Reading Local Seattle

{ Old paperbacks make for a good holiday-time fire. }

By Doug Nufer

I used to despise going through book stores during the holiday season. Holidays marked time: year after year, to shop at those stores was to expose myself to all of the books that had been published instead of mine. And yet, I had no choice. I had to keep on writing. It made me think of Humphrey Bogart in African Queen, getting back into the leech-infested waters to drag his boat through the weeds.

At the beginning of the millennium much has changed, for better and for worse. Book stores are closing, and a hog’s share of those left are chains that focus on bestsellers. Most of the few independents would rather deal with conglomerates than with independent presses. Small publishers that pay next to nothing demand a writer submit through an agent, even though no agent can afford to peddle manuscripts to publishers that pay next to nothing. For micro presses, literary contests , narrow submission/reading periods, and the pocket veto rejection have become standard. To submit, a writer must either enter a contest for a fee or wait for the month of the year when the press is considering new work. Many submissions are permitted on-line, which makes it easier to submit and to be rejected. The rejection slip has gone from being an all-too-common courtesy to a quaint relic, with “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” replacing the litany of euphemisms for, “Hit the road, Jack,” but even winners face a losing proposition: after many months or years, the book comes out, only to be widely ignored. At least now, I can feel fortunate to have been published at all.

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{ Time is not a stiff tick }

YouTubia is neither a utopia or geographical location but a portal through time. In essence, a cue, a prompt, a provocation that stirs a memory so vivid and enveloping it constitutes a location, a cleft in the topologies of time. For Proust it was a madeleine soaked in tea; for me, it is a tiny screen of pixels, Red Skelton bouncing up and down in a crowd of screaming girls while a young Mick Jagger sings “Tell Me” with the Rolling Stones in the lobby of the London Palladium September 22nd, 1964. The emotion is palpable. The separation of 45 years melts away. I want to grow my hair long. I want to walk on the wild side and write explosive dangerous poetry like Arthur Rimbaud and Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman and Allen Ginsberg. I want to push boundaries and open the doors of perception, wide. I want to devote my life to art and poetry and go to England and visit the house where Keats wrote “Ode To A Nightingale” and watched coal deliveries and ate nectarines and met Fanny Brawne. The song gives me all those feelings anew, fresh, vigorous, unqualified. Nothing limps. Nothing balks. Everything is limitless. This is not the slow controlled glide of mature, later life, but the reckless energy of youth, before any seeds have been planted, before any ships have sailed, before any struggles and disappointments have denatured and tamed that feeling. The surprise of seeing the very young, incipient Stones exactly as they appeared on TV in 1964 with their peculiar blend of English Romanticism, raffish libertinism, and the electric blues of Chicago’s Southside brought the strength and purity of that original feeling back to me. Did it last? No, of course not. A 61 year-old man cavorting about like a shaggy teenager would quickly swerve into buffoonery. Age has done much to enrich and undermine the Stones after 40 odd years of almost relentless performance. But a lesson was learned.

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Not right, not right at all.

I hate it when people call me judgmental. The implication is twofold: that I have the arrogance to believe that I know all things, and that I suffer from a narrowness of mind. Consequently, any and all opinions that I express are corrupt and irresponsible. It is pointless to continue the argument. Once your authority is undermined  you have no place in an argument. What is laughably ironic about this is that the person who has accused you of being judgmental is being judgmental. If everyone is blind, who can discern the one person who can see?

The opposite of being judgmental is being open-minded. This does not mean that you are unencumbered by judgment. It means that you have the capacity to suspend judgment and consider things from another point of view. It is a grand luxury if there is no other pressing business. But if you have to decide whether to get a heart operation or not, send a troop of men into battle, or step in to stop a fight you do not have the luxury of endlessly unraveling the ramifications, à la Hamlet. You have to act, and act quickly.

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Leagues weirder than these people.

Identity is a mysterious and cumbersome business. No one truly finds out who they are because we are continually changing. Literally: hair, size, weight, age, gonads, wrinkles, tattoos, and the baptism of daily experience continually change. Everything right down to one’s hormones and cuticles is in constant change. Literature is full of this. It is a primary theme. Transformation is the pivot about which many narratives turn.

I was fortunate to grow up during a time when the collective identity of American youth was going through a change of astronomical proportions. The traditional roles of the staid Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, and Father Knows Best variety had been discarded. Young people wanted something different from life than serenity and moderation. No one was sure what they wanted or who they really wanted to be or even if being someone were really all that attractive to begin with. Maybe it was better to lose oneself in Europe or India in a quest for the ultimate “elsewhere“. There were mythologies available for these ruptures called albums. Rock groups held the key to the most adventuresome personal narratives possible.

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