Sextus Propertius loiters by Q.H. Flaccus' book-stall catcalling. Just being an all around nuisance. Wearing snakeskin pants. Frank gets a little Verlaine. There are a parti-color lights somewhere. And Hemingway browses through the Russians on a blustery day. Bookseller is to modernist what  folksinger is to manager. Rock and roll!

I have been an organic farmer and an assistant kindergarten teacher but I have been employed longest as a bookseller. I have been employed by almost sixty-six percent of the bookstores on the Upper West Side. I sell ornamental holiday pickles such as this beautiful specimen to your right and of course Elf on the Shelfs not to mention the infectious biography romance John Quincy Adams, American Visionary as seen on your left.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce made modernism. This is hilarious and the absolute truth. Jim with his ash-plant walking stick and gentle Sylvia.

Certain critics are career gossips. Having deified certain writers in their youth they now must rectify this travesty by convincing themselves, mind you themselves in the guise of an riveted public, that the lives of these men and women of genius were quite trivial indeed. They sniff and snivel and genuinely drivel laundry lists of minor incidents that would not go over well over drinks let alone over several volumes. It is like a not too topical People Magazine, like a melange of the Théâtre de la Cruauté and friends reruns. Should the genius in question be a publicity somnambulist i.e. d'Annunzio or (better yet!) Mayakovsky then the tactic has a shot. James Joyce embraced life too fervently for laundry lists. Jim lists! Seraphim and moocows.

Ernest composes his Sylvia so gracefully, with such resolute tenderness, one thinks of the portraits Cézanne did of his son Paul. Humanity and craft and heart, whatever that is. Cézanne so moved by his public, now paints with more care.  Made and made of mes petites sensations.

There is the passage in A Moveable Feast where Hem has not eaten and his "perceptions are heightened."I adore this - "All the photographs looked different and you saw you saw books you had never seen before." Anyone who loves reading understand this. I can see the yellow and cream bookends of the turn of the century revealing themselves to young Ernest. Here are the Prose Poems of Turgenev. The Mysterious Stranger. I imagine Hemingway intrigued by a few truly composed sentences. There is the marvelous injunction of Sylvia not to read too fast. Such a kind and unusual farewell.  I wonder if Beach said this to all of her regulars.