Snippets from Strangers :  Books!

Snippets from Strangers :  Books!

“I feel infinite”

vicemag:

Take a Stroll… With Rob Delaney - Help Save St. Mark’s Bookshop

Earlier this week, a woman on Twitter wrote me and asked me to sign and retweet a petition to help save St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City’s East Village. Their rent, to quote Jimmy McMillan, “ is too damn high.”

She also asked, “Didn’t you and Julie Klausner meet there?” In fact we did meet there, in 1998. I was a senior at NYU living in a dorm across 9th St. from St. Mark’s, where Julie worked. During one of my many visits to the store to browse, I decided to buy a collection of poetry by Wisława Szymborska called View with a Grain of Sand. I brought it up to the cash register and goddamn it; there was an extraordinarily foxy woman working it. Not working the cash register, I mean “working it.” You feel me? Also, yes, she was operating the cash register. She had explosively red hair and dark brown eyes and porcelain skin and an outfit that I certainly can’t remember because it was 13 years ago and I’m a man. But it was probably very cute.

I put the book in front of her and said, “Hello.” (Right? I know…)

Then she said this: “Hi. You wear that sweater very well.” WHAT? What does that even mean? I feel like that’s one of the like, five acceptable ways from the 1940s for a proper lady to tell a gentleman that she’s available for coffee and perhaps pie should it please the gentleman. Whatever it was, it remains one of the sexiest things that’s ever been said to me. We continued to speak and the delicious-looking redheaded book merchant told me I should check out a comedy group called the “Upright Citizens Brigade” perform their improvised show “ASSSSCAT” later that night.

Then, rather than ask her for her rotary phone number, I paid for my little book of poetry and went to a park to read it, LIKE A REAL ASSHOLE.

Cont’d

i12bent:

The two most penetrating 20th C. thinkers concerning the function of the archive and the fragment were both born on July 15:

Jacques Derrida (July 15, 1930 - 2004), Jewish-French, Algerian-born philosopher and deconstructivist…

“I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.”

— Jacques Derrida (Paper Machine)