My favorite passage in Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin (so far):

“I began to understand that what drew me to Rin Tin Tin most of all was his permanence—how he had managed to linger in the minds of so many people for so long, when so much else shines for a moment only and then finally fades away. He was something you could dream about. He could leap twelve feet, and he could leap through time.”

A few thoughts on the end of Borders

If you like books it’s hard not to have harbored mixed feelings about Borders and now about its demise. On the one hand, Borders was never good for small, independent bookstores, offering discounts with which they couldn’t compete, buying stock in quantities they couldn’t match, and redefining bookstores as cavernous superstores rather than the intimate spaces they’d long been. On the other hand: Books! Rows and rows of them. Man, did they have a lot of books

That was what struck me the most the first time I set foot in a Borders when I visited Madison, WI as a prospective grad student in 1995. I’d grown up on Waldenbooks, B.Dalton and other mall stores, only late in my stay in the Dayton area discovering the great independent bookstore Books & Co. (Which was subsequently bought by the mega-retailer Books A Million, which then drained it of its character.) But here, under one roof, was seemingly any book I would ever want to buy. It felt like a realized dream, consequences for small bookstores be damned.

That’s, for better or worse, how I thought of Borders until recently, when the chain’s financial woes cut into the shopping experience. I won’t miss what Borders became, but for a while it served as a haven for readers everywhere. I loved that a teenage kid where I grew up could have easy access to all the books I didn’t ever see on shelves growing up. (And, yeah, I know: Libraries. I’m not forgetting them. I grew up loving them and still do. But I also grew up in a shopping culture and ended up spending hours hanging out in bookstores during the many, many trips to the malls across America I made as a kid.)

That’s over now and while Barnes & Noble and others hang in there, those stores never seemed like they were stocked by people who liked books the way Borders used to be. The demise creates some opportunities for small stores, even in the Kindle era. Our around-the-corner store Women & Children First has continued its focus on books geared toward women and children—hence the name—but also partnered with Google books to create an eBook storefront.

I hope it works out for them and others like them. They are, in every way that counts, a better home for books than the behemoths. But wasn’t it kind of nice that, for blip in time of about 15 years, stores for book lovers competed for space shoulder-to-shoulder with housewares stores and chain restaurants? The next generation of readers aren’t going to be stumbling into a place that overwhelms them with the sheer volume of books out there to be discovered. They’ll have to be brought to books deliberately, whether they take the form of paper or words on a screen, and find their way from there. That’s probably as it should be, but at the moment I’m feeling a little nostalgic for a moment of plentitude and pages without end.

10 People who, now that I’m halfway through Rick Perlstein’s great Nixonland, I believe would have made America better had they been elected in 1968 instead of Nixon, Humphrey, or Wallace:

1. Eugene McCarthy

2. Nelson Rockefeller

3. George McGovern

4. George Romney

5. John Lindsay

6. Eldridge Cleaver

7. Pigasus

8. George “Goober” Lindsey

9. Walter Cronkite

10. Checkers 

What I’m reading now: Jane Austen, Sense And Sensibility (1811)

“She could not but smile to see the graciousness of both mother and daughter towards the very person— for Lucy was particularly distinguished—whom of all others, had they known as much as she did, they would have been most anxious to mortify; while she herself, who had comparatively no power to wound them, sat pointedly slighted by both. But while she smiled at a graciousness so misapplied, she could not reflect on the mean-spirited folly from which it sprung, nor observe the studied attentions with which the Miss Steeles courted its continuance, without thoroughly despising them all four.”

Book I just read: The Castle Of Otranto, by Horace Walpole

I’d been reading this 1764 novel, pretty much indisputably the source of the gothic novel craze of the late-18th and early-19th century, for years for a couple of simple reasons: 1) It’s short and 2) It has a haunted castle. What more do you need? I can’t say I loved it however. The prototype of centuries of bestsellers to come, it’s pretty much all plot and breathless confusion. And after a brilliantly bizarre opening in which a worthless prince gets smashed by a giant helmet on his wedding day, the supernatural elements pretty much move to the margins in favor of a scheming count’s romantic machinations. Still, it’s a brisk read and clearly an important one, too, since it foreshadows every spooky castle darkest reaches of the dark ages story to come. It also, at base, seems like it might have been meant not to be taken too seriously, though I didn’t find myself marveling at its wit.

Speaking of castles, I found myself just as intrigued by what I learned of the book’s author as of the book itself. Walpole built his own pseudo-gothic castle called Strawberry Hill. He also coined the phrase, “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”

Cover: First edition of Philip K. Dick’s The Martian Time-Slip (1964)

“‘I’d give anything if I could go on acting it out, playing a role. But that’s a real split—there’s no split up until then; they’re wrong when they say it’s a split in the mind. If I wanted to keep going entire, without a split, I’d have to lean over and say to Dr. Glaub—’ He broke off.

‘Tell me,’ the girl said.

‘Well,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘I’d say, Doc, I can see you under the aspect of eternity and you’re dead.’”

“The tumult was as ten thousand Thors, smiting with hammers against the enemies of Odin. As a forge upon whose shouting anvils was being shaped a new world.

A new world? A metal world!” - A. Merritt, The Metal Monster (1920)

W.W. Denslow, The Tin Woodman from the original illustrations to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz

“So Oz brought a pair of tinsmith’s shears and cut a small, square hole in the left side of the Tin Woodman’s breast. Then, going to a chest of drawers, he took out a pretty heart, made entirely of silk and stuffed with sawdust.

‘Isn’t it a beauty?’ he asked?

‘It is, indeed!’ replied the Woodman, who was greatly pleased. ‘But is it a kind heart?’

‘Oh very!’ answered Oz.”