Mercantile culture

I had in recent weeks been pondering -- in response to fallow real estate in downtown Roxboro, Dolly Parton's distribution of the 100 millionth book from her getting kids to read initiative and my mom's enthusiasm for it -- what it would look like to put something like a used book store -- lending library -- cafe -- study center on Main St in Roxboro. Not a shiny hipster coffee place like we saw in downtown Burlington, but a very basic production with an emphasis on encouraging kids to read and study. A safe space.

I thought momentarily about how nice it would be to get Jeff Bezos on board funding a scale up of this concept -- not unlike Carnegie's libraries back in the day. Bezos definitely needs to figure out what he is up to with his cash.

And I also thought about the risk, if such a space were established and use of it was contingent on a purchase of a coffee or something, that it would become just another place to hang out for a subset of affluent white kids. Which would defeat the purpose.

So you'd need to figure out some way to encourage the African-American and Latinx kids to come in there and use the space, and even hopefully get some of them to donate hours (eventually this kind of enterprise would require lots of donated time). But that then you'd run into the potential challenge of bridging a cultural divide often framed in terms of cultural dynamics and identities: white English vs. Ebonics, white norms of behavior and style, etc.

Which got me to wondering about the issue of mercantile culture and language, and whether anyone had studied it. To wit, did similar cultural norms of politesse and standardized modes of address evolve similarly around the world in different mercantile cultures (English, Dutch, Venetian, Hanseatic, Jewish, Han, etc) to facilitate commerce? In short, to what extent is what is perceived as culturally-determined in current debates actually more "structural" in origin than specific to a particular time and place?

Certainly I thought back to Greenblatt's The Swerve -- generally a shitty and overrated book, as I've probably said elsewhere -- where he talked about the origins of the expectation of quiet in libraries as a development within the culture of medieval monastic scribes. That idea has a certain romantic appeal, though I do wonder if the library at Alexandria was much really a great deal rowdier, as he half implies. It does seem like quiet is a pretty natural attribute of places where lots of reading happens, or at least relatively even white noise, as at a cafe or on a commuter train.

Which brings me to my joy, sitting here in Larchmont, at learning that this little burg has been rather forward-looking in its banning of leaf blowers, which might make it a mecca for readers and writers around the tri-state area, were it not so durned expensive.