There’s something about an indie book store that is like nothing else.

The atmosphere!

The history!

The books!

Book lovers – Read on, if you dare….

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In Harrisburg (PA), it’s the Midtown Scholar.  This is a gorgeous old place where my friend Mitzi works.  It’s on Third Street right across from the Broad Street Market where my family used to sell fruit and produce for many years. It’s was started by mayor Eric Papenfuse.  He converted it from an old run-down 1920’s era movie theater, into this gem:

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In Colorado Springs, it’s Poor Richards.  The name refers to former vice-mayor Richard Skorman.  He came to the Springs as a Colorado College student in the 1970’s and never left.   In addition to the bookstore, his Tejon Street complex now includes a toy store, a pizza place, and a wine bar.  <Don’t worry, the storefront is actually flat, not curved –  but I just liked the distortion in this stylized street view.>

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In Denver, it’s Tattered Cover.  Now at multiple locations, TC started out in the beautifully restored Morey Mercantile Building on the 16th Street mall near Union Station in LoDo.  It was one of the anchors of former mayor John Hickenlooper’s redevelopment of Denver’s Lower Downtown that continues to thrive today.

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Of course there are many others I’ve known and loved across the years, including Powell’s (Portland), City Lights (San Francisco), Prairie Lights (Iowa City), and The Seminary Co-op (Chicago).  But since I’m in Sacramento just now, here are your two choices:  Beer’s Books (on S street), and Time Tested Books (on 21st).

Recently I stopped in at the latter.  A selection of photos follows.  These give you a taste of the local indie flavor that makes Time Tested an enduring favorite with bibliophiles from all over.

All the interior book shelves are on rollers so they can easily reconfigure the entire layout if they so choose – though I’m not sure they ever have done it.

The leather chair’s engraved brass plaque reads “James E. Mulvaney Endowed Chair.”

The antique Royal typewriter is similar to the one my mom used for letters and recipes.

And if you can’t find it on the shelf, they’ll order it!

Time Tested Books, 1114 21st St., Sacramento.

Unlike a lot of the others, Time Tested is NOT owned, run, or founded by a mayor, vice-mayor, or former mayor.  As far as I can tell, however, it IS a hot spot for author book signings, readings, and Lefty political rallies – as their blogspot entry here attests…

What’s Wrong With The U.S. Iran Policy.

Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers….

A Skeptic’s Search For An Honest Mystic.

Craft Weed – Sustainable, Local, Artisanal.

**** WHAT’S NOT TO LIKE, EH??? ****

Support your local independent book seller!

At a family funeral this week I was catching up with my brother who I hadn’t seen in a while.  We were chit-chatting about this and that, when I asked him in passing how he’d slept.   He told me it had been a long night. “Joey and I were talking and he told me to get off my ass and write out my remarks for the reception – so I did.”  The reception was the one after the funeral.  Joey was my brother’s son, who died recently – unexpectedly and too young – of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.  When my brother mentioned that part about conversing with the dead, I didn’t miss a beat.  Because I have no trouble at all believing in ghosts.

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Any discussion of the paranormal in the modern age has got to include at least a passing nod to William James.  James was the author of “Varieties of Religious Experience,” as well as the father of American psychiatry. He was an early 20th century physician, psychologist, pragmatist and skeptic.  He writes dispassionately – some might say “dryly” – of many seemingly mystical phenomena – including ghosts.  If you care to, you can read the full text of his account on the subject, called “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished.”  The bottom line? I here quote James at length just to give you a sense of how lucid – and dry – he could be.

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I will even go one step farther. When from our present advanced standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication should ever have seemed to anyone so little and plain a thing.

Whether it be Descartes’ world or Newton’s, whether it be that of the materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises of our own, it always looks the same to us – incredibly perspectiveless and short. Even Lyell’s, Faraday’s, Mill’s, and Darwin’s consciousness of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an infantile and innocent look. Is it then likely that the science of our own day will escape the common doom?  That the minds of its votaries will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter? It would be folly to suppose so.

Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more for its omissions of fact, for its ignorance of whole ranges and orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any fatal lack in its spirit and principles. The spirit and principles of science are mere affairs of method.  There is nothing in them that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal forces are the starting-point of new effects. 

The only form of things that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of personality.  Every other category is one of the abstract elements of that.

And this systematic denial on science’s part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted science. It’s the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.

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Not surprising, I suppose, that a psychologist would tend to see the world in terms of personality.  But most of us tend to think and talk this way all the time.  Or at least, I do.  <See recent post on teleology, here.>  That’s why talk of ghosts – or even talk of the dead talking to us and us talking back – makes perfect sense to me.  Not just as an idiom of speech, or a turn of phrase.  But as an actual – perceived and lived – fact.

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In the Book of Genesis right after the Great Flood, YHWH sends Noah a message of promise in the form of a rainbow in the sky.  No word from Holy Scripture on whether anyone else but Noah heard it.  But the message?  “Never again will I destroy the whole world by flood.” <The unspoken corollary? “No more flood, it’s the fire next time… but I digress.”>  Nowadays we realize that, even if the remains of Noah’s Ark were to be found entire and intact at the summit of Mt. Ararat, the “Great Flood” as a historical event was most likely somewhat more localized, destroying just a fraction of the Earth’s habitable land mass.  Furthermore, we realize that rainbows are merely an optical artifact of sunlight passing through atmospheric H2O.  As such, they are wholly independent of any supernatural aim or intent. Right?

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One does not have to be a Biblical literalist, nor a believer in leprechauns and pots of gold, to experience a sense of hope at the sight of a rainbow after a storm.  Or just to appreciate the raw beauty of all that prismatic color writ large across the sky.  I guess if the sight of a rainbow leaves you that cold then your heart is made of sterner stuff than mine – or even William James’.   <And believe you me, invoking the ghost of that old blue-blood William James in this regard? Now that’s really saying something.>

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But back to the Talking Dead:  I have no doubt whatsoever that my brother heard Joey’s voice and responded.  My own experience tells me that the main behavioral difference between the one who “hears voices inside his head,” and the rest of us, is in whether the response we make is public or private.   If you doubt what I’m saying then you probably also have never noticed the incongruity of people striding purposefully down the sidewalk in animated discussion with someone unseen via one of those damnable earpiece-phone contraptions that have become so ubiquitous among the professional classes these days.  Change that gesticulating raving lunatic’s suit from crisp business attire to a tattered old coat, add in a pair of grungy oil-stained pants?  Voila!  I’ll bet you dollars to donuts your conclusion about “what’s really going on here” changes dramatically.  Am I right?

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Yep, Plato (and William James) had it right.  We live in a personal world.  So, go ahead and be as skeptical as you like.   But above all, be kind.

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And while you’re at it, would you unplug your dang phone?  Please?