Can Serious Books Have Happy Endings?
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Honoring the booksellers killed in the
bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street ,Iraq 2007 Essential oil contains the magic Rubbing oil provides the balm Cooking oil greases the pan Painting oil colors the canvas Burn Fry Soothe Power Saturate Oils activate, secrete from our glands Thicken our sweat Lubricate our lives Run our machinery, economy Run our desires for freedom, speed and dominance My favorite bookstall shuttered years ago A kiosk spilling in stacks on the sidewalk run by the Strand at the base of the tram to the island where I lived with my two children Dangerously convenient, the bookstall famously sprawled over the Plaza I stopped almost daily and rarely walked away without a new treasure scored in the buzz between work and home, in the roar of the traffic regurgitating from the bridge at 59th and 2nd Like pigeons, faithful readers flocked to this spot especially glorious in the first days of spring I would buy as many books as groceries when the weight of your bookshelf might be a measure of your mind, or appetites or attitudes a presumed barometer of compatibility on first dates To judge a man by his reading has sometimes lead to the wrong conclusions other times to lambent lingering on the skin, foolish fluids, hardened ardors Spines entwined in sleep or on my shelf were a measure of cool, character or contempt rival appreciations, one-up-man-ship of humbling variety Book shelves in modern times have lost their status as mating display replaced by the expansive trolling of Instagram or flashes of palm held light screening us from each other scrolling texts concise compressed new codes for old ideas that previously took massive libraries to say in so many ways that the book stalls all over the world were always spilling onto the sidewalks with remainders of our best intentions and yet unsaid conclusions Can serious books have happy endings? We all lost the street of books in a besieged city bombed for oil bombed for greed bombed for stupidity bombed for ignorance Of course we lost, crush, burned, buried more than the street We lost the booksellers, the beloved buildings, the browsers and schmoozers going about their bartering, bantering days Why do I revel in memories buying books in New York in the honking roar of all those cars, trucks, taxis, limos, belching buses speeding off the Queensborough bridge consuming trillions of gallons of highly refined gas sucked up from wells under the sea, in the desert choking, poisoning, gagging, as we read our books in private luxury Imagine a sudden bomb in that spot and there is suddenly no difference between Baghdad and New York people buying books and dying in the wrong places for the wrong reasons as we drive, eat, sleep, fuck, fear and go about our lives wondering how to stop the madness Why do I revel in New York when the real subject is the destruction of language humanity and beauty Because Baghdad booksellers is now only a reference in a book of lost dreams notations of incalculable travesty that multiply beyond our comprehension Still I have no place to put last night's Lyft driver his family still trapped in a place bombed daily The Middle East was all he would say. Syria or parts of Iraq. Pakistan. Yemen I guessed. Who can really trust anyone? He was reluctant to say. The number of countries at war was too staggering to parse With the precision of an Oxford debater, my driver, a handsome man summarized, “All oil, all oil, all oil which should stay in the ground anyway Big bully oligarchs, profiteers and zealots. Killing and starving. Destroyed my University. Destroyed hospitals. Babies, women, elderly suffering. The people must take back our countries, our world.” I had tears in my eyes when he dropped me off when he got my suitcase out of the trunk we took each other's hands for more than a perfunctory shake My porch light was burning, left on the weeks I was away I felt responsible for my country's contribution to the agony wrecked on his country the volcanic eruption of lethal weapons campaigns of righteous plunder. His last words to me “I am glad that at least one of the many people I will chauffeur through a long San Francisco rainy night has heard of my country. |