I was delighted by the convenience and by the final-draft look of even the messiest prose. But I switched back to longhand several years ago, and now it's the only way I write my drafts. When I returned to pen and paper, I did so with the zeal of a convert. Not content to have just one or two good pens, I've amassed a small collection of mostly fountain pens. I'm catholic in my tastes, and cherish my Paper Mate Ink Joy, Pilot G-1, and Pilot Varsity, along with two '40s-era Parker 51s, one of which belonged to my father. But it's the fountain pens I really prefer to use when writing first drafts. Writing with a fountain pen is longhand taken to the next level. You can't just pluck off the cap and go. Before you can write even the first letter, you have to unscrew the top of your ink bottle, unscrew the end of the barrel on the pen, fiddle with each pen's particular filling mechanism, blot the ink on the blotting paper. And once you actually begin to write, you have to pay attention to the wet ink--especially if you're a lefty like me--and take note of its gradually fading color as a signal that you are about to run completely dry and need to start the filling process all over again. When you write with a fountain pen, you experience writing as a truly physical activity, one that affects all your senses. There's the sort of chalky, silty smell of the ink; the scratch of the pen dragging across the page; the feel of the barrel and the cap you screw on at every pause in writing lest the ink dry faster; the glint of the wet ink that goes to matte while you examine your words. The only sense you don't experience with a fountain pen is taste--at least I'd hope not. Having to attend to all these sensations, I think you can come close to the sort of improved mental processing neurologists ascribe to walking. And you can do it without even leaving your desk. The pen Nina gave me is a Sheaffer Snorkel pen. Kostakis kept it on his desk in its original case, which announces it as "Sheaffer's new Snorkel pen." New in 1952. I'm used to the various filling mechanisms of a range of fountain pens, from eyedropper to squeeze chamber to disposable cartridge. But I'd never seen anything like the Snorkel, whose mechanism works like a miniature version of its name that pushes out from beneath the nib as you turn the knob built into the pen's back end. You dip only the snorkel into the ink, let it suck up the liquid for a few seconds, and then retract it. The theory is that the nib itself stays dry and your fingers never risk the ink stains that I, for one, regularly accumulate during a day of longhand writing. Apparently, when the pens were first introduced, school children discovered how to use the Snorkel in reverse and shoot jets of ink out at each other. The mechanism was quickly redesigned. I know from the graffiti carved into door jambs of my family's ancestral home that my uncle Kostakis was unruly as a child. But I'm pretty sure he didn't try to shoot ink from his pen in 1952 as a 40-year-old man. As soon as I returned to the States from this year's trip to Greece, I brought out my pen-cleaning liquid and ink blotter and did my best to clear the Snorkel's mechanism of 20 years' worth of dry ink. I looked up the instructions for the Snorkel and made my first attempt to fill the pen. It worked and I began to write. But after just a few sentences, the ink ran out. I tried again, with the same result. Looking at those notebook pages, I can see the evidence of my thwarted determination in the lines of writing whose color goes from deep blue to grey and then vanishes to scratch marks in the paper. This pattern repeats to fill an entire page. I realize I need to have professionals look at Kostakis's pen. There is, I've learned, a bladder that may have dried and thus be unable to suck up the full amount of ink. But I keep trying every now and then, in hopes that something will have changed. I want to be able to write with my uncle's pen. Even in my frustrated beginnings with the Snorkel, once I saw my own letters in the ink's deep blue, in the precise and sharp lettering the nib requires of its writer, I recognized my uncle's hand. I saw in my own English print the Greek cursive of Kostakis's letters to me, letters in which he congratulated me on various academic milestones or filled me in on family legal issues (if you're a Greek family with any property at all, you have legal issues). I still have the letter in which he confirms my membership in the alpine club of our ancestral village of Papingo, which conferred on me the chance to join the Greek ski team for training. Kostakis's letters spoke to me of my heritage and nudged and encouraged me toward opportunities, even those that I passed up. He'd already owned the Snorkel for nearly two decades before he wrote his first letter to me. Perhaps Nina knew something when she gave me Kostakis's pen, regardless of whether I'd use it. She'd given me the pocket watch too, after all, and surely didn't imagine I'd be clipping its chain to my jeans. Perhaps she understood that simply having the pen would be meaningful enough for me, that I wouldn't need to be able to write with it, even though I'd want to. I haven't made the time to take the Snorkel to my local pen-repair store; for now the pen sits between my laptop and my stack of notebooks. Sometimes I just sit and hold the pen and admire it. I sometimes unscrew the cap and put it back on just for the satisfaction of hearing the little snick and churning sound it makes. I hold it in my palm as if it were not a writing implement to be set between index and third finger but a tool you grasp with your whole hand. And I don't think that's the wrong way to use it at all. Get the best of The Millions in your inbox each week! Subscribe for free. [ ] [Subscribe] [*]Yes Please [ ][ ] [ ] The Millions' future depends on your support. Become a member today. Henriette Lazaridis new novel, Terra Nova, will be published by Pegasus Books in December 2022. Her debut novel, The Clover House, was a Boston Globe bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors pick. Her work has been published in such outlets as Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, WBUR's Cognoscenti and Pangyrus, and she is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. Visit her website at henriettelazaridis.com. Essays Notable Articles I've decided to reinvent The Millions Essays Notable Articles C. Max Magee May 12, 2003 | 2 min read I've decided to reinvent The Millions. The blog world is crowded. I cannot possibly add to or improve upon the innumerable blogs out there that are about music or politics. So many of the things that I have a casual interest in are covered so obsessively in the blog world that it is hard to find something to write about in any sort of compelling way. Nor do I have much interest in cataloging my daily life. I know from experience that my life is capable of producing, tops, a paragraph or two of mildly amusing reading every few weeks, which does not a blog make. Plus, I would like to try to lure some people into reading what I write, and writing about what I ate for lunch today will likely not do the trick. As for the two of you (you know who you are) who read this blog regularly, I hope you will not be disappointed by my change away from that format. And finally, after some thinking, I have figured out what these changes will be. The Millions will be about books. For a book lover without a whole lot of free time (not to mention money) it can be very hard to consistantly find new and interesting books. To do so, in my experience, requires reading dozens of book reviews weekly and trolling book stores looking for the new and interesting (or the old and interesting). The internet improves this process slightly, mainly by cutting out some of the time required, but it offers little help in locating a book that you might like to take a look at. I have yet to find anyone that has had much luck with Amazon's recommendations. I recently realized, though, that I am singularly qualified to write a blog about books. I work in a great little book store and therefore, in pursuit of my paycheck, I see with my own eyes the hundreds of books that come out weekly and I read reviews in dozens of newspapers and magazines. Finally, I have always loved books and I have always loved telling people about books, and now I have myself a little blog that can serve both of these loves. I hope to update several times a week, if not daily, and hopefully this thing will be chock full of interesting books at all times. So there it is... it feels good to get started on this thing, and if anyone has any comments, questions or suggestions let me know. Essays Notable Articles C. Max Magee | 2 min read * * Essays Notable Articles I Guess It's Probably Time for A Manifesto Essays Notable Articles C. Max Magee July 7, 2003 | 4 min read At work yesterday, after my first 15 minute coffee break, but before my 30 minute dinner break, I thought about some things. Among them was the idea that The Millions really ought to have a manifesto. A manifesto takes this messy collection of asides and non sequiturs and gives it purpose and meaning. You are no longer reading my uncollected natterings... you are reading a means. And ideally this is a means to an end. It seemed like a good idea save one problem. I'm not really a manifesto guy. They strike me as too rigid, too static. Will I adopt a manifesto and then stop delighting myself, and perhaps a few others, with the promise of a varied discussion on varied topics? On the other hand, I decided a while ago to devote the blog to books primarily, so what's another artificial restriction anyway? Plus, what if my manifesto is purely a force for good, and by devoting myself to it, I provide a service to whomever encounters this little blog. Still, that word manifesto bugs me... so maybe it's just a problem of language then. Perhaps if I think of it as a declaration, a statement of purpose, an annunciation, a mission statement... a pronunciamento if you will, perhaps then I will have less reservations about its formulation. Luckily, last night when I decided that perhaps The Millions needs a manifesto (or whatever you want to call it), a manifesto sprung fully-formed into my mind. It stems from a fact that most readers are not fully cognizant of: there is a concrete number of books that you or I will be able to read in our lifetimes. I'd say that on average, given my moderately busy lifestyle and the fact that I read the New Yorker in full each week, I am able to read approximately one book a week, and therefore, allowing for longer reading time for some of the behemoths that I occasionally undertake, about 50 a year. (n.b. I set a goal for myself to read 75 books this year, but it looks like I'll be lucky if I hit 50). So therefore, I would estimate that I have probably read about 500 real books in my life, give or take a few dozen, and assuming I live until I'm 80 (and am still able to read at such a rate), I'll read another 2750 give or take a few hundred. 3250 books may seem like a lot to read in a lifetime, but a look around the book store and you quickly realize that it is possible to read only a very small fraction of what has been written, and only a fraction of what is worth reading. Which brings me to my manifesto (or whatever), given that you and I will only be able to read a finite number of books in our lifetime, then we should try, as much as possible, to devote ourselves to reading only the ones that are worth reading, while bearing in mind that for every vapid, uninspiring book we read, we are bumping from our lifetime reading list a book that might give us a profound sort of joy.I know, heavy shit: death, obligations, the conversion of unimportant choices into important ones... that's why I wanted to keep my mouth shut. But we have to look at this the right way. I am not making the declaration that if you haven't read Dostoyevsky or Joyce, you are under some sort of moral obligation to do so. I am saying that, given the finite number of books that you will be able to read, you ought to read ones that are good for you, not so much nutritionally, but spiritually. I'm partly inspired here by the food writers that I seem to enjoy inordinately. Calvin Trillin refers in Feeding a Yen to seeking "deliciousness" wherever he can find it. He and his fellow food writers are not saying that if you don't eat at this place or eat this type of food you are doing yourself a disservice; the goal is simply deriving joy from food as often as possible, ideally at every meal. The list of foods that qualify as delicious is different for different people. Likewise the list of books is different for different people. To reiterate: this isn't about compulsory reading; this is about making sure that whatever you read will serve a purpose for you and that, as often as possible, this purpose is to bring you the curious sort of joy that only a book can. Clearly there are some problems with my manifesto, first among them being that, I need a word as good as deliciousness to describe the quality we are looking for in our books. Any suggestions???Lighter NotesMy good and old friend Hot Face has finally joined the rest of us and got himself a blog... follow his adventures if you dare. I continue to feel obligated to mention The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis at least twice a week. I do this because, more than any other book, I insist that you read this... Never have I enjoyed a book so profoundly. My excuse for mentioning it this time is that I just found an interview of Mutis in Bomb Magazine. The interview is conducted by another Latin American writer Francisco Goldman, who is an old friend of Mutis' and provides the introduction for Maqroll.The book I'm currently reading refers to this historial event that I was unaware of: "Dan White, on trial for shooting and killing San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, was convicted of manslaughter instead of first-degree murder after his lawyer raised the Twinkie Defense, the claim that Dan White's brain had been so deranged by Hostess Twinkies and other sugary junk foods that he should not be held fully responsible for his actions. Twinkies, the argument went, made him do it." (Apparently this occurred in 1979, but it was news to me)Anybody know of any decent book blogs or websites about books?... I haven't been able to find any besides Arts & Letters Daily and the various newspaper book sections, of course... I'd like to find something that's a little less review focussed and more discussion focussed. (Something I hope to do here in the future). Essays Notable Articles C. Max Magee | 4 min read Essays The Millions Guest Contributor: Author, Kaye Gibbons Essays C. Max Magee September 5, 2003 | 1 6 min read I had the pleasure of making Kaye Gibbons' acquaintance via email, and I have very quickly become a big fan. Aspiring writers and precocious readers could learn a lot from her. One of the more noteworthy events of Gibbons' distinguished career was the selection of two of her books, Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman by Oprah Winfrey for her eponymous book club. I asked Gibbons how she looks back on this experience as a writer, and she was kind enough to send us the following reply:You'd asked how I felt about having two novels of mine on the Oprah Book Club. There's so much to say about it that I'll talk about it chronologically. Before the Oprah call, I was doing fine, amazing fine. But it didn't start out that way. My advance for Ellen Foster was 1500. But I've always had a strong work ethic, and as I worked, as rights were sold and awards won, the money began to catch up to the blood and time I was putting into it. Unfortunately, being a rather eccentric, free-thinking woman in the South led others and eventually me to conclude that there had to be something pathological about me, and it wasn't until two years ago that a twenty-year old diagnosis of bi-polar disorder was eradicated. Doctors made me feel forced to take drugs that took the edge off my creativity, but I've taken nothing in two years and haven't ever felt and written better.My theory is that I want to write the best literature possible and have it read by as many people as possible. Living in NC, now half-time in NY, there's a long tradition of writers helping one another, reading manuscripts, finding agents. Lee Smith introduced me to my agent, and then in 1997 I was able to pass that along when I read the first pages of Cold Mountain. Chuck [ Charles Frazier] and I had had children at the same Montessori school for years and had been close friends. Things like that happen here all the time.But there's still a great deal of intellectual isolation here-and that's probably why I write and read as much as I do. The other day in the grocery store, an acquaintance asked me what'd I'd been writing since I finished Divining Women. When I told her I'd been reviewing books for Atlanta and Chicago, she asked, "They let you review your own books?" This is a strange occupation to have in Raleigh, not so much in Chapel Hill, where Alan Gurganus, Reynolds Price, and others live. But sometimes 20 miles feels very far away.So, with regard to Oprah, one thing her call did was to give what I do for a living a certain amount of validation. I'd been knighted by the French, won awards galore, sold about a million books, had a movie made, done 12 thirty-city book tours, but dealing with the perception that I was a local writer was often frustrating. I'd have an audience of 2000 in Michigan and then 30 in Raleigh, for example.What it took to manage it was self-esteem, and that generally comes from having a firm grasp of reality and what's important, my children. A digression, because I anticipate someone mouthing about the Oprah money: I have a hard time tolerating the starving artist in the garret whining about how a writer writes a brilliant book that the publisher won't promote and that no one is reading. It's easier to be a victim than take action, write a better book, listen to an editor's input, find a new publisher. I truly believe, because I've seen it, that if a brilliant manuscript exists, that if that writer has had enough gall, brains, energy, etc. to write it that he or she can get it to the right people. When a person sends me something that deserves publishing, I see it through the process. But ninety-nine percent of what I'm sent just isn't good. A writer has to be a superb editor, and wishing a book good doesn't make it so. When someone sends me something drowning in cliches, I tell them that language is to use, not to take easy advantage of. When Oprah called and said she wanted to put the two novels on her show, I was nervous about it diminishing my literary reputation, which sounds pompous to say. When she held A Virtuous Woman up and said, "America, you've wanted a love story, well, here it is," I thought, Well, here we go.But, you see, her selling, what now, about three million books that month, didn't change the basic nature of the novels or me. When Jonathan Franzen started running his mouth about the maudlin trash or whatever he said about her choices, I smiled and remembered that the first novel, Ellen Foster, is taught all over the world beside The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. When it was finished, in 1986, it was sent to and read by Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, Gordon Lish, John Barth, and other people who, over the years, became dear to me. The whole Franzen thing got sort of tedious, and I didn't have the time to get dragged into it.What someone like a Franzen doesn't see was how poor I was growing up, a surreal state of poverty, and then that small advance, and how I worked my way up to financial security. I'm finally making now what many, many first, very young writers are getting, and I think it damages the soul. I finally have a house that doesn't have something hanging off in disrepair. There's the whole attitude now in music and writing of, I'm 21, Where's my Big Deal? So, even though the Oprah thing seemed to come out of the blue, it had been earned. I think I'd have felt a little ridiculous if it hadn't been. I used a lot of the money establishing a library at a local children's home, which my daughters and I still maintain. We sat down and wrote checks, making decisions together about where the money went. Anything I put away personally was completely eradicated, gone, during a horrible divorce two years later. So, I found myself back at the beginning financially, having been reamed. But I've got this work ethic, and I've got the post-Oprah, broadened visibility. It'll be okay. My daughter wasn't able to go to college in NY, stayed here because of the financial drain of the divorce, but it remains, we will all be okay.I admire Oprah, enormously. As for the book club, she's getting it done, getting people in bookstores. If there's the criticism that the books she selects have taken on a certain sameness, well, so what? She's not picked Danielle Steele, for crying out loud. I know for a fact, given the hundreds of letters, that people are reading, because of her, who haven't read before.Let me tell you that when I got a letter from a mother who said her daughter's impression of her totally changed when she saw her mother sitting down, reading a book at night in bed, how very proud this woman was, it is hard to say anything critical about the Oprah Book Club.The problem is that it is hard, to impossible, for people who live around books, who read them, own them, who have, like me, about 4000 books in the bedroom, to even process the notion that houses exist where there are no books except the ones the kids bring home from school. That's a deplorable, elitist attitude. When I was house-shopping, I looked at about fifty upper middle-class houses, and only in a couple did I see more than a handful of books. I started asking the real estate agent if the sellers had hidden the books, thinking they were clutter.I have two younger teenagers, and I can tell you that seeing them reading anything is a blessing. I don't go over and demand that they upgrade. And for those 350 kids who use the library Oprah made possible day in and day out because the public library in their town will not trust them to check out and bring back books, they'd wonder what all the snobbish hoopla was about. They're able to do their homework better, their grades have improved, and that money was funneled directly from Oprah.I felt nothing but honored by the whole process, and only wish that I'd been in better emotional and physical shape at the time. I was 75 pounds heavier, weight that drugs I didn't need had put on me, and I felt run down and a little thick in the head. But that was then. This is now. I'm the person I used to be before my marriage went to hell, and I'm nothing but glad that the Oprah thing is a part of my experience. If nothing else, local ladies who stop me in the grocery store don't talk to me like I'm having to sell books out of the back of my car.I think anybody who wants to be successful at this whole ordeal of publishing has to take a certain amount of responsibility that I see so many people abdicating in favor of bitter comparisons. Language is a gift, and to be able to use language to make a living is one of the most joyful enterprises I can imagine. I try to take that joy and make what I'm writing a better book every time I edit it. I work 18-hour days. It is a long, lonely, spiritually hazardous occupation. But the joy I feel in putting even two words together in something of an original way has nothing to do with money or movies, nothing external. I think that people buy and read my books, regardless of Oprah, because I've always studied everything I've read, even packaging on the mascara I just bought, and tried to figure out why a particular word was chosen. You can get in a habit of alert, concentrated reading that comes back when the writing begins. I've learned to be honest with myself and cut what sucks.Kaye Gibbons lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her books include Charms for Easy Life, On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, A Cure for Dreams, and Sights Unseen, as well as the titles mentioned above. Her latest novel, Divining Women will come out April 14th. And make sure to check out her cool new website, kayegibbons.com.Many ThanksThanks to Will Femia for allowing my self-promotion to extend to MSNBC's Weblog Central. For those that are blog-fans, it is always a must-read. Essays C. Max Magee | 1 6 min read Essays Classic Shorts Essays Andrew Saikali November 24, 2004 | 2 min read The recent news, here in Canada, of our great lady of letters, Alice Munro, taking the Giller prize for Runaway (excerpt), her latest collection of short fiction, gives us a chance to praise that wonderful literary form - the short story - and the authors who have practiced it with precision, humanity, and wit.Collected volumes of short fiction often provided me with an easy approach to the many writers who would become my favourites. Tight, economical writing, a whole world painted with just a few deft strokes - and I was hooked.And so it was that Welcome to the Monkey House became the book of my formative college years. In short order, I would devour all of Kurt Vonnegut's marvelous works, but I still hold dear this short story collection. Even now, years later, the thought of "Harrison Bergeron" makes me simultaneously laugh and shudder at the alternate universe he inhabits - a world in which all citizens are subjected to absurd physical and mental "handicapping," a leveling-out process that results in a form of institutionalized mediocrity. Sameness.For Ernest Hemingway, clarity and precision were his stock in trade, and nowhere is this more resonant than in In Our Time, a collection of early shorts. Hemingway can present Nick Adams to us and reveal more of his world in 5 pages than many writers would dare to in 500. "The Battler" stands out - a tale of young Nick's encounter with a disfigured and psychologically damaged prizefighter while riding the rails. Equally powerful are the numerous vignettes that Hemingway intersperses between the stories, many of them harrowing slices of war.Hemingway's contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, gives us Jazz Age Stories. It's within these pages that you can experience the remarkable "Diamond As Big As The Ritz", an astonishing tale of money, power, fear (of losing it) and the complete moral bankruptcy that ensues. This is an unparalleled story of illusion and disillusion. It creeps up on you and will echo for years and years.While The Catcher in the Rye has become such an iconic cultural phenomenon, its often forgotten that J.D. Salinger wrote anything else. Unless of course you've read Franny and Zooey, or Raise High the Roof Beam. Or my personal choice, the collection Nine Stories. Then you never forget. This is dysfunction grounded in reality, not simply splayed out for shock value or a quick laugh. I recommend you revisit the extended Glass family in the deceptively simmering "A Perfect Day For Bananafish."In recent years, I've come to regard Anton Chekhov as the master of the form. Any collection will do. Try Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories. I challenge you to find an unnecessary or misplaced word. Simple, perfect writing. These selections just scratch the surface, and of course there's no shortage of good contemporary short fiction. But it serves us well to be reminded from time to time of "the greats" - not as an untouchable force that stomps on any newcomers, but rather as artistic touchstones that let you approach, and that remind you of first principles. These masters have given us a vital part of our literary canon.Also recommended: The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce's (surprisingly readable) Dubliners, and Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver Essays Andrew Saikali | 2 min read * * 2 comments: 1. [261] James Cappio says: December 2, 2022 at 11:57 am It's absurdly easy to find qualified fountain repairers in 2022. Email nibs.com, or fountainpenhospital.com. In the unlikely event they can't help you, check fountainpennetwork.com. 2. [ea0] Nancy Milligan says: December 2, 2022 at 3:49 pm I too am a fountain pen lover.I loved this story too because I have spent years learning Greek folk dances and culture.This story was so comforting.I too am still mostly a long hand writer as so many friends yell at me for not sending a note electronically because they have to decipher my hand writing and spelling. Thank You Add Your Comment: Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Essays Tis the Season Essays C. Max Magee November 30, 2004 | 2 min read It occurred to me over the Thanksgiving weekend that after three years of paid participation in the holiday retail experience, this year I am free to don my civilian garb and stroll blithely past the giftwrap lined trenches in which I used to toil. I have to admit before I started working in a bookstore I never gave much thought to what the month of December means to America's retail army. But then, on December 1st, 2001, I was hired as holiday help. I hadn't been at my new gig for longer than a few hours when I was informed that, since there was no time to train me on cash register, phones or anything else really, I would be "designated giftwrapper." This came as quite a shock. Up until that point, every single gift I had ever purchased had been wrapped by my mother, sisters, or girlfriend. If none of them were available, I would simply present the gift to its recipient in the shopping bag that it came in. That December, though, I put in many hours at the "wrapping station," struggling with fists full of Scotch tape and wrapping paper as disapproving customers peered over my shoulders.For many stores, and, it seemed, my independent bookstore in particular, the holiday gift-buying season is vital. Between success and failure lie two dozen days in December. There was a lot of pressure, but it was fun, too. With double the staff and quadruple the customers, the crush of human generosity was heartening.But the holidays bring out a certain amount of desperation, too. Every year, I fielded scores of questions that were variations of this one: "My dad's a lawyer. Do you have any books about lawyers?" Or worse: "What do you think I should get my mom?" As I got good at it, I could watch the blind panic fade from their eyes, reassured that the book that I had just slid into their hands might do the trick. As Christmas neared, the real tough cases came out. The frantic parents emptyhanded on the way to the houses of their grown children, or the daughter who decides at the last minute that she'll get a gift for her step-mother after all, if only just to make her feel guilty. Saddest of all were the drunks on holiday-inspired benders who might stumble in a day or two before Christmas, forgetting why they were there but pulled by some ingrained impulse to try to buy something for someone.I'll just be a regular shopper this year, but miss I'll the frenzied energy of working at the bookstore, and for many Decembers to come, I suspect that the peaceful snowfall of whatever northern clime I inhabit will remind me of December drama at a bookstore nestled in the palm trees of Los Angeles. Essays C. Max Magee | 2 min read * * Essays Leonard Cohen, Master of Prose Essays Andrew Saikali January 4, 2005 | 3 min read Essays Books to Laugh with Essays Andrew Saikali February 9, 2005 | 3 min read Essays Battle of the Sexes by Patrick Brown Essays Patrick Brown April 25, 2005 Earlier in the year, I took a look back at the books I'd read in 2004. I was surprised to find that most of them were by men. I'd always thought of myself as a guy who reads good books, regardless of who wrote them, but the facts proved otherwise. My girlfriend, meanwhile, pointed out that her reading list was split fairly evenly between the sexes. The only conclusion I could draw is that I am a chauvinist pig. Well, maybe not, but for a guy who claims he has no biases, my reading list was well stocked with white men and little else.To remedy this, I've decided to try a little experiment this year. For the entire year, I am alternating between books by men and women. Aside from enforcing gender equality, this has so far leant some much needed discipline to my life.Some of you will no doubt say, "But Patrick, I'm not a sexist pig. I don't have to force myself to read women, it comes naturally." My hat is off to you, but I'm sure you have a literary blind spot that could be addressed with a program like mine. Maybe you only read contemporary literature. Perhaps your reading list is strictly non-fiction. Maybe you haven't read a short story collection cover-to-cover since college. If any of these are true, I recommend developing a little curriculum of your own. You'll find your literary world blown wide open, and you'll introduce yourself to some great books you might not otherwise get around to reading. Essays Patrick Brown * * (c) PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. counter Quantcast