NOTES OF A USED AND OUT-OF-PRINT BOOK DEALER

Issue 14. October 10. 2001

Continental Books publishes this free biweekly email newsletter for customers and interested others. Our focus is books but we do occasionally veer off-topic. The objective: We stay in touch through entertainment and information and encourage you to do the same.

1. Book trade: Kinship is the first connection, sometimes onerous but always full of news and opinion. Elmer Conshohocken Story #6
2. Bibliography: Toward a reading list. Arab history and culture.
3. Game: Toward a parlor game. Find the felon

CURLY'S CHOICE

1
Elmer Conshohocken is a composite book dealer who has a composite family made up of his wife, Shanna, and his three grown children, Larry, Mona, and Curly. Moe Shugana is a cover name for a famous Hollywood actor who is a longtime customer of Elmer's. The kernel of this story is true but the details are embellished.

Elmer always tells browsers, with a wink, "Don't despair. There are lots of books still to be written. Your favorite may be upcoming."

2.
When Curly received his junior college degree from LaGuardia College he decided on a career in movie making, a crowded field with every other youngster from 18 to 20 out on the street with friends and hand-held camera recording immortal images. Elmer decided to assist fate by mentioning Curly's ambition to Moe Shugana who, whenever he wasn't active on a Hollywood set, took time to turn every idea, question or issue that bounced his way into a project. And his projects were fabulously and famously all-out.

The initiation of Curly into the cinema business became a project.

Moe wrote a twenty page movie scenario, hired five professional actors, a script and continuity girl, a cameraman and a sound technician with required equipment, a truck with assorted lights and workers and hangers-on, and, with Curly as intern, assembled the troop at Tribeca Square one bright morning for the shoot.

On through the morning hours, Moe a bundle of energy: director, leading actor, teacher and guru, wearing jodhpurs and sun helmet, with a green silk shirt open at the neck, an embroidered yellow scarf, a megaphone in his hand. Shouting, crying, emoting, singing. Curly at the center of his attention: Now behind the camera, now before it, consulted about the script, listening carefully to Moe's directives to actors and crew.

At noon, Moe sent Curly to a nearby Italian restaurant to pick up a coffee and sandwich lunch for the gang because the gofer experience is an integral part of this initial lesson. And he was only outside Moe's supervisory overview for a few moments when he was overtaken by one of those life changing experiences, a flash really, unexpected, unanticipated, for which there is no preparation. He fell in love.

In the restaurant: A group of fundamentalist missionaries, up from central Pennsylvania, giving out little red books titled "Quotations from the Bible." A pretty young woman named Sadie Thompson handed one to Curly. Their eyes met and that was it. They were both goners. Curly called Moe on his cell phone and quit the business he had just ventured into, and he and Sadie quickly set up housekeeping in a rural community located between York and Harrisburg known locally as Bible Belt North and have been living there ever since.

Elmer and Shanna were shocked, flabbergasted, stunned. They had a firmly entrenched family tradition of secularism and never expected any of their children to associate with a religious alternative. A hundred years of doubt and fifty years of certainty cast casually aside for love. They were too liberal to say anything aloud but their faces were long and longer for a very long time.

3
Curly and Sadie now work a small truck farm and home-school their children and they scout books locally for Elmer on weekends. They visit Elmer and Shanna on the secular holidays like Veterans Day and Presidents Day. Curly eventually took to winking at Elmer whenever questions of religion came up, as though to say, "Don't worry Dad it's not that serious." Then the kids started winking, a wink and a big smile. And finally, when none of the others were looking, Sadie winked at him too. And Elmer hugged her and thought, "Oh my, all is not lost, there is still hope for the sweet and universal secular center."

4
Moe and Elmer almost had a falling out over this incident. Moe felt that Curly's bailing out in the middle of the shoot was the height of ingratitude. "No good deed goes unpunished," he told Elmer sententiously.

But Elmer, perversely and irrationally, blamed Moe for choosing Tribeca Square and starting the whole sequence. His silent answer to Moe was, "And no bad deed goes without reward." He considered a steep discount for Moe on his next book order, but he decided against it. "No," he thought, "Moe isn't bad enough and never will be."

NOTES AND ADDENDA

The Conshohocken children are named after the Three Stooges, the ugliest and most lovable of the comic slapstick groups working in the second quarter of the 20th century. They have a large number of web sites dedicated to their memory. Try http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/4516/site/celebs/stooges/stooges.html by Joel Gallagher of Canberra, Australia. I particularly like his trivia list, which notes many of the mishaps of the Stooges while filming. They are funny even while sustaining serious injury.

The theme of love across supposedly inappropriate social identities goes back to the bible. It takes the tragic form in Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Madam Butterfly and the comic in Dharma and Greg (its current TV manifestation) and in the 1922 Broadway hit "Abie's Irish Rose" by Anne Nichols which ran for five years and has been revived repeatedly on stage and film.

See: http://www.pacpubserver.com/new/enter/12-17-99/abiesirishrose.html for a review of a recent staging. There is a variation out now called "Abie's Island Rose." http://www.hollywoodplayhouse.com/reviews_abies.shtml.

The name "Sadie Thompson," is borrowed from the W. Somerset Maugham heroine in "Rain," a short story commenting on the psychology of fundamentalism. There is a printing in THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM. (See http://continentalbooks.com/books.cgi?bk=7379) It was translated into a film starring Joan Crawford and Walter Huston in the 1930's.

RAG TAG BIBLIOGRAPHY OFFERING BACKGROUND TO THE CONFLICT INITIATED BY THE ATTACKS ON THE WTC AND THE PENTAGON

The following are offered to alert our readers to the extent and depth of the literature. All titles cited are from our stock.

Bruzonsky, Mark A. (Editor). THE MIDDLE EAST, U.S. POLICY, ISRAEL, OIL, AND THE ARABS. 3rd edition. Congressional Quarterly (1977) Of historical interest. Politics of Middle East goes back a long way, in this case to the era of Jimmy Carter. (#2914)

Sabini, John. ARMIES IN THE SAND. The Struggle for Mecca and Medina. Thames and Hudson. (1981) History, even further back. The Egytian-Wahhabi War of early 19th century over Hijaz--strip of land containing holy cities. "...throws striking light on resurgence of militant Islam today." The Wahhabi is the conservative Islamic sect associated with ibn Sa'ud. In this struggle the Pasha of Egypt represented the Turkish Porte. (#7023)

Stoddard, Lothrop. THE NEW WORLD OF ISLAM. Scribner's. 1922. "The entire world of Islam is today in profound ferment...A gigantic transformation is taking place whose results must affect all mankind." Stoddard was a Harvard Professor mainly remembered for his racial alarms. (#6187)

Gilsenan, Michael. RECOGNIZING ISLAM. Religion and Society in the Modern Arab World. Pantheon. (1982). Anthropologist, who studied with Evans-Pritchard, and with 20 years of study and participation in Arab settings, gives a nuanced and personal summing up. (Still to be listed)

Cole, Donald Powell. NOMADS OF THE NOMADS. The Al Murrah Bedouin of the Empty Quarter. Aldine. American anthropologist describes the culture and social organization of a traditional tribe. Research done in Saudi Arabia between April 1968 and May 1970. (#8308)

Lunt, James. THE BARREN ROCKS OF ADEN. Harcourt Brace (1967). By British officer who first served with the Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha and then was commander of the Army of the Federation of South Arabia. A sympathetic view of the Arab personality. (#6305)

You can also access these listings via http://continentalbooks.com/books.cgi?bk= (Type in appropriate number)

GROPING TOWARD A PARLOR GAME

Searching for a fugitive like Bin Ladin. Seek the advice of a great fictional detective, say San Spade, Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Mr Keen (Tracer of Lost Persons), Bulldog Drummond, Charlie Chan, Miss Marples and so on. What would each of them answer?

More generally, canvass favored authors with the same question. Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Henry James, Kafka, Dickens, Rudyard Kipling...Tailor the list of authors or fictional characters used to the group playing the game and you might keep a congenial gang, sharing lunch or gathered for an evening together, happily nattering.

As usual you can join us at subscribe@continentalbooks.com or you can leave us via amk104@columbia.edu "unsubscribe." Your choice.

If you have time and inclination to have a friend or colleague join us. Fine.

Copyright Alvin Katz 2001

Over and Out.