The worker as artist, the artist as worker

The lights are out at Glenwood Coffee & Books, as they are on most afternoons, and the door is wide open when the weather permits. On Wednesdays they don’t use any electricity at all, the kind of quietly subversive act for which the store’s proprietor, Al Brilliant, has become known.

Gabe Barboza, a partner in the enterprise, pecks away at an IBM Selectric typewriter by the sunlit window: a poem, one he will eventually commit to newsprint which will then be hand bound by Rosemary Sandifer, the third principal, with cardboard and a needle and thread.

They’ll make 100 of them, put them on the shelves with the scholarly and whimsical tomes of Brilliant’s extended humanities collection, everything from Vonnegut to Voltaire, and sell them for a buck apiece under the banner of Lumpish Press.

Barboza spells out the deal.

“All books are a dollar,” he says. “All books are on newsprint. All books are hand-sewn instead of glued. And we love unauthorized art and unauthorized behavior.”

It began as a discussion at the bookstore, of course. Barboza dropped out of college to follow the path of the autodidact, taking his knowledge from Brilliant’s collection of books and from life itself.

“I don’t think I have any right to tell someone not to get an MFA,” he says now. “What I do think, and what Lumpish Press thinks, is that artists should be artists, teachers should be teachers, and students should be students.

“Can you teach art?” he asks the room, and Brilliant, from an easy chair by the stacks, chimes in.

“I don’t know what that means,” he says.