I guess I should go be a hippie now

[cosmolinguist]

Last night Seth wanted to go to Barnes & Noble. So we did.

Almost immediately I found myself drawn to everything: Irish history, rock and roll, missions to Mars, Robert Bly's poetry, all I saw seemed to be fascinating. I'm sort of like this anyway—I've always read a lot and rather indiscriminately—but it seemed especially acute last night. The infinite-regress stuff seems to have finally snapped last weekend and I've been given lots of new stuff to think about and people to talk to. So I think my brain is in seeking-new-data mode now, and that makes a bookstore feel like a gluttonous adventure.

I'd shamefully neglected to bring my wallet with me, which meant that even if I'd found something I really wanted I couldn't buy it, so I wasn't thinking about the contents of any one book as much as I was thinking about the bookstore. So many books in one place is bound to thrill me ... but I wondered if they were Good Books—the kind with good information and interesting thoughts in them—or Stupid Books—the pompous and misleading kind.

When we'd walked into the Barnes & Noble I was thinking about what it looked like: it was all big and sort of ornate-looking. Comparing the building with other Barnes & Nobles I have seen and and thinking about how expansive and fancy they can be both led me to think about B&N being a huge franchise. Which, maybe just because I'm finally getting around to reading some more of Fast Food Nation since I found it in the back of Darren's car, is sort of disheartening to me now.

They sell Fast Food Nation at B&N, of course—I saw it last night, actually—and I'm sure they sell other books telling you about the evils of corporations, even though Barnes & Noble of course is itself a corporation. I got an e-mail once that pointed out some anti-Wal-Mart book being sold on walmart.com. It may seem ironic, the company working against its own interests or something, but that's not right. There is irony to the situation, but not in what they're doing. They'll stock anything that people will buy. The money is the same to them if you buy a book or a fish in a a cup more fit for urine samples or one of those magnetic "ribbons", to stick on your car, that say God Bless America or Support Our Troops. Even if you buy an anti-Wal-Mart book, you're doing Wal-Mart a favor by buying it there. That's the irony.

I'm not suggesting that I never buy anything corporate—far from it. The stores are pervasive and easily accessible, they're profitable enough to sometimes sell stuff cheaply. I'm used to them, the neatness and uniformity of all Chipotles, Targets, Best Buys. It's true that for me to give any other impression would be extremely hypocritical. But it's also true that I'm disappointed to visit different malls and find them all the same, to see downtowns either fizzle into nothing or be taken over by Subways and Great Clips, to get a white chocolate mocha from the "Barnes & Noble Café" last night and notice that it has too much syrup in it, which I've come to expect at Starbucks, because I know that corporate coffee is supposed to be made to the same standard everywhere.

Comments

[skoobwoman.livejournal.com]

Of course, as soon as people had fun with Wal-Mart by pointing out the fact that they were carrying the book, they pulled it from their shelves. Now, this is even stupider than carrying it in the first place, since, as you point out, at least when they were carrying it they were making money on it. Now, even more people are hearing about the book from the publicity generated and Wal-Mart is making nothing but bad press.

That's why I have trouble believing in corporate conspiracies. They're too dumb to take over the world.

[cosmolinguist]

They're too dumb to take over the world.

Here's hoping. :-)