Something Unusual, Something Strange

'In a land far far away,' before the internet really existed, I used to hang out in bookstores a lot looking for the right book for me. I had a belief that it would just pop out at me, as if by magic, or if that's too strong a word, that a book would choose me, like a pet, and to this day I kind of look at books, movies, and paintings like that, thinking that some higher hand of fate was at work, when I saw a book on a carousel, that caught my eye. Sure, I've been turned onto things by friends and strangers that I wouldn't have otherwise known about, but more often than not, these 'picks,' usually turn out to be 'underwhelming,' and make me wish I could just find a book on a street corner and call it mine. Unfortunately, there aren't many bookstores left to go to in Seattle, and that's really saying something, since this city prides itself on its literacy, and like everyone else I've just kind of retreated to the internet in the hopes of finding some magic dust on line, or communicating through the randomness of strangers and old friends on FB, but it's just not the same thing as loitering in a book shop. There still is a Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle, and I guess there will always be at least one bookstore left for the truly devout, or the lazy, or those just not good enough at working a computer, or too poor to own one, but they are already becoming as ubiquitous as TV's, and that will be over in a generation, or a millisecond, take your pick. I think the 'spirit' of going to a bookstore, or working at one (I worked at Book Soup in L.A., and thought it was the best job I'd ever had, a hard one to get), has already been killed by those thoughts that swirl in the air above us and sort of define society, the viruses of the era.

I never thought I'd say this but I was actually surprised to find myself going to a bookstore the other day. I only went because I was meeting my girlfriend at work, with half an hour to kill, and even then I wondered if I'd be able to do it, or if I'd grow bored, and find nothing to read. I took the elevator downstairs and saw the 'new fiction' shelf but nothing really popped out at me, only increasing my alienation with the publishing world, not to mention most of the 'New Fiction' felt very old. Then one popped out at me called 'The Opposite of Loneliness,' by a young collegiate looking woman with her photo on the cover, and it's so rare to see this kind of thing, I immediately perked up. Sure, I was skeptical, and the title kind of threw me right off the bat, because I study a lot of astrology, and the idea of 'opposition' is a very pertinent one that takes a lot of thought, but I let it go, knowing it was my own 'hang-up.' Besides, the title must have been good because it caught my eye and one thing titles and advertising have in common is that they want to get into your subconscious, whether your conscious mind knows it or not.

I picked a copy off the display table and took it to the coffee shop area, run by Starbucks, where they let any ol' Tom, Dick, or Harry, sit and read, a perk. It's funny that I should say that because in my more idealistic days I would have ranted against Barnes & Noble for selling out to Starbucks, the corporate cup o' Joe, with the corporate book, but in 2014 you take what you can get. I had a couple of quick thoughts before reading it and one was that 'The Opposite of Loneliness,' was a work of 'creative nonfiction,' a genre I blogged about in the last six months, and that I think has taken over collegiate writing courses throughout the U.S. thus dating me. The influence of the 'New Journalism' of the Sixites hadn't really spread to academia yet, or not entirely, even though Hunter S. Thompson was quite popular, but the literary heroes when I studied creative writing (can you study creative writing?) were Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo (ugh!), and a kind of postmodern Boomer minimalist school of fiction, but not 'creative nonfiction,' that blurs the line between an essay and art. I certainly wasn't liberated enough to write 'creative nonfiction' in my early Twenties, wanting to be the next F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Hemingway. I liked Jack Kerouac a lot, but I'm not sure his autobiographical writing wasn't more of a Catholic confessional in the guise of fiction, with all of the regular trappings, than 'creative nonfiction,' that really relies on the idea of an essay, in a way that the Beats just didn't. In my opinion, Joan Didion is really the spiritual Godmother of the creative non-fictionalist, because she wrote these sort of lyrical beautiful pieces in the late Sixties that were informed by fiction and poetry, but were neither, veering more towards an essay, but a very self reflective one that somehow situated her in her times as much as anything.

The subheading to "The Opposite of Loneliness," was 'stories and essay's,' and this combined with a young woman on the cover that looked like she could be in Lena Dunham's TV show, "Girls," (Dunham made a movie called "Creative Nonfiction"), lead me to believe that I had stumbled upon a new literary sensation lighting it up in Williamsburg,and that I was a contemporary reader, for once. The first essay story was the title piece and it was about Marina Keegan ending her time at Yale and looking forward to a new life, but not with any hope for the future, but rather a tinge of sadness that she'd never feel that part of anything again, and it was a very moving piece, that sent shivers down my spine. I related to every word she wrote and that odd dual anxiety that college gives of both thinking that your life is going to take off, and that you've seen better days all at the same time; a feeling of being one with your peers, like you must get in the military in your late teens or early twenties, without any family, or any real definition. It is an unusually loaded emotional time for everyone, because it's like you know that what you're in for is going to change you forever, but you don't know how, and though you're told not to fear it, the poet inside of you realizes that life is only going to thin out and get lonelier from there, as your peers define themselves through family and work, losing the incipient dream of the undergraduate excited by every new major that flashes before them. It was a beautiful piece of writing and I went onto the next piece that was more of a story than an essay, but a very personal one, that I would have been far too shy to write at 22, though I shouldn't have been, and while it didn't have the immediate punch of the opening essay, it was good clear writing about a guy she was dating at Yale that had unexpectedly died, a weird kind of macabre love story, about her competing for his love with his more steady girl.

I looked at my cell phone and saw that it was almost time to leave to meet Jenny, but I didn't want to put the book down, and did my best to memorize the author's name, not having a pen on me, even though my father, an ad man, always told me to carry a pen to jot down ideas. I was going to look up Marina Keegan when I got home and put a hold on her book at the library, because I really thought that the Gods wanted me to read her, and had put me in Barnes & Noble at that exact moment to make a new discovery, and it has been so long since I've made a new discovery in letters that really blew me over, that I should really pay attention, especially since I have become something of a 'creative nonfictionalist' myself (I know the spelling is wrong). I glanced at the back of the book to see what writers had jumped on the Marina Keegan bandwagon, and started reading Harold Bloom say how much he liked the story, and that glimpses of talent could be seen, making it all the sadder that Marina Keegan had died, leaving us only this book. "It can't be," I thought, especially since she was so young on the cover, and the stories were full of 'texts' and computer talk that placed it very much in the present, not to mention she graduated Yale and was all but cajoling her peers to take the bull by the horns and do what they could to change the world, or make their imprint on it. It was doubly weird because I was also reading a story of hers about a boy in college dying, a rare event, only to learn she actually died, a year or so after. I wasn't sure what to think about the 'Boomer' critics on the back hedging on the quality of her work since I found it hard to believe that they'd ever send shivers down my spine like she did, looking forward to the future, but holding onto the past, even if I read it in only twenty minutes. I felt like I'd discovered a significant artist and lost her all in a flash.