Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: bookshop

  • angel Bowie

    Two hipsters compete in a Berlin bookshop, the day of David Bowie’s death

    Hipster One: I know, I mean I was like twelve when I heard ‘Changes’ for the first time.

    Hipster Two: I know, it’s like, I just… it’s like I had a personal connection. You know? Like I…

    Hipster One, abruptly: Yeah, everybody seems to be saying that.

    Hipster Two, hastily: I mean, not that I felt it, I mean like, this morning I was kind of like, Wow… But ~

    Hipster One: But now ~

    Hipster Two: I mean it hasn’t ruined my day or anything.

    I am standing in the window alcove with a volume I saw from the street and have lifted out of the display. This conversation, with its switches from having to care most to having to care least, seems to me exhausting. I think about the beautiful and dignified Iman, Bowie’s wife, whose day the news presumably has ruined. Hipster One, who owns the bookshop, calls across the room.

    Hipster One: Kann ich helfen?

    Me: O nein – danke, ich kann es selber lesen.

    Thank you, no… I can read it for myself. I smile at her lest she think I am being less playful than rude. I am reading a journal called Elsewhere, about place. It is a first volume, compiled by a bunch of homesick expatriates and published locally in English. To get here I walked past a stream of graffiti saying if you want to talk English, go to New York – Berlin hates you. Variations included Not for yuppies and the more melancholy anti-gentrification slogan Wir bleiben alle, written on a building which is about to be mass-evicted and made over for higher-paying expatriates. It occurs to me that Bowie himself was one of the pioneers of this gentrification.

    My companion, who made the signage for this shop, comes in and the shop owner realises belatedly why I look half-familiar. She switches from the formal Sie to the friendly du and cozies up, saying: Habt ihr einen guten Rutsch gehabt?

    And did you both have a good slip? a good slide? This is how Germans picture their entry into the New Year. After Christmas they start wishing each other einen guten Rutsch, as though all the nation held its breath ready to lurch down wildly careening into the new frontier, meatier, balder, bolder, breathlessly. We’ve arrived!

    I buy the journal. We walk on. My companion guides me round a brownish squelch coiled on the stones. I look closer. “That – is just a big fat brown hair scrunchie.” He laughs. “And yet…”

    I am pushing my bicycle, I don’t want to risk a bad slip, a bad slide. I tell him about the dog mess I found on my first visit to New York, wrapped in a flattened red singlet bag and shaped exactly like the drawing of a heart. I wrote about it online: I dog poo New York. On the river a circle of ice has formed round the perfect hole where someone threw a chair, a microwave, a bicycle, and the hole has frozen over. Bottles stand drunkenly frozen in place where they bobbed, and a few Christmas trees. Where the water has dissolved into liquid are a dozen ducks cosily chatting on the curving edge of remaining ice, which resembles a beach. It is so cold the tops of the buildings disappear but my breath makes shapes on the air. We are all smokers today. Or maybe, dragons. Breathing ice.

  • colourful, gleaming, a fresh crate of stairwell

    I walked home at last through the markets and by the time I got to the street door of my new home I was struggling with parcels, camera because things kept flinging themselves at me in their peculiar beauty and a heavy bag of books from the discount box outside a wonderful bookshop I’ve wanted to step into for ages, and I had. At the door I met this man who was one of those so beautifully made, sculpted, just beautiful men built like manhood, his arms bare and brown and his black hair well cut but not obsessively groomed and his shoulders taut as he held at chest height a wooden crate of market vegetables, colourful, gleaming. You know how your breath kind of stops. He reached over me as I leaned my bicycle and fumbled the key and just – pushed – the heavy Haustür open for me, slid past, stood at ease with his lovely boot blocking the door from slamming on me. I said thank you and cambumbled myself and bike and packages inside. At the stairwell we bottlenecked and he was behind me as I hoisted up the bike and looped my book bag over one arm and climbed the wide stairs, measuring the treads with his comfortable, go for miles fit and perfect pace. I knew that he had seen my awkwardness and would be used to it and would take it as his tribute. As we both turned at the landing, me and my bicycle with him and his fruit behind me, he said, “Schönes Rad!” Lovely bicycle. Mine is on the first floor and by the time I’d worked out what he’d said (“He spoke to me!”) we were at my door. The suggestiveness of doorways flickered through my mind as rapidly as a fish and I fumbled my key and said, “Ja. Stimmt.” Yes: true. And he smiled and I smiled and he went on up the stairs and knocked at my upstairs neighbours and beauty is an accursed gift, I remember the luminous days of my own moon when people would stop me or cross the street to tell me what they had noticed about my body, my face. Your hair, your feet, the way your hand pushes back the door: inside this world of collapsed longings which fan out into every promenade and every boulevard you enter and entice and somehow enlist people, the whole world, in your sharedness, even when you are not thinking of it and when you are mournful or hurrying or bored: that is the fanfare beauty gives to our everyday, like a flag streaming across the peerless sky that gives weight to its innocent unmeaning blue and makes it for a moment everything and perfect.

  • jazz bar, balconies, bikers, busker, moth, Madrid

    The moth which landed in the glossy black curls of a woman sitting on the Metro so lightly and delicately without her noticing, and which spread its dun linen wings like opera skirts to reveal the sheer, white gauze underneath. The two boys who jumped on and played joyously, their guitars facing belly to belly. The long, arching trees filling curving streets with greenery and palpably articulating the breeze into soft whistles and dim spirit presences, into a welcoming and retired song, almost a language. The man and woman whose voices caught my attention from above and whose conversation diagonally across from his first floor balcony to hers on the third seemed frank and gossipy, reflective, unhurried. The jazz bar with windows open right onto the street and spilling glorious plants, which served gin and tonic in round-bellied goblets with surprisingly sweet, chewy, nutlike juniper berries bobbing against the cubes. The lovely dog opposite, above the antiquarian bookshop, who stands on the balcony and gazes up and down the street with such a mournfully intent expression; the man playing a baby grand under a white cloth in his open window and gesturing to his colleague, playing violin, and the crowd of silent witnesses standing with their phones and faces raised on the curving road underneath. The security guard reading a volume of poetry on the underground, so intent he almost missed his stop. The three tiny ladies chatting loudly and volubly on the train who parted with light, smacking kisses at Nuevos Ministerios. The BMX bikers who practice outside the opera house every day, every day, waiting their turn and daring each concrete bench and set of steps to rout them like ballet dancers swimming far out to sea. The low doorways and Metro tunnels against which my sweetheart has to watch his head. The expressiveness of public life with a girl flying into a passion of sobs at the post office counter, a woman crying openly as she was talking on her phone walking through a crowded restaurant district at lunch time. The yoghurts brewed in little glass pots desde 1992 which we top with strawberries, blueberries, bananas; the milk section of the supermarket which is on shelves unrefrigerated because everybody likes powerfully adulterated longlife milk yet luscious, unpasteurised, handmade yoghurt. The quiet, hot siesta hours when shops are barred and windows shuttered and the Metro crammed to the gills. The people who gaze up so curiously, so unjudgingly, at me and my two metre tall lover as we bow our heads to enter the train. The busker in orange top hat who tied his dog to the railings and turned aside into a shop window to tune his guitar. The little backstreet shops which build guitars and the man with his cardboard box desk on the shopping street who carves crosses out of two sticks and binds them together to sell, one after another, he was here at Easter and he is still here now, filling the paving creases with whittled shavings as though there can never be enough crosses in the world and he must fill the lack.

  • the lovely man

    You know how sometimes two souls collide in a fleeting way, like two bells chiming in different trees, and you never forget that person even if you never again see them or think of them. Well, that happened to me today. A most beautiful man. I went out to buy eggs and to finally drop in and see my friend who runs an exquisite New Berlin gift shop – it is filled with lovely things – he sells liquors and vodkas brewed locally. He sells handmade cards on creamy laid paper which have perfect arrangements of tiny dried flowers on them. Each card is initialed by the lady who makes it and inside is a little sheet of paper with her wavering handwriting – she is quite old, he says, and lives in Bavaria – explaining which wildflowers she used for this card. After much hesitation among the meadows I chose one with violets and something called in German “geese flowerlings.” The lady’s name is Rotraud – that’s her first name. I imagine her an elderly maiden, Germanic, pure-hearted, fieldly.

    While we were standing chatting a woman walked in whom I had passed on my way into the snooty health food store, she has a seamed and brown face round like a nut and he showed me the cards he also sells with her photographs on them. I was still reeling. Ahead of me browsing in the health food store opposite I had seen this lovely man, baby straps wrapped around his chest, long wrinkled pants and comfy shoes and somehow the back of his head attracted me. At the egg shelves we ran against each other and looked into one another’s eyes and smiled. I like you! I like you, too. As I was walking home feeling so filled with ardour and friendship he cycled past, slow and leisurely, making faces at his baby who lay smiling in the little wooden cart pushed in front of the bicycle. Hey, I said. Hey, he said. I came home to the man whose loveliness is known to me in more compelling detail and the sound of whose voice from outside the door lifts my heart. He took a photo of me in my crowded overalls, every pocket bulging with spinach, bananas, nectarines, tea. I put some water on to boil the eggs whilst telling him all about it. We gloated over the four different kinds of amazing German breadrolls I had chosen and their funny names. My favourite breadroll name is ‘Schrippen,’ a kind of ordinary light white bun. I bought potato rolls, farmer’s rolls, dinkel rolls and poppy and sesame fruit rolls, lifting each one out of its hutch with the long-handled scissor provided there for just that purpose.

  • don’t you feel like reading books any more?

    I was in a bookshop yesterday with my friend just arrived from Copenhagen. It is around the corner from the bookshop where he and I first met. We met because he was standing gazing at the books in the English-speaking section when I visited to see how the ones I’d left were doing, and I went up to him and said, You should buy this one! I wrote it! And he did and then later I visited him at his own bookshop near the cold Danish lakes which has one wall of records and two walls of books and a tiny espresso machine.

    The bookshop yesterday has a cafe attached, it’s built under a railway line in a series of old-fashioned orange brick arches and you can hear trains screaming overhead while you drink your coffee. Adjacent to the cafe part are the shelves of books in two rooms, and the two sections of literature reach each other by means of a narrow passage, all too brief, papered entirely with the titles published by a German house which uses bold whole colours. So you walk into a rainbow of literature: I catch my breath. On the other side I peeled off to go visit poetry and my friend went visiting novels. The man who staffs the back section (English and French, philosophy, poetry) came sailing through from the just-closed cafe holding a small plate high on one hand. A fork stuck out of it, upright like a sail. Hard on his heels were two sad-eyed beagle-like dogs who weren’t beagles, who gathered themselves at his feet as he reached the stool and gazed imploringly at the underside of his plate. “Two very firm friends!” I remarked. “With clearly no agenda whatsoever.” “Tcha,” he said, spearing a wedge of cake. “Or maybe two very firm friends of the strawberry cake.”

    I began turning over the hardcover books, looking to see how people had solved the design problem I am wrestling with: how do you answer, on the back cover, the one powerful almost abstract image on the front? Do you just have a plain colour? If you put another photo, does it end up looking 90s, like a boulevard magazine? The combination, I find, of ambitious ideas of beauty with design inexperience makes independent publishing hard. My friend showed me a novel marked The greatest book you’ve never read. Neither of us had read it, either. He was looking for WG Sebald. “Have you read Proust?” “Oh, yes. But I can’t remember any of it. It took me months.”

    As he turned away I remembered what my novelist friend had said, at the time: You should put that on your gravestone. “She read Proust.” The man on the stool dropped two chunks of cake for his patient friends. I thought how the poetry section was in the dimmest corner but a good slice of strawberry cake brings dogs to your heels. I turned back to the hardcovers, none the wiser, nonetheless. Another book lover walked in, an older man in a beautiful wool coat. One of the dogs had climbed into the leather armchair at the entrance to my rainbow and was sitting there looking rather tired and sad. “Na?” he said, stooping to greet her. ‘Na’ is hard to translate but means, I think, approximately: so? how are you, person whom I feel attached to and fond of, or whom I like on sight. The dog gazed back at him plaintively. Clearly he had brought no strawberry cake. He tickled her under her chin. “Und?” he asked her. “Hast du keine Lust mehr, Bücher zu lesen?” Don’t you feel like reading books anymore? How Germans speak to dogs – courteously, seriously, with familiarity – makes me truly love them.

    You’ll see some raddled punker and some lady in expensive trainers, their two dogs tangle in a sniffing wreath along the river path and they both stand there smiling tolerantly, as if to say: Tcha…. That’s just the way dogs are. I had seen this that same morning, in a seamier part of town. In other news, we saw an otter swimming along the canal, and followed it for half a mile under the trees. Periodically it dived, making a ring of bright water and then emerging further along up the bank. Turns out otters swim at about a walking pace. In all my life I’ve never seen one before, I’d have taken it for a beaver except that I asked a man standing with his arms folded and he told me, doubtlessly, “That – is an otter.” Another man in his blue kayak was sorting things on the bank, readying himself for a sunny day’s rowing. On the other side two trumpeters stood side by side and played some mournful tune into the quiet water’s ears.