为保存独立书店而战

SHOULD WE FIGHT TO SAVE INDIE BOOKSTORES?

I’ll admit that at times I’ve responded to news of random indie-bookstore shutterings as I do to news of catastrophes in faraway lands: with a pang of concern that soon settles into a vague sense of unease about the world and the problem of human existence. But I’ve always suspected that, should the war come home (namely to the shops I frequent: The Strand, Westsider, powerHouse, BookCourt, McNally Jackson, Shakespeare & Co., WORD, Longitude, Bluestockings, Housing Works, or St. Marks), I’d feel differently. And indeed, when news reached me Friday that a link to a petition to save St. Marks books was going around the Internet, I got that queasy, vertiginous feeling you get when you’ve been dumped, fired, evicted, or told that your kitten’s been run over. St. Marks is one of my bookstores, I screamed at the Internet: who thought they had the right to take it away?

我承认有时候对于独立书店被叫停的新闻，我的反应就像听到遥远国度的灾难一样，刚开始会有一阵阵的关心，但很快这种不安就变得很模糊，像是那种对世界和人类存在所引发问题的一种司空见惯的感觉。但我也常常在想，如果那些事情发生在我周围，如果是那些我经常光顾的店，比如圣马克（St. Marks）书店，那我的感觉应该是不同的。的确如此，周五的时候，当我在网上看到为保存圣马克书店的请愿书的链接，我感到头晕目眩，就好像你被抛弃、被解雇、被驱逐，或者你被告知你的厨房被毁了的那种感觉。圣马克书店是我经常去的书店，就像是自己的一样，我在网上咆哮：他们凭什么认为自己有权利带走圣马克？

The answer, according to the petition, is indirectly New York City and its sky-high rents and less indirectly Cooper Union, the target of the petition and the owner of the building St. Marks books occupies. The bookstore would like Cooper Union to kindly lower its rent:

按照请愿书上说的，答案间接地指向纽约市和其极高的租金，还有库柏联合学院。后者是请愿书的目标，也是圣马克书店所在建筑的所有者。书店希望库柏联合学院能够把租金降低一些。

The St. Mark’s Bookshop has a long tradition in the Lower East Side and serves an admirable and increasingly rare function. St. Mark’s is struggling to pay the market rent that Cooper Union is charging them at 31 3rd Ave. A significant rent concession by Cooper Union could save this irreplaceable neighborhood institution.

圣马克书店在下东区（纽约市曼哈顿区沿东河南端一带）有悠久的历史，并且一直提供令人赞叹的有特色的服务。圣马克书店坐落在第三大道31号，一直在努力地按照市场价格给库柏联合学院支付租金。如果库柏联合学院愿意在租金上做一些让步，就能把这个无可替代的邻居保存下来。

I had a friend once who would go on and on and on about rent control and how it unbalanced the rental market for the rest of New York, arguments I found mostly convincing. Imagining the apoplexy that would seize him if he read the petition, I hesitated for a moment before signing. But the thing is that I really don’t want St. Marks books to close, and by hook or by crook (since it obviously won’t happen by book), I want it to be saved. My stance is entirely based in emotion: I have an emotional attachment to a certain vision of New York, and that vision includes a good indie bookstore on the L.E.S.

我曾经有一个朋友，经常不停地谈论租金控制和纽约租赁市场的不平衡，我也认可他的观点。想象一下，如果他看到这份请愿书，估计会像中风了一样定在那里，在签名之前我也犹豫了一下。但我真的不愿看到圣马克关门，不管用什么方法（显然用书是没用的），都希望它能被保存下来。我的立场是基于感情的，我对纽约的每个阶段都是有感情的，而这个阶段就包含了这个很棒的独立书店。

I was explaining all this over e-mail to a colleague, who replied, “I know bookstores are supposed to be good things, but we don’t have video stores anymore, and maybe we need to get used to the new order instead of lamenting the old.” This is what I’d say to his point: it totally sucks that there’s no more video stores. I spent long nights hanging out at Kim’s in college, deliberating for hours over which random German film from the nineteen-seventies to take home with me. I actually watched stuff like that all the way through then, maybe since I’d spent so much time and energy looking for it. I even miss Blockbuster: when I was a kid, the Friday-night trip to the video store to pick out a movie was the most exciting event of the week. How I watch a video now is: I browse on Netflix for a while, start watching something, get about five minutes in, wonder if I’ve made the right decision, and start the process over. It’s ridiculous, and yet I can’t…stop…clicking…

我给一个同事发了邮件，讲述这件事，他的回复是“我知道书店是很好的存在，但看看现在我们已经没有音像店了，也许我们需要适应这种新的生活方式，别再为以前的东西而伤怀了”。针对他的观点，我想说真的是再没有音像店了。以前上大学的时候，我几乎是整夜挂在Kim's店里（音像店，在圣马克书店附近），仔细慎重地挑选19世纪70年代的德国电影带回家看。事实上，也许因为我花了很多时间和精力挑选，就好像我能看穿它们一样。我也怀念百事达（也是提供视频光碟的店），那时我还是个小孩子，周五的晚上，到音像店一游，挑选一部电影是每周最令人兴奋的事情。而如今我是这样看视频的：先在Netflix（美国的一种流媒体）上逛逛，看到一些内容，进去看几分钟，感觉一下是否是个好的选择，然后再决定是否开始看。这种方式太可笑了，但没办法，我无法停止用鼠标不停地点击，点击...

My point is that I wish we had been able to save the video store. I know the young citizens of the new order don’t miss it, but kids don’t miss anything: they’re kids. And since we haven’t entirely killed the bookstore yet, I would like us not to. Going into bookstores to browse, to attend readings, to interact with the staff, to see the selection they’ve curated—all these things excite me and entice me to read. If my book-buying experience becomes simply me sitting alone on the couch click, click, clicking, I don’t know what I’ll become (I’ll probably forget I’m looking for books and jump over to Netflix).

我想我希望能把音像店保存下来。我知道那些年轻的城市人有新的生活规则，他们不会怀念这些，但小孩子不应该怀念任何事，因为他们只是小孩子。既然现在我们还没有彻底让书店消失，那就真的别让书店消失了。走进书店去浏览，开始阅读，同书店的人交流，看看他们的选择，所有的这些事情都另我兴奋，并且吸引我去阅读。如果我的买书体验仅仅是一个人坐在躺椅上，用鼠标不停地点击，点击，再点击，我都不知道我会变成什么样。我很可能忘记我是要找书的，而跑到Netflix上去看无谓的视频了。

Still, my colleague has a point: chaos and destruction are a part of life, and their consequences, impossible to foretell, are not always negative. St. Marks books hasn’t always sat on the corner of Third and Stuyvesant, after all; it sprouted up amid the ruins of thousands of other bookstores that once graced the city. Though I wish I’d been able to peek inside Frank Shay’s Greenwich Village shop, which lived briefly in the early nineteen-twenties, I’m O.K. with the idea that it was of its time and only of its time. My fondest hope is that, should the bookstores still standing now fall, a new type of store, somehow able to survive in the digital era while retaining what’s special about print, would emerge.

我这个同事还说：混乱和破坏是生活的一部分，而这些所导致的结果无法预测，但通常并不是负面的。圣马克书店最终无法长期地呆在第三大道的街角，它会在成千上万个被毁灭的其他书店中继续发芽，不论这些书店曾经多么美化了这个城市。虽然我渴望能偷看一眼Frank Shay在格林尼治村开的那家小书店，这家店仅在19世纪20年代初存在了不长时间，虽无缘一见，但我知道它是属于而且仅仅属于它自己的年代，对我来说就足够了。我最大的希望是即使在这样的数字时代，这些书店仍然能够存在，即使以一种新的方式，也会在某种程度上得以存活，把那些特别的印刷保留下来。

Do I want to save my favorite indie bookstores? Indeed I do. Should we save them (must we save them)? I throw that question to the ether.

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