Across the Great Divide

Understanding Magic.

Gary holds forth for some time as he fingers the house acoustic guitar, a scarred, sixties-vintage Harmony missing a pick guard and patched on the sides and back with two colors of tape. It sounds far better than it looks.

That's one lesson of Peace House: Forget surfaces. Listen.

Gary says he didn't want to practice piano and go over to some old lady's house for lessons when he was a kid, but he was grateful to his parents for insisting. When he was sixteen, he saw Grand Funk Railroad in concert, and that's when he knew he was born to be a musician. For three weeks he begged for a guitar and amplifier until his father gave in, then found a guitar book in the school library.

He instructs as he plays, chording complex songs and running through major, minor, pentatonic and blues scales. He accompanies himself with chatter about flatted thirds and sevenths.

Ty and Roy stare at his hands. It's hard to tell if they get the concepts, which have to travel by a different, slower path through the brain.

When Gary finally hands Ty the guitar, he plays a scale and Gary says, you've got it, but to make music you have to play with feeling. He takes the guitar back and plays another blues lick to illustrate.

Calvin saunters in. Calvin, the Peace House trickster, the Milo Minderbender, the HL Mencken and Spike Lee rolled into one. Sitting next to him in his corner, you hear a running commentary that picks apart everything in the room, like having a translator's earpiece, with jokes.

He begins free-styling to Gary's blues:

    I went to the Peace House just to fill my empty belly

    I went to the Peace House just to fill my empty belly

    If I can't have breakfast sausage I'll eat peanut butter and jelly        

Gary tells the story of a riff he learned in Chicago, written by a stone-cold alcoholic who started his mornings at the door of a liquor store begging for a drop and ended his days dead from drink. The tune grabs, neither strange nor familiar, part-BB King, swirled in a bowl formed of jazz and with a hit of heavy metal. Four men nod in respect toward the nameless man, nothing now but a tune and a story.

Ty quotes Tom Petty. Music is the only real magic. Without substance, yet it moves people.

When Ty takes the guitar, his playing is fluid and his notes bend expressively. 

You were holding out, says Gary. You do know how to play with feeling.

Ty once took violin in sixth grade, the extent of his music instruction.

I can play anything I hear, he says, but I want to understand what I'm doing. 

Survival Strategy: The Increasingly Bookless Bookstore.

Find the book in the bookstore.

Colleges still invest in their libraries, which signal the institution's reverence for knowledge and commitment to learning. Increasingly, they expect their bookstores to turn a profit, like airport swag concessions.

The "bookstore" I entered Friday was handsome, but with the charm and character of a concourse souvenir shop offering grab-and-go beverages, snacks and flocks of branded apparel. Not a single book in sight.

Past the $69 technical fabric long-sleeve tees, a stairway led down to the textbook department, where a shoulder-high run of shelves displayed current titles along one wall. A large table featured remainders. In back was the textbook corral, looking like the airport service counter where you go to report lost luggage.

The online store features generic books in a template format virtually identical across 700+ colleges.

I spied a sole freestanding bookcase. Without the sign noting faculty publications on one side and books by alumni authors on the other, it would have been at home in a driveway on the last day of a garage sale.

Among the alumni books, Karen Yamashita's I HOTEL stood out from the clutter because its spine is about three inches wide, allowing it to stand upright without supporting volumes. Marathoner Hal Higdon's On the Run from Dogs and People, originally published in 1971, had fallen on its side atop some books as thin as Temperance pamphlets. There were ample copies of a thriller penned by college trustee Larry Perlman, the only title faced out. 

But I spotted nothing from Jane Hamilton, Bonnie Nadzam, Suzanne Lebsock, Kai Bird, TJ Stiles, Jack El-Hai, Kao Kalia Yang, Lila Abu-Lughod, James Loewen or Brian Freeman. Or, yes, me. Perhaps they had sold out, but more likely, store management has given up trying.

I get that college bookstores are not in the business of selling trade books to alumni who visit campus once year. (The store does invite authors to sell their books through the store registers for a few hours at reunion.) Nor are they in the business of flattering our egos. But published writers give evidence of the school's quality, and that list of authors exhibits an interesting range of accomplishments.

The textbook business is changing. Students have options besides the campus store, with rentals and online purchasing. As revenues decline, college CFOs have options, too, with outfits like Follett and Barnes & Noble College ready to take the stores off their hands. 

Varney's Book Store, a 126-year-old Kansas institution, has announced it will close all its stores at the end of the month. Its revenue had dropped severely, due to the loss of the K-State Union Bookstore contract to Follett and to online competition. On July 1, University of North Carolina turns over its student store to Barnes & Noble College, which runs more than 700 outsourced stores.

In March, a University of California Irvine official said why the school was considering outsourcing its store, The Hill:

"We’ve remodeled the store, we’ve rebranded, improved our web presence, opened up the Hillside Lounge and partnered with Starbucks, but sales just aren’t keeping pace. The recommendations we followed haven’t changed much in terms of profitability. Either we look for someone to do this more efficiently, or we have to raise prices at The Hill above market standards.”

Given these realities, I won't presume to tell colleges not to privatize their stores, but I will offer a caution.

"Campus Store" better describes what college bookstores are becoming.

Look at the bookstore portals here. Both companies use templates designed to sell textbooks, supplies and trend merchandise. There's no way to order the new Richard Russo or to know it's on the shelf in the physical store.

Follett clients K-State, Notre Dame, Stanford, Boston College and Arizona State sites are distinguishable from each other only by the logo in the upper corner—and whether the Summer Trends module portrays stock photo students or pictures of college logoware. Barnes & Noble College applies school colors to the same layout for Carleton, Wellesley, Eastern New Mexico, Georgia Tech and Dunwoody College of Technology.

Encountering these college stores online and on-floor, you'd be hard-pressed to discern these institutions as places that celebrate learning and literacy.

Fortunately, though, Northfield has a great new bookstore in town called Content, owned and staffed by Carleton grads. I wonder if those other corporatized college towns will be as lucky.

 

Pardon me, are you using that life?

Writers must have a tiny, undiscovered organ that makes us salivate when we hear certain stories.

Someone donated a copy of my novel to the Peace House library, so I'm not totally undercover as writer here.

The account I heard of a tragic childhood event could have been the premise of an entire novel. As told in a few sentences, the story immediately suggested how an infant's death might resonate through four or five generations.

The incident belonged to a memoirist, for whom it was not fiction. The version she chose to tell supported her tale of personal growth, leaving aside for the most part the rich plot implications already percolating through my imagination. 

I wonder if I could use that, I thought.

No, writers don't have an extra organ. We have a disease.

Last week, I spoke at length with a man who is bi-polar, recently spent time in a psych ward and just discovered that the therapist he likes is not covered by his health plan. He lost his phone while in the hospital and lacks the Minnesota ID required to get a new one. He has some supportive relationships and participates in programs that help him, but they are spread across the metro, which he travels by bicycle.

The day before, he had a flat and his repair failed, leaving him shaking in frustration beside the path until another cyclist saw him and, in an exceptional act of kindness, helped him get back on the road. 

The story would be better with more of the details but I am still feeling my way here in the Peace House. 

For years in this blog, I have been sharing accounts of my shelter and day center encounters with people who have experienced severe disruptions to their lives. I've also written a novel that draws upon knowledge gained as a volunteer.

Some of the people I've written about know I am a writer, others probably see me as just another grey-haired volunteer. The organizations I serve know about this blog and have never asked me to do anything differently, so I take that as a sign that I haven't overstepped.

They think of what I'm doing as outreach, awareness-raising, lifting the scrim that obscures the issues related to homelessness.

But in this new place, I find my role as listener altered. I'm not an unpaid worker who is tending the door, wrangling preschoolers, handing out towels or scrubbing toilets. The conversations I enter aren't incidental to my assignment—they are my reason for being here.

And that makes me question anew how much of what I learn I should disclose. If community members are conscious of a writer in the room, will it affect their comfort or inhibit them? I tell stories, but maybe some don't want to be in the story, even if it's told with empathy and tact. And I certainly don't want to become an institutional filter. Been there, done that.

People who have been placed in a category we call "homeless" know all about selective context, of having the details of their lives either exaggerated or left out, of being a character in someone else's narrative—whether it's fundraising for a cause, representing a point of view about social breakdown or simply playing the dead body at the opening of a "Law and Order" episode.

 

I'll have to find my own proper place in these stories, too, if I am to be an authentic participant and not just a fly on the wall.

Whose story are we telling here? It's something we should talk about.