today i was at half price books looking through the fiction section while i waited for the book buyers to decide how many new books my old books were worth (two (i bought six)). i was kneeling on the floor in the D section to see if helen dewitt had written another book i didn’t know about (she hadn’t), and thinking about this quote from the last samurai, this part in particular:
Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.
and i was looking around at all the books on the shelves and thinking about how many books there are in this one bookstore and jesus, these are just the misprints and the ones people don’t want anymore. the number of books that are written is much larger than the amount of time people have to read said books, and that’s not even factoring in whether or not those books are any good.
so then i thought, if i write a book (and i sort of have an idea about one i might write), how will all the potential readers of books find it among all these other ones, and if they find it, will they even want to read it?
as i stood up from the floor of the fiction section, about to give up on my nonexistent writing career, a bookstore employee walked past me and said, “hey, you look great!”
“thanks,” i said, glancing down at the t-shirt i was wearing with a skirt i’d made out of a pair of jessica’s old pants.
“who does your hair?” he said. “you?”
“yes.”
“it’s awesome,” he said, then disappeared down another aisle.
i suppose the conclusion i can draw here is that if my writing career doesn’t work out, i can always try to make it as a seamstress, or some sort of hair model.
(p.s. here are some good songs.)