Heaven.

 

Last week, we hosted the first event in the bookstore in almost exactly two years.

I had to look up our most recent event for reference and it was eerie to read the summary notes from March 2020 -- the regular routines punctuated with nervous laughter -- before bookstore author events and so many other things disappeared instantly and thoroughly for a long, long time.

This event was not like that one, or the ten years of events we hosted before that. We've learned some things, and some things have changed. Attendance in the store was limited, with mandatory RSVPs -- not "free and open to the public" as it was in the past. Masks and proof of vaccination were required and checked at the door. And we had a camera hooked up to Zoom to livestream the event to the virtual audience we've built up over the last years. 

I'm also not the Events & Marketing Director any more -- there's a team of talented folks handling all of that for the bookstore, so I can (in theory) focus on being the solo owner of this creaking ship of a for-profit cultural institution. (More on that later.) And I'm so glad, because I would have thoroughly overthought what the first live event should be, but our events coordinator Jean booked someone I would never have thought of: Adrian Shirk's memoir/social history Heaven Is a Place On Earth: Searching for an American Utopia. Both an impressionistic survey of utopian experiments in this country over several hundred years, and an engagement with her own ethnic and cultural history and her search for a more mutually supportive way to live in this strange and broken era, the book is jagged and ambitious, skeptical and hopeful.

Even before Adrian specifically invited the the audience to ask the question, this book made me wonder: is this a utopian experiment?  The "reluctant capitalism" of an independent bookstore is a quixotic and contradictory thing. The fact of being a physical space both makes the kind of connections we're striving for possible, and creates economic burdens that make for potentially complicated ethical choices: what books we can or should carry, who and how many people we should employ, what we can do for the community vs. what we need to do for the bottom line, how much we ask of ourselves and our coworkers.  We pivot and reinvent endlessly, to stay afloat and to stay in sight of our ideals, and sometimes it feels like no matter what we (okay I) do it's not quite working, we're just a few more adjustments and transitions away from being really, truly functional in the ways we want to be.

As Adrian described it in her reading from the opening of the book, utopias seem to be at their best when they are evolving, contingent, in a stage of hopefulness rather than completion. When the idealists brush off their hands and say "just like this, no more changes", things typically start to turn into cults or dictatorships or other kinds of same-old systems.  Never being quite finished seems to actually be a characteristic by which you can identify a would-be utopia. So, there's that.

Adrian was a strong and soulful reader, and her interview with Anna Moschavakis was brilliant and invigorating, and we had maxed-out RSVPs and none of the livestreaming tech malfunctioned. Our events manager Josie handled everything like a calm whirlwind and the other booksellers (almost all of whom had never been to a Greenlight event before) pitched in to make everything work. The audience was enthusiastic and we even sold some books. It was all the bright and beautiful relaunch I could hope for.

But one of the best moments was earlier in the evening, when I happened to pass by the front door just as someone was asking if they might come in even though they weren't on the RSVP list, as they were traveling with the interviewer -- and I happened to recognize that the person was Jonathan Lethem. On November 5, 2009, Jonathan Lethem gave the first-ever author reading at Greenlight as part of his tour for Chronic City, with the subway rattling underneath and all of us agog that this was all real.  He's since moved to the West Coast, so to have him present for our next, first event (because duh, we let him in) was another thing I would never have thought to ask for. (That's him standing on the left in the photo above.) We chatted about writing and work and life and acknowledged that we couldn't say we were sure this reopening trend would continue, anything could happen, but we would enjoy it while it lasted.  Sometimes, for a minute, heaven is a place on earth, and the place is a bookstore.