“

I’ll bring my baby to bookstores
so she learns at a young age
the value of the written word,
the value of its power.

“

She brought me the book of Rilke’s poems I asked for. And she still can remind me of the girl was once in love with and too shy to tell it to.

“

He’s had a lover for five months, a 15-year-old boy whom he met through an ad in the Voice. “Ads are still better than bars for meeting people,” he said, and I replied, “I guess they must be a lot better for meeting 15-year-olds.”

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Part of my job was arranging displays of art books, many of which were racy, but not in a way that bothered me because I was a third-wave sex-positive feminist who had taken a semester-long course on female sexuality. As part of my class, I’d written feminist erotica and was empowered to squat over a mirror.

“

The most forgotten of brick-and-mortar booksellers continues to try to get customers to buy it some more time as it verges on bankruptcy, and the ways in which is does so are becoming increasingly desperate. Being a subscriber to Borders’ e-mails, the only way to get a hold of its lucrative coupons, I’m privy to these attempts and all their overzealous subject lines, which seemed to culminate in a rather startling offer with this morning’s e-mail.