The cover colours of many of this week’s New Arrivals are a steely blue and white. Perhaps this is a portent of a freaky winter arriving later this year. Perhaps it is just a coincidence. We chose the new arrivals books for this email partly for their appearance, believing that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge a book’s cover by its cover. Since covers are sometimes ridiculously beautiful we feel that is a legitimate byway of aesthetics. So, cool and steely it is. Cool and steely with sudden blasts of neon. That’s a nice style.
Not all is ice in the shop. The students are arriving again and the heart of the shop beats much louder. We’ve said hello to a lot of new faces. We’ve met new students, as well as their parents sizing up the local bookseller. Are we a bad influence? Are we the right kind of bad influence? It’s part of the soul of this neighbourhood that each year new lives are transplanted here, if temporarily, lives with dreams and momentum. It is a second Spring in the Autumn, actually. We love it. We love unironic enthusiasm for all things books and reading.
Camille Paglia mentioned this once in a lecture. She spoke about the loss of enthusiasm for the arts, about how it all became ironic posturing after Foucault. We would be hypocrites if we completely embraced this, as both of us are no strangers to ironic posturing. Also, we need not mention that the arts always suffer from some kind of posturing. Of course they do. THEY’RE THE ARTS. POSTURE IS JUST PART OF IT. But Paglia also mentioned the difference between the sullen delivery of FM Radio vs AM, of how art journalism is weakened by it’s constant need to be FM instead of AM. On this we solidly agree. We’re UHF. We’re Cable Access. We’re self-made radio on our ghetto blaster taping songs off 80’s CKSL 1410. Coast to Coast baby!
We’re not embarrassed by our enthusiasm, is what we’re trying to say. We’re not critics. We’re not scholars. We make, promote, and sell the damned stuff. The original bassist for Jane’s Addiction, Jason’s favourite band, just starting writing music with them again. It’s all Jason is talking about. He had the TV on the other night and all he did was watch old music videos where arty white people from Los Angeles (sporting ill-advised dreads, of course) surf and get married in Mexico. He also wakes Vanessa up through our Google Mini often with Len’s Steal My Sunshine, a song she positively hates. He knows she hates it. He hates it too (does he though?). But there’s a sort of love that’s born of it, is there not? There’s a freedom in just LOVING something, even if you know it’s awful. Cue Peter Falk’s voice in the Princess Bride:
And it was after he played Len’s Steal My Sunshine for the hundredth time that she realized what he was really saying was I Love You.
The neighbourhood is going to get crazy again. We welcome it. London needs these kids coming back each year saving us from our swampy, beer cooler life. Not that we don’t own a beer cooler ourselves.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
