Hurts So Good: Academic Bookstores

The academic bookstore: Never to buy—online and used is of course the way to go—but for wandering and wallowing when in need of bibliographic inspiration and a setting less grave but nearly as abundant as the stacks. Unfortunately, these oases must be shared with the people who actually run the places—invariably insane seventh-year graduate students who might pen something like this. The worst offender would have to be Columbia's Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), where the sneer I received several years ago when buying Writing and Difference from the clerk has left a remarkably vivid psychic etch. True, blank stares from the clerks at popular bookstores are infuriating: I'll admit to a bit of blood boiling when, in Mumbai, I was trying vainly to locate a copy of Écrits, but before I could utter past the 'La' the request had been eagerly filled in by the clerk as '...nce Armstrong!' But at what price must we suffer those who commit what is, of course, the worst sin of all—seriousness?

Meanwhile, a dispatch from the front lines in Berkeley (italics mine):

Hi Henry,
I spent a pleasant 20 minutes in the Berkeley UC bookstore browsing the shelves and noted the many structuralists titles and Frenchmen with whom i have become so intimately familiar over the past years of intense proximity (I have several critical texts in storage) but ended up buying two books on Buddhism and another one on Piracy under Elizabeth I. She was quite the Pirate Queen you know. Just ask the Spanish. There is however little i need add to my knowledge of the Structuralists who have done so much undermine and indeed subvert my comfortable Logical Positivism and Wittgensteinian Ordinary Language background. I did however purchase Leo Strauss' book Tyranny which I have been meaning to read for years. "Are these all for you" inquired impudent coed at the counter. My answer was unmemorable and need not be repeated but it is a wonder anyone reads anything any more.
Hope all is well with you.
Love,
Dad

Snort.