I went to the bookstore for another Auster book, but really, I went because chain bookstores mess with my head. Cliched as it is, there's something incredible about the juxtaposition of literature with all the trappings of aggressive retail selling. You walk by thousands and thousands of interesting stories packed tightly together but you only see the bargain tables and the stationery island. It's like New York City in there.  Multiply that with my 4-month stint as a barista in a chain bookstore and you get one long hard kinky mindfuck.
No luck on the Auster or my backup, the Falling Man by Delillo , based on a photograph that Amazon's unnamed reviewer accurately describes as "electrifying." It's a man, falling from the upper floors of the soon-to-collapse World Trade Center on 9/11. You know the one:




In the book, a performance artist recreates the fall over and over. There's more to the book than that, but you know what I mean.  

Instead, I bought some Rilke after considering my options in the poetry section. A woman stood next to the section on her cell phone talking about granite countertops for her kitchen. She glared as I walked over as well she should have, because I don't generally read poetry. I was definitely out of my league. As she debated different colors of stone on which she will cut her vegetables, I began to read a random page from the Rilke book with the nice navy blue binding:

...ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a while lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not...simply emotions...they are experiences.

But I was skimming at this point, because the countertop lady was angry. She raised her voice. "I told you before that I didn't want to commit to anything until I bring my friend to look at them with me." pause. "He's a friend. His name is John Reed." pause. "I am not telling you the nature of our relationship but I will tell you that his opinion matters more to me than yours does." It seemed to me that there was a poem somewhere in this scene, but I am definitely not the person to write it.

And so I left the woman to her nosy salesman, bought the Rilke, and nearly lost my train of thought on the car ride home when Sinatra started to sing "Fly Me To the Moon."