Aw, thanks mystery customer. We want to tear you out of a magazine and circle you in pink marker, too!

June 28th, 2010 § Dustin
Aw, thanks mystery customer. We want to tear you out of a magazine and circle you in pink marker, too!

June 27th, 2010 § Dustin

The townsfolk came out to welcome the shaykh Abu ‘Abdallah al-Zubaydi and to welcome Abu al-Tayyib, the son of the qadi Abu ‘Abdallah al-Nafzawi. On all sides they came forward with greetings and questions to one another, but not a soul said a word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept bitterly. One of the pilgrims, realizing the cause of my distress, came up to me with a greeting and friendly welcome, and continued to comfort me with friendly talk until I entered the city, where I lodged in the college of the Booksellers.
That is Ibn Battuta or, more properly, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati ibn Battuta, from his remarkable fourteenth century travelogue, the Rihla. He has just arrived in Tunis after the first leg of his trek to Mecca. He is feverish, most likely fasting (it is Ramadan) and tied to his donkey for lack of strength. Booksellers to the rescue!
Well, not booksellers exactly. The college he mentions is a madrassa, one of three in Tunis at that point, and it most likely got its name by being situated in the booksellers’ quarter. Still, the booksellers were allowed to abut the madrassa and its accompanying mosque because theirs was one of the cleaner professions, unlike, say, the leatherworkers.
All of this is from a book I spent some time with this morning, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, by Ross E. Dunn. The book uses Ibn Battuta’s famous travels as a spine around which to array the ribs of context. Dunn gives us some history of each place the wandering scholar visits: generally much more than Ibn Battuta himself could have provided. In a sad exchange, however, he tends to omit some of the traveler’s more fanciful tales of miracles performed by given saints and Sufis. The book is a great introduction, thus far, to a period of time (the fourteenth century) and a place (the entire Dar al-Islam, I suppose) about which I know strikingly little. I’d recommend it unhesitatingly to anyone with even a spark of historical curiosity. But by being so good an introduction, its forays are necessarily brief and unsatisfying. At least it can point me in the right direction; the chapters about the Marinid, ‘Abd al-Wadid, Hafsid and Mamluk sultanates quote heavily from the work of Tunis’ greatest scholar, Ibn Khaldun.
The point is, whether it was our direct hospitality or not, on behalf of bookmongers everywhere I’d like to say you are welcome Ibn Battuta. Godspeed on your travels and, if you think about it, maybe go easy on the wives and concubines you begin to acquire but don’t much mention.
§ 0 CommentsJune 24th, 2010 § Dustin
“The merchant, under pressure of his customers, who are eager to get something for nothing, brings pressure on the manufacturer to supply him with shoddy goods; he leads perhaps the most miserable existence of all, compelled to be servile to his customers, hated by and hating his competitors, making nothing, organizing nothing.”
That’s Edmund Wilson quoting Michelet discussing various classes in his The People, from page thirty of the NYRB Classics edition of Wilson’s To the Finland Station, which book has been my lunchtime reading much of this month and, if I don’t read it at any other point, will continue to fill my scant between-bite blocks of attention for something like the next two years, a prospect which I actually rather look forward to because of its breadth, graceful prose, and obvious cant, whether or not much of its detail has later been discovered to be inaccurate if not, particularly when it comes to Wilson’s approach to Lenin and Stalin, dangerously wrong.
§ 0 CommentsJune 23rd, 2010 § Dustin
This book, for those who haven’t seen it, is full of great tips for saving money in your everyday life. As a gimmick, it comes with a shiny new penny lodged in the cover. Someone has pried the penny out of this particular copy. That’s right, a single penny.
I’ll be taking your wagers as to how long exactly it will be until we are all living in Jim Crace’s Pesthouse. The winnings will be paid in expired spam and tears.
§ 0 CommentsJune 17th, 2010 § Sam
I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming novel Freedom (which was very, very good, but will probably still anger all the people that are angered by Franzen), and buried in the back is this passage:
And this is really all the autobiographer has to tell her reader, except to mention, in closing, what occasioned the writing of these pages. A few weeks ago, on Spring Street in Manhattan, on her way home from a bookstore reading by an earnest young novelist whom Jessica was excited to be publishing, Patty saw a tall middle-aged man…
What bookstore–located near Spring Street, frequent host of earnest young novelists–could the character be walking from?
§ 0 CommentsJune 6th, 2010 § Sam
Apropos of the month (and, somehow, this weird weather), here’s this, a grim poem by Anne Sexton:
The Truth the Dead Know
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In another country people die. My darling, the wind falls in like stones from the whitehearted water and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one's alone. Men kill for this, or for as much. And what of the dead? They lie without shoes in the stone boats. They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.§ 0 Comments
March 8th, 2010 § Dustin
As it turns out, deadly bearded men on motorcycles are only slightly more popular in this country than dead bearded men with pens. Elif Batuman explains here.
And don’t forget to hear Elif in person alongside Keith Gessen at her reading in our store on Monday March 15th.
§ 0 CommentsMarch 2nd, 2010 § Dustin
December 29th, 2009 § Dustin
Also this month we have Julie Powell coming in. That’ll be the evening of January 12th. Can you tell I’ve been working on our event publicity today? Anyhow, I want to link to this not-altogether-favorable review of Powell’s Cleaving by Rebecca Marx, not because I agree with it (I haven’t read the book) but because I think it’s interesting. And because I think you, readers of our blog, are smart enough that a bad review won’t make you dismiss a book, or a reading for that matter, but will may actually stoke your curiousity.
§ 0 Comments