On Lipsyte, Wardinski, Bear Pond and More…

Sam Lipsyte on Teaching Writing: You can help people improve their sensitivity to language, but at a certain point it’s about the ear they’ve always had, even if they’ve never really let it do its work before. And you can’t teach people to be fearless (and sometimes shameless), though you can exhort them to be so.

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Fearlessness. It is, indeed, what is lacking from much of the dreck we’re confronted with in our daily reading. Everyone’s fucking scared. Everyone, it seems, would rather put on their everything’s normal face and then weep when they close the front door. Why? Oh why are we hiding the pain – or the joy, or the anger, or the beauty of it all?

I, for one, am bat-shit confused. And you?

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Oh wait, this just in from the Burlington Free Press: A profile of the candidates for lieutenant governor in Vermont. Better yet – if you get to the end – you’ll see they included Boots Wardinski in the profile.

Taste this bit of fearlessness:

[Wardinski] also would call attention to the need to scale back lifestyles to wean Vermonters from their dependency on foreign oil. “The state could play a role by providing incentives and disincentives,” he said, suggesting a high tax on motorized recreational vehicles such as snowmobiles.

Beautiful.

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But, then again, there’s the news today that Obama declared that “the end to the combat mission in Iraq” is scheduled to meet its deadline at the end of the month. If you’re a non-thinking liberal, you’ll be re-filling your hope-balloons at the news. But if you’re plagued with the need to think deeper than your team’s latest slogan, you’ll read the second paragraph of the story and see that 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq.

Of course, when I think of 50,000 troops occupying a foreign land I think of nothing but peace. Not.

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Speaking of Sam Lipsyte (a few paragraphs ago), pick a copy of his latest book, “The Ask.” I tried to do just that but, unfortunately, my local bookstore, Bear Pond Books, has gone to shit under the new management. I know the rest of you Montpelier-based book lovers are thinking the same thing, too. The problem is that no one is willing to say it. And I will: Bear Pond Books is a sad shadow of its former self.

I remember the good old days when you could go into Bear Pond and browse its packed bookshelves. They could barely stuff another book in the joint. And its employees were steeped in the disease of book reading and book loving. But no more.

Now, you enter Bear Pond and see one shelf after another with the books turned sideways so as to take up space – especially in my favorite fiction and poetry sections. Sad, but true – go see for yourself.

Which brings me back to Sam Lipsyte. He’s certainly no massively obscure writer. Lipsyte’s been the darling of the young-alt-edgy-McSweeney-crowd for years. Better yet – for Lipsyte’s checkbook, his latest book has been positively reviewed by about every mainstream publication, including the New York Times Book Review.

I read an excerpt of Lipsyte’s “The Ask” in my new favorite publication, “n+1”. If you don’t know about it, Google it – and then subscribe. It rocks.

The excerpt had me howling. And so off I went – being the semi-reformed liberal that I am – to my local bookstore. Buy local!

It wasn’t on Bear Pond’s shelves (even though I guarantee it would have been under the previous owners). So I asked. And I got a heaping helping of attitude along with the declaration that they had no plans to order it but I could special order it through them. Yeah right, so I could order it through them, pay an extra ten bucks, wait for their call when it arrives and then drive back to pick it up – hoping, of course, the evil-fucking-meter-lady won’t add another $8 to my trip. Good luck with that.

So Amazon it is. But I tried. My Catholic childhood requires me to say the following: Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have gone to the Internet dark side and purchased a book.

And the response from above (if there’s justice): Duh.

But, then again, my Catholic childhood includes the memory of my naked priest standing above me in the middle of the night with nothing but his Rosary beads on. All praise religion. Not.

Very little of this, of course, has anything to do with the genius of Sam Lipsyte, which is a shame. Because he is a fearless writer, not to mention entertaining and the son of New York Times sports writer, Robert Lipsyte. Cool.

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Enough already. I’ve got cucumbers to pick. Way too many fucking cucumbers. And, please, don’t tell me what else I can do with them. Trust me, I’ve tried.

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Class dismissed.