Schmökern

…and tsundoku. Your vocab votes are in!

Maybe sapiosexuality as well? A fine triad.

Remember that latest vocab poll from a few weeks ago? Well the results of that poll was another tie, this time between only two words. But that’s okay—I’ll do them both, not only because you voted for both, but because they feel very aligned and/or connected, know what I mean? They have to do with similar things, I think.

Anyway, thanks again for your feedback, and let’s get into these two lovely bookish words, shall we?

Schmökern

Ah, the pleasure of a bookstore. I’ve loved the bookstore environment my whole life: I even briefly worked in the famous indie bookstore in Boulder as a young woman, both in retail and in their used book area, where I learned the lore of the book salvage and value mages. But then, in my teen years when I frequented malls, there were bookstore habits I would adhere to strictly.

In the indoor mall, Crossroads, they had a B. Dalton (remember those?) which I would always comb through third, right after Contempo Casuals for gothy clothes, and The Wild Pair for funky shoes (this was in the pre-Hot Topic era). Then once I got bored, and before I’d hit Zeezo’s Magic Castle, I’d take a precursory stroll through Waldenbooks.

At the outdoor mall, historical Pearl Street, there used to be a Borders down on the east side, but we thought we were too cool to go there. And we kind of were, because the aforementioned indie bookstore, Boulder Bookstore, was and still is a titan of the bookstore experience. My favorite coffeehouse and third place home away from home, Trident Cafe, had an excellent used book store attached as half the establishment, which I’d shop at a lot. Red Letter Books, now no longer in existence, was also on the east end of the mall, and was one of those cavernous wizard coves helmed by a man that’s almost for sure a crusty old fae of some kind. There was a witchy and a lefty/feminist bookstore down there in two small basement spots, too, but I didn’t go to those as often. The witchy one, every once in a while.

Eads News was a corner newsstand (remember those?) attached to a little motel called The Buff, after CU-Boulder’s mascot. The Buff also was a stellar breakfast place, and it still is that, though the hotels around that area are huge boutique Marriotts and such, and the newsstand corner with its weird little clocktower is no more. But Eads was sort of in between Crossroads and Pearl Street, and had an especially good collection of Fantasy novels and especially-especially periodicals. And then later in the ‘90s, when I was freshly out of college and dancing with Frequent Flyers at the Dairy Arts Center just down the street, Eads was my go-to for clove cigarettes as well as reading material.

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Going through new textbooks during teaching prep today made me remember my balcony practices during lockdown. I spent as much time as was physically possible in an elaborate lounge chair on my partner’s balcony, where I’d grade, go to the virtual ARTS 271 Hallway, and I’d do all my readings for all the classes I was teaching, methodically, pencil in hand. Now this isn’t exactly aligned with today’s vocab word, in that reading a course textbook isn’t purely about the pleasure, but for the purpose of being ready for teaching the class material. But even so, I do find a deeper pleasure in cracking a new-to-me text, wielding my mechanical pencil with aplomb, and taking notes as I go.

As you can see in the Trident Cafe piece linked above, and if you’ve been following my Saturday Morning Serial with its recent glosses, I do love to annotate. I remember one of my fondest memories from my undergrad days was in learning how to take good notes, and then designing my own tastes in things like pens, styles of bulleting and underlining in tiers, and the like. Most things were still done longhand back then, though final papers were to be typed and printed out—it was an interesting in-between sort of time, after everything was longhand or analog typewriter, and yet before everything was online. Though my handwriting has irrevocably changed since then on account of a job where I had to switch to legible block printing, every once in a while I’ll come across a textbook from back then with a few layers of my notes inside, and it fills me with nostalgia so see those stylish loops in Crayola Washable Fine Tip colors. Sometimes, as in my copy of Backwards and Forwards by David Ball, you can see those old notes from my undergrad days, and two more layers of my all-caps annotations from some of my teaching days 5, even 10 years later.

~

Tsundoku

Friend JQM has more of a problem with this than I do: he’s got entire wall-sized shelves of TBRs, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. And this slang term seems gentle to me—it feels comfy, like part of the book-lover’s culture that’s so prolific today. The acquisition and collection (not to mention the reading) of books has always been a thing in my geeky world, but it seems to have become more widespread or mainstream during the pandemic, with a clinging to books-as-cultural-capital in the aftermath.

I’ve been an enormous bookworm since I first learned to read at not quite 2, and in the culture I grew up in, that was the mark of a nerd. And nerds were not cool back then. But my reading habits have admittedly stalled in recent years. Not totally: I still buy books and I still read, but man, the rate and volume of my reading is a fraction of what it used to be, even earlier in my adult years. I can forgive not being as voracious a reader as I was as a child, as adult life puts more obstacles in the way of such things, but. I wonder why.

There’s been talk, since about 2021 or so, of the new post-pandemic pandemic, that of brain fog left over from the long term lockdown (also the brain fog that’s been observed in people who’ve had COVID and recovered). Now I’ve not caught COVID as yet /knockonwood/ but I am in full-bore perimenopause, which is apparently another source of brain fog. So maybe it’s a combination of a few things, for me. I do still read nightly from my Sherlock Holmes collection, to soothe my brain to sleep, and my academic job is still centered on reading and writing and teaching about same. But just reading? Way way less. Is it just age? Trauma? Existential angst? Oh my?

Waters’ even more famous quote re: books is the one where he warns, ‘If you go home with someone and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.’

Footnote: sapiosexuality

Was sapiosexuality a trend across the nation in the late 20-teens just before the pandemic? Or was that just in my personal circles, saturated as it was with burlesque and other types of sex work? Well I remember learning the term and feeling it helped me quite a bit with my own self-discovery of what Zuko Sexuality* might mean, as I wrenched myself free of a controlling husband, and a sexless marriage, as I began to date for the first time in 20 years in my 40s (arguably for the first time ever, but that’s a different essay). There was one boyfriend I had, older than me, that just looking at him I wasn’t necessarily attracted, but on our first date we clicked famously with charisma and personality, and when our first sexual encounter occurred and I had to clear a spot for myself on his bed by pushing books out of the way, a highly hot relationship ensued. That was when I started to see the sapiosexual trend all over my feed: in memes, in thoughtful commentary, and everything in between. Once, this boyfriend and I were browsing in the aforementioned Red Letter books, in the back room where the sword-and-sorcery was kept, and we started making out, being so turned on by our bookish environment we couldn’t help ourselves.

He was what in the Navy was called a ‘Nuke,’ and apparently that’s like, a job for only the very smartest people? And he was the one in my memoir that I reference as being there when I first asked for a divorce—he was showing me (and telling me, to be fair) how much better other people would potentially treat me in a relationship than my husband did. And that intellectual, book-centered connection that he and I enjoyed, that my husband at the time didn’t and didn’t even appreciate, finally tipped the scales for me. I married because I didn’t think I could do better. Mr. Sapio taught me that I deserved better, and that there were others out there that felt about books, reading, and education in the way I did. And the rest is history. Another enjoyable reading genre…

*other than fanfic of Avatar, Last Airbender. Which, no, I haven’t watched. Ssh.

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CLOSING QUESTION: I’d like to know more about the etymology of tsundoku. Any Japanese speakers have any insight? I don’t know how to parse out the kanji, either. It is slang from a particular time period, too, so. Chime in if you do. Arigato gozaimasu.