hold your breath till march
Working in a bookstore is a good experience. Most of my time is spent thinking about ideas or observing people- if I ever get the courage to have a go at writing, this will be very useful. Of course, most of my thoughts are mundane. The other day I attempted to document between which two authors my books would be shelved, were I to write any. This got disapointing quickly, as there tended to be a Straus or Templeton seperating me from Steinbeck and Thoreau. Why proximity to greatness seems attractive, I'm not sure. I remember a boy in junior high who had a crush on me told me how dismayed he was when we went to high school, and some one elses picture (a Straus, I think) seperated us in the yearbook. But such proximity is really useless. (We never dated) I know this also because I walk by the John F. Kennedy School of Government nearly every day. I offer advice on good new fiction to its professors and I sell bad fiction to its students. And yet I feel hopelessly and terribly distant from graduate school, at Harvard or anywhere else.