"A Gentle Madness"

John Venlet points to "a bibliophile's confession", where the poor soul hits on a fact of my own life in the lead paragraph: about three out of five instances over any given sample of time, you would find me in a bookstore when I should be in a grocery store.

In her smashing 1966 anthology "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", The Russian Rage refers (footnote, p. 71) to Carl Snyder's "Capitalism The Creator" (Macmillan, 1940). I have never known another human being who ever laid eyes on that book, but I own a copy. I was on tour with En Vogue in 1991, opening for Luther Vandross, and we had a day off in Milwaukee. In the entire entourage (I couldn't even tell you how many tour coaches we had out there, but it was a lot), I was the only one who traipsed four blocks over from the hotel, drawn by the four-storey-tall sign, to Renaissance Books, and I spent the whole day there. There were people on that tour who didn't know me, and others who did. The latter would shortly explain to the former the stacks of books lining the wall of my bunk in the EV crew coach: "That's Beck. He's a loon." I've never met another person who's ever even heard of a crew guy carrying his own library around on a twelve-week rock tour, to include an obscure treatise on free-markets economics. In first edition.

My own craziness only adds up to about eight hundred titles at the moment, but I do take pride in the fact that there is not a speck of cereal in the lot. This is not about "collecting". This is Beck University: the lifetime matriculation. These books are workers. I think nothing of researching a point in Solzhenitsyn, whipping out the trusty Paker Vector Rollerball and noting a cross-index to Conquest or Medvedev right there in my first edition of "The Gulag Archipelago". That's what they're for. Friends and family are routinely horrified to see this, and the charges of "abuse" fly roundly, but I stand defiant: "Hey. When you're the one who's generally letting your health go to hell, shelling out pennies on the pound for pages that you regard as priceless, and poring over them while everybody else is out at the titty-bars, then you get to set your Danielle Steele on the dining room table in a Lucite block for all I care. Meanwhile, just hand me that can of tuna and shut the fuck up. Thanx. Luv ya."

When I came home to little old Dryden, New York, this gentle madness was a concern to me. I figured it would end up in periodic excursions down to The City because no mere Border's at the local mall could possibly do. It never has. What I didn't know was that, in the fifteen years I'd been gone, a really superb market had been established just past the fruit stand at the end of town: The Book Barn of the Finger Lakes. If I never saw another bookstore for the rest of my life, that place could keep me busy. I know I could get my hands on a copy of James Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution" online, but Vlad will eventually turn it up for me. Meanwhile, that joint is a like a sinking ship: I just get sucked in every time I drive by.

I can testify: yes, it is a "madness". I have survived far worse ones, however, with nothing to hold after them.

It will do.