Blog

Anyone who follows this section of the Hurley House blog knows I’ve been reading Shakespeare’s plays for the last few months. I’d started because I had re-watched Slings & Arrows. I have to say, I could watch that series over and over again. The more Shakespeare I read, the more references I get. And the more I get, the more emotional the show becomes for me. I mean, it’s a comedy, true, but I burst into tears at least once a season. Twice. More than that. OK, almost every time I’m watching them perform one of the plays well, I burst into tears.¹

So the first two plays I read were the featured plays for seasons one and three of the show: Hamlet and King Lear (I skipped Macbeth because I’d read it before, and I’m saving all the plays I’ve already read until last… you know, in case I die or something before I get through them all…). Then I read all the plays we had as Pelican Shakespeare editions, because those books are so easy and comfortable to read. Finally, I started reading from The Riverside Shakespeare,*< in chronological order (as listed in The Riverside). I just finished The Comedy of Errors. And I finally get who Cyril’s talking about when he sings “Either of the Dromioes” in the opening theme of the second season.

So in S&L, Geoffrey and Oliver hammer home the point about theater being that thing, that place, that asks the audience member to momentarily suspend her disbelief. Not like film or television, though. Film and television often don’t even come close to asking you to do that. They often create a completely alternate reality and place you in it. Often the unbelievable is believable in film an television. There often is no disbelief to start with. But the stage is different. Even if the effects are beyond terrific, it will still seem less real. You bring disbelief with you, but you’re asked to check it at the door. Consciously. And Geoffrey, anyway, seems to like it that way. So do I.

Take this play, for example. I read it, but haven’t seen it performed (yet). And while I was reading it, I was asked to suspend my disbelief:

A twin and his servant go searching for the twin’s long-lost brother and finally arrive in the country where the brother lives—wearing exactly the same clothing as the brother and his servant, who happens to be the twin’s servant’s twin—then they get caught up in all kinds of mistaken-identity confusion and silliness with the brother and his wife and sister-in-law, the servant’s twin and his mistress, a courtesan, merchants, an abbess, and the law.

Wowza.

Talk about suspension of disbelief. I did it, though, and it was really worth it. The play is delightful, and I can’t wait to see a performance of it.

It’s a short play… go read it.

• Cut-Ups, Cut-Ins, Cut-Outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs
  
• Saint Melissa the Mottled by Edward Gorey
  
• Psycho Too by Will Self
  
• Ex Libris: The Art of Bookplates by Martin Hopkinson
  
• The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968 by William Manchester
  
• Dictionaries and That Dictionary by James Sledd, WilmaR. Ebbitt
  
• Middle C by William H. Gass
  
• Alchemists Through the Ages by ArthurE. Waite
  
• The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch
  
• Regan's Planet by Robert Silverberg
  
• One Hundred And Two H-Bombs by Thomas M. Disch
  
• Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch
  
• Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham
  
• Dimension Thirteen by Robert Silverberg
  
• The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson
  

Richard III. Oh, Richard. Richard, Richard.

Did you ever stop and listen to yourself? Evidently not. If you had, you would have noticed how utterly ridiculous you were being and would have stopped immediately.

You’re really up there with Iago in terms of pure evil, aren’t you? If I hadn’t known you were hunch-backed in real life, and if I hadn’t read in the introduction to this play that Shakespeare used Thomas More as a source for a lot of details about you, including the fact that, as More puts it, you were “not untoothed” when you were born, I would have thought Shakespeare made these things up so you could more epitomize evil.

Funny.

Until we find more works in the Pelican Shakespeare library, I’ll be using The Riverside Shakespeare* as my Shakespeare source (unless we’re travelling, in which case I use the Project Gutenberg free Complete Shakespeare for Kindle). So don’t get upset about seeing the same picture and the same link over and over again, K?

“Vital.”

That’s the short answer to a great question posed to William H. Gass at the reading and book signing event for his new novel, Middle C.* He did expand on that, of course. But what a perfect word: vital. And Gass’s statement, “Vital,” was perfectly delivered. Slow. Stark. Sensual. And with exactly the right pause afterward. Exactly.

Thank you, Mr. Gass, thank you.

We had driven to Toronto during the summer of 2006 and were spending a few days wandering about the city on foot. I remember that we went to some bookstores, though not one of them stands out to me as anything special. I do recall that I bought a nice newish Penguin Classics edition of Malcolm Lowery’s Under the Volcano—it had a cover I admired and had not seen. Flash forward to this afternoon as I leisurely read the The New York Times. Stephen Fowler opened up a tiny bookshop in Toronto … in 2006! The Monkey’s Paw is the very form of what an ideal bookshop might be … eccentric in every aspect. I won’t bother describing it … just read the article. Rest assured that on our next visit to Toronto, I will be stopping in and buying some of these treasures. And I’m sure anyone who knows me or has seen some of the odder corners of my book collection will know why this place and its owner resonate so much with me.

Yeah, sorry. I wasn’t very motivated last week, so I didn’t enter any more inventory. Not that we don’t have a bunch that still needs to be entered… I’ll try to be better about it next week.

In the meantime, enjoy Tom Waits and Bono reading a couple of Charles Bukowski’s poems.

“You are marvelous. The gods wait to delight in you.”

I just mailed this lovely item to Saint Paul, MN.

More British history lessons! Or lessons in the lack— read: non-existence—of loyalty in fifteenth-century England.

Boy, oh, boy. Talk about it. Brother betraying king brother for betrayed king then betraying betrayed king for betrayed king brother. That’s just some of it. A very small bit, actually.

I’m finding that in a lot of the Shakespeare I read, comedy, tragedy, and history alike. Loyalty and betrayal. And fickleness. Deceit. Gullibility. Kingly blindness (sometimes literal, even). But loyalty and betrayal are often at the center of all these other themes. Maybe because it’s so enduring. The theme of loyalty and betrayal. It’s at the heart of so much literature. It’s at the heart of life, even.

Until we find more works in the Pelican Shakespeare library, I’ll be using The Riverside Shakespeare* as my Shakespeare source (unless we’re travelling, in which case I use the Project Gutenberg free Complete Shakespeare for Kindle). So don’t get upset about seeing the same picture and the same link over and over again, K?

OK! OK! OK! I did write the thing to automate showing the new arrivals! I think doing that took me less time than putting together last week’s post did. Definitely worth it.

So here’s what I added to inventory this week… We’re keeping them all in our private collection for now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy them from someone else…

• The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño
  
• The Temple of Iconoclasts by J.Rodolfo Wilcock
  
• Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
  
• By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
  
• Ecologica by André Gorz
  
• But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz by Geoff Dyer
  
• Notebooks of a Naked Youth by Billy Childish
  
• Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer
  
• Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life by Adorno
  
• IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes and the Evolution of India Pale Ale by Mitch Steele
  
• Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
  
• The Copyeditor's Handbook by Amy Einsohn
  

So, how do you shop? I mean… I mean a lot of things, actually… But the gist is, how do you shop?

Evidently women love to shop. Evidently I am not a woman. Oh wait.

I don’t love to shop. And I am a woman. So let’s just dispel the myth that women love to shop right now.

Now that that’s out of the way… Here’s how I shop in two steps (sort of):

1. I recognize the need for a particular item, be it a specifically specific particular item, or a sort of I-need-this-but-need-to-find-out-what-kinds-of-this-are-available particular item.

2. If my need is for a specifically specific particular item that I can (and am not too lazy to) get locally, I go to the local vendor, locate the item, and buy it.

2a. If my need is for a specifically specific particular item that I can’t (or am too lazy to) get locally, I locate the online retailer that would sell said item, add it to my cart, and buy it.

2b. If my need is for a sort of I-need-this-but-need-to-find-out-what-kinds-of-this-are-available particular item, I search around online until I find what I like (and can afford), and buy it.

I don’t go shopping. I have something in mind, I locate it, I purchase it. I don’t look at other things and browse around. I don’t go to a store just to look around. I never go to a mall unless I need something from the Apple Store or Sephora, and then, only because we don’t have them as free-standing stores in Saint Louis (to my knowledge) or, in the case of the Apple Store, when Mac HQ doesn’t have what I need.

The exceptions to this are: local produce, wine, books and records (to an extent), groceries (to an extent), and vintage/thrift/antiques. I love to browse the farmers’ market. I love to browse liquor stores. I love to browse book and record stores, but often I do just go straight for what I’m looking for. Patrick does the grocery shopping, mostly. And who doesn’t love thrifting/antiquing?

So enough about me. What this is really about is you. Knowing I’m probably not exactly the best barometer for what people talk about when they talk about shopping, I asked Patrick the other day if he thought people shopped online the same way they do in physical stores (I do: go straight to what you want, add to cart, check out). Or do people tend to browse around physical stores, but not online stores? Or vice versa?

So I’m asking: What do you talk about when you talk about shopping? Are you a get in, get what you want, get out kind of person, or a browse around kind of person? Is it different depending on whether you’re in a store, using your mobile device, or sitting at your computer? Do you look at the “other people who bought this item also viewed these items” items? Do you look at “if you like this item you’ll love these items” items? Do you go to an online bookstore and navigate to a genre and start paging through it?

†I bastardized this from Haruki Murakami.* UPDATE: Patrick just told me that Murakami borrowed it from Raymond Carver.* hee. hee.

“It was a giant Adenoid.”

Photo taken at Venice Cafe

“They bent over, unaware, the saucy darlings, of the fatal strips of white cotton knickers thus displayed, the undercurves of baby-fat little buttocks a blow to the Genital Brain, however pixilated.”

Photo taken at Sasha’s on Shaw

First, happy birthday (yesterday), to Chris!

This week, I’m showing you everything we’ve added to inventory, whether we have it for sale or not… And I know this is going to be painful enough (to me) that I’ll end up writing some functionality whereby I can just say, “Show all the things we’ve added to our inventory between X and Y,” so I don’t have do manually type out each thing… which I’m about to do. Here goes:

Wow! What a list. I sure was busy last week. Unfortunately, though, most of these books are not for sale for one reason or another (we want to read, we’re adding to to our Penguin collection, we can’t sell them for enough for it to be worth our while, etc.). The ones that are for sale will be found on our Amazon.com storefront* the usual disclaimers apply: Our images will almost always have the orange background as shown here (the exception is the “main” image; amazon requires that to be on a white background, so if we’ve designated an image as main, it won’t have the orange background). To find our prices, go to “available from these sellers” and look for Hurley House. If you do not find a copy available from us in the list, then we’ve sold it already.

By the way, yes, that was painful enough that I will be writing something to help me automate it… it’s just a matter of when.

>

Continuing the saga of King Henry VI (in The Riverside Shakespeare.*)… Henry is no longer a child, but still young, good, and kind. He is married to Margaret, who, well, doesn’t seem to be good or kind. The betrayal and intrigue continue, as the Duke of York becomes more inclined to make his claims to the crown, and a “commoner,” John Cade treacherously and traitorously attempts to usurp the crown himself, promising equality for all, while threatening death to any who don’t follow him. Contradiction much?

Is it wrong that I’m getting all my British history from Shakespeare? Probably…..

Found in Dispatches* by Michael Herr.