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Poet-Priest Ernesto Cardenal was born in Granada, Nicaragua January 20, 1925. Revolutionary activist, disciple of Thomas Merton, founder of the contemplative commune Our Lady of Solentiname, and Minister of Culture. Great poet of Nicaragua and the Globe, we remember…
Sometimes books and smoking just seem intertwinted. Take Bukowski’s opus for example. Please! Thanks to a recent acquisition, we have a suitably reeking collection of Bukowski titles from a chain-smokingly loyal reader. From You Get So Alone, to The Last Night of the Earth Poems, to What Matters Most Is How You Walk Through Fire and more. To read these books is to inhale enough secondary smoke to satisfy even the most needy cravings. While supplies last! So if you’ve determined to give up nicotine this New Year, you can still get a quick fix and enjoy the best of Bukowski from the collection of a bona fide night-shift cab-driving Bukowski fan. Who else? Call now for price and availabilty.
Thanks to the exacting care and attention paid it by artist Pat Moran, our iconic Canio’s Books shop sign has been given new life. This past fall when the weather was fine, Pat would climb a ladder and set to work on the 10 by 3-foot swinging shingle that has come to symbolize literary Sag Harbor. Its signature marine blue background is now brightened to match the blue of sun-saturated bay waters nearby. Pat worked painstakingly to first clean and protect the wood surface, then went in with matching colors and highlights to accentuate our Old English lettering. Our beloved logo, first created by artist Nohra Barros, the Pagliacci clown is once again beating his drum atop a pile of books. As we enter a new century of bookselling with much uncertainty about the future, we’re delighted to see our sign spruced up and ready for whatever weather is headed our way. And we’re eternally grateful to Pat Moran for helping us look our best.
As a complement to our newly restored sign, we’re flying a brand-new authentic Earth Flag. Designed by John McConnell, the man who also gave us Earth Day, the Earth flag helps raise consciousness about our precious planetary home. The Earth flag not only symbolizes our love of and reverence for planet Earth, it is truly beautiful. To gaze upon this image, is to experience awe. Come see our new sign, our new flag and browse our special selection of literary books on nature, spirituality, the environment and more.
When I recently heard Ray Bradbury’s comment that a Kindle smells like burning plastic (see NPR) I thought of the transience of this digital media. Ours is the age of impermanence, to say nothing of its toxicity. Some months ago we got a call from someone who sounded familiar. A frequent customer, he had found a book on the street in New York inscribed by a poet from Sag Harbor. Did we happen to know this man? Yes, we did. Vince had been a loyal customer before moving into the city. A published poet, essayist and Whitman scholar, he gave several readings, led an in-depth poetry workshop and championed John Ciardi’s seminal works. The caller had picked up Vince’s copy of Cellini’s autobiography. A note scribbled in the flyleaf indicated that Vince’s ancestors came from the same part of Italy as did the caller’s. Though he made his living as an accountant, the caller also wrote poetry. He said he felt as if he’d found a long lost family member he never knew. All this from a few notes marked in a book, and picked up by a passing stranger one afternoon. The caller had prepared a letter including several poems, some he’d written in honor of his grandfather whose passport photograph he’d copied onto the page. All this, gentle reader, to say our books are our passports into that boarder-less country, the territory of our shared human experience. They are the currency of our community.
Lucky for us we had a pre-publication book launch with award-winning writer Lucette Lagnado the weekend before the storm hit Sag Harbor. Her lucid new memoir The Arrogant Years has just been released. During five long days without electrical power at home, we read Arrogant Years feverishly by the flickering light of an oil lamp. The book charts the course of Lucette’s mother’s early hardships as a young girl in Cairo. Despite many obstacles, Edith is one day given the key to the pasha’s library, something like being handed the key to heaven for one who so loves books and for whom books were a literal means of sustenance.
Lagnado’s first memoir, the riveting Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: A Jewish Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, has been a Canio’s bestseller since its release in 2007. And now Arrogant Years: One’s Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, from Cairo to Brooklyn, earns its place close to our heart. Written with the drive of an experienced investigative reporter, one whose love of literature shapes every chapter, Lagnado’s Arrogant Years is a courageous look at the struggles both she and her mother faced in navigating a world often treacherous for two particularly gifted women. We have signed copies of both memoirs by Lucette Lagnado and highly recommend them both. Those long days without power would have been much bleaker if it weren’t for Arrogant Years to pull us through.
We’ve rescheduled our event with Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen Cohen. They will speak about “The Obama Presidency on the eve of 2012″ on Thursday, September 1 at 6 p.m. Please join us then. Meanwhile, hope you’ve lined up your batteries, good books, bread, wine and other necessities. We wish our customers be safe through this storm. Check in with us as soon as Irene has moved on.
When you begin with influences like Proust, Joyce, William Maxwell and Anne Michaels, you understand the highly literary, moody, imaginative and slightly melancholy world created in Simon Van Booy’s new novel, Everything Beautiful Happened After. Simon spoke at the shop recently about his literary influences and read from his new work finding just the right accents for George, the linguist from Kentucky, and Henry, the British archaeologist. The delicate web woven around these characters and the lovely Rebecca, a painter from Paris, is strung with willowy sentences that span emotional valleys like a lifeline. The setting is one summer in Athens that marks these characters for life. The novel feels like the natural progression from Van Booy’s previous story collections, Love Begins in Winter and The Secret Lives of People in Love. It’s been our pleasure as booksellers to observe such a fine young writer develop his unique voice with such grace, sensitivity and style.
Were you stuck in summer traffic and missed the event? Despair not. A few signed copies are still available. Stay tuned for an upcoming workshop with Simon at Canio’s; see www.caniosbooks.com
Carl Safina’s eloquent new book The View From Lazy Point: a Natural Year in an Unnatural World isn’t just a view from that idyllic place on eastern Long Island. It’s a view that takes in the northern Arctic, down to Antarctica and through the tropics. As he told a tightly-packed house Saturday night, you can see the whole world from just one place. But Safina, world-renowned ecologist and founder of the Blue Ocean Institute, actually traveled these places and saw for himself the ice melt, the loss of habitat, the disruption and displacement of climate change. The book is a lyrical report from the field, a lament, but also a paean to this Earth, the one truly sacred place, as Safina describes it. What’s needed to protect and preserve our precious watery home is nothing short of a moral imperative to do so. Our major institutions, economic, religious, Safina said, have become decoupled from reality, from the world as we know it today. Yet perhaps it’s in the fields just outside the walls of these monolithic and crumbling institutions where we might be able to sew not the grapes of wrath, but the seeds of peace.
Mr. Safina promised to return to Canio’s Books later this year to read from his forthcoming Sea in Flames:The Deepwater Horizon Oil Blowout. From our small corner of the planet, we are honored to host these events while the world is a better place for the work of Dr. Carl Safina.
It seems lots of folks have been spring cleaning lately, based on the flood of phone calls we gotten that run something like this: “I’ve got books, lots of old books here (in the attic, basement, garage). Are you interested?” Or “I’m moving and I can’t take these books with me.” Or “my husband’s great uncle, a professor of linguistics, left him a house full of books. Do you want to take a look?” Books take up space, they tend to weigh a lot when grouped with other books, and when you’re not reading one, well, it just sits there. What to do with them? More and more, we’re thinking of books as inert objects. The only “screen” they provide is inside your own imagination. And that seems not to be good enough. A tip from our inventive brother John, led us to artist Brian Dettmer who “re-purposes” books. He’s got some imagination! See his fascinating work at : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ5QGsiiUmc&feature=related. While I don’t agree with all of Dettmer’s ideas about the fading value of books over time, I do find his work interesting. He and others are raising questions about the role and function of books in our lives in the near future. Would that old refrigerators and outdated computers could be “re-purposed” so beautifully. And how about outmoded nuclear power plants. What do we do with them?
Not everyone has escaped to Mexico or the Caribbean this winter. Last week a woman from up island, way up, headed east on a sunny bright day for a long leisurely drive to Canio’s Books. She had the day off– unexpectedly. It was her birthday, as well as George Washington’s. The bookshop, some 80-odd miles from home, was her destination, the poetry wall in particular. After a long browse, she selected some fine birthday books. She’d met in the shop a surfer/poet/emergency room doctor who prescribed a few titles. And she chatted with the proprietor, and lamented the demise of the bookshops, large and small. She’d been in one of the big chains recently, in Manhattan. It looked empty, she said. The vacuous space once filled with pyramids of books now was stacked with electronic devices. The open space loomed. This woman knew from bookshops. She’d worked at one of the finest in Boston years back. As the woman headed on her way to lunch, and into another year of reading poetry, it gave us an idea: why not celebrate your birthday at Canio’s? Invite a few friends; we’ll supply tea and cupcakes, or more. Stage a celebratory reading of works by your favorite author. As Canio’s Books celebrates its 30th anniversary, we’d love to help you celebrate yours, whatever the decade, or occasion. Happy Birthday to all our well read customers! Here’s to many more.
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