By Byron Spooner It’s mid-afternoon and I’m well into my second beer. The place is busy, as usual for a Saturday. Not as busy as it was a few years ago, not as busy as I’d hoped it would be when I unglued myself from the bed this morning, but busy nonetheless. There have been [...]

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By Byron Spooner I show up early in the morning at the loading dock at San Francisco Center. I’ve always liked loading docks and freight elevators. They’re always off an alley and on the ugly side of building.  It’s usually much colder or much hotter there than you expect it to be.  They make you [...]

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By Byron Spooner I’m reading Room: A Novel by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown; 2010).  My wife gave it to me on Valentine’s Day.  I’m about halfway through and, so far, it’s the best novel I’ve read in months–and one of the weirdest in both in language and subject matter.  Room is the story of a [...]

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By Byron Spooner “What goes around comes around,” one of my volunteers said regarding Border’s decision to close the majority of its Bay Area stores.  He was hailed and heartily agreed with by everyone present in the kitchen, me included. Locally, the coming closings are surely and decisively a victory for local booksellers.  While Borders’ [...]

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By Byron Spooner No one in the car seems to notice as we approach the tunnel; everyone is drowsy from sun and languor.  We’ve been to Petaluma, a day-long retreat on a sympathetic ranch; food, talk, an actual swimming hole. We’re all exhausted from four days and nights of the SF International Poetry Festival. After [...]

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By Byron Spooner “I got more of those Kaw-macs for ya,” the voice yells into the phone.  I feel like everyone in the book store can hear him. It’s Howie, I can tell right away from the Bronx accent and the smile behind the voice, telling all those who can hear it is all but [...]

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By Byron Spooner Saturday night my wife and I went to a benefit for our friend Dee Allen, a poet/activist/anarchist who was busted last May Day at a demonstration near Civic Center.  As I understand it, he was arrested for being involved in a running fight between him and his anarchist friends and a bunch [...]

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By Byron Spooner I saw True Grit when it came out in 1969.  A bunch of us took the bus into Manhattan from Jersey and saw it at Radio City, Rockettes and all.  We made a Sunday of it, going to Schraftt’s for lunch beforehand and wandering around midtown looking for whatever harmless trouble sixteen-year-olds [...]

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By Byron Spooner Mom retrieves her wits as soon as she sees the chaos she’s wrought and rushes over to the scene of the crime. She rights the table and shoves it aside like some middle-aged superhero. The tablecloth, originally her mother’s, tangles in her feet and she kicks it aside cruelly, heedless of its [...]

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By Byron Spooner After all my lobbying, it isn’t exactly a stunning surprise when The Reptile World by Clifford H. Pope shows up under the tree Christmas morning.   We’ve moved the dining room table out of the way so we can all gather around the tree, grown-ups in the chairs, kids on the floor.  Our [...]

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