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buy stromectol pills I remember not that long ago there were used bookshops in all the better little towns in America, and in great cities like New York – which was really at the time just an assemblage of better little towns, with an ethnic flavor – there were very many great used bookstores. Invariably each was staffed by an older man, frequently a bachelor, and always someone who had not known much in the way of worldly success: not quite conformist enough for the world to do anything with, and not ambitious or extroverted to make anything of himself. We all recognized each other as a class, and together we constituted probably the group who gain the greatest pleasure from books, presumably because in our lives there were not many other competing pleasures. In any number of small towns in America – Saugerties, Oberlin, Havre de Grace, Geneva, Somerville, Kingston, Murray Hill, downtown Philadelphia – I remember these great booksellers, who carried and recommended – and loved – those myriads of books which no one finds on bestseller lists, and no one studies in schools, but will forever please the bookish thoughtful literate nonconformists of the world – The Sketch Book, Travels in Arabia Deserta, The Decline of the West, Dichtung und Wahrheit, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Rome and a Villa, The Haunted Bookshop, The Vicar of Wakefield, anything by Richard Burton, or Augustus Hare – books which seem to exist nowhere except in used bookshops where the proprietor always knows if he has a copy, and always knows where it is.

clomid and high order multiples We thought the internet might improve the trade for such booksellers, but all it seems to have done is shutter their storefronts; I suppose many are still in the business, packing books out of some basement where no one comes in to ask them for recommendations or listen to them explain why they think Great Expectations will never compare with The Old Curiosity Shop (or is it Little Dorrit? Or Dombey and Son? I always forget. One of the Dickens novels no one reads is supposedly one of his best) as a novel. I will confess that I miss such men: I miss their simple love for certain great authors, their animated attacks against academia, the utter ramshackleness of their overcrowded shops, their strange ability to have good books onhand and let the trash books go their own way, the funny way they had to reach for their mouses when using their computers because of the sheer amount of crap on their desks.

Well, of course in New Orleans all this exists, and it is at Arcadian Books, where Russell Desmond sits day in and day out in a tiny room which seems that if he tried to put one more book in it he himself would have to sit outside. As it is, you are tripping over piles of books in the two-foot wide somewhat-circular path which makes its way through the tiny shop. Books are three deep on the shelves – Russell says he has 15,000 of them in the one room – and there is a couch which is easy to miss because it is entirely covered with books in boxes. Russell sits at a desk – which is, again, camouflaged with books the way the army camouflaged bunkers with bushes – by the window, with multiple tomes open in front of him all day long. His passion is 19th century French conservatism – and let it be said that Louisiana might be the only plausible place in the world for such a passion to exist – and when English translations of such writers appear, it is often his work. He also writes essays about them for appropriately obscure periodicals. On this particular day he was reading de Tocqueville – pronounced correctly, with a short ‘o’ and the double-l nearly subsumed into the long ‘i’ – in French. “People read Democracy in America – or more likely, a few chapters of Democracy in America – in their first year or two of college and they think that’s all de Tocqueville did. They marvel at how insightful it is, how amazing, and then they forget about the fact that that really was just the beginning – de Tocqueville had decades more development ahead of him, and all the insight is there, but it’s so much deeper and wiser later. And nobody studies this, which is crazy, but there you go.”

It was like I had never left. He said he remembered me, but I kind of doubted that. It had been five years since I had been in his shop, and as everyone knows who works in retail or teaching, you remember your first customers, but the middle and later ones have to remember you – there are too many of them. But I had seen him at Easter services, when he was ushering at the Jesuit church downtown, and he knew I was coming.

“Five years? God, has it been that long?”

It probably seemed like a shorter bit of time because, again, we were not really individuals so much as brothers in a certain fraternity, and the conversation he had leaped into with me he had been leaping into with all the other members of the confraternity who had passed through his shop in the past five years.

“So I’m doing a bike trip up the whole Mississippi River. I’m looking for books about the river. What have you got?”

“Oh God, the Mississippi? Do you have a trailer for your bike? There’s a lot of stuff.”

“All I’ve really got is the Twain stuff.”

“Right.” After recommending a collection of travellers’ accounts of Louisiana, he pointed me to a dozen travelogues about the whole river. He started pulling them out and dumping them on top of one of the boxes of books which sat on the couch. I inspected them, but was unhappy with all of them; I came to the conclusion that what makes a travelogue interesting is an interesting author; a boring author can go around the world and note down every single uninteresting thing and miss all the good stuff, whereas Goethe would have something interesting to say about a journey across the room to his chamber-pot.

“Do you have Olmsted’s In the Cotton Kingdom?”

“Sure. Standard.” This was another book for initiates – it turns out that Frederick Law Olmsted, besides being one of the few great landscape architects of all time, was also a superb travel writer, with just as good an eye for telling detail as he had for tree-form and leaf. His account of his Southern travels before the Civil War is the most comprehensive picture of that society in existence – built up out of innumerable tiny details, whose number and suggestiveness immediately establish credibility. It is a slightly exhausting book, the way real life is exhausting, but for all those with an appetite for reality, it is captivating. I wanted to look it over while in the South myself. When Russell dropped it onto my pile I nearly decided to leave it behind – it must have weighed three pounds in hardback – but I wanted it and it did in fact come with me.

“Do you have a guide to the wildflowers of the lower Mississippi?”

“You know, I don’t, and I’ve been looking for one, but I don’t know of one. I do have the guide to trees of the Southeast, which I buy new just to have it onhand, because it is the standard work. Let me show you that.”

Tree guides were less useful – trees are easier to identify in the field without help – but looking it over, I thought I might be able to learn the Southern oaks with this book. I picked it up. “I don’t know what to do about a flower guide. I looked at the Zoo, but their gift shop had no scientific content – it was just merchandising directed at kids.”

He grimaced and waved his hand. “Oh, what some of these institutions are doing, it’s a disgrace. I mean, is it about knowledge or is it about selling stuffed polyester garbage? ‘Save the environment,’ give me a break. You might try the Botanical Gardens, I mean, they should have one, though these days you never know.”

I wasn’t sure I was going to have enough time to get over to the Botanical Garden, which as I recollected was not the best. The rest of today I would be at Jazzfest; I was hoping to go into the Atchafalaya Basin tomorrow with a friend from the Army Corps of Engineers to talk about the single greatest danger to the existence of New Orleans, which was the Atchafalaya River. And Monday it really would be time to start cycling.

“I think I’ll take these two books,” I said.

“Going with the classics.”

“As always. So how are things here? You seem well, actually. It’s a pleasure to see the place – it’s not much changed.”

“Oh, here in the shop no, there’s no change. How are things going? I don’t know. You know, I look at all these other people, and they’ve got their houses and all this money and their careers and I think, ‘Really? Is this what gets ahead?’ You know, you think when you’re younger that it’s some kind of merit or something, but then you get older and you just say, I don’t know. You know, my brother, I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love him to death, but I just think, ‘He’s very successful, and what am I going to have?’ I don’t know, I’ve just been thinking about it.”  He was not as young as he once was – much of his light hair was gray now.  “You know, a few years ago I had a few people in the shop, this couple and this other guy, and this girl – I’ve got to say, she was stunning. You know, girls like this, they’re trying to get interested in books, and basically they all buy one of two things – for some reason they always buy Jane Austen, or Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t know what it is, but it’s always one of those two. So she got some Poe short stories, and her boyfriend, he was all into ‘modern poetry,’ and I have some good stuff here, but what he got was just dreadful, I could tell he had no idea what he was doing, he was so clearly a pretender. And his friend, I could tell what kind of guy he was, kind of conservative guy, well-dressed, not the same kind of flash that the pretentious poet had, by any means, but he was interested in conservative politics and he ended getting a copy of the Federalist Papers and some of the writings of Tom Paine. And I thought, you know, this guy, he’s the most straightforward of the three of them, but he chose something with substance – something that he’s actually going to read and think about, and makes sense for his life. And you know, there it is. She was completely with the wrong guy. And here’s the topper – as they’re about to leave, the poet-guy steps out with his girlfriend, and says to me that his friend is picking up the bill. So he gets the girl with all his pretend nonsense while the other guy with substance pays for it all. I thought that pretty much summed it all up, academia, politics, economics, life in general.”

I thought there were any number of places where I could object to this particular story, but the feeling was what mattered: the feeling we get that we are in the presence of a continuously unfolding injustice, which stretches from cradle to grave and is sadly – tragically – renewed with every birth. We all know this feeling, whatever we may think constitutes good evidence and cause for it.  Whether or not the world should belong to such as us – well, perhaps it shouldn’t.  He and I had bonded over the Latin poems of Baudelaire, which I found in his shop.  It had occasioned another tirade.  “Baudelaire is one of the greats, and he wrote all these poems in Latin, and no one even looks at them, I mean, maybe if you’re lucky someone has read Les Fleurs du Mal – I’m not even going to mention the people who have never heard of Baudelaire, I mean my God Lord knows there are enough of them – but there’s so much more that people never go into.  There’s an entire ocean of great literature out there, people, and it’ll get more than just your ankle wet, but you have to actually go in at some point.”  Actually he didn’t use that last metaphor, but I could write dialogue for Russell all day long, he and I share so much.

But of course we nonconformists contain many bristly points which we do not share.  I learned also that Russell had been reading the writings of Jefferson Davis. “It’s not politically correct, but honestly, some of these guys really stand up. Davis was brilliant. No one wants to say it now, but you go read that stuff and tell me it doesn’t stand up.”

I should have asked him what precisely I should read, but I did not at the time. I’m sure it does not stand up, to be honest; everything I have read of those men suggests precisely the low mentality one would expect of a slaver.  I was already familiar with this side of Russell. On earlier occasions he told me that “All the heroism, all the true nobility, was entirely on the side of the South in the Civil War,” which is false from top to bottom (and which I mentioned in conversation later on the trip, with interesting results), and he also said, “Lincoln was the worst president this country ever had. The whole crusade mentality that has been such a decisive factor in our foreign policy so many times originates with Lincoln. You look at all the presidents before, they didn’t have that. Now it’s pretty much a continual danger that some American president will go off on some crusade or other. It’s almost expected now.” I spoke with someone else about this too, also with interesting results, later on my trip from South to North. Here all I will note is that there are many people – a surprising number, in fact – all through the South, who imagine, as Shelby Foote said, that it is July 3rd, 1863, and it is still possible that everything can turn out entirely differently.

In fact, it was probably the Mississippi River that determined the war, for it was a huge, flat, almost indefensible highway, slowly pushing from North into South, flowing through the wealthiest area of the Confederacy and right through the middle of its one great city.  Victory was impossible, if not given their indefensible cause, then given the river, and the river was a given.