I walked into our living room just now holding a check in my right hand to ask my wife if she had an envelope. She said she did and started walking to her office.
I passed the check from my right hand to my left and took a step to follow her.
An instant later I felt something in my right hand and turned my head to see what it was. It was then that I realized that the message telling me that the check had left my right hand had just reached my conscious brain.
I don’t think I would have noticed that sort of thing while younger.
We all miss the bookstores of old, small places whose owners were former English majors or people with specialized interests such as sci fi. Pre-Internet, we had few other ways to find books that might interest us. (Libraries helped, of course.) Many stores could simply stock their shelves with good books and people would come.
In 1976 I got a job as a publisher’s rep for St Martin’s Press. My job was to educate myself about St Martin’s books for the upcoming season and then go out and meet with book buyers for independent bookstores in DC, MD, PA, western NY state and eastern Ohio. I learned a lot about telephone books, maps, bookstores and motels. (BTW, my sales manager seemed perfectly happy with the way I worked. I told my buyers what books St Martin’s was going to promote each season and encouraged them to buy a few or take advantage of available ad money if they wished. Buyers liked my approach. One buyer in Rochester panicked my by pushing her order sheet over to me and telling me to fill in her order!)
In 1976 B&N was a fabulous bookstore on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. I especially loved it because it had a basement of textbooks as well as upper floors of trade books.
1976 was also the year that Kramerbooks, one of DC’s most serious and prestigious bookstores, located a couple of blocks from the White House, opened a much smaller bookstore with a café near Dupont Circle. Every book buyer I met wanted to know what I thought of Afterwords and find out how they were doing. Answer: very well.
In addition to Afterwords, bookstores everywhere were experimenting with ways to increase their business.
Special orders. These are usually not profitable, but they build loyalty and traffic.
Work with schools to bring students to stores
Author readings
Play areas for children
And, of course, cafés
And we should never forget that bookstores have always provided refuge from our urban landscapes.
It’s fashionable in my circles to disparage B&N, as Gioio does when he criticises B&N’s book selection and coffee. I disagree with those friends.
I see B&N as a company that saw how bookstores could apply all these new methods to get people into stores buying books on a grand scale.
Ted Gioio must be young because he’s apparently unaware of the fact that pre-Amazon B&N stores had fabulous, deep inventories. Moreover they brought books to many places in America where people had no bookstores or didn’t patronize them. I’ll never forget driving from New Orleans, where I had sold books to a wonderful bookstore in the French Quarter, and stopping at a phone booth in Metairie, LA, to look for bookstores in that city of half a million residents. They had one Logos (i.e., not a real bookstore) and a B&N. Good on B&N for being there.
BTW, Gioio seems to believe that people want to buy good books in order to read them. If he’d ever been in the book business he’d know that about 2/3 of bookstore sales come at - you guessed it - Xmas! That’s why we sales reps worked hardest during the summer to make sure that bookstores had the books that would sell and keep them in business later in the year. (Many of the books I sold in the summer didn’t arrive until late in the year.) I’ll never forget selling 2000 copies of James Harriet’s book, All Things Wise and Wonderful to a department store in Philadelphia; you can be sure that all of them sold.
B&N has suffered immensely from Internet sales, of course. Giono condescendingly remarks that “… the digital age caught the company by surprise” as if B&N was unique in that regard. They weren’t the only bookstores to suffer. In hindsight, we can join Gioio in criticizing the reduced book inventory and all the cards, gifts etc. that replaced them, but are we all certain that we could do a better job?
I do agree with Gioio that James Daunt sounds fantastic. B&N wasn’t the only corporation that didn’t listen to employees or allow them to guide a business, but it sounds as if it’s one of the few to do something to rectify the culture. More power to ’em! I can’t wait to go visit our local B&N and see if I notice any difference.
(Local B&N websites don’t seem to work, but that could be my so-called security at work. Or it could be Daunt at work.)
In late summer of 1964 I entered Peace Corps training in Carbondale, Illinois.
What I want to describe here is the greatest learning experience of my life: learning to speak French.
The trainers at Carbondale use the Foreign Service Institute’s training materials.
We learned in small groups of around 6 volunteers. This was an optimal size for learning our dialogs.
Each lesson began by memorizing a dialog in French. We were told what the dialog said. This might have been in English, pantomime, etc., I don’t remember. The point however is that we were not shown how the dialog was written in French. I’m forever grateful for this because if I’d seen the written dialog, it would have taken me much longer to learn to hear and pronounce it correctly.
The first dialog
Here is the first dialog that we learned:
Notice that the dialog has two participants, perfect for learning back-and-forth oral dialogs. We repeated the dialogs over and over until we reached a satisfactory point.
Although we could repeat the dialogs, sometimes after a whole morning of work, we still didn’t understand how the words were written or the sentence’s syntax. But we could repeat the words.
I’ve circled the last line in the first page of the dialog: « Je suis heureux de faire votre connaissance, Mademoiselle. » We will see it again soon.
The exercises
Now the real learning began. Each sentence in the dialog was used in oral exercises that taught us to internalize its syntax. It did this by substituting new words, transforming the sentences, etc.
Here’s how we began to internalize the syntax of the sentence we saved above:
The teacher would walk us through this exercise, explaining the pronunciation and meaning of each word. We did this over and over again until our brains learned that we were dealing with two entities:
Subject + copulative verb + « de faire votre connaissance »
In other words, we learned a bit of grammar here without being taught “grammar”.
You can hear what the teacher did in this recording of drill Lexical A-1. About 14 seconds into the recording, you will hear the exercise. You will hear a prompt followed by a pause for the student to replace Je suis heureux in the example sentence. Finally the woman’s voice gives the correct answer.
We did this for 5 hours per day (I can’t remember if we did it on weekends) for 11 weeks. It should have been longer, but the school year had already begun in Tunisia and we had to get going ASAP.
We also had language lab each day after class.
What I learned in those 11 weeks
At the end of training I had internalized most French grammar except for the subjunctive, which I never learned well, or the passé simple, which is rarely used in spoken French but is usually easy to understand when reading. My vocabulary was still small and my pronunciation was very heavily accented. (It took a “zen” moment in front of a class of 45 Arab students to make me realize that I had to learn to pronounce the French “u”. Another story.)
What I don’t understand.
Think about this method. At the end of each exercise, I knew how to say a little bit more French than before. Everything that I said in the exercises was correct French.
I’m puzzled by language learning methods that emphasize immersion because in Tunisia I learned to make myself understood in Arabic, very bad Arabic. Once I made myself understood, I had internalized a mistake. Why would I want to learn mistakes?
As far as I can tell the FSI method was never used extensively. I think it may be used at the Monterrey Language School in California, and I’d love to have the year needed to learn Arabic there. It is very labor-intensive. Nevertheless, it should be available.
I will say that even the FSI’s own Spanish course is not as well done as the French one. I never learned to make myself u
Rummaging through files that I’ve kept since childhood, I came across this certificate that I received in 6th grade of my elementary school in Berkeley, CA. Yes, that Berkeley, soon to be overrun by Beatniks, Hippies, then revolutionaries… My home town.
It was illegal - as it should be - to teach religion in public schools. So a couple of times a week, I left the school and went into a school bus parked just outside the playground. It was outfitted with small desks where we sat and listened to non-denominational lessons. We generally read Bible stories, I think mostly from the Old Testament, with lots of of White people in robes, herding sheep and bowing down before beams of light from above. I don’t remember learning about Jesus’s crucifixion, etc., but I probably did.
I enjoyed the classes and probably tended to believe the stories. My religious period came in later grades, primarily from 8th through 11th. I’d pretty much ceased believing in God by the time I entered College. I still very much wanted there to be a God (I’d be very happy for gods or a God to show up, provided that they believed in loving one another): this made it easier for my college to seduce me into majoring in philosophy, one of my worst mistakes.
I made this note years ago, probably in the 90s, and have kept it taped to my wall ever since.
I’m especially tickled by the language, which both assumes and denies that God exists. It’s the sort of sentence that philosophers have devoted piles of books to, the bestseller, Gödel, Escher, Bach, being a prime example.
