A Great Community Bookstore

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Last week I wrote about Ann Patchett, a bestselling author who opened a bookstore after experiencing life in a city without one (http://wp.me/pYql4-1Kn).  A few days later, on a drive into the gold country, Mary and I were reminded of what a treasure a community bookstore can be.

The Book Seller has been a fixture in Grass Valley, CA since 1977.  For whatever reason, we hadn’t stopped by since the days when every small town had a bookshop.  In the days before anyone said, “brick and mortar,” because there was nothing else.

Kit Cole Hattem, The Book Seller owner

We didn’t set out with this or any other destination in mind, but stopped to look in the window and then walked in.  Several customers chatting with the salesclerk and carefully arranged displays in the front suggested the store was thriving.  With Ann Patchett’s words in my mind and Joni Mitchell’s too – “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” – I looked around to see what made this bookstore work.

Unique books for one thing, stacked from floor to ceiling.  I leafed through a few biographies I hadn’t seen before.  The selections had clearly been made by readers, not corporate marketing groups.

Lots of books of regional interest – fiction, history, natural history, and travel guides for the gold country and the Sierra foothills were well represented.

And ebook fans were not left out.  Notes on every shelf invited readers to order Google format books from the Book Seller’s website.  You can read these ebooks on pcs, macs, smartphones, tablets including the kindle fire, and all dedicated readers except the kindle.

Kit Hattem, owner of the Book Seller since 1985, said the store functions as a hub of a vibrant local writing community.  As if to emphasize her words, Steve Sanfield, a nationally known poet, author, and storyteller strolled in to chat with the sales clerk and browse for a few minutes.  Sanfield founded a popular summer event, the Sierra Storytelling Festival, 26 years ago.

To top off the great vibe in the store, conversation stopped when someone came in with a dog, for The Book Seller is pet friendly.  You can’t do that at Barnes&Noble…

I think you’ll enjoy The Book Seller’s website,  http://www.thebookseller.biz/.  If you read ebooks, think about ordering your next one from them.  And look around your own area.  What gems like this are waiting to be discovered and win your support?

The Shape-Changer’s Wife by Sharon Shinn: A Book Review

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I’ve enjoyed several young adult fantasies by Sharon Shinn and reviewed one of them here http://wp.me/pYql4-iQ.  Before she published her first YA book, Summers at Castle Auburn, in 2001, Shinn had a solid reputation as an adult fantasy writer.  I recently finished her first novel, The Shape-Changer’s Wife, which won the Locus award for Best First Fantasy Novel in 1995. Shinn was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer that year.  On top of these honors – all well deserved – long time readers of this blog will know I am fascinated by stories of shape shifters (check out three posts I wrote on the theme in Feb., 2011).

At the start of The Shape-Changer’s Wife we meet Aubrey, a young man with a sunny disposition who is already on his way to becoming a skilled magician. His master sends him to study with Glyrenden, highly skilled in the art of shape-changing:

“Learn everything he teaches you so well you can cast his own spells back at him,” the old wizard had said. “Glyrenden respects only those stronger than he is, and those he hates. If you cannot beat him, he will destroy you.”

With the optimism of youth, Aubrey brushes the warning aside and sets out. Even when local villagers react to Aubrey’s request for directions with narrowed eyes and cold responses, his hunger to learn drives him on.

Shinn is masterful in building a sense of menace, which begins the moment Aubrey steps into the 3″ of dust that cake the entry way of the shape-changer’s house.  It builds when he meet the uncanny servants – Orion, covered with hair except for his eyes and nose, and Arachne, a woman who fights a loosing battle against the dust, while muttering curses and shooting everyone hostile glances.  Above all, Aubrey is fascinated by Lilith, the shape-changer’s wife, whose emerald eyes seem to see right through him, who is silent and self-contained, and doesn’t react to anything like any other woman he’s ever met.

Shinn’s presents magic as matter-of-fact.  Shape-changing sounds dramatic to Aubrey, so he is dismayed when Glyrenden hands him piles of books on anatomy and science and makes him practice hours of concentration exercises.  “How can you change into something you don’t understand in all of it’s details,” the shape-changer asks.  In Shinn’s books, magic is seldom dramatic.  More often, it forms an atmosphere like the felt danger offstage in a Hitchcock movie.

By the middle of the tale, Aubrey is hopelessly in love with Lilith, even as he perceives that “She seemed to be fashioned from the idea of a woman, and not to be a woman at all.”  This and other related perceptions lead him to pierce the secret of Glyrenden’s house – why the townspeople fear him, and why no bird or animal will come anywhere near the wizard’s dwelling.  Aubrey learns that the only way to undo Glyrenden’s “barbaric spells” is to kill him or become a better wizard, and even if he succeeds, the spells may prove too strong to break.

“I came to magic with joy.” Aubrey says.  “I thought it was a splendid thing to take the well of power that I found within me and shape it to marvelous uses…But magic, I have discovered…is not inherently good in itself.  And some of it – yes, some of it is inherently evil.  There are wicked spells, savage spells, enchantments that are so black that even to know them withers the heart just a little, taints the soul.  And yet to be a great magician, to be a sorcerer of any ability or renown, those spells must be learned as well.  For if a magician does not know them, they can be used against him.”

With measured pace, Shinn has brings us through her imagined world to one of our oldest stories, that of tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  The Shape-Changer’s Wife is also a love story, but told with a kind of restraint that is rare in the fantasy genre.

You seldom see titles by Sharon Shinn on the shelves of Barnes&Noble, and never her YA titles.  At first glance, her books are not the stuff of blockbuster series and lucrative movie deals, though I can see them as moody, gothic dramas.

Shinn is a wizard in her own right.  Beyond the pleasure I’ve gained from six of her novels, I return to them often to study the masterful way she can weave character and atmosphere into stories I cannot forget.

Sharon Shinn

Happy Losar

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Today, February, 22, is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent on the Christian calendar.  It is also Losar, the beginning of 2139, the Year of the Water Dragon on the Tibetan calendar.  The dates of Lent and Losar both involve lunar calculations, so it’s just coincidence that they align this year.

Water Dragon

Tibetan astrology predates Buddhism but was adapted by that tradition.  There are 12 signs and five elements, for a total of 60 combinations. The astrological year begins not at Losar, but around the time of the Winter Solstice, so children born since December 22 are Water Dragons.  So are those celebrating their 60th birthday.

Here is a good introduction to Tibetan astrology. http://www.tactus.dk/tacom/.  It’s a complicated system, so this is a newspaper horoscope version.  One website predicts 2012 will be “an eventful, mixed blessing year” – what year isn’t?   Another says, “The year of the Dragon is full of energy and surprises.  The element of water symbolizes calm and receptivity.”

The Chinese government has closed the borders of Tibet to foreigners during the traditional 15 days of Losar celebration.  In recognition of recent unrest, some Tibetan leaders in exile are asking that traditional celebrations not go forward.  Prayers and ceremonies will still mark the event worldwide.  Tibetans believe that the power of both positive and negative actions during the first month of the new year are greatly multiplied in their effect on the year to come.

In any event, Losar is a time when the traditional greeting, Tashi Delek, is given, a phrase that is sometimes translated as, “Blessings and good luck.”

Ann Patchett Interviewed on the Colbert Report

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By a happy coincidence, I was channel surfing Monday night at just the right moment to catch author and indie bookstore owner, Ann Patchett, on the Colbert Report.  In an earlier post, I discussed Ms Patchett’s bookstore venture. http://wp.me/pYql4-1qW.

Author and owner of Parnassus Books, Ann Patchett

Colbert played devil’s advocate, arguing that brick and mortar bookstores are obsolete, and besides, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is no one to mess around with – didn’t he bludgeon the owner of Borders to death with a tire iron?

Patchett said, fine, stay indoors, never talk to anyone, live your life online, “But you’ll wake up one day and find you’ve become the unibomber.”

“A strong argument,” Colbert conceded.

From the sound of it, Patchett’s Parnassus Books has become a community gathering place – not just a bookstore, but a literary salon, a poets corner, a venue for local musicians, and a place where the staff is composed of avid readers who can make suggestions for every taste.  If I were an independent bookstore owner, I’d be tempted to travel to Nashville to look at this model of success.

The full episode is available online: http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-february-20-2012-ann-patchett.  The Patchett interview is about 2/3 of the way through the show, though with a cup of coffee and a slightly twisted sends of humor, you may enjoy listening to it all.

A Day With Anam Thubten

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Last summer I wrote about a retreat I attended with Anam Thubten. http://wp.me/pYql4-Wp .  Another time I posted about his first book, No Self, No Problem. http://wp.me/pYql4-gg.  Just over a week ago, I join a large group to attend another retreat with this Tibetan master.  The event coincided with the publication of his new book, The Magic of Awareness.

The magic of awareness cover

At first I was not going to write about the day because, in Anam Thubten’s own words, “I don’t have so much to say today.”  After a pause, he added, “I think you already know these things.”  A lot “happened,” that day, but not the sort of things you  can write about.

I thought of the Buddha’s flower sermon.  One day when a group of monks assembled to hear Sakyamuni Buddha, he simply held up a white flower someone had given him as he climbed onto the teaching dais.  One monk, Mahākāśyapa, smiled in understanding, and we date the practice of Zen from that moment.  A lot happened that day too – we remember it 2600 years later – but there is also not much to write about.  What are you going to “say” about holding up a flower?

That’s sort of the point.  And the point of this post.

For some reason, I was wide awake at 5:00am this morning.  I got up, made coffee, and dug into the Sunday paper – for some other unfathomable reason, I was really looking forward to catching up on all the news (what are they putting in the water these days?).  It only took one article on the presidential campaign to cure that delusion and cause me to trash a political post I almost had ready for Monday.  No way I wanted to add my $0.02 to the chatter.  There in the pre-dawn quiet, I thought again of Anam Thubten, the wisdom of silence, and the Buddha’s flower.

At the retreat, Anam Thubten gave few instructions on meditation beyond this: “The essence of meditation is doing nothing.” He elaborates in his first book:

“to rest means to pause, to pause from working very hard, to pause from continuously constructing this world of illusions, the dualistic world, the world that is based on the separation between self and other, you and me, good and bad.  When you completely take away the egoic mind, the creator of this illusory world, then realization is already there and truth is automatically realized.  Therefore, the heart of Buddhist meditation practice is to relax and to rest.”

When you think about it, those are really quite enough words for a lifetime…

King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald: An Appreciation

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My recent discussion of unlikely mentors and guardians http://wp.me/pYql4-1J8 reminded me of Tireseas and Gonzaga, two “mystical vagabonds” (book jacket description) in one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read.

Ian McDonald, a visionary author who lives in Belfast, published  King of Morning, Queen of Day in 1991.  I still pick it up to read certain passages or a random chapter, to study and enjoy the ideas, the writing, and characters.

The narrative follows three women of three generations who are alternately attracted and attacked by creatures of the Mygmus, a technical name for the infinitely overlapping worlds of Faerie.

“The Mygmus may be viewed not so much as a place, a spatio-temporal relationship, a quasi-Euclidean geometrical domain, but as a state.  The concept is a familiar one in modern quantum physics, in which time is not considered a dynamic process, but a succession of recurring states eternally coexistent.  Such thinking liberates us from our essentially linear concepts of time, with past, present, and future.”  So reads a manuscript given to one of the women by a strange group of deformed, “Midnight Children.”

The first of the women, romantic, Edwardian Emily, dreams of a faerie lover and seeks him out.  First her rapes her, and then she disappears.

Gonzaga and Tireseas help Emily’s daughter, Jessica, battle free of the otherworld threat, which is personified by her mother, who has become a demonic force.

Jessica’s daughter, Enye, modern young woman in Dublin, battles Otherworld manifestations at night with martial arts swords.  Gonzaga and Tireseas charge her blades with high tech wizardry as well as ancient charms that allows her to win her way into Faerie, redeem her grandmother, Emily, and return to modern day Dublin.  The author gives the ending a contemporary twist that I won’t reveal here.

McDonald’s characters are among the most vivid in any novel I can remember, painted with a sure touch both in broad stroke and detail.  Every December, for instance, I reread “Enye’s soliloquy” – my name for it, with a nod to Molly Bloom.  It’s her internal monologue, in response to the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have Christmas all year long?”  It’s a long single sentence paragraph – not quite as long as the one that ends Joyce’s Ulysses, but then Joyce doesn’t make me laugh out loud.  I’ll quote the whole thing next December.

With his first book, Desolation Road, 1988, Ian McDonald won critical acclaim, and an Arthur C. Clarke award nomination.  Like other cyberpunk authors at the time, his vision of the impact of  technology at the birth of the internet age continues to amaze.  As a quick aside in King of Morning, Queen of Day, McDonald throws out a challenge to fantasy writers that has largely remained unanswered in the 21 years since it was written.  In the same manuscript that defined the Mygmus, Enye reads:

“I have this dread that…somehow we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a technological age.  We are withdrawing into another age’s mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler…and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane.  We have created a comfortable, sanitized pseudo feudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in scanty armor and dungeon masters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Colombian drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of whales, and the desecration of the rain forests.

Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt…where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?”

Ian McDonald

I haven’t kept up with the work of Ian McDonald in the two decades since I first read King of Morning but returning to the book via the characters of Tireseas and Gonzaga reminded me to do so. McDonald published Planesrunner, his first YA fantasy, in December, 2011. Here’s the blurb:

“When Everett Singh’s scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer. Suddenly, this teenager has become the owner of the most valuable object in the multiverse—the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel earths, and there are dark forces in the Ten Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but this is my very next read.

An Interesting Take on the Publishing World

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I’ve been following Kristen Lamb’s blog for a while.  I’ve picked up some useful writing tips, like the recommendation that led me to Save the Cat. http://wp.me/pYql4-1BC.

Ms. Lamb is also a keen observer of changes roiling the publishing industry, and her latest post is worth a look by anyone with an interest in that world.  The post is called,  “Bracing for Impact – The Future of Big Publishing in the New Paradigm.” http://warriorwriters.wordpress.com/2012/02/15/bracing-for-impact-the-future-of-big-publishing-in-the-new-paradigm/

The author makes several key points:

  1. The music industry was the first to get steamrolled by new technology.  They buried their heads in the sand and thought their customers were music stores when they really were music lovers.  I don’t buy CD’s anymore, do you?
  2. Kodak went bankrupt because management thought they were a film company.  They forgot the vision of George Eastman, their founder, who knew their customers cared about pictures, not film.
  3. Finally, Ms. Lamb quotes a startling line in an Author’s Guild report:  “For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers.”   I read this a few times and found the analogy to a car wreck very appropriate. 

Ms. Lamb offer suggestions to traditional publishers – the same message she sent to their headquarters in the past, to no avail.  For instance, what if the Big Six developed their own ebook divisions where new authors could get a launch, and a print contract later if online sales were strong?  Why couldn’t they design apps for smart phones and e-readers, and set them up so that indie bookstores could help customers with downloads and get a commission in the process?

There’s much in this post of interest, including a link to another blog that details the latest turf war between Amazon and everyone else.   Everywhere you look are signs that traditional publishing has hit an iceberg.  Kristen Lamb, among many other things, does an excellent job in helping us sort this out.

Angels Incognito

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The local California Writer’s Club branch hosts an annual short-short story contest every year.  I hadn’t intended to enter until this morning when one of those end-of-the-night inspirations slipped into awareness.  A story idea:  A reprobate is convinced that “they” are stealing our memories, and he is probably right.

I wrote the opening with relative ease.  We’ll see how it goes; openings are easy, but I also have a great fondness for this kind of character – the guardian or the wise one whose appearance is humble or even repulsive.  You meet him – he is most often male – in various guises in movies and fiction:

Mel Gibson in "Conspiracy Theory," 1997

He is found  in myth and scripture.  John the Baptist is a classic example, who must have dismayed a lot of the city people who came out to hear him.

John the Baptist

Tilopa, (989 – 1069) one of Tibetan Buddhism’s greatest teachers, was expelled from a monastery and made his living as a sesame pounder, a pretty low rung on the social ladder.

Tilopa

Once in a while, you meet someone like this in real life.  I read an account by a man who wanted to go to India in search of a guru, but then found his teacher, a Zen master, earning his living by fixing washing machines in a laundromat 12 miles away.

When my wife was a social worker at Loaves and Fishes, a local center that helps the homeless, she was startled one day as a small hispanic man climbed out of a dumpster in a parking lot. Significantly, his name was Jesus. Mary’s eye’s still light up when she tells what a joyful man he was.  The meeting was so unexpected, but left such a vivid memory, that she thinks of him whenever the subject of angels comes up.

These reflections led me to think of one of my all time favorite fantasy novels, King of Morning, Queen of Day, by Ian McDonald, 1991.  The story features a pair of otherworldly guardians who look a lot like bums as they craft powerful magical charms from bottle caps and debris.  McDonald came to mind when he published his latest novel in December.  I haven’t yet read the new one, but I’ll discuss King of Morning next time.

Meanwhile, has anyone else encountered an angel, a wise man or woman, a mentor or a guardian who showed up disguised as an “ordinary” person but then turned out to be anything but?