DUNAWAY BOOKS
NEWSLETTER FOR THE MONTH OF MARCH
IN THE YEAR 2005
Greetings to everyone! This is the beginning of a new sort of newsletter for Dunaway Books, to be tentatively described as coming out at the beginning of each month. It will feature more words and fewer pictures, and endeavor to deliver a sense of what is happening in the shop and in the fabulous kingdom of used books on a more frequent basis. We will be announcing events and new acquisitions, and changes in the shop as it evolves. We will also be sharing literary tidbits because reading is a joy, pure and simple, and a community that does read enables itself to realize its potential. This month, due to our SF/Fantasy expansion, we will be focusing on some authors we feel to be relevant to the postmodern dilemma. Future topics may include Japanese literature, the Harlem Renaissance, the history of the travel narrative, and many others.
…So Happy March, soon bringing Easter, Equinox, and bright festivals many-named around the world! Spring does appear to be coming, in lumps and bumps, interspersed with snow still, but coming. Snow will soon defer to spring beauties and green. It will be a lovely time to read beneath an open window with your cat; on the porch swing or stoop; at the neighborhood coffeehouse or café; anywhere in Tower Grove Park; really, anywhere and any-way at all.
At Dunaway Books we have been continuing to organize and restructure, to better absorb the continually inflowing stock, and to make it a yet easier and more pleasant place to browse. The lower level, which has been open to the public for many months now, is undergoing a gradual transformation: the floors have been painted, and areas previously used for storage are being cleared out; music, rugs, and more seating will soon be established. Seating will also be added to throughout the store in general, for greater comfort and ease in browsing.
As there has been more space created downstairs, we have shifted whole sections of stock to fill it: Poetry, Philosophy, Religion, Natural History & Science, Foreign Language, Archaeology & Anthropology, Mystery and SF/Fantasy have all been relocated to the basement. Philosophy and Poetry have been and will continue to be enlarged from recent purchases, SF/Fantasy has quadrupled in size, including graphic novels and manga, and Natural History has also expanded quite a bit. Upstairs, we have improved several areas. The Mesoamerican section has been restocked and nicely reorganized. We have acquired more Photography and Art books. Our CDs have been added to and their area restructured. The Children’s/Young Adult section is growing, and we hope will grow further: some of the most enduring stories are those enjoyable to all ages.
We definitely plan to keep adding to our World Religion, SF/Fantasy, Mystery, Archaeology/Anthropology, Art, and Craft sections as greatly as we are able in the coming months. There have been numerous requests for all of these things, and we would like to be able to fulfill the wishes of the community.
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On that note, we are quite pleased about having been able to expand the Science Fiction/Fantasy section: if literary ghetto it is, then it is also a conveniently obscure corner hidden from the establishment where bardic tales are kept alive and revolutions sown. Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Stanislaw Lem, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, and many other figures familiar in daylight have passed through the place and left their mark. Its boundaries are indistinct, and its alleys lead to many other parts of town.
There is in the work of Angela Carter and Tanith Lee a grand continuation of the literary gothic: Sade, Poe, the Symbolist poets, the Arabian Nights and the tales of the brothers Grimm echo even as they are reshaped by the voices of their subjects. Folklore and fairy tale also inform the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Holdstock, Jane Yolen, and Charles de Lint. Many ancient ballads and stories are found in similar versions in cultures all over the earth, and these writers assure their continuance and vitality, as the likes of Joseph Campbell and Robert Graves have done elsewhere. The relevance is in the retelling, which is never the same if a story is truly alive.
The social institution of culture, with both its glories and its perils, is the territory of anthropologist’s daughter Ursula K. Le Guin and postmodern raconteur Samuel R. Delany: it seems that, to be comfortable, humans like to define the Other so that they may be the unquestioned entitled One. To be comfortable is dangerous, far more so than the exploration of the liminal frontiers of human experience: the future likely holds the Many. All must be questioned. What is race, gender, sexuality, nationality? What is valid knowledge; what is power and what is strength? What is responsibility and what is shame? From whence do our values come? These two writers continue to do extensive work both within and without genre, often causing the public to question the validity of that boundary itself.
Culture has its material manifestations (and consequences) also. Thinly veiled critiques of current political situations and operatic epics of imaginary kingdoms rub covers with paranoid dystopias and good old-fashioned adventure stories when the theme in question is the expansion into physical space and the fate of its resources. Frank Herbert envisioned the occult workings of a space-folding dynasty reliant upon the monopoly of a strange fuel buried beneath desert sands, while Philip K. Dick and George Orwell attempted to describe the effects upon reality of language and sensory experience being controlled by government. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke took the pulp stories of a boy and his rocket a generation forward, Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg brought them one more with a twist or two, and William Gibson and Neal Stephenson invited the dynamos and circuitry inside of us and told us what they saw. In these visions we appear as gods one moment, monkeys with clever tricks the next, building and destroying, often both at once. We create, we exult, we ride, faster and faster and faster…all surfaces of the machine are eventually described and reported upon, gleaming surface and grisly gear; as blind men to elephants we attempt to assess this ship in which we hurtle.
Not to be forgotten are the books that dwell in the twilights between stages and ages; that speak of beginnings and endings, of the mysteries of initiation and transition. Some of the aforementioned writers turn up here again: Yolen, Le Guin, and Lee…Tolkien is here, of course, and there are so many others. Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, and Susan Cooper; Lloyd Alexander, T.H. White, and C.S. Lewis; Ray Bradbury, Madeleine L’Engle, and Meredith Ann Pierce…mazes, doors and keys; guardians and guides and oracles…what is it to confront the numinous with a dirty face, scabbed knees and no map? Recently, a fresh wave of tales has come up, led by J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter; Garth Nix, Christopher Paolini, and Clive Barker (with his own fantastical illustrations!) have all published new and significant work, and its popularity seems to have spurred reprints of many of the older novels. This is a good thing for those who acknowledge that the dreams of young and old alike must be cared for and fed.
Once upon a time, all stories spoke in the language of the fantastic. The existence of humanity is somewhat fantastic in itself, and modern technology has not exorcised our ghosts, our tricksters, our heroes, or the possible futures dreamed by our ever-living will: rather, it is another manifestation of the same. At their best, these genres transcend the label and ask what all great work must: who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going? In this age of irony, due to their specialization (shall we call it?), they are often more free to ask.
RELEVANT (starter) LINKS:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/
http://www.sfsite.com/home.htm
http://www.endicott-studio.com/
http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/
http://www.feministsf.org/femsf/
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And, of course, spring is at least a good a time as any to become drunk (on poetry!)
"It is essential to be drunk all the time. That's all: there's no other problem. If you do not want to feel the appalling weight of Time which breaks your shoulders and bends you to the ground, get drunk, and drunk again. What with? Wine, poetry, or being good, please yourself. But get drunk. And if now and then, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the glum loneliness of your room, you come to, your drunken state abated or dissolved, ask the wind, ask the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, ask all that runs away, all that groans, all that wheels, all that sings, all that speaks, what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will tell you: 'It is time to get drunk!' If you do not want to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk, always get drunk! With wine, with poetry or with being good. As you please."
--Charles Baudelaire
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The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
—Dylan Thomas
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I cannot say which is which:
the glowing
plum blossom is
the spring night’s moon
—Izumi Shikibu
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Don’t forget to be watching for our next newsletter in the month of April. There will be more news in store, and a few surprises, too. Have a wonderful March, and don’t forget to keep feeding your head!
DUNAWAY BOOKS
314-771-7150