On Being in the Service Industry, Surrounded by the Wildly Over-degreed, Pt. 1

For some weeks I've debated whether or not to post the following. In the end I decided it really didn't matter. So here goes.
I work in a bookstore cafe; I am the book buyer. Because the management is a combination of insane, cheap, and totally unconcerned with the state of the bookstore (it makes no money, whereas the cafe makes a bundle), I am not afforded any of the sorts of things buyers are supposed to have. I'm not asking for much here. A room to call an office would be nice. Filing cabinets for catalogues. A phone that's not in the middle of the store. A fucking desk would be good. A chair.
The store has never even given me an email address, which is ridiculous considering how everything not done by phone is done via email.
As it is, I spend my eight to nine hours a day standing at the cash register, ringing up sales for the bookstore and the cafe while trying to read catalogues, place orders, make phone calls to fix when an order comes in wrong somehow... and getting to listen to innumerable conversations held in the cafe.
This joint is in the middle of a college town. The regular customers at the store and cafe are local business people, academics, and students. Lunch rush is, overwhelmingly, students and young professor types. (In the morning we get a bunch of lazy intellectual types, the sort who have a late breakfast and argue with each other about the Op-Ed pages of the Times; later in the morning we get a lot of mommies with strollers and the occasional really ill-behaved child.) Mid to late afternoon, you get faculty meeting with students, faculty meeting with each other, that kind of thing. It's all supposed to be very collegial and friendly. It is actually entirely cutthroat and nasty and unpleasant. I imagine it's that way if you're one of the people at the tables drinking cappuccino and eating scones, but it's even more so from my perspective.
Recently, the editor of our local "alternative" newspaper wrote an article talking about local cafes, and he talked about how the place where I work is sort of uncomfortable, sometimes, because it gets so noisy with all the conversations you have to listen to (besides your own). I snorted when I read his piece, not because he was wrong, but because he had no idea how right he is. So I sent him an email saying, "You think you have it bad when you go there for coffee once or twice a week? Try being us, the staff who has to put up with you arrogant fucks day in and day out."
I don't think I really called him and his cronies arrogant fucks, but lord I wanted to. The funny truth is that I don't actually know who is more arrogant, me or the overly degree'd people drinking those three dollar lattes. We're running neck and neck as far as I can tell.

Bookseller Commentary

Yesterday morning I was drinking coffee with The Most Ethical Man in the World. We were sitting in our kitchen discussing that Top 25 Novels list that the New York Times printed a few Sundays ago. (We've been batting the subject about off and on since it got printed. It's not like we just found out about it or anything like that.)
I'm annoyed by the list for many reasons and at the same time I really don't care about it all that much; but one strong feeling I have about it is that it's very sad that the Times doesn't have the sense to realize that the list is just fundamentally silly and bound to be laughable not just now but increasingly so as time goes on, fifty or a hundred years from now. If one looks at books, which do exist, which reprint various ratings and awards that were issued to and from the literary world over the years, it's remarkable how many titles that once seemed like huge deals are now... worse than obscure. I mean, they're just non-existent. I firmly believe that the NYT list is just another contribution to that cosmic file.
I don't understand why no one is talking about this. People are pissy about the list for various political reasons -- not enough women on the judging committee, not enough women on the final list (though a woman is at the top of the list); presumably other folks are mad about the ethnicities of those on the list, and I'm sure there are other identity-politics agendas I can't think of off the top of my head which are getting others riled up too. And I've had some customers who've come into the bookstore slobbering to get a copy of each book on the list so that they can feel that they're well-read (which is hysterical, but we won't discuss that now). But none of it ultimately matters. All these books will, one day, be out of print. All of these books will, in time, be viewed as, at best, decent portrayals of a certain period in time. If they are read, they'll be read the way we read Trollope now: to find out about daily life for a certain group of people at a certain time. We don't read Trollope for art's sake (most of us don't anyhow). We read him as social or cultural anthropology. Which I'm not knocking, not at all. I just wish folks would SAY this rather than just going around with their noses in the air saying high-toned things that mean squat.
The Most Ethical Man in the World is for some reason fixated on Updike. Perhaps it's because his father is a fan; perhaps it's just because Updike seems to dominate these kinds of debates about 20th c. literature. But yesterday morning I got fed up talking about Updike, and stormed, "Updike has been worse than ridiculous for the last twenty years!"
Ethical Man looked at me, gawped, and began to laugh.
Ok. Maybe I was overreacting. And it's true I probably haven't read an Updike novel since I was about 25 (which was, yes, exactly eleven years ago). But Jesus. I wish Updike would take a break and just stop writing fiction. I cannot believe that any book with a title like Gertrude and Claudius is actually worth reading; I cannot believe that I will have to sell his new one, Terrorist, with a straight face. It is all I can do to get through the day, sometimes, in my job in books. I try very hard to not be hypocrite but the publishing industry sure doesn't make it easy on me.
For the record, I admire Updike's non fiction tremendously. I just think there are way, way too many novels.
So for anyone who's reading this, all upset about that New York Times list. Take it from me, Tante Gadfly: it does not matter one whit. Read whatever the hell you want.