I have a confession…blogging gives me the vapors.  Unlike most booksellers, I did not major in English and I have no aspirations to be a writer.  All I want is to read, read, sell, and read!  When Lemuria started this blog thing I was not happy, but I have slowly come around and my vapors have decreased (only slightly). It is actually kinda fun especially when people comment and a little conversation starts because one thing I am good at is talking.  So I talk through my fingers, so to speak.  I know that many of you who read the blog also are fans of our Facebook page.  I really like that because I can just throw out a sentence or question or two and see what happens.  Now we are on Twitter!!! The bookstore and some of us individually.  I mean Lemuria has come along way since I started here 11 years ago…I remember when we started using the interoffice email and we thought we had hit the big time!

The reason I’m going on and on is because I want to let you know about something that we have started on the weekends!!  Every Friday on Facebook and Twitter we want you to tell us what you are reading over the weekend!!  It’s called Mississippi Reads Weekend!!!  How fun is that!!  You don’t have to be living in Mississippi to join in just some how connected.  A MS Expat? Whatcha reading? Reading a Mississippi Author? Let us know? If you spent the summer with your grandparents running barefoot through the Delta…we want to know if you are reading fiction or nonfiction!!!

This is how you can join in on Mississippi Reads Weekend…

Facebook…

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/LemuriaBookstore

Twitter…

http://twitter.com/#!/lemuriabooks

When you post on twitter make sure that you mention @lemuriabooks and use the #msreadswkend!

If you want to follow me on Twitter I am @Maggie4Lemuria.  I usually only post about the bookstore but occasionally something else slips in.  I just can’t help myself!

By the way, My Mississippi Reads Weekend selection is….The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller.  I started it last night and am ready to get home and get back to it.  It is a debut novel that takes place in London, 1920 after the Great War.  Laurence Bartram has survived the war but do to a family tragedy his ‘home’ is not the same and he has basically withdrawn from the world.  Then one day he receives a letter from Mary Emmett, the sister of a classmate and she wants him to help her understand her brother’s death.  John Emmett returned home from the war but kills himself while in a veterans hospital.  Mary convinces (or charms) him into helping her and Laurence enlists help from his friend, Charles.  While putting together the missing pieces of John’s life more veterans turn up dead and Laurence must ask questions and get answers that force him to relive is own experiences that he is trying to forget.

Dear Listener,

My original plan for this blog was to continue the discussion I was having with myself about Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell.  I’m not going to do that.  Instead I’m going to talk about the song that has rented a room in my head for the past week.  To do so, I’ll need to regress a couple months for a little backstory (aka blatant self-promotion).

If you read my first blog, you’d know that I had seen the closing of Be-Bop as an employee.  On the last day of Jackson’s beloved (not beloved enough) lost record store, I was attending the second amazing record swap known as 4TheRecord.  Special for the event, Cody Cox and I put together a cd featuring fourteen songs that we ript from vinyl and called it Issue #2.  The first track that appears on this mix is by The Walkmen (signed to Oxford’s own Fat Possum records, y’all!) called Angela Surf City from their sixth full-length record Lisbon (2010).

More recently I’ve been trying very anxiously to finish The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  I don’t know if it’s common with all booksellers, but I’ve had a fair amount of difficulty not leaving work with a new book.  That being the case, I became less and less interested in Mr. Fitzgerald’s work and more interested in the shiny new books. With respect towards the Lost Generation, I ceased reading altogether for a handful of days.  Until I decided it was time once and for all to finish what I had started.  The first problem that I faced was the center of the book: the spoils that the rich in love had left me with were quickly spoiling.  On top of that, I was losing focus on the words and focusing on the aforementioned song by The Walkmen.

That’s when everything started to come together.  The song itself is bouncy and upbeat with a side of surf rock.  But the lyrics are telling a different story about hate and love.  Very much mirroring the story that I am attempting to read about our friends Anthony and Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned.  So I kept listening.  The tone of The Walkmen’s song isn’t necessarily positive, but who really wants pure positivity?  Isn’t a little bitterness and cynicism good for the wit muscles every now and then?  Either way I saw a dramatic improvement in my overall demeanor in five short minutes just by mixing my medias. (hint hint) And more accurately, I was really able to hand myself over to Mr. Fitzgerald once again.

by Simon

About three years after I opened and moved Lemuria to Highland Village, a large strange man came to check out my collection of books for sale.

My memory tells me he wore a navy blue suit, he walked around a bit, scoped the layout of my store, and then parked his assertive self in front of the Nobel Prize winners bookcase.

He looked at the desk where Tom, Val and myself were learning the book business and blared out to all ears: “I guess you guys like Hemingway.” We said, “Yeah!” and from there my enduring friendship with J.C. Simmons grew. Soon his buddy, another Papa crony, showed up to check out the joint, and that was when I met Ed.

Over my lifetime of bookselling, I’ve had the good fortune to meet many wonderful bibliophiles (Good Doc “T” Rest in Peace) but none have embarked on a journey like my ole pal Ed Grissom. After a lifetime of learning all about Ernest Hemingway, Ed launched into the ultimate “Papa” project of which this extraordinary book is the result.

I encourage all Hemingway fans, on any level, to stop over this Thursday at 5:00 to visit with and talk to Ed about his fascinating journey of bookselling and the oddities he encountered. I’m told some of the “rarest of the rare” Hemingway books will be shown and explained.

Remarkably, Ed’s passion came to fruition. It’s not everyday that in pursuit of your wildest dreams that there actually awaits that cup of gold. And for Ed his cup is filled with the publication of this ambitious project. I praise my pal for never giving up on his passion.

All who share the love of this author’s great work, please join us in celebration of Papa’s literature. Not only will Ed share some his “rarest of the rare” at Lemuria, but our old bookstore crony, J.C., will be hanging around again just like the old days.

Ernest Hemingway: A Descriptive Bibliography by C. Edgar Grissom (Oak Knoll Press, 2011)

Have you ever thought about how you would go about actually making Willy Wonka’s lickable wallpaper?  I have…quite often.  Meet Heston Blumenthal and his very fantastical cookbook with which you can learn how to make lickable wallpaper, an edible graveyard and all sorts of other crazy edible delights.

“I wanted to create feasts that captured the spirit of their times.  They had to be theatrical and fantastical, stimulating all the senses and conjuring up for my guests all sorts of memories and allusions and associations, as though I had waved a magic wand.  To that end, I explored some strange places and some even stranger ideas.  I ate boar’s eyes, Play-Doh and a lot of Spam.  I went to the walled city in Fes to get tips on cooking camel meat and to snowy Transylvania to find out about a legendary recipe for leeches fed of goose blood.  I tried to make edible bones, lickable wallpaper, floating food, superstringy cheese, a savory Zoom lolly and fake Champagne using a SodaStream.  It was a mad, invigorating, informative, frustrating, funny, shocking and surprising journey-and it’s all here in the pages of this book.”

Within the cookbook you are given six different Feasts; A  Fairy Take Feast, A Gothic Horror Feast, A Titanic Feast, A Chocolate Factory Feast, A Seventies Feast and An Eighties Feast to create and told exactly how to go about doing so.

Take a look at the Fairy Tale Feast.  It includes Cinderella’s Pumpkin (Pumpkin Puree, Langoustine Tail and Osetra Caviar Sprinkled with Golden Fairy Dust), The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg (Chicken Testicle Jelly Beans, White Bean Veloute, Peashoot Beanstalk, Golden Egg and Shredded Goose Leg), Snow White’s Heart & The Wicked Queen’s Apple (Deep-fried Boar’s Ears, Braised Cheek and Tongue, Snout Sausage, Gribiche and Radish Eye Apples with Boar’s Heart Parfait) and Hansel & Gretel’s Edible House (Shortbread Roof Tiles, Marshmallow Bricks, Sugar Stained-glass Windows, Aerated Chocolate Door, Green Moss, Welcome Mat).

I suggest you pick up a copy of Heston’s Fantastical Feasts and get to cookin’.  Enjoy.

by Zita

The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things on Off and Start Getting Stuff Done

by Piers Steel, Ph.D.

Harper Collins (2011)

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking about why distractions, so constant in modern life, keep us from having authentic face-to-face experiences. It seems every experience is interrupted by someone informing us of something consequential or not. Often these interruptions seem to caused by device hypnosis. I think this psychologically distracting habit is interesting especially when this behavior seems to destroy concentration and even to the point of producing rude self-centeredness. In the workplace, interruptions lead to poor customer service and can infringe on other coworkers’ time and focus.

Procrastination has been identified as not just a delay but an irrational one. That is when we voluntarily put off tasks despite believing ourselves to be worse off by doing so. We know we are acting against our own best interests. Self-deception and procrastination go hand and hand, exploiting the thin line between couldn’t and wouldn’t by exaggerating the difficulties we face and come up with justifications even if we don’t vocalize them.

Procrastination is to suffer from weak impulse control, lack of persistence, lack of work discipline, lack of self-management skill, and the inability to plan ahead of time. Even after starting, a procrastinator is easily distracted. Putting off responsibilities inevitably follows. This behavior is especially rude and counterproductive in the work environment. It’s almost like a learned helplessness which decreases the pleasure and quality of life, and its source is likely procrastination.

Impulsiveness shares the strongest bond to procrastination, for example, cell phones are responded to by people who act without thinking. Those who act on impulse are more likely procrastinating. In the retail world, impulse results in unwanted purchases leading to impulse buys and decreasing the customer’s opportunity for good service. Our love affair with the present moment and immediate gratification is the root of this process.

So attached it seems are cell phones and computer that they seem embedded, not only within people’s lives but that they are an actual part of their body, even to the extent that when they are not around people can experience a phantom limb syndrome, for example, a faux cell phone arm. Americans on the average watch 4.7 hours of TV. By doing this, the TV is controlling part of our mental body. Does this create a faux TV brain?

In the short term, we can regret what we do; but in the long run, we regret what we don’t get done.  When interrupted by a device, it takes approximately 15 minutes to refocus. About two hours of our work day is lost to interruption and less productivity, i.e., entertainment for the employee paid for time. Could this be called shoplifting or just stealing?

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Every indecision brings about delays in usually costly and unproductive efforts. These types of effort produce drudgery and decrease the flow of total engagement which in turn decreases creativity. A bigger picture understanding is clobbered by this narrowness of effort, thus producing less work success and reward.

Proper goal setting is the smartest thing you can do to battle your own procrastination. Framing our goals breaks down big picture success into short term objectives. Routines get stronger with repetition, and so does the habit become stronger every time you slack off or interrupt yourself with your cell phone, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If you protect and nurture your routine with good habits, it will eventually protect you.

If you are in a small business and want good service generated by right-minded efforts that lead to you enhancing your community, I suggest Steel’s book. Managing your time and those you employ correctly eventually makes your efforts have longer constructive effects for your business and your community.

If these ideas interest you, your time reading The Procrastination Equation will give you plenty to think about.