#no shouting pornography at a bookstore that's for sure

[just-an-enby-lemon]

Gabriel: For the crime of betraying heaven and dating a demon...

Aziraphale: Uh. I'm not dating Crowley

Gabriel: Lying is only going to make the situation worse. We have evidence!

Sandalphom: *shows photos of Crowley and Aziraphale lunch dates and holding hands at the park*

Aziraphale: That's just things we do as friends.

Micael: Mayhaps, but aren't you two a queerplatonic couple?

Aziraphale: A what?

Gabriel: *trying to not show he also has no idea what a queerplatonic couple is* hahahaha you're telling the truth.

Aziraphale: Why is this funny?

Micael: Let me get this right. You followed every single dating procedure to the point is punishable. Not only that but you betrayed us for your demon's sake-

Aziraphale: It was also for Earth's sake. I mean of course a part of it was for Crowley and our friendship but also stopping Earth for ending being the endgoal shows that saving the plane and it's inhabitants was a major player on my decision. Clearly?

Micael: *ignoring him* You did all that... and you're not even dating the demon?

Aziraphale:.. yes

Gabriel: *still laughting* Only you, sunshine, only you. Failing to date the demon you're getting punished for dating.

Micael: You know what I think we should send you back... see if you at least suceeds at dating the demon and them we punish you.

Sandalphom: *that really wanted to see a punishement happenig* What? Gabriel say something.

Gabriel: That's... genial, Micael.

Aziraphale: *confused but hey is a free pass* Is it? I mean it is!

Sandalphom: Why? Isn't it better that he didn't date the demon?

Gabriel: It's embarassing. What type of angel fails at a simple task like that? He likes the demon, the demon likes him at least say it to each other for heaven's sake! We trained him better.

Micael: Yeah. That's too much of a loser behavior, I don't want to make an example out of a loser. I'm here to punish a traitor.

Gabriel: You heard the lady, Aziraphale, chop chop, go date your demon so we can punish you for dating the demon.

[back at the shop]

Crowley: Angel! You're back! I was very worried. Had a cool plan to infiltrate upstairs and all.

Aziraphale: *shaking his head foundly* Of course you did, dear boy.

Crowley: Pray tell, how did you escape the archangels?

Aziraphale: *red as a tomato* I don't wanna talk about it.

-//-

[[Bônus ]]

Aziraphale: *reading about queerplatonic relationships* Crowley! Crowley! Look at that, my dear, I think we have one of those.

Crowley: *reads the page Azi is showing him* Yeah. It checks out.

*nothing about their relationship changes at all*

[[[At heaven]]]

Sandalphom: Micael, Micael, we finally can punish Aziraphale.

Micael: Are you sure? They have exactally the same dinamic they did and they weren't dating then.

Sandalphom: I think I heard they say they had a queerplatonic relationship to that wich girl once.

Micael: Did you check with Gabriel?

Sandaphom: He is watching The Sound of Music.

Micael: Oh Lord! You think it will last ten years again?

Sandalphom: I hope not. I still have Do-Re-Mi flasbacks.

[itsclydebitches]

Discredit Pt. 2: More Recommended Reviews For A.Z. Fell’s

Alright, folks. Some notes first: 

1. You all rock. I’m sending out 20k+ virtual hugs for all the notes I NEVER expected to get on this nonsense. 

2. This is probably the final section, just because I’m not sure I can adequately follow up part one and it might be foolish to attempt it here. Let alone twice. But for now, here we go. 

3. Kudos to the anon who reminded me of Aziraphale’s cash-only policy <3 

4. Nicole Y’s review is based off an actual comment I read years ago, but heaven only knows where online it was. I’ve got the memory of a goldfish. 

5. Trigger warning for the use of a queer slur in this. It’s the same review as above, number 5 if you want to avoid it. 

6. There’s a text-only version of just the reviews at the end, after all the images. I’ll upload that to my Sparse Clutter collection on AO3 in a bit. 

Bonus 7. People thinking this is a real shop deserve all the good things in this world. 

That’s all I’ve got. Hope you enjoy! 👍

****************************************************************************

I’m a simple guy who likes simple jokes. If there’s a whoopee cushion I plant it. I will call you up to ask if your refrigerator is running and then tell you to go catch it. (Actually that one died out so thoroughly it’s actually capable of a comeback now!). Yes, I’m a dad and yes, I have a t-shirt that says Dad Jokes? I Think You Mean Rad Jokes! which I wear un-ironically every Saturday. All of which is just to say that my wife was well prepared for my stupidity when I walked into Fell’s.

I? I was not.

You see the bibles when you walk in? The ones to the left? Let them be. Don’t even look at them. Definitely don’t pick out the fanciest one you can find and absolutely don’t walk up to the owner with it held in your pudgy little fingers, grinning like a loon, cheerfully asking whether this should be in the fiction section. Just don’t. Mark my words you’ll regret it. Though your wife won’t. She’ll get a great old laugh out of it all.

In conclusion: it’s quite possible that mama did raise a fool and he just got his ass verbally whooped by a guy in a bowtie.  

***

Shout-out to Mr. Fell for being the only decent bloke in this city. I’ve popped in and out of his store for years—including before I started transitioning. So he knew my dead name, dead look, whole shebang and I was definitely nervous to play the ‘You know me, but this is what’s changed and are you gonna throw a fit about it?’ game.

You know what he said? “Oh, Rose! What a lovely choice. Crowley dear, why aren’t you growing any roses? Some white ones would look splendid next to my Henredon chair.”

That’s it. He just went straight into dragging his partner for not giving him roses. So hey, Mom? Next time you’re snooping through my social media why don’t you explain to all these nice people why the 50+yo book seller accepts me in ways you won’t. Don’t go telling me age is an excuse or that you’re ‘Stuck in your ways.’ I’ve watched Fell dress in the same damn clothes since I was ten!!

Yeah. Sorry. Rant over. Fell’s a gem. That’s my take. Rose out.

***

Anyone else in the shop when that guy started yelling about buying pornography? And then got escorted into the back room for some ‘private conversation’? Well done, Mr. Fell! Didn’t know you had it in you.

***

Alright alright alright alright I am TOTALLY calm about this.

Went into A.Z. Fell’s last Thursday. Not because I knew anything about the place. Just because I’ve been hitting up every bookshop within a twenty-mile radius, asking if they’re hosting any book signings. Long story short I self-published my novel Blight last month—which you can get for a mere £5 here but I swear this isn’t a promotional thing I’m just BROKE—and have been looking for networking opportunities, tips, stuff like that. So the owner listened politely as I explained all this. Then said he didn’t do anything of that sort, which didn’t surprise me given the shop’s vibe.

But then? Then??? He offered to let me do a signing there??????

As said. Totally calm about this. This man either plans to kidnap me or is actually giving me my first shot at an audience outside my blog. AKA totally worth the risk.

Tuesday the 9th. 7:00pm. Just in case anyone’s interested ;)

***

holy sweet baby jesus i was tripping balls last week you tryin’ to tell me that kING KONG SIZED FANGED FUCK SNAKE IS REAL

***

Witnessed the most perfect exchange the other day:

Grumpy Dude With No Manners: “You. Boy. Where’s the man I spoke with over the phone?”

Mr. Fell’s Partner Who Knows Damn Well Only Two of Them Work There But Clearly Doesn’t Like This Guy’s Tone: “Did this man give you his name?”

Grumpy Dude: “Might have. Don’t remember. Sounded like a fairy though.”

Me: “....”

My girlfriend: “....”

This Poor Sweet Startled Kid On Our Left: “?!?!?!?”

Fell’s Partner In The Drollest Voice I’ve Ever Heard: “None of us have wings. Out!”

***

This shop gets full stars simply because every time I walk in they’re playing Queen.

I mean, I’ve walked in once, but once is enough when you’ve got Crazy Little Thing Called Love blasting full volume.

***

Okay, I’m still kind of shaken up but I needed to write this out somewhere and this seemed as good a place as any.

I spilled my latte on a book. Just tripped on thin air, popped the lid, and chucked a venti’s worth of coffee all over a very expensive looking text. I didn’t mean to, obviously, but it happened and I just started bawling on the spot. Full on sobs because this semester has been absolute hell, I ruined this guy’s antique, there’s no way I can pay for it, I can’t even sneak away because I’m drawing the whole store’s attention...just all the things all at once. I really was straight up panicking and was seconds away from pulling out my inhaler. I couldn’t breathe.

And then Mr. Fell showed up.

Jesus it’s embarrassing to admit but I think I hit him once or twice. On the arms I mean, because he was trying to touch me and I figured, I don’t know, it was a restraint or something. He was going to call the police and hold me until they got there. But then he managed to start rubbing my back and I lost it like I hadn’t already been bawling my eyes out in this shop. Ever cry into a perfect stranger’s chest? I have! But if Mr. Fell seemed to mind he definitely didn’t show it. Just kept holding me while I probably ruined his shirt and then took me into the back and made me a new coffee in this cute little angel mug. He let me stay there while I called my sister and waited for her to arrive.

She’s a good twenty minutes outside of Soho, so we talked for a while. It’s not like Mr. Fell could fix my shit roommate or bio classes, but I guess just talking about it all really helped. I was a lot calmer by the time my sis arrived and Mr. Fell insisted I come back any time I wanted—for browsing or more coffee.

Of course, sis offered to pay for the book herself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look so surprised in my life. “Certainly not!” he said. “Contrary to popular belief, no one should pay for their mistakes. It’s what makes you all so wonderfully human.”

So yeah. Thanks, Mr. Fell.

***

This little shop must have started a book club for kids! Lately I’ve seen the same group of children hanging out at Fell’s. Three boys and a girl. They’re a bit rambunctious at times, but who isn’t at that age? So wonderful seeing literature passed down to the next generation. Even if some of it is rather questionable looking...

***

It’s an honest crime that more of you aren’t talking about what a wonderful bookstore this is.

I’m a book lover at heart and Fell’s always makes me feel like I’m coming home. I just arrived somewhere safe and familiar after a particularly harrowing day. I’ve slipped under the covers of my bed after dinner and a bubble bath. It’s something like that, but with an element of surprise too. One of the reasons why I adore private and used shops over chain stores is that little touch of chaos. You walk in and sure, there are general sections to browse, but everything is just a little bit disorganized from people leafing through books and then putting them back somewhere else. There’s no real record keeping, you’ve just gotta head to one particular corner and hope for the best. It’s not the sort of place you go to if you want something specific because the chances of them having it are slim—that’s just how the universe works—and even if they did no employee knows where it is anymore.

But if you wander the shelves for a while, crouch down low to get a look at everything on the bottom shelf, pay attention to the books that don’t have easy to read titles or any summaries to speak of... you just might find something you didn’t know you were looking for. That’s Fell’s: the comfort of the familiar and the excitement of the unknown.

*** A lot of people might assume that these stories are embellished or outright made up, but as a bookseller myself going on twenty years I believe every single one of them.

That being said, I accidentally moved a rug and found chalk sigils that look like they belong in a cult. Make of that what you will.

***

There’s a special place in hell for 21st century shop owners that only take cash. Who carries cash anymore? Not me! I haven’t bothered with that nonsense in years! You can get a card reader for 15 pounds on Amazon. Or you know what? Be stingy and pay 7 for the little attachment on your phone. This place is nuts if it thinks it’s going to survive much longer on a cash-only policy, especially with some books that look like they’re worth hundreds or thousands of pounds! Yeah, yeah, just let me pull out this giant wad of bills for you. I’ll carry them around a crime-laden city because there’s no ATM near you either.

I mean jesus, you’d think this guy didn’t want to sell anything.

***

I walked in. There was a man screaming at a fern while another threatened him with an umbrella. I walked out.

5 stars do recommend.

***

I once walked in on the same (?) guy yelling at a book for daring to fall on the owner’s head. I think that’s just a Thing over there.

***

Like a lot of people here I didn’t actually go to Fell’s for any books (flat tire, Angel Recovery taking forever) and ended up staying three hours (not because of Angel). No, I wandered towards the back and found this ancient CRT set propped on a table of books, the kind that my Dad used to watch Twilight Zone on. This lanky guy had a marathon of Gilmore Girls going... though how he was managing that with a broken antenna and no DVR, I really don’t know. But yeah. He told me to pull up a chair and I did. Guy gave me popcorn.

I wish I’d paid a little more attention to his name. Charlie? Curley? I really can’t remember, but thanks for the enjoyable afternoon, man.

***

I BOUGHT A BOOK HERE

Not sure how though. Just kinda happened. First edition of Just William. Frankly I didn’t even want the thing, but the owner basically shoved me out the door with it when I took two seconds to look at the spine. Odd that he was so willing to part with this one.

Update: ... hold up. I didn’t buy a book because I never actually paid the guy. ‘Basically shoved me out the door’ was literal. Do I go back??

***

This page has really gone feral the last couple of months so I’m just gonna bite the bullet and say it:

Anyone notice that Fell’s snake and Fell’s partner are never in the same room together?

***

I really don’t like the implications of this…

***

This is precisely why the Internet has turned into a cesspool. You all should be ashamed of some of the stuff you’re writing here. Can’t two men just be friends anymore? Two real life men? These guys aren’t some characters for you to ‘ship’ or whatever. Quit making outrageous assumptions about their sexualities and use this website for what it’s actually for: reviewing the bookshop. Honestly I’m so sick of this sort of this shit.

***

Dude. They run a queer-focused shop together with a flat on the second floor. Fell calls the guy ‘Dear’ and he’s always calling him ‘Angel.’ People have literally seen them kissing. If you want I can give you the number of my physician. He might be able to help you pull your head out of your ass.

***

What the hell is your problem? I’m literally just reminding people to stop making assumptions. It’s gross and insulting. These guys check their Yelp page. You really think they’re gonna be okay with this stuff?

Also: I’m not the five-year-old relying on insults, so.

***

Making an account purely to set the record straight: I’m the hot twink in question and I married that angel. Peace

[shiroblack]

My mind is very dirty sorry to all who read this

So for those who saw my last post about Gabriel and Belzzebu this is my perverted and dirty thought

Starting from the same premise where Gabriel and Belzzebu came to earth to spend some time with the "half brothers" in order to understand how they did not die in the trials, they begin to follow Aziraphale and Crowley in their dates, and one day things go a little bit out of control among our favorite celestial beings so imagine this scene:

Aziraphale and Crowley kissing passionately (not sexually, just love) while Belzzebu is totally baffled and Gabriel dying of shame and discomfort, So both of our heroes realize that their "little brothers" never participated in any sexual act, in fact, both virgins and without any knowledge about it. Then Crowley suggested: "They should watch" Crowley said clearly joking and being Scolded by Aziraphale Shortly there after

The days were passing is Belzzebu and Gabriel did not take the scene of their heads, is the idea of ​​watching was cooking on the heads of both, especially Gabriel's, Then one night, when Crowley and Zira were in a more intimate moment Gabriel went to peek, He watched only the kisses, did not have the courage to see to the end, more out of shame than anything.

In Crowley's apartment Belzzebu was more incisive, asked many questions, related to both carnal and emotional sensations Crowley had already been a nanny, and explaining about birds and bees has never been so traumatic, So without much patience, he tells Belzzebu to go to a certain site and watch videos (I do not think it is necessary to tell which site it would be)

Belzzebu watched the videos, sata and God knows how many videos he watched, and he liked and wanted to try, but now the question came "What creature would be able to do with one of the lords of hell???"

Belzzebu did not have to think hard to find an answer: "an angel"

In the other Date that Aziraphale and Crowley had both noticed something strange about Belzzebu, he was looking at least strangely at Gabriel.

In Crowley's apartment he seemed genuinely concerned about his brother's attitude, Gabriel was not a flower to be smelled and all he wanted was to spend time with his angel.

In the bookstore Aziraphale gave several books to Gabriel, novels, biology and by irony, also pornography. And Gabriel read each and bombed Aziraphale with questions and more questions.

Both brothers who lived the longest on earth began to get really worried about their brothers' attitudes, Aziraphale found some curiosities cute, and Crowley just hated having to look The curious eyes of Belzzebu every time he returned home after sleeping with Aziraphale.

After much study (from both sides) who took the initiative the old enemy to a Date was Gabriel, He was convinced that since Aziraphale was top, he too would be, it should be something natural for an angel, stand over a demon and show him his place, He was wrong.

HE WAS VERY WRONG.

Crowley joked about the rule of the five dates Before going to bed, but Belzzebu took seriously, So the Dates were more or less like this.

1° Simple meeting, walked in the park neither ate anything, just talked

2° Gabriel invited Belzzebu to spend an afternoon in the bookstore, again only talked

3° Belzzebu tried to do something for Gabriel to eat, it went very wrong, resulting in a Crowley screaming about his kitchen being destroyed. In the end they drank a tea that Aziraphale had given to Crowley shortly ago (First meal that Gabriel even tasted)

4° They went running in the park, it was a fun experience for both of them.

5° They both found that each other's company was pleasant to say the least, and they ended up kissing, then things went downhill.

In what was supposed to be the 6th Date they went to a motel, Gabriel was at least glowing with excitement. Belzzebu looked very calm, as if it were something already I had done it millions of times.

As the bedroom door closed Gabriel felt his body in the wall and the small body of Beelzebub near his own, and he felt as if all the fire of hell were in the room He had never felt anything so intense in all his existence.

Belzzebu knew more or less what he was doing had watched many videos.

Gabriel was quite lost in reality, not quite sure where to put his hands or how to react to the lush kisses he was receiving, Plus he felt really good, something bothered in the middle of the legs, but the experience as a whole was being much better than he imagined

Now both already naked, a little wave of shame went through Gabriel, he was in excellent shape, he was very attractive no doubt about it Even so when Belzzebu appeared completely naked in front of his eyes He doubted all his attributes, and a whirlwind of thought passed through his heavenly little head, Belzzebu noticed the doubts and insecurities in the purple eyes that faced her so cedarly and that made her excited, a totally vulnerable Gabriel, was a delightful sight.

The kisses were better now, the contact with the skin devoid of layers of clothing, the nervous lips of Gabriel was an experience that Belzzebu could not describe in words.

Gabriel was very nervous, he could not just kiss for much longer, Belzzebu's skin was soft and his small breasts touching his chest were making him go Crazy

The penetration did not hurt as much as Beelzebub imagined it would hurt, now Gabriel seemed to be about to have a heart attack, as if all the pleasure he was feeling was going to blow him up.

It had been a few minutes, Beelzebub sitting on Gabriel's lap feeling his whole being burned pleasantly, finally understanding why humans had so much proliferated, Gabriel's moans were cute, the way he controlled himself so as not to beg her to go faster was also lovely, he was adorable, at least in his eyes

Gabriel could not take it any longer, he needed to come, but every time he approached his full pleasure Beelzebub slowed. The more he needed to come,more his body trembled and he could barely put together related sentences, so that was the feeling that made humans spread? It was no wonder there were so many of them.

Belzzebu was aware of the situation the angel partner needed to relieve himself, he did not even know how long he would take all that pleasure, so he made a request, or rather gave an order:

"Beg, say you want to Come and I'll let you come inside me"

Honestly Gabriel did not know what was right or wrong anymore, so he begged, shouted and begged with all the Forces remaining, when Belzzebu roasted his shoulders as support to increase speed both shouted in pleasure It was too much for Gabriel to bear, he came in a deliciously sinful groan, at least To the ears of Belzzebu, who also ended up coming Together with him more quietly.

When Belzzebu came home Crowley was waiting for her with a look that bordered on the mockery and curiosities, he would not ask anything, However he would like to know if it was all right between the two, Beelzebub did not give details but said that everything was fine, that was enough for Crowley, already in the bookstore Aziraphale had locked himself In his bedroom, hi covered his ears with his fingers so he would not hear every sordid detail Gabriel proudly spoke of.

[duckbeater]

Arbitrary Comparison: Sontag and Batuman

This business of waiting for celebrated essayists to produce their first novels should have ended by now. In the first, there exists no material or aesthetic contest between the forms: neither lends respectability nor solvency to its practitioner. In the second, this is obviously the age of essays—or, perhaps, at least the age of opinions. Attaching a personality to the opinion seems to produce the essay. That and fact-checkers. Also brevity. 

Essays are things you can scan on the train, share among friends, and credibly lie about having read in their entirety. You can even manage lying about having read the savvier responses to the original essay—my brother calls this the “meta”—and so absorb and reflect on whole ecosystems of expression through muddled précis, vivid sub-headlines, mean tweets, and abstruse hashtags alone. 

Essays, particularly those that produce sensations, do the important work of shoring up intellectual economies. Interpreters, commenters, bloggers, reposters, recappers, analyzers, pollsters, wonks—a generation’s vitality restored by its ability to call-out or call attention to whatever urgencies its essayists prefer. We used to have public intellectuals and now we have guest columnists. Analogously, our latest capitalism is defined by its precarity. Writing gigs feel very fly-by-night.

I want to suggest, by way of comparison, one inheritor of our outmoded expectations for the magazine writer. I mean, the essayist.

Like Susan Sontag, Elif Batuman is primarily known for her personal and literary essays. Always at a remove, Sontag nonetheless made her presence felt in places as disparate as Hanoi and Sarajevo; she scrutinized the morality of photography, and parsed the aesthetics of pornography. She delighted in difficulty, and yet, through a queer kind of autoerotic extrusion technique, mangled what was most difficult, least seemly, the silliest, the most somber—she took all of the patience-taxing seriousness of high art (many movies, many dances, many “happenings,” and many, many long novels), and fashioned of it these beautiful, brisk essays.

Part of that briskness, of course, is a matter of Sontag’s reductions, her love of aphorism and epigram—the effects of pendant lights hewn from the material they shine upon. Batuman has a similar fondness for these rhetorical devices, and she often dazzles the reader, paragraph by paragraph, in a repertorial style that synthesizes high and low—that looks at disarray and disconnection—to find great elegance. Batuman situates her romances in Erdoğan’s Turkey and then Samarkand, she appreciates Russian authors like Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, and playfully comments on such cultural trends as awkwardness, the brontosaurus, and Gone Girl. A recent stint in Istanbul, where she taught writing at Koç University, has always struck me as a move motivated in part by the need to absolve herself of the critique sustained in “Get a Real Degree,” a rather notorious assault on American creative writing programs.

Comparing Batuman and Sontag may seem unproductive at this stage in the former’s career. At 40 years old, Batuman has not, in any way, cultivated a leonine majesty or moral superiority. Indeed, she regularly submits, on Twitter and elsewhere, amusingly awkward portraits of herself, such that would undercut ambitions toward glamour. So we see Batuman: doleful, holding a koala; blank, in a “transcranial electrical stimulation selfie”; overhead cropped, to emphasize her cat Friday, who is helping her to “edit.” Whereas Sontag seemed to regard the camera with a heat that bordered on contempt, Batuman, even in press photos, is alight with reservation. (Realize, too, that for several decades, Sontag had Annie Leibovitz taking her goofy snapshots; if you google their names together, you will quickly find Leibovitz’s emotionally overwhelming collage of Sontag’s corpse.) Batuman’s beat has never been the absolutism of a given artist or artwork; she does not enshrine the pieties of a recondite vanguard; the world remains open and strange to her, alight with hilarity. When she’s exploring the stunning archaeological weirdness of Göbekli Tepe, she’s breezy about the multitude of erect penises to be found in the Early Neolithic figurations of man and beast. (Sontag’s review of Flaming Creatures comes to mind.) When she ever does lecture, she’s self-deprecating, warm, and witty. Batuman’s genius—when she recognizes it—seems to fluster and depress her.

Superficially, Batuman publishes in the same arenas as Sontag once published. Where Sontag staged her early salvos in the Partisan Review, Batuman made her name in n+1, a magazine perhaps two or three generations removed, though surely its noisome spiritual inheritor. Both published in the New Yorker (Batuman remains a staff writer there), and they’ve variously contributed to the New York and London Review of Books. Their tendencies as journalists, critics, polemicists, and memoirists, apparently at the behest of editors, prevented both writers from their first inclinations as novelists—steered them off course, as it were.

Both writers studied masters of the European novel and continental philosophical thought; the seriousness and attention they paid to these masterworks, they repaid again in serious attentiveness to reporting on our popular culture. We get this in Sontag, gleefully, when she vivisects b-grade sci-fi in “The Imagination of Disaster,” allowing the detritus of Eisenhower-era Hollywood to speak to a world’s fears of nuclear annihilation: “The films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction which I for one find haunting and depressing.” Much more recently, we see this impulse repeated in Batuman’s take on the Ghostbusters reboot: “If the original Ghostbusters was about the thrill of the free market, the new one is about its consequences—about the people it disenfranchises, and the possibility that they will try to take violent retribution.”

This is why we encounter, in “Under the Sign of Saturn,” Sontag’s moving account of the life and work of Walter Benjamin, a sprinkling of astrology, and likewise among Batuman’s tender reflections on Dante, in a long article for Harper’s, a shout-out to “all the thousand and one douchebags of Florence.” Neither of these essays is academic. They are robust evocations of the peculiar, melancholic personalities these geniuses attract in their orbits (the authors included), of passions abrogated by exile, and it is difficult to finish either essay with dry eyes. I can, besides, point out where my breath catches in the essays—when I realize my goose is cooked.

In the first pages of his small book on Susan Sontag, Philip Lopate is quick to dispatch his subject’s fiction: it is, “in the main, poor,” he notes, qualifying that Sontag “lacked broad sympathy and a sense of humor, which are usually prerequisites for good fiction.” I have such an abiding reverence for Sontag’s essays, that I’ve not made it past her novels’ first chapters (although I have read their last pages—Lopate recommends this). It’s difficult enough to find them stocked in bookstores (hardcovers of The Volcano Lover do turn up in resale shops; I picked up my copy in Vancouver), and too depressing to excavate from off-site, remote-access stacks of university libraries, that I’m satisfied in the opinions of my betters: they’re best enjoyed as anecdotes.

Unlike Sontag, Batuman is very funny. I recently finished her novel The Idiot, and I think it’s tops. But I’m grateful that she’s always been an essayist, and that I’ll always have her essays at hand, and that they already constitute, to me, the memories and comforts of great novels.

[butterflyslinky]

Okay, after yesterday’s way too long post about AO3 and the moral guardians, I’ve been thinking about this more and I’m going to make a separate post so that the person who started that one can have a little more peace in their notes.

Imagine you’re in a Barnes & Noble. It has thousands of different books on its shelves, everything from Hop on Pop (light innocent kids’ faire that is inoffensive to anyone) to Fifty Shades of Grey (hardcore erotica that romanticizes abusive relationships) and everything in between. All the books are sorted into sections based on who might like them, and each book has a summary on the back cover or inside flap. Generally before buying a book, customers read that summary and look at the section it’s in to determine if they might want to read it. Some customers might even read a few pages before deciding whether they want to buy the book. No one is forced to buy any books. The store is a privately-owned business and the owner happens to be in the store that day.

Now imagine that as you’re standing in the aisle, an irate customer walks in—let’s say an older woman, moralistic Christian type. She barges over to the customer service desk and starts shouting at the minimum-wage clerk that the store is immoral and should be shut down because it carries Fifty Shades of Grey. The clerk tries to point out that the store carries many other books as well, but the woman keeps saying that the store is bad and everyone who works there is bad because there are immoral books on the shelves.

The owner overhears this. He thinks about all the books he has in his store. Most of them are sent by corporate or the publishers—he hasn’t even heard of most of them. He has a general awareness of what’s in the most popular books, but he has thousands of titles on-hand and doesn’t know what every book is about.

In that situation, what is the owner of the bookstore going to do? Is he going to apologize profusely and swear to expend all his resources reading every single book and removing all of the ones that have morally objectionable content from the shelves? Even if he had the time and manpower to do that, he couldn’t because his moral standards may not be as high as this lady’s. Plus, if he removed every book that has sex or violence or death or drug use or whatever, he’s not going to have very many books left to sell and his store will go under.

No, more likely in that case the owner is going to go over to the woman berating his clerk and tell her to leave his store—she’s disturbing his paying customers and abusing his clerk for something that no one could reasonably control. Maybe if the owner is feeling generous, he’ll direct the irate lady to the Christian bookstore down the street, which is much smaller and only carries books that people like this woman would like. 

Either way, the answer is the same—this is his business, and he decides how it’s run. And this owner (and the corporation that licenses him) has decided that his store is a place where any book is available, even if people find it distasteful—even if the owner himself finds a book distasteful.

Now, getting back to fanfiction. AO3 is like Barnes and Noble. It’s a privately-owned site, which means the people who own it get to decide how it’s run, and the owners have decided it’s a place where any story can be shared, no matter what’s in it. Like with Barnes and Noble, the stories are sorted into categories. Like with any book, the stories have summaries on them. Unlike books, stories also come with tags and warnings on them.

AO3’s standards may be a little more lax than other websites. FF.net doesn’t host hardcore pornography. Mugglenet Fanfiction (which I wrote for for many years) doesn’t allow anything horribly graphic, whether it be sex or violence, requires warnings for way more things than AO3 does, and has a team of people who carefully read every story before they’ll post it to make sure it’s up to their standards. Wattpad, as I understand it, also doesn’t allow graphic content or many of the other highly objectionable things that AO3 does. And that’s all okay, because those are all privately-owned websites. The owners and administrators of each website get to decide what they’ll allow. You may not agree with them, but guess what?

No one is making you go to Barnes and Noble.