nerd astonishes by obsessively kvetching
I arrive at Barnes & Nobles around noon, still dismayed that the adjoining theater has been shut down ("Life is Beautiful CANCELLED" - like the grim edict of a fascist army led by a Pninist dictator, if not he himself [though I think he'd only have been elevated to such a position of power if he found himself, like C-3PO in Jedi, lofted unwittingly, and surely with some unease, on a crude throne by legions of Ewok worshippers] - reads a poster still visible, in its dormancy, within the lobby), as Diana, in an uncharacteristic note of sadness amid her usual, good - natured - pothead - gaily - swinging - arms routine, had informed me, between musings on Eraserhead and the discographical nuances of Cabaret Voltaire ("If you stop to think about it, chronologically, they're just like the industrial counterpart of The Cure "), just the other day.
So, here I am; I haven't visited here since it first opened, when my friend Bill, out of a surprising and shielded inner demonstration of morality that stopped to befuddle my mind (had he really, after all, been keeping a ledger of his interminable debts, only now sliding its businesslike, leather-bound contours into daylight, as the day six months ago when he suddenly appeared to reclaim his forgotten drum kit from my basement?), gave me some ridiculous - I think it was 79%, perhaps - discount on Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, as restoration of various psychic and monetary damages. Anyhow, yes, Barnes & Noble(s?): not much nobility on display here, thank you very much, throughout the dizzying maze of faux-upper-class shelving, bestsellers in their ubiquity, biographies, "For Dummies" books, those new children's books that have a weird glossy competence to their art that succeeds in scaring me away, as if by a magnetic field's assertion on a pocket of iron filings (only this pocket being, perhaps, located in a portion of my brain), in their seeming too-hipness - one expects to see the T-shirt of an often - referred - to - but - seldom - heard band on the harmless torso of an anthropomorphized didactic li'l critter. And other effluvium
[...]
Yes, it's a weird and somewhat manic day. Gazing at the utilitarian mural that encircles the coffee enclave like a hatband, I can imagine myself greeting all the authors who hang, in this protective arc of culture, shielding the patrons there's Kafka at the end, and he's certainly got the piercing if dolorous eyes, the same stare Bryan always had, but they've got his skin color wrong, and his style of dress; his cheeks rouged, if you believe it, on pale flesh, his collar starched, his coat perhaps borrowed - ill-advised - from Oscar Wilde, who sits near him.
He looks almost effete, as though bemused by our poor fashion sense, a sort of metaphysical Mr. Blackwell, critiquing the contents of our barren souls with growing disdain, slashing aside our tacky precepts with cold effrontery.
And of course Nabokov, a few portraits down from him, looks sleepy, even heavy-lidded, as if his gaze, his telepatic line of sight, landed, in headpiece-to-the-staff-of-Ra fashion, directly, like a chance encounter, upon a certain shameful celebrity memoir and he found himself about to issue a tumultuous yawn. I can mock the artists' incompetence, and the weird Desdemona font, to boot, that intrudes, but I greatly prefer this image of him to that colored-pencil-and-ink-outline visage that sometimes appears on shoddy critical editions, usually with an unconvincing "quizzical" smile (a magnifying glass or butterfly welded incidentally in, without finesse, like the airbrushed cover of a puffy Disney video box), this being, in my opinion, far less endearing than his grumpy pout.
Particularly weird, it appears filled in as if out of mnemonic lapse.
[...]
©1999 Nerd is the property of Christopher Blake Smith. Please do not reproduce without the author's permission.
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