On Birds, Bullets, and Being

Today, at around 11:30 am, as I sat working at my desk at home, windows open, birds chirping, a fifty-year-old woman two blocks away came out on the front yard of the four-family flat where she rented an apartment and began firing a pistol into the air and apparently sometimes into parked cars. Police were called. They arrived, and within a few short, confusing moments, shot her dead. I heard all the shooting. I thought it came from another direction. I did not hear sirens. At least I don’t remember the sirens. It is disturbing to me that I barely took note of the sound of guns being fired repeatedly.  It is disturbing to me that I barely took note of whether or not first responders responded. The sound of gunshot is now as common to me as the sound of sirens, as the chatter of the birds in my backyard.

The woman was reported to be fifty years old. There are no more facts available to me, other than her landlord reporting that she had passed tenant screening just fine.  But this morning, she was upset enough to go outside and shoot a gun. Over, and over, and over. She was upset enough that the arrival of uniformed officers did not persuade her to set the gun down. One moment, she was screaming her pain to the world. I was barely paying attention. The next moment she lay dead in her yard.

People shoot guns because they are angry, or afraid, or both. They shoot guns because the pain in them is exploding to get out. They often, in fact, most always, are shooting at either another person or themselves. In the case of our neighbor across the alley, our garage door proved sufficient, though it required frequent discipline, apparently. But this sort of inanimate target choice is rare. And it was only inanimate because my husband was not working in his workshop that lay on the other side of the aluminum door.

The anger could be fresh and appropriately targeted, say in an act of defense against an intruder. Or it could roil up from a long-suffered wound and spew, geyser-like at anyone unlucky enough to be in its way. Ditto for the fear.  No one that I know of has done a comparative study of how many people thwart an attacker with a gun, versus how many people thwart anger/pain/grief/fear with a gun. No study that I know of has found the use of a gun effective in the latter.

And yet.

Pain. Grief. Grief. Pain.  Shoot into the day, despair sitting on your neck like an albatross, the grief/pain/fear/anger miasma clouding your vision, choking your heart, pressing the very breath out of you.

What happens to a fifty-year-old woman to put her in her front yard shooting up the morning like it’s the 4^th of July? And who will care? It is worth noting that she did not actually shoot at anyone, even though rumor has it she threatened to.

Here’s what was happening to me when I was a fifty-year-old woman living in the four-family across the street from where this woman was shot down in her yard, taking her story to the grave, full stop.

I was still grieving the end of a seventeen-year relationship (not married since queers were still illegal). I was trying to figure out how to stay in the life of the four-year-old I had become mother to two years before in a short-term and ill-conceived rebound relationship. My heart split daily at the thought I would lose that beautiful boy who called me mom. Mom. I was the sole person responsible for the care of my own mother in what was arguably the worst, and would be the final, two years of her life. I was working full time and wondering how I would adjust to the surprise departure of my new business partner who I thought would be taking a load off of me. I was hitting an early menopause hard. Oh, and 9/11 happened.  I was alone for the first time in my entire adult life. And, brain cell by brain cell, I was losing the one person who loved me unconditionally.  I had no support and I was sure I was doing everything wrong. A gun would have been what lawyers might have called an attractive nuisance. How attractive would it have been to silence the pain, empty the grief, forget about the fear, and let the rage, blind to the finer points of the social contract, solve my problems? One way or the other.

The fifth decade is when the rubber meets the road for women. Children, parents, partners who feel they need a change, and the test results of your lifestyle to date—it all swoops in like the flu and language serves no purpose. Hot baths, herbal tea, red hats, it can all go to hell as far as you’re concerned. When you are a fifty-year-old woman, you officially do not matter anymore. Can’t breed, not pretty, too smart to be subservient; you aren’t even sized up in the grocery store. You no longer exist. People walk right into you on a crowded sidewalk or at the mall. You just aren’t there. You don’t get waited on. There is not one woman over fifty who will challenge me on this.

But:

If you are a mother, you are expected to be there and fix all things.

If you have older parents, you are expected to be there and fix all things.

You are expected to buy the groceries, figure out the stuff, be on call for young and old alike, fix all the shit at work, whatever it is, but usually not for any appropriate recognition or pay.

Otherwise, feel free to roam about the cabin, but the bar is closed.  Put on the hideous red hat, proclaim the end to your sexual being, and commence to overeat. Conversely, you could always get a gun.  Missouri would like you to have it. Especially if you are a school teacher.  Or really, anyone, say a deeply unhappy, bleeding from the heart, fifty-year-old woman. The Millennials may find a way to delay the selective downgrade a few more years, but the Gen-xers and we baby boomers are legion. We’re here, we don’t ovulate, and we don’t fucking care anymore. So yes, be afraid, be very afraid. But you might want to rethink the joke that is gun legislation. Because killing us just really complicates things for all the people who expect us to take care of them.

In the meantime, I weep for my doppelganger two streets over, who waits in a chilled morgue as I write this for someone, anyone, to speak her pain, to say her name. Rest in peace, my sister. Rest in peace.

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Update: Since I wrote this, the woman’s name was released., Robin White was reported to be battling bone cancer. The rest, offered by a nephew who wishes to remain nameless, is speculation.

Amazon to Open Sweatshop in Edwardsville, IL. Region Rejoices

It’s official: Amazon made a deal with elected officials and developers to locate two giant fulfillment centers in Edwardsville, Ill. (Which counts as the St. Louis metropolitan area, except that this plan cleverly doesn’t count as having nexus in Missouri so Amazon will still be exempt from collecting and paying Missouri sales tax on Missouri sales.)  Everyone is crooning about the supposed 1,000 “high quality jobs” that will be created.

This is what a “high quaility” retail job looks like at Amazon.com

No word yet on just how, in an Amazon spokesperson’s words, the local officials were “very supportive” of Amazon’s requirements for locating there.  In other states, this has often meant various property, payroll and sales tax abatements or outright exemptions as well as lots of free infrastructure support for sewage, water and other services to the warehouses.  Meanwhile, the locally-owned main street bricks and mortar stores continue to make our communities attractive places to in which to live, work, shop, play and be tourists, yet we have had little to no access to capital, be it loan, grant or gift from unsuspecting taxpayers.

This constant preference for giant remotely owned box stores (and Amazon) persists in our area  in spite of study after study showing the myriad ways in which locally owned businesses contribute far more to the local economy that chain stores and Amazon, creating and maintaining quality jobs at a far higher rate and reinvesting dollars in the local community at two to three times the rate of chain stores.

It is a no brainer: support locally owned business if you want to see an economic turnaround.

Yet incredibly, our public officials continue  to do the same thing –give financial support to giant remote companies like Amazon—over and over in hopes of achieving a different result, which as we all know, is the very definition of stupid.  A recent article in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on a maddenly obvious example.  In the May 1 issue, David Nicklaus wrote:

“Area governments have provided more than $2 billion of subsidies to retail developers in the past couple of decades, but metropolitan St. Louis has the same number of people working in retailing as it did in 1990.

The numbers looked a little better in pre-recession 2007, but about 5,000 store jobs have disappeared since then. For every new Lucky’s Market or Ikea we’ve gained, a Kmart  or OfficeMax has closed.”

You could easily include “Amazon Fulfillment Center” in this article because the Edwardsville facilities will be the Amazon version of a big box store, albeit with grueling, sweatshop conditions. 

The biggest reason investing in big box stores and Amazon fulfillment centers does not create more jobs is not that other big box stores close. It’s that locally-owned, main street stores close and they are in fact, the biggest job creators, not Ikea or Amazon.

Even counting all the jobs in Amazon distribution centers, Amazon sales produced a net loss of 135,973 retail jobs.

Let’s be clear:

1. Amazon jobs are not high quality.  Amazon keeps costs low at its Allentown, PA facility by not installing air conditioning and  instead requested ambulances to be stationed outside as workers, including pregnant women, collapsed when the heat reached up to 110 inside. Company officials refused to even open windows. But hey, they added some fans.
2. States with Amazon facilities still see a net job loss. 

One employee said it’s now like “working in a convection oven while blow-drying your hair.”

Amazon and Empty Storefronts is a ground-breaking study released in 2016. It found that the economic impact of Amazon in 2014 alone was staggering.

From the study:

“In 2014, Amazon sold $44.1 billion worth of retail goods nationwide, all while avoiding $625 million in state and local sales taxes.

That is the equivalent of 30,000 retail storefronts, 107 million square feet of commercial space, which might have paid $420 million in property taxes.

A total of more than $1 billion in revenue lost to state and local governments, $8.48 for every household in America.
Amazon also operated 65 million square feet of distribution space, employing roughly 30,000 full-time workers and 104,000 part-time and seasonal workers.
Even counting all the jobs in Amazon distribution centers, Amazon sales produced a net loss of 135,973 retail jobs.”

 

What did this mean in Illinois?

Again, to quote from the study:

Illinois: Essential Findings

• In 2014, Amazon sold $1,834.5 million worth of retail goods statewide, all while avoiding $36.1 million in state and local sales taxes.
• That is the equivalent of 1,289 retail storefronts, 4.5 million square feet of commercial space, which might have paid $23.6 million in property taxes.
• A total of more than $59.8 million in revenue lost to state and local governments, $12.51 for every household in Illinois.
• Amazon also operated 1.7 million square feet of distribution space in Illinois, employing roughly 3,431 workers.
• Even counting all the jobs in Amazon distribution centers, Amazon sales produced a net loss of 7,802 retail jobs in Illinois.

 

In January, 2015, Illinois became the 24^th state to require Amazon to comply with the same tax laws as Illinois-based retailers, which will go a long way to levelling the playing field for bricks and mortar businesses located in the fiscally-challenged state.  Yet it seems clear that Edwardsville, a lovely small town with a great Main Street comeback, will be subsidizing their sweatshop anyway.

 

What about Missouri? Not one of the 24 states that wised up and started charging Amazon at least sales tax, effectively punishing bricks and mortar retail located in the state and employing Missouri voters.

Missouri: Essential Findings

• In 2014, Amazon sold $768.3 million worth of retail goods statewide, all while avoiding $60.2 million in state and local sales taxes. 

• 

  Amazon sales in 2014 produced a net loss of almost 8,000 retail jobs in Illinois and nearly 5,000 in Missouri

• Amazon sales produced a net loss of 4,704 retail jobs in Missouri.
• That is the equivalent of 540 retail storefronts, 1.9 million square feet of commercial space, which might have paid  $7.6 million in property taxes.
• A total of more than $67.8 million in revenue lost to state and local governments, $28.71 for every  household in Missouri.
• Having no Amazon distribution centers to offset retail job losses, Amazon sales produced a net loss of 4,704 retail jobs in Missouri.
• Bonus Factoid courtesy the Small Business Administration: In 2012, small businesses in Missouri employed roughly half the private workforce and created nearly 30,000 new jobs.

 Amazon’s physical presence in our region is NOT a positive development. What would be a positive development is if Missouri would require the anti-labor behemoth to at least collect and pay sales tax.  The rest of Missouri’s retail business citizens will still be creating jobs, paying payroll and property taxes while Amazon drains the state of its vitality, but at least there would be some sales tax revenue. It’s called efairness and it should be the law.

When you call 911, do you want to be put on hold because the tax base doesn’t support enough first responders?

State and local officials should not give remote etailers a pass on corporate responsibility while expecting the business owners who pay the salaries of those officials as well as  the salaries of the most of their constituents, to adhere to the law. It is short-sighted, expensive, and detrimental to the vitality and economic health of the state.  Policy-makers should redirect their planning to programs that ensure the health of their local main-street businesses. There are plenty of models at work across the country  that have turned neighborhoods and main streets around.

What I say to consumers

Where you spend your dollar is a political act. You literally cast a vote for the kind of community in which you want to live.

When you call 911, do you want to be put on hold because the tax base doesn’t support enough first responders? Do you want good roads? Decent schools? Sewers?  How about somewhere to walk around other than on a treadmill  at a gym?  Perhaps a park or two for your kids?

This is what a retail job looks like in a locally-owned business

I am not saying you have to go cold turkey. I know it’s easy and quick and sometimes appears to be less expensive but if you shift even 1 out of 10 transactions to a local retailer, you’d make a demonstrable contribution to your local economy. Civic Economics did a study in Grand Rapids, MI in 2008 (a year most of us would rather forget economically) and found that just a 10%shift in market share from chains to local companies in just 3 sectors: groceries, pharmacies and full-service restaurants would generate an additional $137 million in revenue and 1600 jobs.

 

Easy Way to Shop local on line: Independent bookstores are locally-based retailers with e-commerce websites. You can shop on line AND local.  Check with some of your other favorite places to see what online services they might offer. You would be surprised. www.left-bank.com

Left Bank Books, a locally-owned bookstore, partners with three other local institutions to bring authors in to speak with their local fans.

What I AM saying is start spending at least some of your money in local establishments.   Even a ten percent shift in spending from chains and on-line etailers to locally owned businesses can result in significant revenue generation for the community and job creation. Real job creation.

What I say to folks who sell through Amazon

You affiliate because you think you simply have no choice. Doesn’t that concern you even a little bit?You affiliate because you have come to the conclusion that they are the only online game in town.  They are not. And even if you decide  to affiliate anyway, wouldn’t you like more say in the terms of sale for your business?

Do you really want one gigantic, completely unregulated company to decide what’s best for you?

Support policies that level the playing field.

Support regulation. 

Consider alternative platforms for your business that give you more control. Otherwise you risk becoming merely another of Amazon’s “quality” jobs.

What I say to organizations who think they can raise money telling all their friends to shop on Amazon

Please see the economic impact of Amazon in the study I quote from.  An economically healthy community has money to spend on local charities.

Most local businesses, including my own, support local charities with money, time, and resources that are almost immeasurably more effective than you will see when you send money to Jeff Bezos.

I have never seen Bezos donate books and time to St. Louis Public school children, serve on the board of a local charity, weed and plant the first Transgender Memorial Garden in the country, do a winter clothing drive for St. Louis’s homeless and personally deliver said clothing (Mo Costello, MoKaBe’s), underwrite free and reduced veterinary services for stray animals (Carol House) or show up for anything that helped St. Louis in any way.

Lots of local businesses, including my own, have numerous programs for generating revenue for your cause. It’s our community.

We actually care.

We, local independent retailers–your tax-paying, job-creating friends, family, neighbors, and constituents, encourage you to support homegrown initiatives instead of inviting Amazon in to destroy anymore of our community.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Ann Moore and One’s Place in the Family of Things

 I remembered the phone number. A number I hadn’t dialed in how many years, I can’t say. And even when I used to dial it, I had to look it up. Grief will do that to you; it will access the deepest and most oddly on-the-mark status reports of your soul, life-to-date. It’s like your heart was standing there all the time dressed in a lab-coat, carrying a clipboard, and staring at you sternly over the top of her bifocals. Waiting for you to notice.

Laura Ann Moore had to pass away, no longer to be encumbered by gravity and prejudice, for me to notice. And when the news came, it was her voice on my land-line answering machine way back when, asking me to call and repeating her number in case I didn’t hear it the first time, it was her voice that got my heart to sit up and take notice. To return the call that never actually was placed.
Of course, I called this time to hear the voice of her life partner, Marlene Schuman. To tell her I love her and am thinking of her. To ask her what she needs. Nothing, I am surrounded by friends and so many things. Laura and I have been living in this house like Arsenic and Old Lace. I have everything I need.
Except Laura. We agreed that Laura was larger than life and that her absence leaves a hole so wide and deep we cannot see to the bottom of it.
I met Laura when I was 17 and a budding lesbian feminist. Laura was old school, of the bull dyke persuasion. She was working class. Grew up in an orphanage. Laura didn’t get anything she didn’t fight for. And fight she did. For the right to grow up and be loved. She was. For the right to love women. She did. For the rights of all marginalized people, poor, homeless, working- class, differently-abled, black, gay, or otherwise disenfranchised. These were her people and when she was on your side, you didn’t have a pit bull on a leash, you had an entire pack of pit bulls running in front of you clearing the way.
Which is not to say she wasn’t challenging. She was. She would tell you to your face what was wrong with what you were saying or doing. She never did the easy thing. She did the hard thing. The thing that cost her: jobs,  black eyes, lovers, friends, public acclaim. But she always did the right thing. The thing that mattered. Not the thing that let people off the hook, or the thing that gave you lots of awards and invites to fancy luncheons. Not the thing that made political appointees and elected officials happy to see her. You could feel the groans in the room as folks mentally looked for an exit and braced themselves when Laura arrived, be it at a town hall meeting, a community meeting, a pot-luck dinner, or anywhere else that moral and political laziness had occurred.
She was relentless in her pursuit of justice. An act of discrimination wasn’t a teachable moment for Laura. Them was fightin’ words. Laura didn’t know from nice. Nice wasn’t handed to her at the orphanage on a silver spoon. Nice was way too fussy for Laura, who preferred a steel-bladed shovel to a silver spoon.
As a result, people were often afraid of Laura. Not just the bad guys. Sometimes her beloved lesbian community would seek to exact its own pedagogy of the oppressed out on her. I know it broke her heart but she would never say. She would keep on doing the right thing. The not sexy or fashionable thing. Life wasn’t meant to be safe in that way in Laura’s eyes. If the shoe fit, wear it. I was never afraid of her. Not even for a minute. And that shoe frequently fit my imperfect, impatient, sometimes lazy self.
What did I love about Laura? She wasn’t the first old school dyke in my life—my closeted lesbian mother’s friends were a preamble to that—but she was definitely the first one who wasn’t ashamed of herself. When we met, she was teaching women car repair. Women needed to be more self-sufficient, less dependent upon men, the thinking went. Automobile literacy was a key component to this independence. We worked on my mother’s car, a used Ford Galaxy 500 4-door sedan, which she had just inherited from her mother. We changed tires and oil, did brake jobs, replaced a water pump. My mother’s car from her mother was up to the task.
All car repair lessons came with a heavy dose of lesbian liberation theory and class awareness.To this day, there is nothing under the hood of a vehicle that frightens me even if I have no idea what is going on. Likewise, there is nothing about class, race, and sex, but especially class, that I did not initially learn while also being told how loosen a lug nut or tighten a fan belt. Laura’s pop-up car repair for women course might just as well have been titled: The Nuts and Bolts of Class: Sister Laura Moore Explains It All For You. Pretty much everything else–with the exception of my mother’s fine example– all that book-learning and those fancy degrees and study groups and talk, was just continuing education, professional development. None of it would have had a context without Laura and her car repair class.
Laura Ann Moore is deep inside my white, middle-class college-educated, small business-owning, queer, lesbian bones. This was never clearer to me than when I learned that she had passed. It felt so deep. So personal. So inside of me even though we hadn’t really spoken or socialized much in the last several years. I think there are a lot of us out here who know what I mean. Losing her is like having your bone marrow removed. It functions inside of you without having to think about it. But oh, when it’s gone.
Which isn’t to say we didn’t fight or disagree. We did. Sometimes, often, really, those fights were impassioned on both sides and included yelling. She was philosophically opposed to the concept of “feminist” therapy at one point, and was outspoken in her position against my own friends, my own therapists. She was a dyed-in-the-wool lesbian separatist and I was no longer a believer in in separatism. For a time, she wasn’t too keen on transgender identity and my partner is trans. Frankly, she didn’t really like anyone with what she thought was too much easy access to what she and so many others have called male privilege. We had some doozies, Laura and I.

There are people who are not up to that kind of engagement. Middle-class sensibilities, Laura would have said. No: Middle class privilege. Don’t want to tarnish their silver spoons.I relished it because here was someone who challenged you to think, to defend your position. We both won a few, we both lost a few. There were stretches when we didn’t speak. Two essential things came of this: One, Laura’s positions sometimes DID evolve and she owned that when it happened. Two, my positions evolved as well, but more importantly, I learned a shitload about personal accountability and integrity. If I do the right thing today in the face of an easier, more fun, only slightly right choice, (if there is such a thing) a choice that would gain me friends, invites to parties, awards, but I do that right thing anyway, it is because because Laura Ann Moore pushed me to, whether she knows it or not.
Oh, and a third: These were Laura’s brand of teachable moments. If you were willing to engage, willing to stand for your beliefs but listen as well, Laura would always have your back.
I never really doubted that even in times when I was angry with her. And when some actual attack came at her in the social or public sphere that was wrong-headed, morally lazy, or just plain mean, I stood up for her even if we were in mid-argument, because I knew she would do the same for me. She would do what’s right, regardless of cost.
What I love about Laura? Slow-dancing in P.K.s on the East Side, under-aged and loving her big boisterous joyous self as she belted out the song on the juke box in my ear and steered me around the floor like I was an extension of that big-ass heart. Sitting for hours listening to her microscopically detailed knowledge of the inner workings of St. Louis politics. Coming over to her house in which she took great pride, watching her fuss over her beloved chow Red Emma, and being witness to her enormous joy and love for her partner Marlene. Seeing her at events in her “I am your worst fear and your best fantasy” t-shirt. Hearing her big, big laugh. Knowing with a certainty, that every shred of documentation of St. Louis’s struggle for social justice has been preserved by Laura, a one-woman herstory archive. Knowing that she loved with a big, soft heart that could be and was frequently wounded, but that she nevertheless loved people and animals and life in the deepest and best possible ways.

Good-bye Laura. I will miss you fiercely. Thank you for letting me into your life. I will try to do the right thing by you.

Here is a poem for you by another lesbian, the poet Mary Oliver:

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

I’m Sorry Y’all

Dear Paula Deen,

I know you are having a BAD WEEK.  First, you get inexplicably outed by the National Enquirer for remarks that you think are perfectly ok. Remarks about people of color especially.  And then somehow, everyone gets all up in your business about it. These remarks, incidentally, display a deeply imbedded racism so obviously part of your cultural dna that you seem to be more confused than sorry.  You were so confused you were a no-show on the Today Show this morning.   Now the media, while simultaneously enjoying this moment of deep-fried dirt, can also put you on the “black”-list. Sorry Paula. That’s what it’s called.

Lawyer: Have you ever used the N-word yourself?
Deen: Yes, of course.

As if this weren’t enough, someone told you to make a You Tube video to apologize. Not your best recorded moment, I must say. You seemed, well bewildered to find yourself sitting in some random chair in some random room fiddling with your pinky and trying to say something your agent told you to say that might as well have been in Swahili it was so foreign on your tongue. Alas, to no avail. By the end of the business day, the Food Network announced it had cancelled your contract. I’m sure you are stewing over this. After all, you apologized! On You Tube! Much better than the Today Show, more potential viewers. Isn’t that good enough?

the bible of southern hospitality

But what’s worse, at least from my bookseller’s point of view, you’ve got a big new cookbook coming out this Fall from Random House. Paula Deen’s New Testament. The announced print run is 750,000 copies. Somebody got a nice advance! I am pretty sure that you have just ruined a few publishing executives’ weekend, if not their entire year. I’m pretty sure that employees of the Random House will not be seeing that $5,000 bonuses they got last year for the stupendous sales of the 50 Shades of Gray “erotic” novels again this year for the anticipated sales of your book.  At 750,000 copies, it has the largest announced advance print run on Random House’s entire fall list.  I just bought that list today and the next biggest print run I recall came in at less than half that.

But it is possible that as I write this, Random House has already stopped the presses on Paula Deen’s New Testament.  I feel bad for them. I like the folks at Random House. They publish some of my favorite writers, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and Jeanette Winterson and Gertrude Stein. Black, and/or gay, and/or Jewish.  What a pickle you have gotten yourself in Paula!

You must be extra confused about this. As you testified in a court case last year, you saw no problem with your brother Bubba making anti-gay/Semitic/black jokes or looking at porn in front of his and your employees.  Yet last year, everyone at Random House got Christmas bonuses for selling porn, and you will probably be lucky if your book gets published at all just because of something you said. Something you also said everyone else says. Everyone you know, that is. Apparently in your world, it’s acceptable to make racist jokes and download porn at work. I’m sure it must feel like a double standard. But of course, Random House hasn’t issued a statement as to how it is handling your new book. Maybe you still have a chance. Especially if you keep your mouth shut.

But Paula, the real reason I am writing to you is that I have an apology of my own to make.  An apology and an immodest proposal. When I spoke to you at a Random House party a few weeks ago, I complimented you on how good you looked. And you do. You look great, especially for someone who was single-handedly responsible for elevating butter to its own place on the food pyramid. You have managed to take the inevitable diabetes diagnosis and turn yourself around. I expect that took a major effort. It wasn’t just your birthright and lifestyle, this advocacy of a diet that kills, it literally made you millions of dollars. I admire your fortitude. I admire the fortitude of your staff who most likely coordinated your new diet for you.

But that’s not what I have to apologize for. When we spoke, you had just met a high-ranking suit from the company that will be selling your book, if it gets published, to Walmart and Hastings and Target and the like. He promised to sell a ton of your books. (Of course, that probably isn’t all that many, calorically speaking.) He turned and left immediately and you turned to me. I told you that Left Bank Books wouldn’t be selling a ton, but we’d probably sell a half ton.  You seem satisfied with that.

So here’s the thing: we won’t be selling a half ton. We wouldn’t have sold a half ton even if you hadn’t revealed your true colors. And now of course we won’t be selling any. Because I didn’t order any today, when ironically, your book was being presented to me by my Random House sales rep, right about the time you were posting your “apology” and the Food Network was cancelling your contract. Talk about timing! So sorry, Paula, but I sort of lied when I saw you last month. You could say I “misspoke”. That’s a term you might want to borrow from your conservative friends, incidentally. You can use it to pretend that you didn’t mean all those things you said that got you into trouble.  It’s like saying you told a little “white” lie.

Paula Deen, I don’t think you are ever going to learn anything from this experience. You have lived in a bubble of Southern hospitality, a phrase I have come to see as meaning, “well honey bunches, I think you are a piece of deep-fried doo-doo and I have no intention of accommodating your wishes but I am going to slather you in buttery falsehoods so greasy that when you manage to stand up and wipe yourself off, you will think I was actually nice to you”.

And because you have perfected the art of Southern style “playah”, you have come to believe your own pretenses of actual compassion. There may be a way out of this for you, Paula. But you are not going to like it. I make this proposal inspired by where I live, St. Louis, Missouri. We are not regarded as a healthy town. We have high rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, the very sorts of health problems that result from following the diet you have profited from promoting all these years. And black folk, the very ones you seem to think make decorative slave motifs for wedding parties, suffer the most.

So why not use this opportunity to make it up to us, Paula? Why not—wait for it— give away your new book to poor communities and communities of color? Why not lead free community cooking classes in those communities to teach better dietary choices to the folks who have been harmed the most by your previous food religion?

No cheating either. No new syndicated “Feed My People” show. You have to actually look people in the eye. The revolution will not be monetized. After all, you can afford to do this. The only thing more over the top than the amount of butter you have consumed over the years is the amount of money you have made preaching its virtues. Could you do that, Paula? Could you go among the common people and do the right thing?

That, Paula, would be what the folks in AA call making amends. THAT would be a real apology.

Not holding my breath,

Another 60+ year-old white woman

Midnight Bookseller

Ok so New York wasn’t just like I pictured it. Arriving around lunchtime at LaGuardia, the taxi line was short and I should have taken that as an omen. The taxi driver clocked us as tourists instantly, something that has never happened to me at LaGuardia. But apparently, when I gave the address of the Airbnb apartment that Left Bank Books Events Coordinator Hannah Nutt and I would be staying in, an address smack dab in the middle of the theater district, that marked us as tourists and  he decided to take us on the longest, most congested route to our abode, adding at least $10 to the bill.

Then there was the not so small matter of our abode. Nice location on West 49th Street but the dude who let us in and gave us the 411 was as alarming as the apartment: him–rasta hat white guy, big black I’m-totally-chill-hip glasses, brown plaid blazer paired with cargo shorts and Converse All-stars, drinking the last of a 12-pack of something like Corona or Stella Artois.  The apartment: a grody blend of early teenage boy, complete with hockey helmit beer bong, numerous anachronistic surf boards, guitars, crumpled receipts, sports posters, and just plain clutter.  Dust. Pillows I wouldn’t put on a dog bed. Yikes.  The good news: not only is there wifi, there is an actual printer that works!

Making the best of it, Hannah took off to see a play: Unbroken Circle. I sat around mapping out the many receptions I intend to attend in the next two days on Google Maps with the help of the outstanding NYC mta website.  And then I got hungry and with a little research, found a Lidia  Bastianich restaurant just around the corner. I would have to wait until 8:30 to eat but at least they took a reservation for one. Left Bank Books hosted Lidia about a year or two ago at the Sheldon, along with Sauce Magazine. Alyson Mace sat on stage and talked to her. She was promoting her new cookbook Lidia’s Italy in America.  I liked her. Down to earth with high food standards.

This past January, in the middle of an epic snow storm that assaulted Missouri,my partner Jarek Steele, and Left Bankers extraordinaire Jonesy and Lauren took the train to Kansas City for an indie bookseller confab appropriately called Winter Institute. One of the perqs of this event was the opportunity to have dinner or a cocktail with an author or two. I was thrilled to be invited to a Graywolf Press dinner at Lidia Bastianich’s KC restaurant, Lidia’s Italy, where I was introduced to her outstanding tableside service and delicious fresh pastas.  I was also fortunate to be seated next to author Ru Freeman, whose extraordinary novel, On Sal Mal Lane, was just published this month.  But I had read an advanced copy in anticipation of the dinner and I must say that I loved it. A lot. Like Cutting for Stone a lot. Mixed with not a little To Kill a Mockingbird.   Really, you have to read it. It is wonderful. ’nuff said.

Thus I was positively disposed to eating at Lidia’s NYC. Having just spent the last 3 hours mapping out my every move from Book Expo America  at the Jacob Javits Convention Center to a cocktail reception with Malcom Gladwell, a cocktail reception with the president and ceo of HarperCollins, and a dinner in the home of Granta magazine editor John Freeman co-sponsored by Grove Atlantic, I was ready to carbo load on great Italian food.

Gladwell’s new book comes out this September and promises to be his typically brilliant take, this time on why David is more powerful than Goliath. He shared some of his ideas at Winter Institute and I look forward to the continued build up over cocktails on the rooftop of Hotel Gansevoort tomorrow.  I am very curious what the reception with the President and CEO of HarperCollns Publishers Worldwide, an entity owned by Rupert Murdoch will be like. I am thinking it will be the sort of event where men sport  navy blue suits as a defensive measure and mostly I will be ignored. In short, a sweaty armpit affair. But I have many many many favorite Harper collins authors, not the least of which is Barbara Kingsolver, so away I shall go!

Oh, about the Italian dinner: great service, even if I was installed in a far back corner where eventually the same sex couples were also installed. Food, uneven. Great bread. Great caesar salad. Gnochhi out of this world. Spaghetti with tomato and basil, too chef boyardee. And the lesbian couple seated next to me were disappointed in the mushy meatballs. But I did enjoy that I could have my pick of more than 3 dozen Italian wines for a flat $25 a bottle and take the unfinished bottle home.

Off to bed, hopefully without bedbugs. We will be doing with air conditioning tonight. #sweatysleeplessnight.

Barbara Grier, 1933-2011

I read this morning that Barbara Grier passed away yesterday. She was 78 and leaves behind her partner of 40 years, Donna McBride, and an inestimably significant legacy in the publishing world. Barbara Grier almost single-handedly created the genre of lesbian fiction. He publishing house, Naiad Press, was responsible for hundreds if not thousands, of books by lesbian authors. They were mostly entertainments–romances and mysteries–but they cast lesbians at the center of the story and lesbian lives as the driver of their plots. In the nearly three decades Barbara published writers like Katherine Forrest (Curious Wine is the bestselling lesbian novel of all time), Karen Kallmaker, Sarah Aldridge, Ann Bannon, Lee Lynch, Sarah Schulman, are but a handful of the writers who benefited from being in the Naiad stable. When she and her partner Donna retired in 1997, Barbara made sure that the women who now run Bella Books were ready to step in and carry on. That we can count on a steady stream of lesbian novels to be published every year is almost totally due to Barbara’s unwavering, rock-solid, in-your-face, unapologetic, absolute commitment to making this happen. At Left Bank Books, we sold hundreds of Naiad titles. We had some customers who would buy nearly everything they published. One customer had a standing order with us and came in monthly for her fix. For a while, St. Louis lesbians had their pick of stores: The Women’s Eye Bookstore and Our World Too and Left Bank Books from which to get their Naiad fix. But for many more years, before and after those other wonderful stores existed, Left Bank Books was the only place in St. Louis you could find Naiad’s titles. I had so many quintessentially Barbara conversations with Barbara over the years. She would call to tell me about the latest “bestseller” she was about to send me. “You’re going to need at least a hundred. Lesbians are going to be knocking down your doors for this. You might need security the morning it goes on sale.” She would be completely serious. She would tell me something like this about her new book several times a year. She completely believed in what she was doing. Barbara didn’t mince words. If we were a little late in getting a payment to her, she would discuss breaking kneecaps. My business partner, Barry Leibman, would grimace and hand the phone to me when Barbara called to collect. I always managed to smooth the way, Barbara the butch warming to my femme ministrations. We were in this together. We were part of this vast network that Barbara had so much to do with—lesbian booksellers and readers and writers and publishers making our own culture where the mainstream continued to ignore our existence, save for the odd Rita Mae Brown title or two. (And Rita Mae Brown didn’t get mainstream attention until the long-gone lesbian publisher Daughters Press published Rubyfruit Jungle first and made it into a bestseller). Barbara knew that the novels she published were sometimes formulaic, she also knew that there were thousands of lesbians out there who would pluck down their lunch money for a book in which the formula included lesbians. She was completely dedicated to making a cultural space by and for lesbians. Sometimes she appeared to misstep, as when she published the nonfiction anthology, Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, in 1985. While it was a smash hit with lesbians, a cause for outrage among conservatives, it was the fact that she sold an excerpt to Penthouse Forum that caught the most criticism from her otherwise loyal base. Lesbians didn’t want their sexual laundry shared so obviously with a nonlesbian readership. But she stood her ground. If lesbians could make money, Barbara was all for it. Left Bank hosted an event with co-authors Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan. I can barely remember it today, but I know Barbara’s business decision dominated the conversation that should have been about the lives of the women inside the book. I loved Barbara. I loved her brash, confident attitude. I loved her complete belief in lesbians. I loved flirting with her at Lambda Literary Award Ceremonies every year. (with complete respect always to Donna) I was super proud that she hailed from Kansas City—proving for the umpteenth time that all important developments in lgbt culture were not invented in San Francisco or New York. I am, we are, forever in her debt for her meticulous lifelong work in archiving the written words of lesbians far beyond what Naiad published. Barbara was one of the few women still among us whose lives connected the early days of modern lesbian identity—in 1956 with her work on The Ladder, the first lesbian periodical with a circulation that capped under 5,000—to the end of the 20th century, when you merely have to press a button to see lesbian content on your computer. Not one lesbian writer, editor, publisher, reader, or bookseller would be what we are today without Barbara Grier, whether we realize it or not. I will miss you terribly Barbara.

Dinners, Fires and Knives: Whether or Not to Try This at Home

If you cook this meal you will feel like you put your fingers in a pencil sharpener. Especially if you use your mandolin to make the perfect ¼ inch thick crescent moon slices of red potatoes called for in the Goody Girl Championship Potatoes recipe in Guy Fieri Food. Fieri is the spiky-haired dude on The Food Network who travels around eating spectacular diner food on his show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” His first book includes his stop at St. Louis’s own Iron Barley.

Left Bank Books hosted a booksigning with Guy when he was in St. Louis recently with his Guy Fieri Food Road Show.  I spent the better part of an afternoon taking copies of his book out of dazzled fans’ hands, opening them to the right page and handing them off to “Stretch.” Stretch is a sculptor and the owner of Grinder’s, a Kansas City-based “dive” featured on Guy’s show. Stretch handed the opened books off to Guy and ushered the star-blinded fans to his side for a photo. Guy stood right where rocker Sammy Hagar had signed a month before. Turns out they are friends and one of Guy’s recipes in the new book was developed for Sammy. Small world.

Later that day, Stretch would be on stage at the Touhill with Guy where he would roll out a “blender” the size of a washing machine that he welded together from spare parts, including garbage disposals. He and Guy could not pass around the gallons of finished product because the Touhill prohibits drinking and eating in its auditorium. Not a great place for this show, which depends on people getting progressively drunker and rowdier throughout the evening. It’s literally a three-ring circus of food demo-ing, music and drink mixing, and in the right venue, a fair amount of food and drink flinging. I would have loved this show more at say, a state fair.

Guy grew up on a hog farm. His tour was sponsored by The Pork Council. My meat-eating extends to chicken.  But I got a book signed anyway for my foodie 13-year-old and cracked it open Saturday to have a go.

Advice to the adventurous: when you are going to try a pork recipe after basically never having cooked a pig-based product past bacon, don’t start with Guy’s “Summer Grilled Pork.”

First of all, Guy doesn’t go into a lot of detail in his book about technique so if you aren’t pretty sure of yourself you might wind up with half the ingredients in the bowl wondering if you should have blanched, roasted, or peeled something first. To accompany the pork, I made Guy’s Kale with Roasted Beets and Bacon (didn’t use the bacon), and the aforementioned Goody Girl potato salad, again with bacon-didn’t-use-the-bacon. Beets bleed all over you, perhaps a blessing since I was already bleeding from the tragic mandolin accident earlier. Guy should perhaps mention that food gloves might come in handy here, especially if you plan on entertaining later.

But back to the pork. Buy four 1-inch boneless pork loins. Then take them home and, in the words of Ysma on The Emperor’s New Groove (funniest family movie ever), “Smash them with a hammer.”  Ok, not a hammer, too small, but something that will be strong enough to mash out the flesh from 1 inch to ¼ inch. After spending about 20 minutes pounding away with the back of my ice cream scoop, I gave up, got out the cast iron skillet, and banged on those hapless pieces of porcine matter like I was a steel-driving man.  I almost got them to ¼ inch, I’m going to say it was more like 3/8ths. You will not need to go to the gym for a few days after performing this procedure.  Maybe to the chiropractor instead. Or to a course in anger management.

After you have repaired your worktable from the assault, you lay out a big piece foil, arrange a sheet made from slices of thick bacon and then lay the pork loins on top. Add some cream cheese, roasted red peppers, and artichoke hearts and then roll it like a gigantic maki roll.  Grill this massive foiled burrito “for 7 to 8 minutes on each of the four sides,” Guy writes.  No temperature mentioned.  When the time came to turn it onto its folded edge, as I feared, bacon grease came pouring out and four foot high flames leapt upwards towards Ameren’s lines and a conveniently dead branch on the maple tree. I don’t think you can squirt water on a grease fire on a gas grill.

Shortly before this part of the preparation, our dinner guest, Kathleen Finneran, author of the beautiful memoir, The Tender Land, had arrived, and theoretically, I was supposed to be visiting.  But Jay kept her company in the living room. And anyone who’s been to dinner more than once at our house knows about my No Fly Zone in the kitchen.

As I contemplated my next move, Jay called from the house to see if I could find our advanced copy of Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante to loan to Kathleen. It’s a great read written from the perspective of a retired female orthopedic surgeon who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. It has a murder in it and the narration makes it absolutely un-put-downable. It comes out July 5.

“Not a good time,” I called from the flaming grill.  Long-handled tongs came in very handy here as I could not even approach the lid of the grill to close it, my solution to the fire being to ignore it.  “Do you need any help out there,” Jay or Kathleen called to me from their safe confidence that I knew what I was doing. “No, I’m ok,” I replied. Not really, I thought, but perhaps what they don’t know won’t hurt them.

When the time comes, you are supposed to open the grill, take the foil off the bacon-wrapped pork loaf, and “crisp the bacon” on the grill, while basting it with the honey mustard sauce you have prepared in the meantime. But instead, I was trepidatiously peeling soot-blackened foil from $40 of groceries. I discovered that far from need to crisp the bacon, I would need to call in a forensics specialist in fire events to verify that the charcoal crusted loaf was indeed covered in bacon. Good thing Kathleen is a good friend, I thought.

Kathleen and Jay swear to me that my rendition of Guy Fieri’s Summer Grilled Pork was really good and had seconds and thirds, eating the immolated bacon along with the delicate interior. Later, back from working the Shirley Strawberry/Lyah Leflore event, Jay’s sister gobbled it down, too. I’m not planning to try this again unless someone else bangs the pork (ok, off-color joke), and I have a way to prevent another oil spill.

Remember the potatoes alluded to in the opening of this story?  Goody Girl potatoes are adapted by Guy for his book. Not sure what he brought to the recipe. But it is sinfully and undeniably delicious, probably because of the stick of butter, cup of grated cheddar cheese, and sour cream involved. Don’t eat this if you care about cholesterol. The really cool part of this recipe is that you boil the potatoes in crab boil, which imparts a fabulous bouquet of slightly exotic taste to the little spuds. I stood over the pot sampling their undressed little selves for several minutes to be sure I wanted to serve them to Kathleen or just hoard them aside for later. I will definitely try this potato boiling technique again even if I don’t use them in this recipe. Which, by the way, is supposed to be a warm potato salad, and involve some bacon (of course), but I chose to spread it in a casserole like scalloped potatoes and keep it warm in the oven while I put the finished touches on my fire-fighting lesson in the backyard.

Guy’s kale is not much different than mine, except that he uses apple cider vinegar and I use soy sauce. We agree on lots of slivered garlic. The roasted beets stirred into Guy’s kale is wonderful, but again, my mandolin-shaved, charcoal-blackened and beet reddened digits were a reminder as to why people who can afford it hire caterers.  Plus, you don’t need the bacon in the kale. Already I was serving an entire pound of bacon, 4 pork loins, and a stick of butter to basically two people. It’s just too Paula Deen for my tastes even if I’m not eating most of it.

In case you are wondering, I grilled myself a chicken breast rubbed with a rosemary, sea salt, garlic, and olive oil paste and loved the honey mustard dressing meant for the pork. On Sunday, I nursed my digits and pined for a masseuse. But they say the best thing is to get right back on the horse so I’m planning to make pasta from scratch with a seafood sauce for dinner tonight. My kneadin’ arms need a workout.

Independent Bookstores: We’re Here, We’re Near, Get Used to Us

This year’s book industry news has been dominated by two stories: E-readers and the Chapter 11 and reorganization of Borders. Depending upon who’s speaking, the existence of either can be seen as a blessing or a curse. Many assume e-readers mark the death of books and of independent bookstores. Many also assume the death of Borders marks a second chance for the indies. Others see e-readers as another techno-boom that will play itself out eventually and the reading public will settle into its preferred reading styles, probably a blend of electronic and paper. They will source these reading options from places they trust. Many of those places will be independent bookstores and their websites.

Other others understand the demise of Borders as a drag on all of us. Smaller publishers left unpaid by Borders for the last quarter of 2010 have been seriously injured and some have gone or will go under. Larger publishers have behaved in ways I can only describe as panicked: making irrational cutbacks in staffing that result in degraded publishing (poor editing, fewer high quality “mid-list” books, worse deals for their sources, the authors) and compromised service to their showrooms, the indie bookstores. Having previously put all their eggs in the big box store basket, then shifted slightly to include the even bigger online behemoth Amazon, they now find themselves scrambling to get on the e-book bandwagon because the limited production needs and relatively high margins seem like the new black. And even as they speak glowingly of their independent bookstore partners, big publishers are boasting about their shiny new direct-to-consumer websites, as if someone in a executive office said after Borders stiffed them and Amazon started its own “publishing” business, “we don’t need no stinkin’ bookstores.”

This flawed logic overlooks the fact that the biodiverse indies are  the healthiest part of  bookselling ecosystem. We are the real Amazon, the Amazon rainforest of species, each with our own unique properties and talents. If one indie closes, chances are the cost to a major publisher will go nearly unnoticed because each of us individually is a relative speck in the accounts receivable departments of major publishers relative to an entire quarter of unpaid billables from Borders. And although I know failed indies have stiffed publishers, a larger number of them actually pay their bills before they close.

If one indie closes, another one opens somewhere.   In fact, more indie bookstores opened than closed last year. About 200 newly opened bookstores joined the American Booksellers Association last year, a number similar to the number of Borders who closed. Two hundred leaner, more focused, unique and fiscally responsible bookstores.

These stores may not possess the airport-sized square footage of the missing Borders stores, but they do have something more important: owners on the premises. People who have a stake in what they are doing punching the clock everyday.  When the person who signed a piece of paper saying he or she would be good for the debt is in the store handselling and handshaking, straightening, counting down a drawer, and working side by side with their staff, he or she is more likely to care about the outcome than a board of directors in another city whose only measurement of success is stock dividends. Owner occupied bookstores are more involved in their communities. We have to be. We have to look you in the face when we don’t get your book on time, or cut you off in traffic later for that matter. These aren’t widgets we are selling, these are collections of intellectual property, works of art that we are curating for our community. We have our livelihoods in mind to be sure, but we see our livelihoods as inextricably connected to the health of our communities overall. We pay our taxes. We buy goods and services from our neighbors. We listen.

With the advent of e-readers, we listened.  Indie bookstores brokered a deal with Google and over 200 hundred independent bookstores nationwide now offer Google e-books at competitive prices on our websites that you can download and read on any e-reading device except the one that Amazon sells.  We have definitely lost sales this year because you all got gadgets for Christmas and thought the only place you could get content was from Amazon, but we are here to tell you that you are mistaken.  And don’t hesitate if you don’t know what you are doing, bring that thing in and we’ll help you get started in e-reading. When you are fatigued from the digital experience, you can count on us to find you something made from renewable resources to read.

Yes, underneath all the doom and gloom stories the media so loves to print, independent bookstores, the tortoise in this race to nowhere, are still moving steadily along. When you need a break from the noise in the industry, stop in or surf over to our websites for an old fashioned human interaction, kind of like the ones you read about in…..books.