Overheard at The Strand

I was shopping for books as The Strand over the weekend, trying to spend my Cingular rebate for my new phone (paleontologists tell me that my previous phone was originally from the Cretaceous period). One of the occasionally fun but usually irksome things about going to bookstores is listening to the pretentious people trying to impress others with their own non-extant wit and intellect. Inside voices are shirked by such people when in bookstores or the foreign film section of chain video stores, all this in the hope that someone will hear them talking about things which they really know nothing about and silently envy them for their appearance of intelligence. It's like reading bad movie or music criticism but without the snark.

This could be why I don't really talk too loud in bookstores in most instances. I try to remain as low key as possible as it would be an affront to everything sacred to me to act like "that guy."

So anyways, I was checking out some of the fiction specials on a table at The Strand when two guys passed me. One, after eyeing a book, turned to his friend and said in a crisp, civics-competition voice, "I want to write some sort of poem like that one Ginsberg one with that 'Best minds of my time,' line. Y'know that one? But instead I'd have it say 'I've seen the worst writers of my time published.'" He giggled, not inconspicuously, at his own witless witticism.

I was tempted to say, "It's called 'Howl.' Maybe you should learn the name of the easiest poem to name drop when you want to impress shallow people in the general vicinity before you attempt to impress shallow people in the general vicinity."

I didn't say anything of course. Instead I figured I'd just try to surreptitiously watch them as they checked out more books.

The faux-Ginsberg fan's friend looked at the newest Penguin edition of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair with the cover illustrated by Charles Burns. "This is a cool cover," he said. And he's right, of course, it is a cool cover.

"Well yeah," his windbag buddy said. "Well, you know, Sinclair could afford that."

What exactly does that mean? Burns is a contemporary comic book artist and illustrator who was only 13 years old when Sinclair died in 1968. Did he believe that the cover was a commission from Sinclair's deathbed to the adolescent Burns; that yea, in the 2006 printing of The Jungle through the house of Penguin, one named Charles Burns would be charged with illustrating a flayed cow's head.

Awkward Run Ins
I suppose I'm not one to speak about these types of annoyances since I'm guilty of annoying people quite often. Case in point, a little after leaving The Strand, I ran into Peter Dinklage from The Station Agent and Living in Oblivion on the street and said hi and that I liked his work. He gave me a look like he was busy and that I bothered him. Given, I think it was pretty lame I said hi by asking "Aren't you Peter Dinklage?” How many other famous dwarf actors are out there who look like Peter Dinklage? I admit, it was a pretty jerky way of saying hello.

Looking back, I think I've learned to just tactfully notice actors (as I noticed Donald Sutherland on the street a few weeks ago) and maybe give a quick hello if they aren't busy.

Though perhaps I had paid forward, inadvertently, some of the annoyance I'd just experienced at The Strand. I'd seen the worst minds of my time in bookshops and philosophy classes running their yaps, peacock prancing the dregs in their minds, parading pomp as profundity while lacking in that latter, and I had imparted some of this disdain to Peter Dinklage who was irked by my irking him. Tis the season for giving, after all, and it's strange what brings people together in the bustle of Union Square.