I went to the bookstore last night...

You just need to hang out more in the philosophy section, Will. Good article here!

Thanks, Ed - I just realized that I need to spend more time with a spell checker as well! Can't wait for the LIVE LIVE LIVE Boston Gather meeting coming up. That should be a real hoot! Remind me that I need to buy you beer for all the hours of reading you have given me.

Hey Will, I'm so looking forward to meeting you; and I'll hold you to that beer!

Will, I enjoyed this, but am not sure I have digested it completely. I sense something much deeper than my first impression (which is good). I'll print this and study it, and maybe be back if I have something more intelligent to offer later ;-)

Given what I just wrote, perhaps a major motivation for venturing out into meatspace is to confirm that you are all real, not just coded language algorithms running through circuitry! And if that venture involves beer and Nudelman -- all the better.

Be careful searching for to much meaning in my meandering musings, sometimes they are just a stone skipping on the water tossed by a younger, sun-tanned Will with bleached hair and hand-me-down shorts half-falling down revealing his pale white butt.

Sometimes romantic and shallow is what's needed to lighten the mood. I love the almost vampiric quality to the soul collecting! Interesting read.

It's always a dangerous proposition venturing out to the bookstore, when I have about 200 pounds worth of books to read. Just the books that John Walter has recommended means I could quit my job and be busy reading for a year.
Maureen, living in the backbay, I know exactly the bookstore you refer to, and shame on me for going to Border's because I invariable feel that it fast is becoming the Walmart of books.
Harvard Bookstore on Mass Ave is decent. But I never want to shop in a dilettente bookstore that would count me as a customer. Perhaps the anonymity of amazon.com is the best place for the likes of me, although at this point, I could cash out my Gather points and go on a book binge that would make Pan, Caligula, and Bucchus all pale with silent reverence at my ability to consume.

Yes, why should Dr. Phil be the only one to collect souls?

Jayne, I ask that question almost daily.

Hannah, Just as the interior's of so many Airports have become interchangable, I fear that may be becoming the case with bookstores. All dull, tuscan yellow walls and greyblue industrial carpet, filling up with 200 Iraq titles, and a poetry selection that is on a repirator. Ghost writing Paul Bremer's book, and Chris Mathews and the Greatest Generation and only one copy of Ulysses, Girl Interrupted and Gone Wild on Spring break.

And! And! The young adult [literature] being spoon fed to young girls becoming women (11-14 age group), makes me pale! Henry Miller and Anais Nin were at least honest that they were writing adult content - but Nancy Drew and Little House on the Prairie has been replaced by MTV Pimp My Adolescent, in softback with innocuous names like Boys of the Beach - rather innocent, and I am sure mother's would agree until they realize what is being advocated in there makes the culty FLDS men look like moral giants.

I will quit now before I sound to moral myself - since we all know that is the polar opposit of true, but when I get concerned, not all is well in Gotham (Bookstore)

I adore bookstores, I adore reading Will's articles and, speaking of souls, I adore Gogol's dead ones. What an amazingly funny book!

"So many books, so little time" could not be more true these days, but culling the worthwhile ones lightens the load a bit.

I wouldn't be surprised if Nora Roberts, Grisham and Dan Brown are computer programs written by superior computer programs, but we're real!! Like Ed, I'd suggest the philosophy section (to troll for souls if nothing else) and for something completely different, try Haruki Murakami.

Nice Diane, and thank you for the compliment. Dan Brown! I furtively admit to having read all his books. Correction - his 1 book. Angels & Demons is DiVinci code, replace Opus Dei with Illuminati. Digital Fortress, replace with NSA. If freemasons were the catholic church, when A&D becomes a movie, they would be protesting at the lodge, and when DF becomes a movie, the NSA cryptanalysts would be....... there are no cryptanalysts because the NSA stands for No Such Agency.

If I was to make a career change now, I would take the pay cut and become a professor - not just for the fresh crop of nubile [minds] every season, but so I could read all summer long.

Ah, I was so disillusioned when I finished all my yellow-spined Nancy Drew books and read the article (in TV Guide!) that revealed there *is* no Carolyn Keene! The same authors who wrote the Hardy Boys wrote Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls and a host of other kiddie adventure books. :-( We didn't need to wait for computers for soulless, formulaic writing -- we only needed computers so that there would be *less* reason for us to read such schlock, and therefore it is all the more tragic that we continue to do so.

I catalog books for a living --I create a virtual reality for every real book I handle, so that people no longer need to browse the shelves in search of a good read. This is supposed to be a convenience, but I have discovered some of my favorite books and authors simply by walking around the library and picking up the titles that look interesting. Hence I perceive my "service" to be a disservice, except for instances where the tiny rural libraries cannot afford all the books their patrons want or need. In those instances, a minute or two of typing on a keyboard and all the books are at their fingertips, to borrow -- free! -- from anywhere.

Too bad that even in those moments of real value, the requests are for the latest Nora Roberts or Dan Brown...

I don't even enjoy going to bookstores anymore; sort of a busman's holiday to go there when I'm done at work. Even to collect souls -- I'd rather find them at the grocery store where people buy cartloads of diet food....

I admit to never having read nancy drew - but I am pretty sure it wasn't soft-core teen porn like the stuff lined up in white paper jackets with fuscia sans-serif titles and an offer for $2 off the next Ashlee Simpson CD.

Whoops! That's correct, and I forgot entirely about that aspect of your article while I focused on the nonexistent writer syndrome.

We had a huge discussion among the librarians concerning the (lack of) literary merit in such tomes of wisdom as Gossip Girl #1, #2, ad nauseam. Some librarians say "give them what they want to read -- it's their library" and others say "we can't, in good conscience, offer this without some sort of caveat" and there are many other stands, such as "this is nothing but a new way to advertise products."

The concept I liked was reading such a book with a group of teen girls and holding a book discussion, where they could bring to light the "girl bullying" situation. I think it might give the victimized girls a safe place to speak up and resolve some issues. Restoring souls?

This is a difficult discussion. One I have had with my more foppishly pedantic friends. Most adults don't even read Little Women or Jane Austen or JF Cooper's Last of the Mohicans - what I would consider adolescent literature. Some argue (for instance with Dan Brown books) -- "Hey - if it gets people reading...then all the better." This is questionable at best.

The worst answer, the one that abrogates any aspect of literary integrity the librarian ever had is to say "we give them what they want...:
That answer is the same one given by news editors for the constant sound bite 24-hour mindless tripe on CNN, or the equally vapid Reality TV...it's not an argument, is a justification. And a bankrupt one at that.

Librarians are just humans in a chosen profession, so some are amazingly creative/nurturing while some are tyrannical nitpickers, and there are plenty between the two extremes. All sides had a say in the discussion I mentioned.

The ones who say "we give them what they want" have the viewpoint that all library funding is taxpayer dollars, and thus public property and a place where the public has what it wants to read. They feel that when Parent A comes in and demands we remove Cleland's "Fanny Hill" but we refuse because of our principles, we cannot turn around and ban Gossip Girl simply because we think it's a lousy book.

The debate continues among the libraries, just as, on another article's comment thread here, censorshp is being debated. Some libraries will buy the books, some will have them because a patron donated them, some will not have them on their shelves at all.

If my library has those books, I'm free to leave them there and read something worthwhile instead.

I think re: giving them what they want - in a time when no doubt funding levels for public libraries has decreased, they need to do what is necessy. And every book a person reads is one left episode of desparate housewives...but when there is so much good shit out there, I think it will get lost in the noise, bad money pushes out good money. When Dianetics replaces the bible, dan brown replaces umberto eco, Anne Coulture replaces thomas paine, Pandas and People replaces Darwin's Origin of Species, simply because people didn't know the difference or the choice

Will, to hell with the Philosophy section and mind-numbing navel gazing - go the the New Age part but ignore the mystics and those published to make another truckload of bucks. Instead, look for the gems pointing you to, "that younger, sun-tanned Will with bleached hair and hand-me-down shorts half-falling down revealing his pale white butt." For there is your soul, who yearns for you.

Magi

I don't know what brought him out - probably summer! Catching frogs, and wading through tide pools in Leguna Beach, where I grew up, going out coyote hunting with my best friend and accomplice, Jen - who, on one of our adventures - used our clothes as hansel and gretel breadcrumbs to find our way back!

Collecting souls gives it all an interesting bent. To think that I just get depressed and find a burrow.

Your soul is next, Cat!

eeek... I've returned to bare my soul to you, Will. I say mosey down to the independent bookseller, and look for some real soul.

If I am out harvesting souls - the first lesson is to trim the weak ones from the pack, so that the herd can get stronger, ergo it is necessary to find my souls at large chain-store bookstores, where the intellectual blogosphere will not suffer one less hollow carcass as I drain it of its life force.

:-)
I think I hear the ice cream truck. Yum.

That makes sense.

There is a vast collection of souls. Many are reading here.
Big business corporations and media are spending lots to create a false sense of what we want...to look good, stay young, feel better, lose weight, and do everything just a little bit faster.
I think I'll go out and smell the roses.
Will, I wish I could go to Boston and drink beer with you all.

Call me a contrarian, but what ever happened to the good ol days when I could look like hell, grow old, feel like shit, gain weight, and do everything at a snails pace?
Business (big or otherwise), and media are just trying to make money. This is a holy pursuit, akin to siddhartha's search for an escape from the circle of birth, life, death.

Therein lies the one problem and opportunity with Gather -- meeting in meatspace is problematic, especially when annoying things like geography get in the way.

I should amend that last comment by saying that my meatspace coordinates are
42 deg 20' 47.544"
by
-71 deg 4' 31.728"

Will, are you still coordinated after a few beers in meatspace? And, are the souls easier to harvest at the bar?

Soul harvesting seems to be alot less work at the bar. It's a veritable Kazbah of buyers and sellers, some even giving their soul away for free.
Am I coordinated after a few beers? If you mean does my shirt match my pants, with accented colours, then yes, I tend to be coordinated after a few beers, unless of course I have had a few to many beers, in which case my clothes come off and I dance a rousing celebration of my own ass as it shakes like a bee decrypting coordinates of honey to the hive.

I used to work at a bookstore and was depressed as well at what many people were asking for (not to mention what WaldenCrooks was featuring in the window and the main aisles). The Romance section is the largest because it's one of the best moneymakers, so as soon as you figure out a HAL-like computer to churn them out, patent it! (Oh, patent "meatspace" while you're at it. And the honey-ass shake that makes a hive coordinated).

So, what are some of the COOL books people have requested lately? We could use a glass-half-full comment after all that Dr. Phil's Empty talk. Self-help authors are a bit vampirish, sucking life out of the living for a living as they do...

I work in a bookstore as well. I've noticed the "types" that seem to come in. There are the twenty-something hipsters asking after Fastfood Nation or Sex, Drugs and CocoaPuffs like they're unknown, esoteric texts that make them impossibly cool for even saying. The middle-aged men who won't tell you the name of the specific book they're looking for; they just guess what section they think it would be in and ask where that is. The middle-aged women who don't know exactly what book they are looking for, they just know that the book you found matching the exact description they gave you is not the one.

And I often wonder what devil Dr. Phil sold his soul to to get his pudgy butt on a best-selling diet book. Oprah?

i agree with the geography comment... it would be nice to meet my future wife down the street rather than having her halfway around the world typing electronic messages while conforming to and playing the bs games that people play just to put food on the table and plan for that so called fantasy land called "retirement." I decided to take my vacation four years ago. i learned a lot since then about the so-called world of men, which seems to me even beneath the layer of animals now... anyhow, i figure if i die oh well, at least i had more vacation time then someone sitting in commuter's hell thinking about their crappy 401K that will probably amount to a pile of wooden nickels if they can survive getting to work. yea that sounds about right... oh and bookstores are fun, but methinks 99% of the books are not even worthy of print... after all, in the old days, people could memorize the good stories and recite them from memory and pass them down with uncanny accuracy via oral tradition. now you go to a bookstore pick up a book more as an object as if you are buying some product believing you will be smarter for it... they should just sell books with titles and after page 10 fill them with blank pages... that's how most people get anyways before tossing them aside... i usually read my books by opening them up at random... usually a bargain book like the Tao Te Ching on the bargain rack for $10.00 is good enough to last me... as i can turn to one page at random and read something thought provoking and be content for the day. and then of course, there are the 11 million people that are supposedly illiterate... while we waste our lives finding ourselves in pages of rubbish.