Beauty in the Breakdown...

Joyce Carol Oates has written something like 40,000 novels. It's absurd. It's defeating.

I just got back from Border's. It is baffling how many books there are out there, how many blogs there are on the internet, how much stuff there is to read. I stood in front of the Joyce Carol Oates section for a while. I looked at her picture and got scared. Then I went over to Joan Didion. I looked at her picture. She looked cool, with her big sunglasses. Then I handed Daniel a copy of Nicholas Nickleby and laughed. At Border's most of the books aren't pressed against the back of the shelves, they are pulled out so they are near the edge. I walked around pushing the books back against the back of the shelves. The Garden State sound track was playing, that Nick Drake song where he sings the word, clock, like he is Apu. I went over to the Books In Foreign Languages section and found The Diary of Anne Frank in German, TageBuch. Then I found Der alte Mann und Das Meer by Hemingway and read the first sentence aloud in German and was suprised to find out I was pretty sure I new what it said, and I have never read The Old Man and The Sea.

I bought a book called, Under the Banner of Heaven, about fanatical Mormonism.