8:10 a.m., New Year's Day, 2008.
I could wax on about all the deep-ass, new beginning crap that floods the collective philosophical consciousness on this date every year, but it's been done.
No, instead I'll give just another slice of real life to remind us all that no matter how high-falootin' our ideals & our verbiage, people are still enigmatically stupid, and that isn't changing any time soon.
It goes like this:
I was in a bookstore yesterday, Specifically, I was in a Barnes & Noble in El Cerrito, Ca. I had been reading my ancient & abused copy of The Last Days Of Socrates, which is such tremendous fun, and I decided that I was going to go pick up a new copy, because mine (which I bought used, 17 years ago) is falling apart. I said unto the wife, "I'm loving this book, but it's falling apart on me."
She replied, "That's one of the things I love about you."*
I said, "No, I mean the book is physically disintegrating. I need a new copy."
She also wanted a few new books, so we were off to the shops, where I began hunting down a collected volume of Plato. I found several versions, with various translations & prices. The translations were all crap. The humor of Socrates was lost in either a complete lack of poetry**, or an overly technical, antiquated approach (I appreciate that they went for the 1877 translation, but the academicians of 1877 were just as interested in embellishing social stratification as they were amassing information; which is to say that they were a bunch of stuffy shit-heads).
After this disappointment, I headed to the information desk, hoping that the store might stock Plato in more than one section. I told the girl (yes, "girl") at the counter, "I have three questions for you. first off, I already looked in Philosophy, but I was wondering if you stocked Plato in any other sections."
She stared down at the keyboard, then looked back to me & said, dead earnest, "You're looking for Pla-Doh, like the kids' toy?"
....
It took me a second to process the fact that I had just been asked that question. Socially, I get when that mistake is made in casual conversation. When spoken, "Pla-Doh," & "Plato" sound anywhere from similar to indiscernible. However, I am standing in a bookstore, you are at that bookstore's information desk, and I started the sentence with, "I already looked in Philosophy."
The conversation did not improve from there.
We moved on to spelling "Plato," and clarifying that the books for which I was searching were by "this person," rather than about him.
He is, for your own, personal reference, only stocked in Philosophy.
I was ready to abandon ship at this point, but she reminded me that I had mentioned that I had three questions. So we moved on to Saki. That conversation didn't go much better, but a very nice woman, who was over by The Barnes & Noble Editions rack walked up & handed me a copy of The Complete Works of Saki, saying "I overheard the conversation. Here you go." It was the giant, hardcover edition that I was trying to avoid, but it was very sweet of her to go out of her way to extricate me from the situation like that.
Finally, I had to ask the third question: "Where do you keep the Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels?"
She walked me directly to the section where they would be kept, assuming they had any in stock (which they didn't), and proceeded to engage me in conversation about the show's character, "Oz" (a werewolf, played by Seth Green).
The wife & I left after that, and headed for the B&N in Emeryville, where I purchased a collection of Oscar Wilde, the first book by my friend Laura Anne Gilman, called Staying Dead, and the latest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, The Black Dossier.
I stayed in after that.
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*Referring to an incident involving Kierkegaard, not long after we met, wherein I was on the couch, reading, at 7:30 in the morning, and laughing. She asked, "What's so funny?" I said, "Kierkegaard. His notions of social structure are so simplistic & cute." I had completely forgotten about this (why the hell would I remember?), until she tells me, some time later, that she'd been telling her sister this story. One never knows how a passing conversation is going to lodge itself in other people's heads, does one?
**No, I'm not discussing Platonic poems about Socrates, I'm talking about injecting language with poetry. The idea of poetic translations of prose first struck me when I was reading an edition of Nausea translated by Lloyd Alexander (author of The Chronicles of Prydain). It was some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read. So beautiful that it very nearly disguised the fact that Nausea is an over-wrought load of self-satisfied monkey-spunk.
