Physical and Online Bookstores

Before I talk about how physical and online bookstores live in rather complicated symbiosis - partly because I buy and read books in multiple languages, and partly because I have no access to all my favorite physical bookstores - I have to say that as a general rule I prefer electronic books to paper ones.

This might lead automatically to my preference for online bookstores, as I can't buy electronic books at physical bookstores. But I love the latter much more than the former for a very simple reason - I can experience far more unexpected encounters with books I didn't know existed by walking through any physical bookstore. I even felt many times that such books "found" me, so to speak, instead of my finding them.

Some online bookstores, including Amazon, do recommend related books on the basis of our browsing history, but they can't recommend books we ourselves didn't know might interest us. In this respect, I don't think even the best generative AI can help such books "find" us in the way they "find" us directly at physical bookstores.

Where I've been living since October 2023, I visit two huge local bookstores every week, mainly to browse new books. If I find interesting books, I generally buy them as electronic copies from online bookstores. And many of the books I find interesting are translations of English originals into the local language, so I acquire the originals.

In this new place I've bought very few physical books at local physical bookstores for a very simple reason: they don't sell those books I need or want as physical copies. They are either Chassidic books in Hebrew, English or Russian, or Russian books for Russian sociocultural literacy.

But I have to mention one special exception. In the capital of the country where I live now there is a physical bookstore that imports and sells Russian books. In the past three years I've bought about 20 such Russian books from there. When I visited this physical bookstore last November, I also got acquainted with its owner. Since then we've been corresponding by email almost on a daily basis about various topics, including not only Russian books and Russian (book) culture but also geopolitics and geoeconomics.

This has made me realize that another important benefit of physical bookstores, though probably such specialized ones, is the existence of fellow book lovers who are familiar with books they are "matchmaking" with their customers. I also have three such physical bookstores in Jerusalem, and I miss them and the "matchmakers" there most in Jerusalem.

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Website
Блог на русском
DeepL (probably the best machine translation available now)

Linguistic (In)competence and Cultural (In)compatibility

Every time I started learning a new language, I could never know in advance if the culture of its native speakers was compatible with me. By "culture" I mean here the mentality of these speakers. I had to communicate with enough of them to decide whether their culture was compatible with me or not. I stopped learning or even using certain languages after discovering that their respective cultures were incompatible with me.

I say all this because it's often neglected in practice, if not in theory, by both language learners and teachers that cultural competence is no less important than linguistic competence, especially if we see a language as a means of communication and not just grammar and lexicon. We can say what is grammatically correct but culturally incorrect.

This cultural competence in communication concerns, among other things, the so-called speech acts, including how (not) to express gratitude, how (not) to apologize, etc. Even advanced learners can often "import" automatically into a foreign language what they are used to using unconsciously in their native language. I would also add a shared sense of humor (or lack thereof) as part of cultural (in)competence.

This problem becomes complicated when we are fluent in a certain language both linguistically and culturally but feel that its culture is incompatible with us. I've found myself in this dilemma in at least two languages.

What "solution" have I found? I intentionally "violate" with full awareness those cultural norms in communication that I simply can't allow myself to follow, while speaking with no foreign (linguistic) accent.

I've even started to turn what might otherwise become an obstacle in communication into a playful "lubricant" in such a way that some native speakers may become aware of those cultural norms they have been following unconsciously. Once they realize these unconscious cultural norms of theirs, often including their absurdity, they laugh with me instead of my laughing at them.

Recently I've discovered something truly amazing and even consoling, at least for me. What really counts in heart-to-heart communication is neither linguistic competence nor cultural competence. What comes from our heart - with genuine care and/or curiosity - enters the heart of our interlocutor even when we are culturally incompatible with each other.

Now I suddenly recall that I've already experienced true heart-to-heart communication, where silence with action, such as hugging and offering help, can be far more eloquent in certain contexts where speech seems too powerless and totally out of place.

Skills and Habits from My Academic Life: "Recycled" vs. "Liberated"

When I left academia officially at the end of September 2020 and practically at the end of September 2018, I never imagined that I would be able to "recycle" in my post-academic life some of the skills and habits I seem to have acquired rather unconsciously during my almost 30-year-long life there. But to my pleasant surprise, I was wrong. ;-)

Though I concluded that academia was not for me, I didn't automatically reject all those 30 years there as just a long waste of time. But it was only after leaving academia that I realized clearly for the first time what skills and habits I had acquired - and suppressed.

Leaving academia meant, among other things, being able to study what truly interested me not only intellectually but also spiritually, first and foremost, from books. The skill - or meta-skill, to be more precise - of learning any new subject, at least in the humanities and for myself, from scratch has turned out to be especially handy.

Habits I acquired in academia unconsciously and have been "recycling" more consciously in my post-academic life include preferring the original to a translation, preferring primary sources to secondary interpretations, checking at least three primary sources and/or at least three secondary interpretations, cross-checking both primary sources and secondary interpretations, quoting others verbatim, and giving credit where credit is due, among others. These habits, which I may not have been able to acquire outside academia, have been enhancing both my input and output enormously in my post-academic life, too.

But there are also skills and habits I had to suppress while I was still in academia and could finally "liberate" after leaving it. One skill that I had to suppress consciously and "liberated" consciously concerns how to write. I could finally let go of the illusion of WYSIWYG and the "tyranny" of Word and switch to a plain text editor and Markdown for writing almost everything now. The difference between these two mindsets and tools is like that between swimming in a suit and tie and swimming in minimal swimwear.

Probably the most important habit I could "liberate" is preferring lived experience to conceptual understanding. One academic incident I experienced at the "threshold" of leaving academia made me realize the fundamental difference between lived experience and conceptual understanding in such a vivid way. It was also comical to me in that it was not comical to those who are still in academia. ;-)

Here is the story. After spending a year studying Chabad Chassidus as life wisdom at a special school in Jerusalem, I contacted one association of Jewish studies outside Israel, thinking that some members of this association might benefit from experiencing indirectly this rather rare direct experience of mine. I asked them to allow me to give a non-academic talk. But I was too naive. I received a letter of rejection that said, "Your proposal is not academic enough." ;-)

This and other similar observations of other researchers, first from inside, then from outside, have led me to let go of blind faith in my intellect, then blind faith that I have no blind faith. This, in turn, has led me to decide to continue working on one character trait as an indispensable tool for turning the unknown unknown into the known unknown, and hopefully into the known known in some cases.

So thank you, academia. ;-)