Left of Center

What may very well be the best bookstore in the city is going out of business, and you should be sad about it.

Left of Center Bookstore (link in the title) is one of the few bookstores that carries (let alone knows about) much of the Dalkey Archive Press‘ catalogue (Dalkey Archive Press may very well be the best publisher in the country.). Considering that Left of Center is (but for a short time only) located next door to what may very well be the best coffee roaster and coffee shop in the city (Metropolis Coffee), this is doubly sad, because what neighborhood in Chicago couldn’t use a really awesome bookstore coffeeshop/roaster one-two punch on a single block?

Anyway, you should do what I’m going to do, which is hie myself over to Left of Center and spend lots of money on discounted books. In fact, tonight I’m going to go there and buy (among other things) The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus.

And that name (Ben Marcus) leads me to this tangent: About a month ago, I went to the Reconstruction Room, which is a themed reading series at a bar not far from my first apartment here in Chicago. It is organized by friends of mine from grad school, and has been going on for almost two years, but for some odd reason I hadn’t ever gone before. There, I ran into someone from grad school I hadn’t seen in a long time. We got to talking, and she told me she had just read The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus and that I should absolutely read it. I wrote down the title and author in my little, black notebook, thanked her for the suggestion, and promptly forgot all about it (my backlog is too deep to add new things (whatever, shut up Shawn)). The next day (or the day after the next day) at work, I was in the new guy’s cubicle showing him how to do something with his computer for some reason, and I looked over and saw he had a Harper’s magazine on his desk. The title of one of the essays in the magazine then caught my eye, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know it: A Correction.” Then I noticed the author’s name: Ben Marcus. The new guy, MM, also being a nice guy, asked me if I would like to borrow the magazine. I did, photocopied the article, and returned the magazine. I read the article (and took notes in the margins, if you’ll allow me to appear to be patting myself on the back, even though I’m only trying to tell you that I didn’t just read the damned article, I read the damned article (except it wasn’t damned so much as it was damning and it said things I’ve been thinking and trying to say for years now and that was refreshing (and also a little frustrating, I must admit, because I kind of wanted to be the one saying them (but how will that ever happen if I don’t get off my ass (on my ass) and write, rather than desultorily surf the internet looking for fun games where I try not to let my character the King of All Cosmos get rolled up into the ball?)))), and enjoyed it as well. I expressed pretty much all of this (my enjoyment as well as all that shit in all those parentheses) to the nice, new guy MM, who then offered to lend me the book which contained the essays by Jonathan Franzen referenced in the article by Ben Marcus (has this tangent gone on long enough? Let me tell you now that the pay-off isn’t worth all the trouble I’ve gone to (to which I’ve gone–sorry)). I thanked him again. He kindly brought in the book, I photocopied the relevant essays, read (and took notes on, etc.) one of them (the other one is languishing in my bag, along with several photocopied pages about Warhol’s work (research into the writing workshop I’ll be teaching at the MCA this April (link to the right or down), and then he and I had several small conversations about what an absolute douche-bag Mr. Jonathan Franzen is.

Anyway, (here comes the pay-off) this week, I again went to the Reconstruction Room, and again ran into the friend from grad school. She asked me if I had yet read The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, to which I replied, no, I haven’t, but let me tell you about this thing that happened at work. I then recounted most everything from the above paragraph (even the parts in which she had participated), all the way up to having read just one of the essays by Franzen, when she said, “My god, Jonathan Franzen is such a douche-bag.”

*disclaimer: I don’t personally know Mr. Jonathan Franzen, so I can’t say whether he’s a douche-bag or not. Some of his opinions on literature, however, are total and complete rubbish, and he should be (and has been, by Ben Marcus) metaphorically slapped for them.