Today marks the one year anniversary of me being a bookseller. It may not seem like much, but I wore pink to celebrate anyhow. This morning I woke early and walked to Cafe Allegro, and on the way back two hours later staggered out of Magus Books and the University Bookstore with a copy of Elaine Showalter's Jury of Her Peers, Billy Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors (it looks so interesting) and Rose Macaulay's Personal Pleasures. I may or may not have purchased Personal Pleasures already this past Sunday, but this was a far better copy, was cloth bound and had an inscription. And then I ran home terribly afraid and thought about my dwindling bank account the whole time and how I actually may not be able to pay my rent. This is pathetic. This is what my year of being a working women has brought me to.
Has it really been eight years since I last wrote here? It was picking up Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood that reminded me. My reading diary said I read the novel in 2011, but I don’t believe it. I have no memory of it. (And you would.) I came back to this blog to cross-reference. Yes, I can see I bought it in December 2010 – for a steal – but wrote nothing on it. An old blog, like an old diary, is a shed skin, preserved by sentimentality, laziness, and neglect. For a while I was appalled at how openly I exposed my ignorance! I thought it was charming. (An Americanism?) Also for trying to speak in a register I couldn’t consistently command. But now that blogging is a dead art, that the energy that once lived there has been translated into Tiktok, or Youtube, or Substack, the blog becomes practically private. I can come back and paw over this old, shed skin. When you come across old writing, there’s an inevitable measuring up between the self you were then and the sel...
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