DUNAWAY BOOKS

NEWSLETTER FOR THE MONTH OF SEPTEMBER

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Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands,
come off the whisper of the silk hangers,
the lap of the flat spear leaves.
--Carl Sandburg

***

September has come, and all over the country and all over the world it has been a tumultuous month. Let us hope its second half will be peaceful and favorable toward those involved in rebuilding their lives, and all those who have come forward to help. Here on South Grand it is indeed peaceful and calm and cooling down. The monarch butterflies are fluttering over and through the neighborhood on their yearly voyage south. Migrating birds will soon begin to move into the park, and the city soundscape will be punctuated by the calling of geese in their Vs. The autumn clematis is blooming fragrant and white on the alley fences, and the nights begin to suggest scarves and sweaters. We have a special evening event to announce this time around, and a few bits of store news. We also hope that if any of our customers have family or friends on the Gulf Coast, they are now safe and sound.

Recent arrivals on the shelves include a cache of books about the Dead Sea Scrolls, some assorted Black Studies material, some more Christian and Christian-related mysticism, and many critical works on Tolkien. We have acquired several shelves’ worth of Literature, and more vintage SF paperbacks have been put out: good-sized handfuls of Heinlein and Wells, with charmingly psychedelic cover illustrations. We are now in the process of rearranging our Americana (American History) section into Biography, States, and Miscellaneous sections, so that all of those things will be easier for you to locate. The sets and series in the front windows, and the front area of the store in general, are also being reorganized. Hopefully the frequent re-tooling of our layout does not confuse too much: please do not hesitate to enquire at our counter if your favorite section appears to have packed up and moved!

We are glad to be making this announcement: live music is returning to Dunaway Books! On Sunday, October 2, noted experimental pianist Thollem McDonas will be performing on our lower level at 8 o’clock in the evening, after regular store hours. McDonas, based in the San Francisco Bay area, has been described as having an “inventiveness…facilitated by his highly developed virtuosity, a tool that allows him to confer on his music an extraordinary flexibility and dynamic variability.” His playing contains elements of modern classical, jazz, and blues, all transformed by his own trained, muscular and extemporaneous sense of composition. Darin Gray, Dave Stone, and Eric Hall will also be performing; each will play alone in turn, then join together at the end for an ensemble performance. A number of chairs will be provided for the audience, and the price of admission will only be six dollars. We are fortunate to have McDonas stop in our city, and hope that some of you will come out and experience what he has to offer. We look forward to being able to host more events of this type in the future, slightly different in orientation than our Sound/Art series; there are so many talented musicians in and around the community, and we would like to be one of the many places on South Grand able to give them a space to do what they do best.

And for New Orleans, our sister city on the Mississippi, and for all the small communities surrounding it, we send out a hope, a wish, a prayer. This is a city that spawned or incubated so many authors it is impossible to list them all here: Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, William Faulkner, John Kennedy Toole, Zora Neale Hurston, Kate Chopin, Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, Walker Percy, Lafcadio Hearn, William S. Burroughs, Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite, and Andrei Codrescu have all lived in, worked in, and written about the place. Some of these writers have ties to Saint Louis; a few of them are buried here. So many creative, imaginative and reflective individuals have undertaken picaresque journeys, played the flaneur, or simply recorded daily life there that “New Orleans has become one of the cities of the mind, and is therefore immortal”, as Cleanth Brooks wrote; in that sense it is one of the great and eternal cities of the world. It is one of the few American cities that is still full of independently owned bookstores. It is a writers’ city, a musicians’ city, a painters’ city, a city so filled with the spirit of making any plain everyday thing curiously unique and defiant and joyful, despite all the world’s undeniable hard-bit ugliness, that it is almost redundant to say so. This writer, at least, keeps her fingers crossed and candles burning for the healing of such a place, and the people that comprise it, who have enriched the life of our country and the world, who represent a peculiar, paradoxical, unconquerable land of the mind.

***

One heavy day I ran away from the grim face of society and the dizzying clamor of the city and directed my weary step to the spacious alley. I pursued the beckoning course of the rivulet and the musical sounds of the birds until I reached a lonely spot where the flowing branches of the trees prevented the sun from the touching the earth.

--Kahlil Gibran

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…I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
    went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
    bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

--Langston Hughes

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…being lost,
being crazy maybe
is not so bad
if you can be
that way:
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know.

--Charles Bukowski

***

Here is Thollem McDonas’ website, with several audio samples for your listening pleasure:

www.thollem.com

Andrei Codrescu’s online literary magazine, Exquisite Corpse:

www.corpse.org

***

…The poets in owlish old rooms

who write bent over words

know that words were invented

because nothing was nothing

In use of words, use words,

the X and the blank

And the Emperor’s white page

And the last of the Bulls

Before spring operates

Are all lotsa nothing

which we got anyway

So we’ll deal in the night

in the market of words

--Jack Kerouac

***

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

--Tennessee Williams

***

Oh, autumn
in the boundless world!
its traces

--Masaoki Shiki

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DUNAWAY BOOKS

3111 S. Grand

St. Louis, MO 63118

314-771-7150

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