BREAKING BOOKSTORE NEWS!!!!!
Our former helper and shelving architect Sean Masterson the FAMOUS MAGICIAN will be on stage at the Morse Theater in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood in February and March. If you remember Sean from the store you know him as a warm and witty guy who can talk his way out of anything. This translates well before an audience, and he puts on a great show, suitable for all ages! Be amazed, be thrilled, be entertained, be on time!
This promotional entry has been made without the knowledge or approval of Mr. Masterson, and all objections should be directed to his website! ( "Mastersonmagic dot com" ) and ( "the Morse dot com")

DON'T MISS IT IF YOU CAN!!!!!

HELP! We've been Yelped! I've been braggin' it up that the store has a five star rating on Yelp, sharing that distinction with only one other used bookstore in town, but a recent visit to Yelp.com reveals evidence of an assassination attempt and the loss of one half star. This is due to a recently added TWO STAR review by one "T.C.", a visitor who just didn't get it. He mistook the store for a library, I guess, and demanded alphabetization. Despite some unsanctoned and unofficial efforts by Missy Mae (sic.), one of our three invaluable helpers, the store is not organized that way. It would be impossible to do it in such a small space, and would require a full time staffer to keep up with it. This is not an apology. It is a caveat. Love it or leave it. Or just like it enough to come back.
The mean reviewer, T.C., does not present a profile photo on his Yelp reviews, and a quick search turns up more of T.C.'s disapproving reviews of other Lincoln Square stores. Apparently, he is a serial mugger. I am inferring gender here because the bad reviews don't have a woman's voice. They imply an attitude I associate with guys who suffered abuse as children. Women from these unfortunate backgrounds tend to be less public when acting out their psychic pain. (Thank you, Dr. Jim )
Could this "T.C." be the same person who came in last week and complained non-stop about every book we recommended, after asking for advice? Then presented a twenty dollar gift certificate his neighbor, our customer, had given him in exchange for dog walking!
Of all da noyve!

The inaugural poem issue is still fueling many postings all over the web. Most or all of the heat and noise is generated by poets of all stripes, both the published on- a- pin -head variety and the can’t- get -laid- in- a - whorehouse variety. They seem to have taken possession of the entire issue of The Poem. It is the center of their universe. Their one chance to get noticed, albeit by proxy, has been hijacked by the controversy over The Poem’s worthiness. To dismiss it as trivial, modest, inept, inapt, unmoving, or otherwise ineffectual, is to mark them with the same stain, as if The Poem was a community effort and not the work and performance of one individual.
This is a phenomenon of Poet Ghettoization. They all live in a crumbling tenement off in a marginalized and forgotten corner of a city which has on its mind everything but Poetry. It’s their own fault. They got there by choice, after struggling across potholed streets, through gang infested turf. They were dying to live there, and now they wonder why the rest of us out here in suburbia aren’t driving up their property values.
Please insert many smily face emoticons where appropriate.

I have had some 'net conversations and inter- blog postings about the inaugural poem. One response to my posts was positive, but many sites are the provinces of poetry teachers and grad students with territory to be fiercely guarded. As a consequence, my remarks have been condemned as those of a philistine. My favorite was a dare to "try (my) own hand at it" before presuming to criticize, as if only union members had voting rights.
On an unrelated note, we are going to install a trap door under the floor of the poetry section. This will lead to the basement alligator pond. The trip wire will be triggered arbitrarily, ensnaring the beautiful as well as the damned.
Such is life. Nothing is "fair".

Posted to http://mikechasar.blogspot.com/ These guys did not like the poem, but their blog rejected my post. What's that all about?

This poem sounds like a class exercise. It is trite, inappropriate to the occasion, broken and disjointed. It was also read in a stilted and pretentious manner, with cadences and emphases adjusted to imply more depth than the words themselves conveyed.
Many apologists, mostly poetry teachers, are now defending the poem by use of the dopey explanation, "It's better than it sounds"! They are counseling careful readings and study of the piece, so that we unenlightened boobs can come to understand it. Had it been written for readers rather than a live audience it should have been printed up in a run of two million and handed out to this crowd of Americans who came to be witnesses to a moving and meaningful spectacle of the country's best and brightest - for real, this time. The time slot could then have been filled by a recording of Ray Charles singing "America". I would still be crying.

Welcome back to the bookstore blog! Missy Mae, one of the store's valued and respected employees, has taken the initiative in dragging us into the generation Y world of Facebook. Playing with this new toy has become an obsession, but it will pass. In the meantime, please accept our invitation to join the Ravenswood Books facebook group. I have no idea how to get there from here.
We continue to buy books from our customers and friends. We pay just enough to cover the cost of gas expended in transporting them to the store, but not enough to jeopardize our razor thin tightrope walking breathtaking and death defying tiptoe along the edge of financial ruin. In short, we are cheap, but, like The Dude, we abide. All the books we like are listed down below somewhere in the archives. Happy New Year