Non-Fiction, nonplused
Feb. 26th, 2004 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabThis recent tradition of waking up in the eight o'clock hour is getting really damned old, as well as nauseating, migraine-inducing, and dull, but it has reacquainted me with "breakfast," which is a thing with eggs much like hope is the thing with feathers.
Today brought me to Fred 62, because they make eggs-in-the-hole, which my mom always called "gashouse eggs" when I was growing up, and because I've learned that in the wee-morning-hungover hours Fred's doesn't have the tendency (as they do in human hours) to play the jukebox at teeth-shaking levels. That, and this morning "Bernadette" (from Paul Simon's The Capeman) showed up on the pipes and I caught myself singing aloud with a furrowed brow, over my second cup of coffee and my gashouse eggs.
Took a trip down to Skylight Books after, where there's a little nexus of bliss right smack in the middle of the store between the Graphic Novels shelf and the shelf quietly labeled "Non-Fiction."
Naturally, as in any bookstore, anything that isn't fiction/plays/poetry has a good chance of adopting the non-fiction moniker, and Skylight, being a bookseller more than worth its salt, has all the requisite "Politics," "Essays," "History," and "Travel" a girl can shake a stick at, but still there's this little installation called "Non-Fiction" that I find eerily seductive, and a good place to crouch and pet the tailless store cat and thumb through stuff.
"Non-Fiction," I think I love you. I want to know about the sailors stranded in the Sahara in 1816. I want to know the true history of the spork. I like the etymology of conspiracy-theorist slang and I like anything about post-WWII masculinity in the deep South. There can never be enough books about mountain climbers or expats or spies or things that are breaded and deep-fried for me. Never enough quasi-Depression era biographies of the Hat.
So I crouched there with the store cat, who yowls like Edith and who eventually succumbed to letting me hold her, and dismissively took a nap on my jacket while I read about germ warfare, and played with all the hardbacks I can't afford.
It was while perusing the table of contents to a book about Japanese pop culture when my non-fictional bliss started to manifest itself as aggravation and then almost pissedoffedness. How dare there be so much stuff I don't know! And no matter how much I read (or buy with the pretense of someday reading) these bastards'll just keep publishing, and there's always something new to learn about cryptography or the birth of the needle compass, and the more I flipped through dustjackets the more evident my own ignorance became. So much stuff to know! So much cool stuff to read about! I want to know everything! It's not fair!
I was there for a good hour, left with a Denis Johnson travelogue/essay anthology and Billy Collins' Nine Horses and most of the store cat's fur on my pants. I didn't get the one about the post-WWII masculinity or the one about the sailors in the Sahara but I told myself -- as I always do -- that I'll read them someday, when of course we know this is a big lie because next time I end up at Skylight there's gonna be a new stack of things to piss me off in the Non-Fiction section and there's just TOO MUCH TO READ.
To make matters worse, Vintage has started to publish Vintage primers to the works of folks like Naipaul and Didion, with these really sexy b&w covers and just enough information to get a girl all hot and bothered, but not enough for her to really know anything.
When I was in high school I got to do an independent study, where I designed a course and picked a teacher to work on it with me. I invented "Cocktail Party Books," where we read just enough of those Great Works of literature I figured I'd have to someday pretend to know at a cocktail party so I could fake my way through adulthood, or so I thought.
Adulthood, as it turns out, is not nearly as easy to fake as I might have hoped, and there's only so far I can get into a conversation about Something Happened or Absalom, Absalom before I've run out of key words to drop and key names to fake.
Still, I want the Cocktail Party gloss-over to all the books in the Non-Fiction section and I want it now. Like, how is it possible I don't have a working knowledge of all the east Indian expats writing in the United States? How is there so much to know about napalm?! Who were Shackleton's most prominent successors?
Feh, I say. FEH. The world is too much with me.
On the other hand, I did write the beginning of my Markus story in my head on the way home, so the morning hours were not entirely lost. And while there will always be more fanfic than I can ever know comprehensively, at least here on LJ I know folks who probably know folks who know 'em. Or, as my father always said, if you can't know everything, at least know where to find it.
Which pisses me off when I'm trying to puzzle through "what's outside the universe?" but it's too early for that kind of headache today.
Today brought me to Fred 62, because they make eggs-in-the-hole, which my mom always called "gashouse eggs" when I was growing up, and because I've learned that in the wee-morning-hungover hours Fred's doesn't have the tendency (as they do in human hours) to play the jukebox at teeth-shaking levels. That, and this morning "Bernadette" (from Paul Simon's The Capeman) showed up on the pipes and I caught myself singing aloud with a furrowed brow, over my second cup of coffee and my gashouse eggs.
Took a trip down to Skylight Books after, where there's a little nexus of bliss right smack in the middle of the store between the Graphic Novels shelf and the shelf quietly labeled "Non-Fiction."
Naturally, as in any bookstore, anything that isn't fiction/plays/poetry has a good chance of adopting the non-fiction moniker, and Skylight, being a bookseller more than worth its salt, has all the requisite "Politics," "Essays," "History," and "Travel" a girl can shake a stick at, but still there's this little installation called "Non-Fiction" that I find eerily seductive, and a good place to crouch and pet the tailless store cat and thumb through stuff.
"Non-Fiction," I think I love you. I want to know about the sailors stranded in the Sahara in 1816. I want to know the true history of the spork. I like the etymology of conspiracy-theorist slang and I like anything about post-WWII masculinity in the deep South. There can never be enough books about mountain climbers or expats or spies or things that are breaded and deep-fried for me. Never enough quasi-Depression era biographies of the Hat.
So I crouched there with the store cat, who yowls like Edith and who eventually succumbed to letting me hold her, and dismissively took a nap on my jacket while I read about germ warfare, and played with all the hardbacks I can't afford.
It was while perusing the table of contents to a book about Japanese pop culture when my non-fictional bliss started to manifest itself as aggravation and then almost pissedoffedness. How dare there be so much stuff I don't know! And no matter how much I read (or buy with the pretense of someday reading) these bastards'll just keep publishing, and there's always something new to learn about cryptography or the birth of the needle compass, and the more I flipped through dustjackets the more evident my own ignorance became. So much stuff to know! So much cool stuff to read about! I want to know everything! It's not fair!
I was there for a good hour, left with a Denis Johnson travelogue/essay anthology and Billy Collins' Nine Horses and most of the store cat's fur on my pants. I didn't get the one about the post-WWII masculinity or the one about the sailors in the Sahara but I told myself -- as I always do -- that I'll read them someday, when of course we know this is a big lie because next time I end up at Skylight there's gonna be a new stack of things to piss me off in the Non-Fiction section and there's just TOO MUCH TO READ.
To make matters worse, Vintage has started to publish Vintage primers to the works of folks like Naipaul and Didion, with these really sexy b&w covers and just enough information to get a girl all hot and bothered, but not enough for her to really know anything.
When I was in high school I got to do an independent study, where I designed a course and picked a teacher to work on it with me. I invented "Cocktail Party Books," where we read just enough of those Great Works of literature I figured I'd have to someday pretend to know at a cocktail party so I could fake my way through adulthood, or so I thought.
Adulthood, as it turns out, is not nearly as easy to fake as I might have hoped, and there's only so far I can get into a conversation about Something Happened or Absalom, Absalom before I've run out of key words to drop and key names to fake.
Still, I want the Cocktail Party gloss-over to all the books in the Non-Fiction section and I want it now. Like, how is it possible I don't have a working knowledge of all the east Indian expats writing in the United States? How is there so much to know about napalm?! Who were Shackleton's most prominent successors?
Feh, I say. FEH. The world is too much with me.
On the other hand, I did write the beginning of my Markus story in my head on the way home, so the morning hours were not entirely lost. And while there will always be more fanfic than I can ever know comprehensively, at least here on LJ I know folks who probably know folks who know 'em. Or, as my father always said, if you can't know everything, at least know where to find it.
Which pisses me off when I'm trying to puzzle through "what's outside the universe?" but it's too early for that kind of headache today.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 12:24 pm (UTC)In the spirit of Cocktail Party Books, the Guardian's #Digested Reads' might amuse: http://books.guardian.co.uk/digestedread/0,6550,124958,00.html
no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 01:17 pm (UTC)I miss my Skylight Books.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 01:36 pm (UTC)I have a great feeling of agreement with this post. I look at my own bookshelves and cringe. I will someday read that 600 page book about cryptology that I bought on clearance. And the 35 year run of my dad's National Geos? Those too. Perhaps if I ever break my leg. I feel so dumb with all these things I don't know.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 05:22 pm (UTC)ah, but i LOVE you. we will buy books on the street and sit at cafes and be new york intellectuals.
no subject
Date: 2004-03-14 12:35 pm (UTC)... how'd you like Nine Horses?