This week, The Book Mark — the oldest bookstore in Toronto — has announced that it is closing its doors for good. The popular store has been in business for 46 years, but a stiff increase in rent and high property taxes are forcing The Book Mark to close.
Click on above link to read full story - an all too common event these days, the closing of another independent bookstore due to punitive rents, taxes and bureaucracy...
The health of independent artistic activity is a telling measure of a society's commitment to innovation and exploration. A society without independent artists and those who facilitate their work is a society rapidly on the way to atrophy and death. No society can move forward or innovate without independent creators, free of larger agendas and the influence of vested interests. For any deeper, more meaningful idea to find form and function and to eventually become mainstream and accessible to most people, it must first be conceived of and created as a prototype, whether a painting, a poem or some radical form of new energy - all of it must begin in the creator's mind as an independent artistic act. Everything else is just derivation and already in the past.
When a regime and its economic bureaucracy makes no distinction between an independent bookstore and some place selling shoes or beer or whatever - when the regime treats everything like everything else - and all efforts are judged by the same number of beans, that regime has nothing to offer its citizens but cultural, emotional and intellectual paralysis.
Now that I've been away from North America for a few months, it is fairly clear how sclerotic that society has become - where no enterprise can be conceived of and created in any commercial or non-commercial sense without a financial institution or government agency providing financial support and bureaucratic approval.
Here in southeast Asia, creativity is flourishing at a breakneck pace. The societies are dynamic and fluid, red tape is either non-existent or completely adaptable. A young Western woman here in Thailand found all avenues of opportunity blocked in her home country so decided to start a regional English-language magazine with very little money. She rented a cheap office, got a couple of used laptops, networked like mad with writers, designers, printers, advertisers, distributors and within not many months has CREATED a powerful hub of activity that is cross-pollinating at a phenomenal rate, with ripples going out in all directions. And she is the tip of an iceberg. As far as I can see, for many artists and entrepreneurs the West, with all its power and influence, has priced itself out of the market. And as the non-Western world grows, the West will also lose it's importance as a market.
As a writer who wants to be read, it may be more feasible for me to work toward being published in India - the world's largest English language book market by far - and never even be heard of in the West, yet still develop enough of a readership to earn a viable living.
If the people who ran The Bookmark want my unsolicited advice; Forget Toronto and the West. You and your efforts are not welcome nor appreciated there. It is easy enough to find cities in Asia or Latin America or Africa with large English speaking expatriate communities who lust for a good bookstore - not only as a place to buy books, but as a hub of creative interactivity. And all they would need to service this ready clientele is renting a cheap space, putting up a shingle and stocking the shelves. Everything else is open to negotiation.
