Bookstores can't die if new ones keep being born

Nina Barrett and Jeff Garrett at their bookstore.

     A pal of mine teaches in Evanston, where we sometimes meet for lunch. At Dixie Kitchen, of course, where I get the blackened catfish, every time, since I can’t conceive of liking anything better.

     As satisfying an experience as that is, Evanston is off the beaten path, so while there, I try to be efficient by hitting the various cultural highlights — Comix Revolution sometimes, and, until last winter, Bookman’s Alley, the sprawling used bookstore actually located in an alley off Sherman. I started going there as a green NU sophomore, and went regularly for the next 34 years, part to browse the books, part to chat with its eternally amused owner, Roger Carlson, the last man I referred to as “Mister.”

     But Bookman’s Alley closed, gradually, over years, lingering in a dim twilight of boxes and clutter.  Eventually, it was shuttered around December. In mid-June, I was vectoring from Dixie Kitchen to my car, when I instinctively glanced down the alley, holding a faint flicker of hope that the store might still be there, magically. There was a blue sign that hadn’t been there before, enough to get me hoofing down the alley.

    The sign was for “Bookends & Beginnings,” an aptly named bookstore that opened in mid-June in the former Bookman’s Alley space. Inside, I founded Jeff Garrett and his wife, Nina Barrett (“the copy editor isn’t going to like that,” I muttered, noting the Garrett/Barrett dichotomy).  If you think your career choices are daft, Jeff and Nina (as I will call them, since Garrett/Barrett just sows confusion) have opened a bookstore. In 2014. Without Wi-Fi or coffee.

     “Opening a bookstore is really overwhelming,” said Nina, who was a food reporter for WBEZ and is in charge of the store’s ample cookery section.

     Jeff was head of special libraries at Northwestern for 20 years but quit to devote himself full time to the book business.

     “It’s an area where our interests meet,” he said. “We both left our day jobs to start this bookstore. We’re hand-selling each book; we’re hand-curating the entire store.”

     “Curating” makes me wince — what’s wrong with “picking books our customers might like” — but the hand-selling aspect is key to the bookstore experience. When I think of small bookstores at their finest, I think of the old Stuart Brent’s on Michigan Avenue, and bright-eyed Adam Brent pressing Alfred Lansing’s Endurance upon me so skillfully that I bought it even though I had no interest — I thought — in early 20th century Antarctic explorers. Masterpiece.

     Bookman’s Alley had a grungy, comfortable, dusty vibe, which Bookends & Beginnings sandblasted away for something brighter, freshly painted, lighter but still homey. New books, quality remaindered sale books, a large cooking section, a big children’s section in the back. They had me at “new bookstore,” but I couldn’t help but admire the in-for-a-dime, in-for-a-dollar moxie that inspired them to install a permanent puppet theater by the children’s section. 

     What kind of shows will they have?

     “It depends on who we can get running our puppet theater,” Jeff said.

     “That’s Phase II of our plans,” Nina said.

     Talk about fate! I almost volunteered on the spot to be their first artistic director: We could mount a series of Eugene O’Neill plays adapted for the puppet stage while I pursue my dream of writing Punch & Judy vignettes pegged to current events. But I figured I was already in one moribund profession and it wouldn’t do to shift to another.

     Three weeks have passed since my visit, so I thought I would circle back and see, nearly a month in, how the couple are doing? Sorry yet? Divorce on the horizon?

     “We’re doing great,” Jeff said. “The art fair weekend was just spectacular. I think in a year we’ll still be here.”

     And still married?

     “Absolutely.”

     It’s encouraging to see people drop established careers and make a change. When it comes to professions, we have a sad tendency to slavishly follow the general trends. If the field of law is crowded, we urge people not to be lawyers. If there’s a shortage of doctors, great, then go to medical school. 

     We wouldn’t do that in other aspects of life — if a friend said he was marrying a blonde, you wouldn’t say, no, marry a brunette, studies show they get divorced less.

     The lone factor in choosing a career should be: Are you happy doing it? Then you can do the hard work needed to succeed, and if you don’t, hey, you’re still doing what you love. The message behind someone opening a bookstore in Evanston is not only that there’s a new bookstore in Evanston, but it’s never too late to chase your dreams. 

"Free free Palestine"

    "Free free Palestine," chanted hundreds, if not thousands of protesters marching along Wacker Drive Wednesday night. "Free free Palestine."
     They did not, significantly, demand that Gaza and the West Bank be freed from Israeli control. No Palestinian leadership—to the degree that there is any—seems to be calling for that. Or has ever called for that, to my knowledge. No, what they would like is the entire country under their control, not that it ever was, but they did live there, or at least their parents or grandparents did, once upon a time. 
     But that was in 1947. And it has been 47 years since Israel, getting a jump on the latest Arab attempt to destroy it, instead destroyed the Egyptian air force and seized the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. The Sinai was given back to Egypt in return for a sort of peace, but the Gaza Strip was kept along with the West Bank and Jerusalem.
     If they had pushed the Palestinians off the land then, by force, the world would have forgiven them, to the degree it can ever forgive Jews, long ago. By 1992, 47 years after the end of World War II, Germany was everybody's pal, Europe's most upright citizen, and all was forgotten. But that wasn't Israel's style, and the middle road, neither conquering the land nor abandoning it, created an ever-growing population of permanent victims, four million and counting. 
     Which is enough history to delve into, because while history usually helps in the understanding of current events, in the case of the Israeli/Palestinian stand-off, history is of limited use. No one can even agree what happened, never mind what should happen. The Palestinians see a history where their nation is seized from under their noses by crafty Eastern European Jews, and Israel sees a rebarbative people who bat away chances for peace time and time again.
     Neither can be deemed correct. What I used to ask was: What happens now? Assume, for argument's sake, that history actually occurred, in some form, leaving us to the present day. Where do we go from here?
     But even that question is naive. The answer, plainly, is nothing. Nothing happens. Or, rather, more of the same. They're going nowhere.
     None of the signs demanded union with Egypt or Jordan, which also border the Gaza and the West Bank. Somehow, this isn't their problem. You remember when Egypt and Jordan were demanding the return of those territories? Neither do I.
     Nor did the protesters demand an independent country. They decry "War on Gaza," which began, most recently, after weeks of missile attacks deep into Israel, and display their grievance to the world, in the hopes that the world buys it, which of course it does. Hating Jews is always in fashion, and there were plenty of pale, black-clad young kids, their faces covered, Sandinista-style, so that the government doesn't come get them personally, for striking their blow on the world stage, marching as part of their youthful Occupy Chicago lark. To them, oppression of the Palestinians, if that is the proper phrase, is the only wrong on the globe, except of course for life here with mom and dad.
     One of the keys to approaching the problem, in my eyes, is to remember that the world hated the Jews before. Before there was an Israel, and before there was a single Palestinian refugee. The Germans did not believe that Jews who had lived for centuries in Germany belonged there either. So the Palestinian complaints have to be given a bit of context. If Palestine was up for grabs in 1947, when the British buggered out, and the Palestinian forefathers wanted it so badly, you have to ask why they didn't take it themselves, why they let a ragtag mob of Polish refugees—in their estimation—take control of their land. The Palestinian national narrative presumes an element of bungling on their own part.
    That said, the four million Palestinians are real, and live in their limbo, self-imposed though it may be. Myself, I'd prefer Israel pulled out and declared them a state, unilaterally, at least once. They've taken steps in that direction, but they need to do it 100 percent, to illustrate the Day After Problem, which is: they pull out, the Palestinians start attacking them, because that's what they do, and they have to go back in and stop it.  That seemed where they were going, with the wall, but Israel has its own growing population of fire-eyed zealots, the folks who kidnapped a Palestinian teen recently and burned him alive, in retaliation for the three Israeli teens who were murdered last month. It was a depraved act, which made the situation worse. Though there is something almost anesthetic about the far right Israeli settlers and Ultra-Orthodox black hats. By rendering  Israel increasingly alien to its American supporters, it allows for a certain distance. Many American Jews increasingly regard Israel with a squint and a muttered, "This is not the place I loved, not anymore."
    But we fight that. Being Jewish, I support the Jewish state, even though it becomes more and more unpalatable with each passing year, as its own Jewish fanatics deform the country's modern values. If the present state of Muslim society can be explained by a revenge culture, then Israel has allowed itself to be pulled into it. Now the Palestinians are facing an enemy more like themselves. "When fighting monsters," as Nietschze said, "be careful not become a monster." Israel should have listened.
    Still, I can't pretend there is a false equivalence. Even were I not Jewish, one is a friend to the United States and an advocate of peace and democracy of some kind. The other claims to be oppressed but shows no interest in working to end that oppression, not an end that doesn't involve being elevated to a status that they never enjoyed and never can enjoy. In 1947, Britain controlled Palestine, then the Jews took over. The Palestinian Arabs, as they were called, had a chance for their own land, and batted it away, losing some land in a vain grab for it all.
    That has been their strategy this entire time, to their misfortune, and Israel's, and the world's. No amount of protest will change that. They're sticking with it, tossing down their losing hand, again and again, reshuffling the cards in their hand and ending up, again, with nothing. Only more time lost, and still more suffering. It hardly merits thinking rationally about by third parties because rational thought is such a trivial factor in all this passion and hatred and revenge and bloodlust. The end is nowhere in sight. I'm not sure there's much value in even paying attention to it anymore.

In 2011, I had lunch with Oril Gil, then the consul general in Chicago, to talk about the Israeli strategy toward the Palestinians. It was not encouraging. 

Attack of the Giant Cupcakes Repelled!

 

     You should never celebrate when any business goes under. Money lost, people out of work, dreams dashed.
     Yet, score one for the little guy.
     It will be five years ago, this September, that mother daughter team of Holly Sjo and Samantha Wood opened up The Cupcake Counter, a tiny, 290-square foot store wedged between a parking garage and a Quinta Inn on Madison Street.
     And a year later, New York giant Crumbs opened up directly across Franklin Street.
     In 2011, I compared the two this way:
     “Cupcake Counter cupcakes weigh about 2 ounces and look exactly like the cupcakes your mother would bake and bring to your first-grade classroom in a tinfoil-lined box to celebrate your birthday. The icing can be spare—sometimes it doesn’t even cover the cupcake top, but leaves a gap of bare cake rimming the crinkly paper wrapping. Decoration might be a single tiny red candy heart, set directly in the center. I would describe Cupcake Counter cupcakes as simple, classic cupcakes with a certain quiet dignity; solemn cupcakes, maybe even a little sorrowful; cupcakes as Wayne Thiebaud would paint them. Sometimes only a handful are on display.”
     Meanwhile:
              "Across the street at Crumbs is a different story...The display case is jammed with cupcakes, ranging from 1-ounce minis to the 'Colossal Crumb' intended to feed eight people. The ‘signature’ cupcakes are 7-ounce, 500-calorie behemoths the size and shape of grapefruits, domed high with icing, studded with candy, drenched in chocolate, crusted with sprinkles. Circus-like cupcakes. Mardi Gras cupcakes.”
     The assumption of course was that the big chain would drive the tiny storefront out of business. That’s how life works. Sometimes. But just as mice outlasted mammoths and the Book Bin in Northbrook saw Borders come and go, so Crumbs shut down while the The Cupcake Counter bakes on.
     This week Crumbs announced it is closing its 65 stores in 12 states, including two in Chicago, on Madison Street and in Water Tower Place. Its stock has been delisted from the stock exchange.
     What happened? Though one pastry chef I talked to called Crumbs, off the record, "shockingly bad," in the taste test I conducted with my family three years ago, we decided Crumbs was as good as The Cupcake Counter, while offering 250 percent more cupcake at a 25 percent greater price.
     They were huge.
     "Crumbs was big," said Sarah Levy, a dessert maven who had boutique bakeries around Chicago and now is entering the airport food concession business through her S. Levy Foods. "Not a nice little indulgence. There's guilt associated with eating such a large cupcake."
     She speculated that the out-of-town aspect might be a factor. "Chicago likes to support local business, so maybe the fact that they were this big chain ..." but then she observed that Sprinkles, based in California, still has "lines out the door."
     Does this mean the cupcake craze is over?
     "I hope the cupcake craze is over," Levy said. "In a way, I never fully understood it. I think there's still a ton of people who absolutely love cupcakes. The cupcake craze is not dead, but maybe it's slowing down. Maybe doughnuts have taken over. The doughnut eaters are taking away from the cupcake eaters."
     And then she went on to rhapsodize the Doughnut Vault. She certainly has a point.
     The only downside, except for those who worked for, invested in or genuinely liked Crumbs, is for the mother-daughter duo who owned The Cupcake Counter. Facing family obligations, they sold three years ago to Marlene Kritlow, who is not at all puzzled as to why Crumbs went belly up.
     "It makes a difference when you bake fresh," said the lifelong Chicagoan, who grew up in Uptown and "had the itch" to bake. "I think people can tell the difference."
     She said she has been watching Crumbs close locations around Chicago for a year.
     "Their quality was different," she said, noting Crumbs cupcakes were baked off-site and not always that day. "My customers would go, then they would come back."
     She watches expenses closely, and her store is always busy. "There's no downtime," she said. "We're happy, a great location."
     Does she see the cupcake craze fading?
     "No, cupcakes are never going out of style," Kritlow said. "Some of these franchises might open and close, there will always be trends. But people have always wanted and loved cupcakes. It's a portion, like an individual little present to the person. That never goes out of style."

Papa is a mean old waffle

     "Waffle," I said, one morning at breakfast a couple weeks ago, as our hostess passed around these delicately browned beauties. "Now there's an interesting word. I wonder where it's from?"
     Out came the smart phones, several at the same time, like Western gunslingers on the draw — I've noticed that people are rapidly losing whatever inhibitions they may have once had about consulting their phones on a moment's notice, even at meals, checking them when a question arises and often when one doesn't. I imagine someday soon it'll be rare to ever put them away.
    "It sounds Dutch," I said quickly, guessing, trying to lay out a claim before technology revealed the truth. Like placing a small wager: I'll put $2 on the Netherlands.
    Up popped the e-definition: "a crisp cake of batter baked in a waffle iron" and this etymology, dating to 1744: "Dutch wafel."
    Bingo!
    But there was more.
    As a verb, waffle means "to fail to make up one's mind" (not how I would define it. I would say it is closer to "vacillate, waver between two different courses of action.") 
     But the second definition led me to play one of my favorite etymological games: connect the meanings. Is there a link between "waffle" the foodstuff and "waffle" the politician's friend? And which came first?
     The Oxford English Dictionary defines waffle as "a kind of batter-cake, baked in a waffle-iron, and eaten hot with butter or molasses" (do the Brits not use maple syrup? Poor blighters) and traces "waffle" to "wafer"—obvious, though I had never considered it before. A footnote cites the source of wafer as the Teutonic, wabe which, to this day, means "honeycomb" in German. The Shorter Oxford adds a wonderful bit of US slang, "waffle stomper" for a boot with a ridged sole. 
     My 1978 full OED only offers waffle as a verb meaning "to yelp" but nothing about going back and forth. The 1993 New Shorter OED elaborates "of a dog, yap, yelp"  then pushes on to "waver, vacillate, equivocate," which makes me think it's a fairly recent usage. The OED traces waffle the verb to the Scottish, "waff," which means flap and flutter in the wind, so the path to waffling as indecision is obvious. The Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English ponders the connection, defining waffle as an aircraft term, "to be out of control" and "to fly in a damaged condition and/or uncertainty," dating it to the Royal Air Force around 1925 and wondering "Hence (?) to dither."
     Two different routes then, the breakfast treat arriving through the Netherlands, tracing back to the honey-loving Teutons (though it should be noted the French "gaufre," sounds awfully similar, and dates to the 12th century) while the personality flaw goes back through Scotland, evoking the fluttering sound of pennants. ("Waffle" and "wave" share the same heritage).
    Though both terms disappear quite quickly—no "waffle" in either Noah Webster's 1828 American Dictionary or Samuel Johnson's great 1755 Dictionary.  So no common ancestor for both breakfast treat and rhetorical blunder, though allowing a similar expression to stand-in, I found both crisp batter cake and inconsistency mingling in a single passage in the Second Act of Shakespeare's Henry V, written about 1599: "Trust none;" Pistol tells his wife. "For oaths are straws, men's faiths are wafer-cakes."
    Ain't that the truth? The Riverside Shakespeare interprets "wafer-cakes" as "fragile" as in easily-broken, but that's very close in meaning to wavering.
       There are a few obscure definitions worth noting. The Dictionary of American Slang defines "waffle" first as "a difficult or dangerous task" and then moves on to include "A disliked person, esp. an old person with wrinkled skin" and offers this 1934 gem from Damon Runyon: "[her] papa is a mean old waffle," noting that the usage was "never common." 
    Well, maybe it should be common. It's never too late. Some words slumber until needed. A "cursor" in my OED is defined as "a part of a mathematical, astronomical, or surveying instrument, which slides backwards and forwards." Where it stayed, esoterically—chiefly to describe the clear plastic sleeve on a slide rule—until about 30 years ago, when we all started using flashing electronic cursors every day. So as the Baby Boom proceeds into its senescence, I have a feeling we're going to be encountering a lot of mean old waffles, and will need a solid, unfamiliar, mildly-derogatory, slightly-humorous term to describe them.

Margaret Sanger, we need you again

"The past isn't dead," William Faulkner wrote, famously, in 1951. "It isn't even past." That's true for some groups more than others. Religious fanatics keep trying to drive women back into the past and, perhaps because no one takes them seriously except the Supreme Court, their successes don't seem to cause much distress.  

     Timing is everything, in book publishing as in everything else. 

     OK, maybe more so in book publishing. 

     So I do not want to suggest that by not being published until October,  The Birth of the Pill by Chicago writer Jonathan Eig will be in any sense “late.” 

     His previous books — about Lou Gehrig, about Al Capone — were excellent and best-sellers, and this next one is excellent and will be a best-seller, too, or at least should be.                 That said, it’s a shame it’s not available right now—I read an advance copy—because to read of the arduous struggle of American women to gain access to contraception at the precise moment when the U.S. Supreme Court is rolling back those hard-won rights, well let me tell you, it’s special. A chilling kind of privilege. 

     It’s like reading Upton Sinclair’s stomach-turning meatpacking novel The Jungle if the government were in the process of lowering food inspection standards. It’s like reading The Shining at the Stanley Hotel.

     Yes, that’s overstating the case. The Supreme Court did not say all women lose access to contraception, just women working for Hobby Lobby and, on Thursday, Wheaton College.     
     And only if they want it covered in their medical plans. They’re still free to buy it themselves, for now, assuming their pharmacists don’t balk, which is next.

     The ruling, in case you’ve been asleep, says the family owners of Hobby Lobby, because of their “sincere” religious convictions against contraception, can opt out of the federal Affordable Care Act. The Wheaton College ruling suggests even signing a form seeking an exemption is asking too much. This is not through any constitutional reading but due to the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bill designed to help faithful sorts take their ball and go home whenever it pleases them. 

       People who think that is a good thing point out that nobody is forced to work at Hobby Lobby. True, but that is like saying it would be OK for Holiday Inn to ban blacks because they can stay other places. What if every business took this path and tried to tailor-fit the law to suit the religious whims of owners? If the court respects the sincere belief that sex is for procreation only and women who insist on having protected sex are whores who shouldn't be served by the company medical plan — the Hobby Lobby position, plainly stated — why shouldn't sincere religious belief in barring blacks or literally anything else not have equal weight under the law? A big book, the Bible is.
     Eig's book starts with Margaret Sanger, the pioneering advocate for women's reproductive rights, kick-starting birth control pill research in 1950, then backtracks to how women were treated when she began, around World War I. Maybe we've forgotten: One hundred years ago it was illegal to send information about contraception through the mail, forget the contraception itself. Not "illegal" as in one of those laws that sat on the books and nobody enforced. Illegal as in your pamphlets would be seized by postal authorities and you'd go to prison.
     Sanger opened the first clinic for birth control in New York in 1916, helping women desperate to get off the maternal treadmill. Shortly thereafter she was arrested for breaking the law: New York was one of 30 states that barred all contraception.
      I truly believe, if women of today understood how their grandmothers lived — baby machines under the thumb of men and religious men at that — if they had any sense of what life for them was like even 50 years ago, the babies they were forced to have, their constricted life choices, they would fall upon Hobby Lobby with a howl and tear it down brick by brick rather than let them prod our nation back toward that world.
     But they don't know. We're crazy about liberty, and miss, as the Supreme Court did, that here we're talking about the liberty of rich business owners and smug college deans to constrain the ability of minimum-wage clerks and struggling sophomores to run their lives. The Supreme Court gives that a kiss of approval and we shrug and sail into summer.
     No one's religion is violated by participating in the Affordable Care Act. As Eig points out, "There is no mention of contraception in the Bible," and the Roman Catholic Church had no official position on birth control until 1930. What you have is a divide, between those who want to live and let live under neutral civic laws and those who want to shanghai those laws to drag us all back to Christian theocracy, assuming we ever left.
     I should tell Eig I'm sorry for jumping the gun on his book. I promise I'll leap on the bandwagon come fall, if there's room. Alas, it'll be even more timely then, as women's rights keep sliding backward into history.

Calla lilies

     "Calla lilies!" I thought to myself, trucking north on Franklin last week. "What an odd place for calla lilies, in a glass vase, next to a white plastic bucket, beside that cement truck."
     I can't say for certain those actual words coursed through my brain, but some sort of enzyme flash that approximated those words. I slowed down, diverted my path to investigate.

Calla lillie

     But first, an explanation. As much as society today celebrates knowledgeable, sensitive men, in theory, I'm not sure that recognizing a calla lily on sight is something for a guy to brag about. In my defense, my wife had us focus intently on the top 50 or 100 flowers used by humanity over the past century when planning our wedding, and this particular flower must have lodged in some little-used antechamber of the brain, where it flashed catching glimpse of orange after laying dormant for nearly a quarter century.
     And my further defense, I was wrong. When I saw what my supposed calla lilies really were, I smiled, and took the above photograph, which sent two cement workers, standing nearby in their yellow vests and hard hats, hustling over to see what I was photographing.
     Nobody wants to get in trouble.

   I must have perfected a certain disarming manner, however, because within moments I had explained the nature of my confusion, and we were happily talking cement, particularly its quality of heating up as it hardens. I explained that not too long ago I had been out to tour Prairie Materials, in Bridgeview, for a pending concrete story—fascinating stuff, concrete, the trucks are everywhere this summer—and they insisted I include their company, Ozinga, which is another big cement concern in Chicago.
     By the time we parted, we were old pals. They took my card, and assured me the top bosses at Ozinga—fourth generation cement guys—would leap to be involved in my story, and explained how construction workers put decals on their helmets, as tokens of their jobs, like fighter pilots painting kills on the sides of their jets. They gave me an attractive Ozinga sticker for my hard hat, and they were ready to give me a hard hat too, but I insisted that I already have a serviceable one my friends at the CTA had given me.
     I parted in maximum good spirits, hurried to my office, dug out my hard hat, and put my trophy upon it, at the very back, in the place of honor. If you had told me that knowing a calla lily on sight, perhaps coupled with not the best eyesight at a distance, would help me make a good connection at a cement company for a story, well, I would have been dubious. But that is indeed how things work in the city. Wonderful world.        

   
   

Saturday Fun Activity: Where IS this?

     This struck me for several reasons, in the few seconds after the el car doors slid open.
     The colors, first of all: light steel blue tiles with a reddish orange trim. Quite smart, for public transit.
     And then the whimsical typeface on "LOOP," the odd little split between the "LO" and the "OP," almost rendering it into a different sort of word. There was something sweet about it. 
     And oddly, there is no stop called "LOOP" on the el—I know it's officially 'L', but that looks ugly to me. If "el" was good enough for Nelson Algren, it's good enough for me. The CTA is going with 'L' now, officially, but it also created Ventra cards and we'll see how long those last.  Better to stick with the old standards.
     Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, so there is no "LOOP" stop to the el. This signage, though whimsical and perhaps even helpful, in a rough kind of way, won't tell you what station this is.
     Where is it? Googling won't help you here—I checked. You'll have to have just noticed it, as I did, which means you have an eye for design, and thus might appreciate one of my super-rare blog posters, which I will send to the person who correctly identifies the line and station this is. Post your guesses in the comments section below. Good luck.