Everything Beautiful…Begins Here!

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  http://www.caniosbooks.com

What do we do with all the books?

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 Would that old refrigerators and outdated computers could be “re-purposed” so beautifully.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?

A bookish birthday

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.

Canio’s Literary Costume Party – Celebrating our 30th Anniversary

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Our Favorite Cast of Characters

Thanks to all in the community who turned on their creativity and turned out to celebrate Canio’s Books’ 30th anniversary at our literary costume party, October 30. It was great evening spent with such witty friends:

Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, and their friend Maggie, a ghostly-faced Girl of the Streets got the party off to a great start. Alice B. Toklas, complete with “pot brownie” prop stopped in,  and Picasso showed up too. All the while,  a tall dark Death waited at the door. Undeterred,  Charlotte’s Web; Tinker Belle and Peter Pan floated in…and a most distinguished red-masked man had us all guessing. A beautiful Elizabeth Barrett Browning character appeared in the full bloom of love; and later, the poet Paul Oppenheimer, in a period tweed jacket, warned us: “The Battle is to Rescue Life from Abstraction.”  Rob surprised us all bursting in with a hearty  “Bon Appetite”  and wearing a floral apron and brandishing a rolling pin. Julia Child would have been proud. Who knew Leo Tolstoy was a bee-keeper! Our party was not only fun, it was educational!.

A dashing F. Scott Fitzgerald attended wearing an elegant tux, and an earthy Patti Smith, with signature black ribbon at her neck rocked the house. Sherlock Holmes spied on the crowd and Anna Karenina read plaintively.    Our host, one adorable Cat in the Hat kept the party moving.   And wherever there are writers, there’s bound to be at least one Run-on Sentence. This one counted Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at somewhere over 11 thousands words sans punctuation.

It would have been impossible to pick one winner, best costume, when so many were so creative ! Thanks to all  for your enthusiasm and your generosity. Donations to Canio’s Cultural Cafe will help keep the literary party going!

Book Spotting

It was a wildly colorful Maxfield Parrish kind of sunset tonight, all smoldering oranges and smoky fuchsia spreading behind steely dark clouds. But the young man, smartly dressed in greys and blacks, wearing a beret didn’t seem to notice as he walked along the beach road. He was reading! Not on a Kindle or Ipad. He held a hardcover book in his hands and strode along oblivious to the cars passing and the sun setting extravagantly over his shoulder. Whoever his is, he gets a prize! Reading a book in public!

A few weeks back, a young man in an uptown subway  was spotted reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. It was all I could do to stop myself intruding on his privacy. I wondered what prompted him to choose this fine novel.  Later on the LIRR, a woman was reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Great choice in, this, it’s 50th anniversary year. Hats off to HarperCollins for throwing a nationwide celebration of the book. We hosted novelist Hilma Wolitzer at the shop this summer to speak about the book’s influence on her and other writers’ work. And tonight, Kathryn spoke about Mockingbird at the East End Arts Council in Riverhead. The talk was a highlight of their current show “Scenes from a Book” on view through October 8. Photographers were asked to depict a particular scene from any book ever written.

We’ll keep our eyes open for more people reading books in public places. What book would you like to be spotted reading?

James Salter on the Art and Intimacy of LETTER writing

Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps

August 21, 2010

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Novelist Robert Phelps described novelist James Salter as a “minority of one; a new herb in the cabinet,” and later wrote that Salter’s letters were like gospel to him. Phelps introduced Salter to the works of a dozen writers crucially important to shaping him as a novelist.   Salter says Phelps was one of the most important influences in his life and in whatever he  wrote after they met. The correspondence which began with a fan letter from Phelps to Salter spanned decades. The intimacy of the letters continues.

Ten Years at Canio’s Books

What’s a bookshop with out great writers near by? Looking back over our first decade at Canio’s Books (founded in 1980 by Canio Pavone), we realize how rich we are in Sag Harbor to be surrounded by so many talented writers steadily at work in their studios.  The fruits of their many labors fill our shelves and have enriched us with many inspiring evening presentations.  Even just a short trip down Memory Lane gives a glimpse of what we’ve enjoyed over the last decade. 

Robin Morgan reading from her memoir Saturday’s Child.  In 2002, Budd Schulberg celebrating his friend John Steinbeck on the centenary of Steinbeck’s birth. Poets Star Black, Bill Knott & Eileen Myles read.  Poets Joy Harjo and  Edward Hirsch read. Photo critic Elizabeth Sussman speaks on the work of Diane Arbus. Journalist Amy Goodman draws our hugest crowd ever.  Farmer/poet  Scott Chaskey publishes This Common Ground; Tom Mathews ‘ Our Father’s War; and Robert Long’s Dekooning’s Bicycle  all published in one year!

Then there was our literary costume party at Halloween 2005. Guests included Anna Akhmatova, Colette, Dante and Simone DeBeauvoir, Edgar Allan Poe, and Femme De Plume among many others. Several ghosts writers hovered. We published our own collection Sag Harbor Is, a Literary Celebration in 2006 with Jim Monaco of Harbor Electronic Publishing. In 2007, poet Grace Schulman read along with Phil Schultz whose book Failure won a Pulitzer.  Our friend Lucette Lagnado published a brilliant memoir The Man in the White Shark Skin Suit.  More recently, poet Mark Doty read from his exquisite memoir Dog Years and  from his National Book Award winning poetry collection Fire to Fire.

2009 will probably be remembered as the year Sag Harbor finally became a novel, in the expert hands of Colson Whitehead. His reading was a tour de force and attracted a huge hometown crowd. Whew, and that’s just a brief sample of what we’ve had the pleasure to present. Looking ahead, we’re happy to announce the creation of a new non-profit Canio’s Cultural Cafe’ an effort to continue  and expand our events series in the years to come We hope you’ll join the effort and be a part of our literary celebrations.

Julia, Julie and Me

It’s not that I’ve had a lot of experience whipping up a delicate sauce mousseline sabayon. It was Marcella Hazan who taught me most of whatever it is  I know about cooking. (It was,  historically speaking, the Italians who taught the French about cooking, but never mind.) When reporter Stephanie Clifford called from the New York Times, I thought for a moment of that slightly similar scene in Julie and Julia.  Ms. Clifford, however, wanted to know how sales of Mastering the Art of French Cooking were going what with all the movie buzz.  (See immediately, The New York Times, Monday, August 24, front page! ) Great!  I’d just seen the movie, loved it, and wasn’t much at all bothered by the Julie Powell character.    It was a thrill to be mentioned in the same article with booksellers from Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago, and the venerable Powell’s in Portland. And even more so, to be linked in some vague and general way with the Master Chef herself. Best of all was to hear from old friends and former students, far flung and who’d just happened to see the paper that day. So inspired, I went home  and whipped up an airy sponge cake to bring to a dinner party, just for fun. And yes, the books are  flying off the shelves.  Sometimes they leap out all on their own…kind of like that lobster jumping out of the steaming pot.  Bon Appetit! ~ MC

It Takes a Village

What makes a good bookstore? An interesting collection of books, hand-selected by knowledgeable and friendly staff. A welcoming, comfortable space, with maybe a bit of history built in, a sense of rootedness in a place. Yes, all these elements comprise Canio’s Books. Then factor in our eclectic series of weekend events, writers, poets, musicians and artists sharing their talents with us. But who is this “us”? It’s you, dear reader and all your friends and neighbors who care about sustaining a place for art, culture and literature to thrive. Yes, it takes a village to make a bookshop. See Peter Applebome’s essay in the Sunday, New York Times, “Who Killed This Bookstore? There Are Lots of Suspects” about the demise of a 37-year-old establishment, Second Story Book Shop in Chappaqua, New York. We’ve read too often about the demise of this or that beloved bookshop. Rents go up. Ugly chain stores move in. Customers scrounge for bargains on line, then bemoan the loss of their neighborhood shop, the loss of community. And realize, too late, that they, we, are part of the community we help create or abandon. Here is another wake-up call.
Be a part of the bookshop you want to see in your community. In our case, we’re creating a direct route for community involvement in Canio’s Books. We have formed a non-profit entity, Canio’s Cultural Cafe, Ltd. to make it possible for us to continue to develop new programs at the bookshop and at other locations. We hope to make it easy for our supporters to become part of sustaining the cultural capital of our unique community. Your tax deductible contribution to Canio’s Culture Cafe will help underwrite new workshops, seminars and other events of literary, educational and cultural interest. Please consider becoming a regular patron of Canio’s Cultural Cafe with a donation today. And meanwhile, stop in for something delicious to read.

What is a book?

A book is not a flower press.
A book is not a coaster.
A book is not a foot stool.
Nor a flotation device. Although sometimes.
A book is not a hat in the rain.
That’s what newspapers are for, if you can find one.
A book is not an electronic object.
A book is not your best friend.
Though you may sleep with a book, do not write on its skin.
Take your book to lunch, but do not share your spaghetti with a book.
Do not banish a book to the basement,
Nor hide onein an attic. Read a book  in broad daylight.
Take one to the beach, but not for a swim.

Remember your first book? A love like no other.