My eyes are filled with gods

Jason’s post on how the closure of Borders affects Pagan publishers and the availability of metaphysical titles has me in a reflective mood today.

Back in the ’90s, I worked for a small nonfiction book publisher; we specialized in sports and sports psychology titles, and a typical print run was 1,000-2,5000 books per edition, depending on the title. We sold to distributors, bookstores, and individual customers (through catalog sales, and then later, the website).

Of the distributors, Borders was the perpetual thorn in our side; the orders that made us approach the mail or fax with trepidation, significantly more so than any other customer. Ingram had wrangled a much deeper discount, and Baker and Taylor was more scattershot and inconsistent with the titles and numbers they ordered, but Borders … Borders would order five or six cases of a title, distribute them to the stores, and then return the majority to us before their invoice was due 90 days later. And then they would immediately re-order the same title, sometimes before the return had landed in our warehouse. So we would take those same returned books, box them up, and ship them right back. Repeat until the books became unsellable from shipping wear and had to be remaindered.

Mind you, distributors, the big three, anyway, did not pay shipping, so that was our company footing the cost for shipping these titles back and forth every few months.

It was a recurring problem to get actual money out of Borders; they would attempt to write off almost all of their debts with the perpetual return-and-reorder machine. Sometimes they would double-claim return credits, or claim returns we’d never received. When the boss finally sold the company to a larger sports publisher, Borders owed us — if I remember correctly — something like $9,000 in actual funds. They insisted they had $12,000 of outstanding return credit (they did not). I ran the reports and provided all kinds of documentation to the accounts payable office at various levels — several times, in fact. They never once acknowledged receipt of the documentation, even though we had proof they’d received it. And still they refused to pay. I believe they were eventually written off as a bad debt once the company finally changed hands.

When I ran into my former boss a few years later, she said Borders was still sending her notices about twice a year, insisting that the old publishing house owed them that mysterious $12,000. Every time, she would photocopy the original reports and numbers, deny their claim, and insist that they pay the outstanding $9,000. Six months later, she’d receive another notice. We laughed, but it was an exasperated laugh, one punctuated with much eye-rolling.

So, my own feelings on the demise of Borders are a bit of a mixed bag. I loved the brick-and-mortar store. I hated the distributor side of the business. Which was more reflective of the company’s core business practices, I can’t say.

I’ll miss browsing the shelves of an actual bookstore, though, since I despise the new Barnes and Noble location — now that it’s been surgically attached to the patchwork monkey side of the mall, I can’t stand the place.  Granted, it’s probably doing well because it’s the only major bookstore left in the area, as far as I know. There are a few niche shops — a couple of Christian stores, gaming stores, and the like — but nothing like a good general bookstore. I wonder how long B & N’s fortune will last.

This is the weekend I accomplished nothing. Well, nothing except burying my nose in a handful of books.

I took Mom home from the hospital on Friday, and so I stopped at the bookstore on the way, thinking I should pick up a few books to take along when I stayed with her.  Strangely enough, after I got her home, we were both immediately exhausted for some strange reason and napped for a good three hours or so.  She puttered around the house a bit, and after a good half an hour of testing things out with the walker, announced that I could leave. Which was not our deal; I was supposed to stay with her for the first few nights home, and she insisted that I should not — that she was getting along perfectly well and I’d only be sitting around watching her sleep, and she’d had quite enough of that, thankyouverymuch.

In the end, she had me go and pick up her prescriptions and then chased me out. I think she just desperately wanted to be alone for a while, after the constant worrying and wake-ups and phone calls and poking and prodding of the last few days.

So, instead of hanging out at Mom’s this weekend, I made myself utterly useless and had a reading binge the likes of which I haven’t done in years:

• Roadkill -book 5 of  Rob Thurman’s Cal Leandros series.  Good, as usual, although I found myself a tad annoyed that it took Cal so long to figure out how to rid the earth of the Plague of Worlds.
• Just Another Judgement Day – book 9 of Simon R. Green’s Nightside series. Fun, if only for getting to see old favorite characters again, and the latest twist on the odd relationships between John Taylor and Mr. Walker and Taylor and Suzy Shotgun. Possible hints that the terrible future glimpsed in Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth may come to pass.  Otherwise … a fast read and sort of forgettable.  (Also: John Taylor’s trademark snark just doesn’t even come close to Cal, Nikos and Robin from the Leandros novels.)
• Jack of Fables #7: The New Adventures of Jack and Jack – spinoff graphic novel from Willingham’s Fable series. Fewer Babe the Blue Ox appearances, sadly, but I am amused that Jack is being written out of his own series.
• The Red Tree – Caitlin R. Kiernan. Builds slowly, takes an awful lot of autobiographical color from the author — which isn’t bad, just odd, to see it used so freely — and employs a few conceits I’m not particularly fond of. Even so, Kiernan manages to reinforce her status as the only author who has successfully managed to creep me out in a very potent and visceral way, and always makes me bone-cold afraid for her characters, even though I know going into the story that it cannot possibly end well. It never does — and in this case, we’re told as much before the novel proper even begins.

And now it is after 1 AM and I should go to bed, probably to dream about dark and endless caverns of muck and still black pools, snaking off from the basement, and dog people with red-brown eyes, and murderous red oaks, with their leaves falling everywhere…

1. Bones. Mom’s hip surgery went well yesterday, although she reacted strongly to the anesthesia again; she was freezing the few times she did wake up, kept setting off the oxygen level and pulse alarms every half hour or so, and didn’t really regain coherency until late afternoon. It still amazes me that they can get someone up and walking the same day after a joint replacement surgery like that.

Sadly, she did not demand feature upgrades, as I suggested. Nary a hydraulic or storage compartment to be found. I mean, technically, yes, being able to walk is useful and all, but really – if you’re going to let someone cut your bones apart and cement metal bits to the ends, why not make the most of it?

It was a Very Long Day: bed at midnight, up at 3:45 AM, at the hospital by 5 AM, surgery at 7:30 AM, recovery at 9:30 AM, semi-coherency at 4 PM,  ran home to let her dog out, napped from 5-6 PM, did laundry, etc., finished the book I’d started that morning (Deathwish by Rob Thurman), and apparently passed out on the couch sometime between 11 PM and midnight. Will noticed the lights on at 1AM or so and shooed me off to bed proper — and thank goodness, or I would’ve had a wicked crick in just about everything today.

Roughly three nights in a row with 3-4 hours of sleep. Nothing terribly new, but yesterday drained out the last of my reserves, I think. I’m bone tired today; tonight, I visit the hospital and then spend a few hours with Will before the weekend spins us off in different directions.

2. Books. It’s been ages and ages since I read a novel for fun, and the stack that awaits me is at least a year old, I think. Many are borrowed. I know there have been several books released over the last couple of years by my favorite authors, and these books remain sadly unpurchased, although I did finally get copies of Caitlin Kiernan’s The Red Tree and The Ammonite Violin & Others. I completely missed the release of Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters when it came out in 2008, so I’ll be tracking down a copy of that in the near future. I admit, short stories are typically not my thing, but Kiernan and Link are definite exceptions.  So many good things waiting … but at the moment, the Cal Leandros novels have just the right mix of mythic WTF, darkness, cool and snark that I sailed through 340+ pages yesterday and now feel obligated to pick up the next one before the coming weekend. (I’ll be staying with mom for a few days when she comes home from the hospital).

3. Yoga. Auzumel and I started yoga lessons on Tuesday. We’re starting with just the practical basics: breathing, posture, how get up and down from the mat with a modicum of grace. And by that, I mean: not killing ourselves or the surrounding furniture. We’re still working on the “grace” part, but so far there have been no casualties, furniture or otherwise.

Also there was tasty, tasty homemade hummus and veggies beforehand. Edige assures me that the hummus recipe is insanely easy … now, if only I had a food processor.

4. Texts. Cleared out my text messages at the hospital yesterday while I was taking a break from reading. Kept two from Will, which I couldn’t bring myself to delete. They do kind of sum up our relationship nicely:

• I love you.

Yes. This is one of many reasons why I keep him.

• Got the vampire bastards!

This refers to a co-op match on the Magic: The Gathering X-Box game that pitted Will and Matt vs. the vampire deck and the black deck. That duo had been their brick wall for quite a while, and I couldn’t help but laugh when I received the victory text.

Sharing your victories is important. Sharing them with someone who gets why they’re such a victory is even better.

5. Lammas. Although we’re sliding away from the brilliant full moon of earlier this week, August 1 is the usual calendar date for Lammas/Lughnasadh, the first of the autumn harvest feasts.  This really is the best time of the year for night drives, around here; if the weather stays warm and humid into the night, the country explodes with delicious perfumes, especially if you drive past blueberry bushes, pine groves, or (fittingly, for the feast of grains) cornfields.

There’s always a part of me that sighs when I realize we’re this far into the year, though. A new academic year will be starting soon, the days are already shortening, and each summer day seems more desperately precious and inherently nostalgic — even though the brutal heat and humidity have kept us hiding indoors for most of the summer.