in-between places

My first contribution to Journal Edmonton was going to be a love letter to the city's secondhand bookstores. But as I wrote I took a wrong turn at the thought of online book-buying, which led me to consider what's missing (materially, locationally) from places like kobobooks.com and thebookdepository.co.uk, and eventually I got lost, somewhere in the idea of the distances — and how essential they are to place and narrative.

I don't have anything against ebooks (dear publishing industry, stop panicking! The codex is not the be-all and end-all of this thing we call the book!), but personally, I like to experience my book-buying binges with all five senses and the unpredictability that accompanies walking in the city. If you order a book online, there's no chance of a chance encounter — having an allergic reaction to the cat presiding over the second floor; walking past the Wee Book Inn and seeing that they have Neil Gaiman's ten-volume Sandman series on sale. If you're clicking, not walking, you're not going to be able to duck into Block 1812 (or is it 1912? I always forget) for gelato, or drop by Chapters on Whyte to say hello to your friends who work there.

Photo by Erika Luckert.

Usually, we think of the distances between places as something to be overcome, like the fifteen-minute LRT ride you slip your earbuds in to get through. But I think that distances also bring places together, in addition to keeping them apart. Distances force you to travel, and that travel creates a kind of narrative. Narrative is essential to how we make sense of places, especially conglomerates of dissimilar places like neighbourhoods and cities.

And this only happens in physical city space. Hyperlinks are, of course, a form of travel. You can check browsing history to stalk someone's journey online. It's kind of mind-numbingly fun to go on Wikipedia for twenty minutes and see if you can get from "chocolate" to "Jesus." But online, it's all instantaneous, disembodied travel, characterised by sameness — like hermetically sealed airplanes, like spooling up the FTL drive and blipping from planet to planet without getting to see the stars.

This is the geography of the web: when you travel it you naturally follow metonymic or metaphoric routes, moving based on principles of contiguity and similarity. It's easy to blinker yourself and stay within communities tailored to your interests. Physical neighbourhoods, though, have a sort of necessary heterogeneity: the gas station is by the yoga studio is by the DQ is by the elementary school, and these are all juxtaposed; they coexist.

In the city, there is always a chance encounter. You can take a wrong turn and discover someplace you've never been before — a place that might be outside of your comfort zone, but which you have to confront anyway, because you can't just click a back button. You can set out to walk a preplanned secondhand bookstore crawl and end up lost, thinking about in-between places.