To work a shift at the Barnes and Noble on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia in the Aughts was a relatively simple, straightforward task. I worked there from precisely the turn of the century until mid '06, when the University Fellowship at Temple University allowed me to graduate upwards (I had done a low residency Boston MFA from Philly). We all had our ways of passing the eight-hour shifts, seeing as the work-load wasn't too heavy. For Mary Evelyn Harju, who worked at B & N until '09, when she moved to New York to do her own MFA (which I felt was unnecessary, after PAFA, and told her as much), the shifts were reducible to how she looked that day, her threads and the fashion statements she was making with them. Mary loved clothes, and she loved to dress. I am, admittedly, no clothes horse myself, so it is difficult for me to judge how much fashion gravitas she had. I noticed that Michael Barbella, an intelligent, charming gay man about fifteen years older than us, who was the B & N head manager while we were there, approved of Mary's moves. As she effortlessly sashayed around, Mary didn't always say much; it took me a while to draw her out. But, since Mary loved to be well-dressed in public, and since she was no snob about working retail (nor was I), B & N was no stretch for her. The Renaissance ideal of well-roundedness was also hers.
Mike Land was difficult to ignore at B & N for other reasons. At a lanky-yet-strapping 6'3, Mike's life was animated by a central contradiction- even at a young age (and Mike was precocious in every way), he was an extremely advanced hustler with a heart of gold. Mike took pains to pay attention to all those around him, and to make everyone feel special; yet the Puerto Rican edge of his good looks meant that certain types (including Mary Harju) would always mistrust him. How Mike passed the eight-hour shifts was to practice his seduction skills on absolutely everyone. Venus rising in Libra, and with stamina to back it up. Nick Gruberg was a problem at B & N. Also tall and strapping, at six feet even, Nick was a scientist first, and a U of Chicago graduate, and enjoyed employing his considerable IQ toying with other people's brains. He let Mike and I off the hook, considering I was a Penn grad and Mike and him became fast drinking buddies; others were not so lucky. Alone among us, Nick eventually got his ass fired for his transgressions.
What all of this is leading up to is one shift I worked at B & N: May 15, 2001. Mike and Nick weren't there yet; I was yet (also) to be Mary's hubs, but was in a long relationship with Melissa Floyd, a Southern belle transported to Philadelphia, whose delicacy and refinement were appreciated by most of us, and who already knew Mary (they were spiritual cousins) to be a rather sinister threat. I had spent several months delving deep into Modern Philosophy texts- prompted by the niggling fact that I had been a philosophy major at Penn State, and had let philosophy go for several years. May 15, 2001 was a bright, sunny spring day in Philadelphia. As my shift started (was it 4-close?) a series of ideas occurred to me in a certain order, resolving many of the problems I was encountering in Modern Phil. aesthetics texts (Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc), and the solutions came to me in a kind of lightning bolt. For the rest of the shift, I was on fire, and scrawled the thoughts I was having onto scraps of paper. Many of the May 15 notes became the backbone of Space Between, as it developed in 2013. In the crude form I collated them in that May, they didn't look like much. Melissa, another high IQ, liked them; Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum was tolerant but befuddled. Because there were so few philosophy heads around me (I was doing English at Penn), it took me a dozen years to get back to the notes the right way. Yet May 15, 2001 was certainly the most memorable shift I ever worked at B & N, and the feeling I had that day of being struck by lightning was unique. All those years in Aughts Philly were lit up by lightning bolts- the explosiveness was reliable, as Philadelphia ascended to heights none of us could've foreseen in 2000, when the distant rumble of thunder was heard which was to deliver us a mature United States.
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