Archive
An unfolding love letter
Wednesday 16 January 2008
I love Berkeley, California. No, let me revise that: I’m in love with Berkeley. Or, more accurately, I hold both emotions together, like couples in the early days of a marriage. Most people there, it would appear, are old-school communists and having grown up in the last communist state in India – think faded, watery baby-pink rather than red – I have a certain soft spot for people who want to rename public parks after Mao or Che Guevara. I like to think that their Cesar Chavez park – named after an union leader; can this really be the US? – is a homage to Hugo Chavez.
There’s a bookstore on Shattuck Avenue, ‘Comic Relief’, dedicated wholly to graphic novels. In the evenings, they open their doors wide to the street and two placid, timorous, supremely indifferent pussycats sit near the entrance, flanking the bookshelf on which Marjane Satrapi, Igort, Richard Sala, Jeffrey Brown, David B. all nestle tightly against each other. And the thing that amazes me is this: the cats don’t run out into the trafficky big road outside. They don’t even seem to be interested in exploring the world outside their front door. When I ask the young man behind the counter why this is the case, he just shrugs silently. (French, I think, but I am wrong). I bend down to stroke one of them. He suffers it for a bit then walks away towards the small shelf showcasing Adrian Tomine.
The secondhand bookstores in Berkeley are little symphonies of delight. London, where I live for the larger part of the year, has not anything to show more fair. Three, particularly, stand out: ‘Half Price Books’ on the corner of Shattuck and Addison, practically next door to ‘Comic Relief’; ‘Pegasus’, on Shattuck at Durant; and the legendary, astonishing ‘Moe’s Books’ on Telegraph, the only place I know that organizes ‘An Evening of Counterculture: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Reads His Latest Stuff’. Ferlinghetti? Is he still alive? Good god! The place is packed: stairs, aisles … I expect to see people perched on bookshelves. There are people strumming their guitars and singing Joan Baez-y type songs as a warm-up for the main event. My eyes prick with tears. Outside, the small, old bejewelled hippy – white, cottony hair that he keeps under a denim cap, a bony, angular, pale, lined face that reminds me of a starving Whitman at some moments, of Christian Bale method-acting in a Werner Herzog film at others – sells ‘countercultural’ bumper stickers: ‘What’s our oil doing under their soil?’ Meanwhile, the Barnes & Noble opposite ‘Pegasus’ has shut down. Hurrah and huzzah! Everything about Berkeley seems to invert the dominant paradigms of America.
(To be continued).
There’s a bookstore on Shattuck Avenue, ‘Comic Relief’, dedicated wholly to graphic novels. In the evenings, they open their doors wide to the street and two placid, timorous, supremely indifferent pussycats sit near the entrance, flanking the bookshelf on which Marjane Satrapi, Igort, Richard Sala, Jeffrey Brown, David B. all nestle tightly against each other. And the thing that amazes me is this: the cats don’t run out into the trafficky big road outside. They don’t even seem to be interested in exploring the world outside their front door. When I ask the young man behind the counter why this is the case, he just shrugs silently. (French, I think, but I am wrong). I bend down to stroke one of them. He suffers it for a bit then walks away towards the small shelf showcasing Adrian Tomine.
The secondhand bookstores in Berkeley are little symphonies of delight. London, where I live for the larger part of the year, has not anything to show more fair. Three, particularly, stand out: ‘Half Price Books’ on the corner of Shattuck and Addison, practically next door to ‘Comic Relief’; ‘Pegasus’, on Shattuck at Durant; and the legendary, astonishing ‘Moe’s Books’ on Telegraph, the only place I know that organizes ‘An Evening of Counterculture: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Reads His Latest Stuff’. Ferlinghetti? Is he still alive? Good god! The place is packed: stairs, aisles … I expect to see people perched on bookshelves. There are people strumming their guitars and singing Joan Baez-y type songs as a warm-up for the main event. My eyes prick with tears. Outside, the small, old bejewelled hippy – white, cottony hair that he keeps under a denim cap, a bony, angular, pale, lined face that reminds me of a starving Whitman at some moments, of Christian Bale method-acting in a Werner Herzog film at others – sells ‘countercultural’ bumper stickers: ‘What’s our oil doing under their soil?’ Meanwhile, the Barnes & Noble opposite ‘Pegasus’ has shut down. Hurrah and huzzah! Everything about Berkeley seems to invert the dominant paradigms of America.
(To be continued).