Dear Nicholas
I am disappointed that you lack the wherewithal to even enter the bargaining process, which is a generic feature of the secondhand trade worldwide. The price requested for a secondhand item is not absolute, and should be susceptible to some negotiation in the spirit of maintaining a mutual satisfying relation between the merchant and his customer. Nevertheless, I would still like to purchase the Poetry and Life anthology. Is it possible to email me banking details such that I can transfer direct to your account? Please let me know a.s.a.p.
F.
P.S If you have reconsidered pricing of the ietm, please also indicate
Dear F,
Likewise, I am disapointed that you feel it neccessary to behave in a rude and patronising manner, and and am suprised (though not especially so) that you believe such an approach would cause me to reconsider offering you a discount. Despite what you assert, there is no tradition in the world of second hand bookselling of offering a discount to all those who ask - the only such tradition is that of offering a ten percent discount to our colleagues in the trade. With respect, I am certain I am more familiar with the traditions of bookselling than you are.
We do not allow a margin for offering discounts to customers without reason; in order for us to do so, and to budget for the time consuming bargaining process you cherish so, we would have to increase our prices, which would simply penalize the overwhelming majority of customers who do not ask for discounts.
Direct deposit details follow. I would appreciate it if you could let us know when a deposit has been made, so we can get the book off to you. Likewise, if you would prefer not to continue with the order, I would appreciate being advised of that also.
Yes, I'm arguing with the customers again, always a sign that everything is not right in my world. Still, nobody questions my wherewithal and gets away with it. DiscountGate errupted over the question of whether F should pay $20 or $22.50 for an anthology of Catholic poetry that I bought six months ago from the much-missed Cronstalk dollar shelf. F eventually bought the book anyway, despite my insults - unfortunately, without any further whining. A shame; I could have gone a few more rounds.
I seem to be a little miserable lately, particularly today; angry at nothing in particular and having difficulty finding meaning in anything much I do with my days. The Newcastle Young Writers' Festival is on; I would have liked to have gone; a lot of my friends are going, and it would have been fun. Unfortunately work prevents me.
I am re-reading Elizabeth Wurtzel's terribly entertaining memoir of Ritalin addiction, More Now Again, which has the effect on me that it has on everyone - namely, it makes me want to go out and snort Ritalin. Simultaneously, I continue to consider the possibility of planning a potential effort to one day think about whether or not I'm going to quit smoking sometime soon. I think... maybe. The plans for next year involve not spending much money, which is my main motivation - that and the way my lungs don't seem to be well-equipped for smoking. There are people who've been smoking two packs a day for thirty years who cough less than I do, it's sort of embarassing.
I have the Karate Kid I, II and III on DVD to watch tonight. Unfortunately lacking The Next Karate Kid - my second-favourite installment, with Hillary Swank as a new, female pupil for the wise old Mr Miyagi.
Ah, crap, the neighbours are arguing again - this is getting ridiculous. Last week he locked her in the apartment and she had to climb over my balcony to escape. Their arguing stamina is truly extraordinary, and despite my intimate familiarity with their disputes over who has whose keys, who paid for the pot, who slept with who, etc, I'm still not sure who is at fault.I wouldn't want to be dating either of them, that's for sure.
I know this is a pointless, whiny post, but at least it's something new to read, on the off-chance you're like me and constantly frustrated by the lack of anything new to read on the internet and spend your time clicking reload on various sites, waiting for something different to appear. OK, off to watch Karate Kid movies. I can't imagine why I feel my life is devoid of meaning. At least I'm going out tomorrow night, and yes Tim trivia on Monday would be fun. Maybe Mr Miyagi will have some homilie that will strike a chord with me, help get me out of my rut.
Yes, yes! I just finished the new Bret Easton Ellis book, Lunar Park, and it is terrific. He's one of the few people currently writing whose books I'd buy upon release, one of the few I have really high hopes f0r - and in truth, after the piece of crap that was Glamorama, I didn't have very high hopes. I thought he'd gone downhill since the beginning - slowly, then rapidly. American Psycho, for all its fame, wasn't as good as Rules of Attraction, which wasn't as good as his first, Less Than Zero. And Glamorama was just a turkey...
So I didn't expect it to be good, let alone great. I didn't expect such depth - because, though I love him, he's always been about surfaces, and there has always been that lingering doubt - is he really great, or just great at working within his limitations? If somebody writes brilliant books without plots, or real characters, in a perfect deadpan, no matter how well they do it, you have to wonder if that's all they can do.
I was going to write a review of it - I wrote about 5,000 words on Glamorama, when it came out, explaining in excruciating detail why it was shit - but the thought seems like such a struggle, when I really just want to say, "Read it". It's the best new book I've read since Roth's The Plot Against America. I also read a few reviews on the web, and have nothing more to add - people who can read, like
Salon's Laura Miller, and the
SMH's Malcolm Knox, cover the points I'd make - how fun, and funny, and self mocking it is, and how unexpectedly deep it is, and that it is also an extended homage to Stephen King, but better than anything King has ever done. (I like Stephen King, and always wanted him to write something like this - a measured, careful, brilliant horror novel that transcends the genre. He started out as such a careful writer, Steve did. These days his prose is just a mess.) How great is the first chapter, and the last chapter, how amusing is the character "Bret Easton Ellis"'s novel-in-progress, "Teenage Pussy" an hilarious piss-take of all that is most comic-book about his own work, a "pornographic thriller" which features all the expected sex, drugs, and violence, and even a camera crew following the narator around everywhere - well, you'd have to have read Glamorama for that to make sense. Bree will understand...
Apparently the Boston Globe reviewer said "Lunar Park" was the worst book he'd ever read. The New YorkTimes seems to have needed three seperate bad reviews to fully slag it off. These, too, are reasons to read it. I mean when a reviewer for a major newspaper describes a book as the worst they've ever read, you must be doing something right. And I don't mean that in a Chuck Pahlaniuk "it's just so fucked up, man" kind of way. I really don't, it's not like that at all. The bad reviews compare him to Chuck, which is ridiculous. And they say it is self-indulgent. This is not a terribly imaginative criticism when the book's main character is called "Bret Easton Ellis".
It just works on so many levels. I'm lapsing into incoherancy, clearly - I could be more coherent, but it's one thirty in the morning, I just finished it, and I loved it, and I wanted to record that feeling - it's been so long since an author I really like has written something new that blew me away, and suprised me. Read it. That's all.
ADDED: I really should go to bed, but there's two other things I want to say. The first is that, on reflection, the stylish and unexpectedly sensitive aspects of this work recall parts of Less Than Zero - the reflective, poetic parts of that work that everybody forgets. The second is the Stephen King thing. I will be very interested to see how this book emerges as a popular work. It's not suprising that it's better constructed and better written than any King novel. I like Stephen King, but Ellis is a much better writer. What is surprising is how Ellis squares up and beats King on King's strengths - it's both a better page turner, and scarier, than any Stephen King book I've read.
(and it's funny when he drops in the stephen king stream-of-consciousness italic bits, oh yes)
Today's task - Sweep The Floor.
Steps required in order to do this:
1. Remove rubbish from floor. Remove clothes, take dirty dishes and cutlery to the kitchen, put food items back in pantry, kitchen, or (if rotting) bin.
2. Categorize book boxes AJ-AZ. These are shelved, but I can't clean the floor until I've done this, because of step 3:
3. Categorize boxes BA-BI, which are on the floor.
4. Put now empty boxes in car. Also put in uncatalogued boxes, as many as will fit.
5. Take these to work. Swap empty boxes and uncatalogued boxes for boxes BJ-BU, although BV and possibly BW boxes will probably have come into existence by then.
6. Do the banking (not strictly necessary for sweeping, but has to be done today, so while I'm in Newtown...)
7. Come back home. I will probably leave BJ-BW boxes in car.
8. Reorganize remaining uncatalogued boxes into easily swept around piles.
9. Sweep the floor.
This task I chose over the other possible task for the day: Wash The Dishes. The latter task has fewer steps - basically, I just wash the encrusted whatever from every single item of cutlery, cooking utensil, plate, bowl etc in my apartment. They are
all encrusted with whatever. The ones that weren't, I have, in the past week or two, washed and re-used until such point as they were encrusted - then ignored them.
Blogging as procrastination.
Apologies for the lack of updates – I have been busy. I am also fit – there has probably not been a day in the last twenty that I haven’t been moving around heavy boxes of books. And then there was the lugging of twelve massive eight-foot bookshelves up three flights of stairs, which was hard work to say the least. Thanks, Tim, for the help.
The last few weeks have been hectic mostly because of the closing down of the best stocked bookshop on the street. Amazingly good books were being sold at liquidation prices, and with a series of sales – half-price, quarter-price, two dollars a book, one dollar a book, ten dollars a box – and with little advance notice of the changeover points of the various sales, I have not had much concentration and energy left over for blogging. It has been worth it, though – with the upcoming Sydney University Book Fair I should have enough books to get me to where I want to be next year, specifically, somebody who has ample free time in which to write.
The bookshelves complicated things. I needed them for storage in my apartment, and they had the advantages of being sturdy, attractive and cheap. I didn’t realise they didn’t fit in the elevators.
My main competition was the famous Mr G from across the road. On the two dollar sale he seemed to be offering me an object lesson. He followed behind me on the shelves, buying my mistakes, then dropped a heavy aeronautics book on my head. Strangely, he seems to have adopted me since then, and now comes over regularly to enquire how the internet is treating us.
I am still very busy – it is book sale season. This is more in the way of an update and to let you know I’m still here. Last Saturday was a book fair, this Saturday is another, and I am still shifting library-loads of books and bookshelves around the apartment. Hygiene standards have fallen below New Orleans levels and I can’t walk from one side of the apartment to the other without being forced to avoid three obstacles. I have blog entries in my head. Hopefully in the next week or two I’ll have a chance to write them…
