The Airbrushing of Tom Wolfe

When the world of books and movies collide, the lawyers step in!

While researching Focus Features' new movie Beginners, I noticed something interesting about two of their promotional stills. In this image, you can see Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor browsing a bookstore. Plummer clearly has a copy of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full in his hands. Yet in another duplicate still found on some websites, Wolfe's 742-page epic has been blurred. I guess Focus Features was worried about unauthorized product placement.

I am not outraged or surprised by this -- it probably happens all the time and we just don't notice. I just thought it was something cool to point out.

Wuthering Wyler

The other day someone came into the bookstore and asked where we would have Wuthering Heights. I told her we'd shelve it under plain old Fiction. She thanked me and then checked her smartphone.

"That was Wyler, right? The author?" she asked. "Bronte," I said. She looked at me skeptically then went away to the stacks.

It hit me later that she was probably referring to William Wyler, who directed a 1939 version of the classic novel. Her fancy smartphone must've told her Wyler was the author, though I can't imagine how she Googled herself to that mistake or which app deceived her.

No, I've never read it.

Above: a wuthering height.

Spring multitasking

It was an exceptionally nice day today, with highs near the 50's. I'd say it counted as the first day of spring. To celebrate, I took two walks, and on my second one noticed a peculiar sight.

There was a young man walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. He wore sunglasses and a backward baseball cap, and was engaging in several complicated tasks at once. There was an iPod plugged into his ears and with his left hand he was trying to light a cigarette dangling from his mouth. But that wasn't the most interesting part--in his right hand he was holding Tom Clancy's latest 900-page behemoth. Talk about your sensory overload!

I don't think I've ever seen anyone taking a jaunty stroll while reading a hardback novel, much less something as thick as "Dead or Alive." But I can't knock the guy for wanting to be out on a day like today. There must've been so many things he had to do, and it would've been a waste of nice weather to do them inside.

One month!

I've officially been at the bookstore one month. I have nothing to say except good things, and that it's been my most intellectually-stimulating job so far. There's definitely an art to selling books, and there is also a bit of psychology involved with the process--knowing what people want, what sells best, what a customer is thinking when he or she steps into a section.

For some reason I am still on the zoo email list, and I learned today that the zoo will be coming out of "hibernation" shorty. A record amount of snow these past few months has kept crowds away, but with the March thaw more people will be trickling in. My old ice cream store is set to open again next Saturday. How time flies!

One thing I will miss about the zoo, and which I will not be able to experience at the bookstore, is working outside. Unlike many zoo employees, I enjoyed the days when I was stationed on a food cart or in a popcorn wagon. Alas, I won't be selling any merchandise on an outdoors, and I am already nostalgic for my view of the moose enclosure and the duck-covered lake.

Coincidental metal

This happened two Fridays ago:

One man came into the store asking if we had any books on metal detecting. I told him where he might find one. About 45 minutes later, I was working at the register and the customer returned to purchase books, telling me he couldn't find any books on the subject. Now, while he filled out a card to be put on our mailing list, another customer walked into the store and asked if we had any books on metal detecting.

The first customer (who was writing just a few feet away) laughed and said he'd just asked about that. The two men started talking and trading stories about metal detecting. I'm pretty sure they left together, no doubt becoming fast friends and planning to meet up to start a hunt for buried treasure.

Oh, the coincidences of a bookstore!

Have a nice nay

Random observations at the bookstore:

--I think it's a common problem among retail workers to mix up the time of day in that familiar parting expression. If I worked at the register one night, then again the very next morning, I tend to confuse the two and sometimes end up with the combination in the title of the blog post. And wow, Wikipedia has a whole freakin' article dedicated to the phrase. I guess if they have one for toilet paper orientation...

--Laser discs, records, and CDs may all be collectible items, but VHS tapes will never be. They're simply too bulky, and the tapes tend to fall out of the bottom of the box when you pull it off the shelf. HOWEVER -- I am volunteering an ingenious solution for the problem of the world's excess tapes: use them for home decoration! Many bookstores offer a bulk amount of "neutral" books to make customer's home/work libraries look prestigious: Reader's Digest Condensed Books, for example, or bland law textbooks. I see no reason why film professors of the future can't have shelves of multicolored, uniformly-shaped boxes in their office.

--For about two minutes today I wondered why Theodore Dreiser's novels were so radically different from his more well-known works, like Green Eggs and Ham.

--Sometimes a spine can be confusing. Is it Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome or Ethan Frome's Edith Wharton?

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

Google tells me that Bono said something similar to this post title last week, so he obviously has been reading my thoughts. I'll have to think of some wicked new song ideas.

I'm reading Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution at the moment. I took it out of the library after being inspired by the Egyptian revolution and was struck by the similarities between that year and 2011. The Arab world is ruled by iron-fisted autocrats in power for decades, just like 19th-century Europe, and while the leaders enjoy untold luxury, large swathes of the population are unemployed and longing for basic freedoms.

When popular protests erupted in 1848, as in 2011, the governments promised superficial reforms. In reading Rapport's book, I was struck by how similar France and Austria's responses to the protesters demands mirrored, for example, Hosni Mubarak's: they fired an unpopular minister, or shuffled the cabinet, or announced from balconies that the people were "children" who needed to be protected by a strong leader. As you can imagine, the rabble wasn't too happy about all this patronizing. When France went, the dominoes fell, and the continent erupted just as the Middle East and North Africa are doing right now.

Anyway, there has been much discussion in the press about social media like Twitter and Facebook being responsible for the Arab revolutions. I think they are important players in the protests, but it's important to remember that those are tools and not the sparks of change. Twitter and Facebook have simply replaced pamphlets, telegrams, and horse-carried messages as the staples of revolution.

Yes, I am on Twitter, but I have a paltry three followers. That doesn't really bother me too much -- most of my friends aren't even on Twitter and I don't think they care that I've had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. The reason I joined Twitter was so I could follow breaking news events as they happened. So far, it's come in handy when I wanted to follow protests in Iran, Thailand, and now Egypt and beyond. It's like a front-row seat to history.