by Edward Champion

The Latte of the Real

“Are you still stressed out?” I asked.

I was worried. I liked her. We’d had many amicable conversations in the mornings. But today, there was the telltale flush of frustration on her face. I had ensured her days ago, as she was studying for a test, that beating stress was a matter of staying as calm and focused as possible and getting to the other side. That she could survive this if she didn’t let anything get in her way and she gave it her best shot and stuck at it. But I was worried.

“Someone didn’t close very well last night,” whispered her co-worker. This was the hushed susurration of a man who knew how to play office politics. The morning manager, after all, was twenty feet away.

When the manager had disappeared into the back, she listed the offenses. The coffee maker hadn’t been cleaned. Milk hadn’t been put away, causing the morning shift to scramble for Friday morning’s latte demands. The customers, of course, hadn’t noticed any of this. Many of them, as shamefully reliant upon the coffee as I was, stared into space. Perhaps they did not want to see because they were going on to thankless jobs and they’d experience their own versions of this vocational hell upon settling into their cubicles. A little girl waiting for a sesame bagel kept shouting, “Ba-gwal! Ba-gwal!”

“I mean, if she can’t do the basics for this job, imagine if she had a job in the real world.”

I was stunned by this. Was this job so thankless that it was somehow categorized you beneath the real world? Did working in a cafe, remaining largely invisible to the many people who enjoyed these services (and who often did not even bother to tip), somehow prohibit you from having a life? From being real? Yes, I know that New York is a more class-conscious city than San Francisco, but this seemed a tremendous statement to make.

“You know,” I said, “before William Faulkner was a writer, he was one of the world’s worst postal workers. He misdelivered mail. He couldn’t do his job. Maybe some people are only meant for certain jobs.”

“But she worked as a waitress before this! She should have known how to close properly.”

That may be the case. But maybe these indiscretions had been committed by this woman because all of us, in our own conscious and subconscious ways, can’t seem to view the tasks others perform or the people who work for us as “real.”

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Because of other deadlines and ancillary technological healing, I won’t be covering the New York Anime Festival today. But I will be there on Saturday and Sunday. In the meantime, Heidi McDonald has assembled a crazed journalistic army. So you can no doubt find coverage over at The Beat. Making sense of the daunting schedule does indeed require a strategy. So I have decided to simply throw myself on the floor with full gusto and see what happens. This always seems to be the best policy under such circumstances. Podcasts and reports are forthcoming.
  • It’s that time of the year again when Congress devotes its energies issuing ridiculously draconian Internet policies instead of showing a little backbone in relation to larger matters of war and corruption. CNETs Declan McCullagh reports on a bill known as the SAFE Act — not to be confused with the efforts a few years ago to curtail the PATRIOT Act — that seeks to punish anyone running a Wi-Fi network with a $300,000 fine if they do not report on someone downloading an “obscene” image. And The Nation‘s Larisa Mann reports on a House Resolution that threatens to do away with a school’s federal funding in toto if the school allows even one illegally downloaded song. Democrats in large part supported both of these bills. In fact, for the first bill, the only two people who voted against it were Republicans — including Ron Paul. These two pieces of legislation suggest that the Democrats have special interests in mind more than the First Amendment. And if you want to do something about both of these bills, Public Knowledge has an action page for the school bill. Meanwhile, the SAFE Act has now been received by the Senate and is being referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. Contact the Senate Judiciary Committee and let them know that asking a wi-fi network operator to consistently be on the lookout for an image that is “obscene” or “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (the bill as passed by the House specifies U.S.C. Section 1466A as well as child pornography) places an undue hardship on coffee shop owners trying to attract customers and runs contrary to the First Amendment.
  • Three Percent lists the Best Translations of 2007.
  • On a related note, Scott observes that the book he voted for — Enrique Vila-Mata’s Montano’s Malady — didn’t make the longlist. I likewise think this is disheartening. And as NBCC Board Member, I hope to draw greater attention to translated titles. It’s bad enough that newspapers frequently ignore non-English titles for review, but the time has come to draw greater attention to the fact that not all books are written in English and that there are translators regularly doing hard and often thankless work, sometimes denied even a mention in book reviews! (For instance, in all the celebration of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, how many of you are aware that Natasha Wimmer translated the book? Wimmer’s name isn’t even on the cover. Thankfully, Scott interviewed Wimmer a few months ago.) For more insights into translation, see the Segundo interviews with translators Betsy Wing and Jordan Stump. And I hope to feature more translators in future Segundo shows.
  • Is Joshua Henkin a manly writer or not?
  • Why isn’t there more hypertext fiction? (via Maud)
  • Sign of the times? The Sacramento Bee has outsourced some of its advertising production work to India.
  • $3 million for Karl Rove’s memoirs? (via Quill and Quire)
by Edward Champion

Scott McLemee Enters the Ring; More NBCC Boad Member Thoughts

Thankfully, I’m not the only person using his blog for an NBCC Board Member campaign. Scott McLemee has also announced his candidacy. Mr. McLemee has some solid thoughts on the digital divide and, as a fellow candidate, I wish him well in his campaign and likewise offer my endorsement, however crabwise the gesture may be.

In light of Mr. McLemee’s evocation of Wilfred Sheed, however, I’d like to continue my campaign by quoting from Elizabeth Hardwick’s “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” written for Harper’s in 1959:

Invariably right opinion is not the only judge of a critic’s powers, although a taste that goes wrong frequently is only allowed to the greatest minds! In any case, it all depends upon who is right and who is wrong. The communication of the delight and importance of books, ideas, cultures itself, is the very least one would expect from a journal devoted to reviewing of new and old works. Beyond that beginning, the interest of the mind of the individual reader is everything. Book reviewing is a form of writing….It does matter what an unusual mind, capable of presenting fresh ideas in a vivid and original and interesting manner, thinks of books as they appear. For sheer information, a somewhat expanded publisher’s list would do just as well as a good many of the reviews that appear weekly.

Hardwick’s complaints from nearly half a century ago are just as applicable today. And as NBCC Board Member, I will do everything in my power to ensure that the delight and importance of books is celebrated and encouraged among the constituency.