littlek wrote:<bookmarking>
I have to read up and see what Dallas is like. I've never been there (not outside the airport, in any event).
It actually seemed much more cosmopolitan than I thought. The major setback for Dallas, confirming my prejudices, was that I couldn't a decent bookshop anywhere in downtown. At one point, I thought I had found one, and asked a very friendly staffer if they already had Paul Krugman's
Conscience of a Liberal. She gave me a wide-eyed perplexed look. Only then did I notice that I had run into a Bible bookshop, run by the adjacent Methodist Church.
That experience was unusual to me. When walking through San Francisco, New York, and Munich, I never could help running into a bookshop, whether I wanted to or not. (Google now says they have bookshops in Dallas's university district. Those intellek-chewalls just
have to read, don't they.)
Fort Worth, on the other hand, seemed to fit in the book-city category more familiar to me. It has a big, fat, Barnes&Noble, in a tastefully renovated old building (Not the B&N franchize look you see in malls), in the middle of the city, right across the Art Deco performance hall. Although
Conscience of a Liberal hadn't officially come out yet (A B&N salesperson in their Irving Mall branch checked the computer for me), the Fort Worth branch had it in their storage room, to be put in shelves on the 15th. When I told the salesperson I'd be back in Germany on the 15th, she went to the storage room, breaking the law I think, and brought me two copies -- one for me, one for my father who is also a Paul Krugman fan.
Fort Worth1, Dallas 0.
