the past has the scent of books and black pepper
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When my friend M'ris posts to her journal, I find myself clicking "bookmark" as often as not. This time it was for this line: "For heaven's sake do not rely on a plan that assumes that other people are all far more efficient and organized than you have ever managed to be. It will lead to tears."
It was odd seeing Merrie Atlas's photo in the business section of this morning's Tennessean. I worked with her at Store 01, and with Robert Teicher at headquarters. One of my favorite memories of bookselling is of the dumbfounded expression on an assistant manager's face when Merrie walked past him wearing a t-shirt proclaiming that "Nobody knows I'm Elvis." Robert was my predecessor as the drama and dance buyer; as senior fiction buyer, he wielded incredible clout in the industry, but I also knew him as the friendly, soft-spoken guy who would saunter over to Jurassic Park (the corner where my cubicle was located, so named because four of the five buyers there were also industry veterans) to shoot the breeze about sports, sales meetings, and other whatsits.
This CNN article about the closing is the best I've seen at itemizing what really went wrong. I've been saying for over a decade that the company started to die when it went public. There's a brilliant quote from Joe Gable, the legendary general manager of Store 01: "The problem with the new guys is they tried to take the book business, which is complex and boring, and make it simple and sexy."
On the poetry front, 2012 is starting to come into focus: I'll be reading with some other Uphook poets at Nashville's Global Education Center on Friday, January 20 (and in South Carolina January 21-22), and then in March (date TBD), Mary, Joanne, and I will gather at the main branch of the Nashville Public Library. There may be some poems celebrating the invention of paper; there will certainly be poems about women and science and mayhem. :-)
The week's "Want to Get To" list includes sending out some subs, but that's contingent on the "Must Get Done" items getting done, so I'm diving back into the redline tango in a sec. In the meantime, here are two poems from the bookmarks folder:
DeLana R.A. Dameron, Reflection, broken
(You want to know
when I will write a poem about being sated.
I tell you I do not know what writing feels like
that is not my reflection, broken...)
[Yet another instance of coming across verses that don't speak my truth but kick ass anyway.]
Kathleen Flenniken, The Nuns' Remains
(On the eighth day of rain,
the nuns --
stacked in twos
in their Calvary graves --
washed down the hill
to our own back garden...)
It was odd seeing Merrie Atlas's photo in the business section of this morning's Tennessean. I worked with her at Store 01, and with Robert Teicher at headquarters. One of my favorite memories of bookselling is of the dumbfounded expression on an assistant manager's face when Merrie walked past him wearing a t-shirt proclaiming that "Nobody knows I'm Elvis." Robert was my predecessor as the drama and dance buyer; as senior fiction buyer, he wielded incredible clout in the industry, but I also knew him as the friendly, soft-spoken guy who would saunter over to Jurassic Park (the corner where my cubicle was located, so named because four of the five buyers there were also industry veterans) to shoot the breeze about sports, sales meetings, and other whatsits.
This CNN article about the closing is the best I've seen at itemizing what really went wrong. I've been saying for over a decade that the company started to die when it went public. There's a brilliant quote from Joe Gable, the legendary general manager of Store 01: "The problem with the new guys is they tried to take the book business, which is complex and boring, and make it simple and sexy."
On the poetry front, 2012 is starting to come into focus: I'll be reading with some other Uphook poets at Nashville's Global Education Center on Friday, January 20 (and in South Carolina January 21-22), and then in March (date TBD), Mary, Joanne, and I will gather at the main branch of the Nashville Public Library. There may be some poems celebrating the invention of paper; there will certainly be poems about women and science and mayhem. :-)
The week's "Want to Get To" list includes sending out some subs, but that's contingent on the "Must Get Done" items getting done, so I'm diving back into the redline tango in a sec. In the meantime, here are two poems from the bookmarks folder:
DeLana R.A. Dameron, Reflection, broken
(You want to know
when I will write a poem about being sated.
I tell you I do not know what writing feels like
that is not my reflection, broken...)
[Yet another instance of coming across verses that don't speak my truth but kick ass anyway.]
Kathleen Flenniken, The Nuns' Remains
(On the eighth day of rain,
the nuns --
stacked in twos
in their Calvary graves --
washed down the hill
to our own back garden...)
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