Serendipity Engines

In commerce, there's an incalculable difference between search and discovery. Discovery requires serendipity, and there's no better source of serendipity than independent bookstores. (Issue #125)

Before we get to today's main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things that merit your attention…

• Watch Baby Fever tomorrow! Baby Fever is a short horror movie starring my daughter, Helena Berens. Starting Monday, July 1, at 9:00am, you can stream it for free on Alter, either on Alter's YouTube channel or on these streaming platforms. It's great... and very spooky.

• Prescription Benefit Managers: I know I mentioned this last week, but if you haven't read "The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugs" by Rebecca Robbins and Reed Abelson in The New York Times ($), then what are you waiting for? If these two reporters don't win a Pulitzer for this first-in-a-series piece, then I'll be shocked at the injustice of it. This is another example of Chokepoint Capitalism, which Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow wrote about eloquently in their book of the same name, and which I discussed here.

• Remembering Gene Wilder on Netflix is a lovely documentary about a talented man whose talents brought joy to millions. I was sad they didn't spend much time on one of my favorites of his movies, The Woman in Red, and that his short-lived TV show, Something Wilder, didn't merit a mention, but it's still a great watch.

• R.I.P. Frederick Crews, my old friend and teacher, who died last week at 91. The clearsighted, insightful, and occasionally savage intelligence in his writing was overmatched by his kindness and generosity in person. We traded notes just weeks ago, when he was still looking for meaningful work to do as he dealt with aging. He got to meet his adorable first great-granddaughter. I'll miss him. The New York Times has a lovely obituary ($).

New Feature: Mini Rant. I blame the 24-Hour News Cycle for our polarized, piping-hot-take-fueled cultural moment because when you change the container you also change the content.

I learned this firsthand when I was Editor in Chief of iMedia Connection. We abruptly went from a Monday-to-Thursday publication schedule to five days per week because one of the sales guys had closed a sponsor. It didn't matter that at that time (nearly 20 years ago) the digital ad biz didn't have enough going on to merit a fifth day: the publisher had a revenue number to hit, and that sponsorship would help him to hit it. So we dug into the rejection pile, the dreck, the dross, the op-eds, the thinly-veiled sales pitches, the glorified press releases, and generated those extra 10 pieces each week to feed the machine. In other words, we lowered our standards because our weekly bucket to fill had stretched 25% bigger with no warning. Quickly, we raised those standards back up, but faced with a hungry content machine at first the intellectual nutritional value of our content suffered.

That's what is happening with the patently ridiculous calls for Joe Biden to step down as the Democratic Presidential candidate after a shaky debate on Thursday night. Reporters have column inches to fill. Opinion writers have to generate opinions. Pundits have to hold forth passionately on whatever cable or broadcast or streaming platform they happen to be on in order to get future invitations to pontificate.

There are four more months until the election—an eternity in politics. Donald Trump hasn't even been sentenced for his 34 felony convictions yet. That happens on July 11, and four days later the Republican National Convention starts in Milwaukee. The Democratic National Convention isn't until August 19 in Chicago. Calling for Biden to step aside is a Ready, Fire, Aim exercise.

At this moment, we don't need more hot takes. We need cool, thoughtful ones.

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On to our top story...

Serendipity Engines

Wednesday, I was in Eugene, a small Oregon city a couple hours south of Portland. I dropped into the legendary Smith Family Bookstore, where I found a $4.00 copy of Violent Spring by Gary Phillips, which my friend Michael Estrin had raved about in a recent issue of his newsletter. I snapped it up.

At the cash register, I saw a small, colorful pile of copies of another book, A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: an Essay by Octavia E. Butler with art by Manzel Bowman. This is a beautiful little artifact by Chronicle Books that reprints a 2000 essay Butler wrote for Essence magazine. With a bit of internet searching, you can find the text of the essay online, but I didn't know that at the time, and I wanted to read the piece.

More importantly, I wanted to reward the folks at Smith Family Bookstore for thoughtfully curating that book and having it at checkout. "This is an impulse purchase," I sighed to the clerk. "You're the first person to have that impulse," she replied. (You can buy it via Smith or Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.)

I'm glad I bought the book. Butler was a brilliant writer of near-future science fiction dystopias (something that I know a little bit about myself), and an inside look at her methods for creating those broken worlds intrigued me. On top of that, after reading the essay I can see why Chronicle chose to preserve and republish it: the essay explains how this cultural moment got to Trump.

Writing about her process for Parable of the Talents, a novel about how a country descends into fascism, Butler writes

I wanted to understand the lies that people have to tell themselves when they either quietly or joyfully watch their neighbors ruined, spirited away, killed. Different versions of this horror have happened again and again in history. They're still happening in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, wherever one group of people permits its leaders to convince them that for their own protection, for the safety of their families and the security of their country, they must get their enemies, those alien others who until now were their neighbors.

Despite my interest in Butler and in dystopian fiction, I don't think that I would have ordered the book had I simply run across a link online. It took a slower, friction filled moment, standing at checkout in a physical bookstore, juggling my wallet and the cheap paperback copy of the Phillips novel, for me to notice the colorful little book on the counter in front of me and linger long enough to pick it up.

Bookstores are serendipity engines. E-commerce is efficient for helping us get things we know we want at a fair price, but it sucks at the kind of slow discovery that I experienced at Smith Family Bookstore.

Then, yesterday, it happened again. La Profesora and I went on a brief holiday to Hood River and Mosier (a small city and a small town an hour or so east of Portland) to celebrate our wedding anniversary. After we checked out of our AirBNB, we hiked the Indian Creek Trail that snakes across the hills above Hood River. Here's an image from our hike:

Photograph by the author.

As we hiked, we noticed a long line of tightly connected logs running alongside the trail. What were they? A pipe? Something to hold the hill together to protect the houses above the trail from erosion? Indian Creek Trail has several points at which you easily walk down into town, so we decided to grab lunch (at Broder Øst, delicious) and then wander over to Waucoma Bookstore, a must-visit on any jaunt to Hood River, to search for answers about the logs.

At Waucoma, we met Ryan, a charming young man who has only ever worked in bookstores. He immediately answered our question: yes, it was an old pipe from an early refrigeration system a century plus back. He and La Profesora then took a tour through Waucoma's thoughtfully curated offerings on the history of the Columbia River Valley, whereupon she bought...

• Columbia River Basketry: Gift of the Ancestors, Gift of the Earth by Mary Dodds Schlick

• Building the Columbia River Highway: They Said it Couldn't be Done by Peg Willis

...and an unrelated book that Ryan raved about:

• Glaciers, a Novel by Alexis M. Smith.

He also mentioned Stubborn Twig by Lauren Kessler, but they were out of stock.

(I'm not providing links because you should order these books online from Waucoma.)

I picked up the new book by Ray Kurzweil, which I mentioned last week.

Our discovery moment at Waucoma was similar to but distinct from my discovery moment at Smith Family a few days earlier.

In Hood River, we were leaning into a particular frame (Erving Goffman's helpful term) of our collective identity: we were on vacation, celebrating our anniversary in a particular place. La Profesora's interest in the history of the Columbia River Valley wasn't new, but our surroundings activated and intensified it.

Plus, buying and reading those books gave us a chance to hold onto our vacation vibe in a different way than buying a t-shirt or a bottle of wine would have. Reading a book takes time: it's full of friction in the best possible way. A t-shirt would quickly lose its connotation of "our holiday in Hood River and Mosier" and become just another garment. A bottle of wine would quickly be empty and recycled.

Context in brick and mortar bookshops like Waucoma adds depth and flavor to commerce in a way that simply does not happen online. If you hand me a book that I bought in a bookstore, then most of the time I remember which bookstore. That isn't the case with things I buy on Bookshop or Amazon.

Coda: the lost bookstores of Los Angeles

The contextual, serendipity generating quality of bookstores is one reason why I get wistful when I visit family in Los Angeles.

Decades ago, L.A. was a great book town. Just in the San Fernando Valley, driving east on Ventura from The Bookie Joint on Reseda, past Pages and Alpha Books in Tarzana, past Encino Books and the B. Dalton, past Elton's shop near Hazeltine (I am sad I can't remember the shop's name, but I can see his face), past Dangerous Visions and Scene of the Crime near Woodman, past the cluster of Dutton's locations in Studio City, and onto a happy, dense knot of used bookstores in Burbank. Over the hill in the city, Santa Monica sported Midnight Special, The Change of Hobbit, and Los Angeles proper had dozens more.

Crown Books killed independent bookstores in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Then Borders and Barnes and Noble killed Crown, and then Amazon killed Borders. Barnes and Noble is hanging on... phew!

Today, there's Book Soup on Sunset, Diesel in Brentwood, Chevalier's in Hancock Park, The Last Bookstore downtown, Lost Books in Montrose, and a few remaining Barnes and Noble locations. There's not much else. If you're willing to haul to Pasadena, then glorious Vroman's still holds the title of best bookshop in SoCal, but it's a long drive.

It is a painful irony that Los Angeles, the storytelling capital of the world, has so few bookstores.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.