Independent Bookstores: as American as French Fries

James Joyce in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris, 1938
(from: Gisele Freund)

"Everywhere in the world may look more and more like everywhere else, but there are still a few proudly Gallic institutions that you can count on spotting in any city or town in France: cafés that thrive in spite of Starbucks, bakeries with their total indifference to things gluten-free, tabacs that keep hanging on as smokers turn to e-cigarettes.

     Most pleasing of all, in this age of Amazon, are the independent bookstores—around two thousand five hundred of them, all told. Paris alone has nearly seven hundred, one for every three thousand citizens, though the ratio of bookstores to readers often feels closer to one to one. If you can’t find the Colette novel you’re looking for on Rue de Reuilly, you just go two blocks over to the Rue de Charonne, or to Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where bookstores share the street with Algerian tea shops and furniture makers that predate the Revolution.
     This isn’t a university neighborhood with an intellectual pedigree. It’s just the way things are there—pretty different from here. In a recent study of the American cities with the most bookstores, and the most per capita, New York didn’t make the top ten in either category. To a New Yorker who spent her formative years witnessing the routing of independent bookstores by Barnes & Noble, and then the gutting of Barnes & Noble by Amazon, the situation in Paris is luxurious beyond belief."
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
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What we think about when we think about thinking... then write about it.

From: Reanimation Library

"In contrast, pre-reflective self-consciousness is pre-reflective in the sense that (1) it is an awareness we have before we do any reflecting on our experience; (2) it is an implicit and first-order awareness rather than an explicit or higher-order form of self-consciousness. Indeed, an explicit reflective self-consciousness is possible only because there is a pre-reflective self-awareness that is an on-going and more primary self-consciousness. Although phenomenologists do not always agree on important questions about method, focus, or even whether there is an ego or self, they are in close to unanimous agreement about the idea that the experiential dimension always involves such an implicit pre-reflective self-awareness."

— Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, "Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness"
(Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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"[…] Designed so you can read the Wake on top of its open pages, [Roland] McHugh’s book [Annotations to Finnegans Wake] matches the Wake page for page, line by line, making it easy to take in a note with a quick glance. The Annotations scatter a thousand points of light through [James] Joyce’s nocturnal maze, illuminating countless intertextual allusions and literary quotations, biographical and historical references, musical notations and songs, geographical places, mythical beings, fragments of philosophy and religion – the list goes on. Additionally, McHugh untangles some of Joyce’s more difficult puns, parodic phrasings, and compound neologisms, often identifying and translating fragments borrowed from other languages. (Often I found myself, when stricken by the incomprehensible suddenly made obvious, slapping my head and muttering, 'D’oh!')"
— The Brazen Head, A James Joyce Public House
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Buy all of James Joyce's books (and the many books about Finnegans Wake) here...

Screen Writer

"When I was 13 or so, I watched a movie in which a young writer (played by Frank Sinatra?) and his girlfriend go to an Italian restaurant to celebrate the acceptance of his first short story. The restaurant’s owner is celebrating too, as are all the people sitting at the other tables, which are covered with checkerboard tablecloths and lit by candles dripping wax. Everyone wishes the writer well, no one more so than I, who tried to foresee such a moment when I, too, would become a writer. The acceptance of the story. The cheers. The girl and the life of my dreams.

     Most films about the writing life are more accurate, because writers write them. And rarely is the writer shown as successful, triumphant or — are you kidding? — happy."
— Roger Rosenblatt, The New York Times
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"The movie ['Finding Forrester'] contains at least two insights into writing that are right on target. The first is William's advice to Jamal that he give up waiting for inspiration and just start writing. My own way of phrasing this rule is: The Muse visits during composition, not before. The other accurate insight is a subtle one. An early shot pans across the books next to Jamal's bed, and we see that his reading tastes are wide, good and various. All of the books are battered, except one, the paperback of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which looks brand new and has no creases on its spine. That's the book everyone buys but nobody reads."
— Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
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What I find irritating about movie (and television) depictions of writers-at-work is the mandatory scene of the anguished protagonist pulling a besmirched-with-words sheet of paper from his/her typewriter, vehemently crushing it into ball and tossing it into an overflowing — with similar tainted and disfigured pages — wastepaper basket.
     No matter what our omnipresent "inner critic" says about it, who in their right mind would discard a first draft?
     And who, in this post-"Murder She Wrote" age, still uses a typewriter?

Gestation

From: Wikimedia Commons

"SHAKESPEARE & Company, the famously ramshackle Anglo-American bookshop on the Parisian Left Bank, is more than just a place to pick up a paperback. It is a bohemian hub once frequented by Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and Anaïs Nin, the Paris equivalent of San Francisco's City Lights bookstore. Besides rare editions, second-hand books and the latest literary phenomena, the store holds regular workshops for aspiring writers.
One such group is 'The Other Writers' Group,' which gathers every Saturday in the bookshop's library. To reach this room, you must walk to the back of the shop, past a coin-filled wishing well, turn right at the old piano and clamber up the creaky wooden staircase to the first floor, where bookshelves threaten to topple at every turn. At the top of the staircase, someone has created a tiny writer's den, a closet-sized cubby-hole that is open to anyone who cares to write in it." — Sarah Dallas, More Intelligent Life
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From: Genetic Joyce Studies

"[...] while visiting her bookshop [Shakespeare and Company], [James] Joyce reported the bad news to Sylvia Beach: the two American publishers were finally compelled to decline. On that same day, Beach offered to publish Ulysses under her Shakespeare and Company imprint. By mid-April, Beach, with Adrienne Monnier's help, secured a printer for the job and proposed to Darantiere an edition of one thousand copies. Joyce wrote to Weaver about his change of fortunes on 10 April and they undertook plans almost immediately for an Egoist Press, English edition also to be produced after the French edition sold out. Beach and Joyce planned to publish the book in October 1921 and decided to offer the book to subscribers, hoping to acquire enough advance funds to cover the printing of the edition. As part of the advertising initiative, Joyce and Beach included on the form a number of brief review statements by well-known literati.

[...] Beach moved Shakespeare and Company to a larger, new address at rue de l'Odeon in September 1921. Meanwhile, Joyce continued to compose and correct Ulysses. The author's numerous and substantial late-stage emendations to his text delayed the printing and publication of the book. Joyce continued to correct proofs and delivered the last of them to Dijon only on 30 January 1922. Finally, on 2 February 1922, Darantiere delivered two copies (#901 and #902) of Ulysses to Beach, who in turn brought them to Joyce on this, his fortieth birthday.

[...]  When George Slocombe reported in his Paris-society column, '...and here it is at last, as large as a telephone directory or a family Bible, and with many of the literary and social characteristics of each!' he aptly described the first Ulysses. The first edition was unwieldy and fragile but purchasers of this book were expected to have it individually rebound in cloth or leather to match other items in their library." — Stacey Herbert, Genetic Joyce Studies Issue 4 (Spring 2004)
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Go to Skakespeare and Company's website here...
And buy Ulysses here...

More Than Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008)
Photo: The Village Voice

"On Feb. 7, 1972, when David Foster Wallace was 9 years old, he began work on a creative-writing assignment—a one-page story narrated by a tea kettle. 'Hi I am a kettle,' his protagonist says, by way of introduction, adding: 'Ouch! Listen I come to you for advice. This flame is real hot but I love my job.' [...] Along with a complete Gutenberg Bible, some letters of James Joyce’s, and collections of Don DeLillo and Norman Mailer, this tale of a tea kettle in extremis now rests in the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, as do more than 20,000 of Wallace’s other papers and books." — Newsweek
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"As an adolescent, Wallace played football and was a regionally ranked tennis player, but his interest in writing and language was influenced by his parents, who read Ulysses out loud to each other. His father read Moby-Dick to Wallace and his sister when they were only eight and six years old, and his mother would playfully pretend to have a coughing fit if one of the children made a usage error during supper conversation." — David Foster Wallace:
An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
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"Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it's entirely boggling for a longtime fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in where they belong." — Maria Bustillos, The Awl
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Books by David Foster Wallace here...