Previously on The New Normal: "Having had to rapidly shutdown their businesses as coronavirus hit, booksellers scrambled out of their physical bookshops. Many furloughed staff and closed. Others set up skeleton online operations in the back room--or from home--corralling uncertain supply chains, ad hoc online ordering and home deliveries."
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| Next Page Books, Cedar Rapids, Iowa: "The more committed we are now, the sooner we’ll move on to the next 'new normal,' and small businesses can reclaim their 'essential' status." | |
On the next episode: "Finally, prepare for re-entry. Lockdown may end in a week or three months. We may have to endure further lockdowns, so get prepared for a new normal. This is--quite frankly--unnerving, even terrifying. It will require courage and a willingness to try new things." (via the Bookseller)
If it feels like we're living in a present- rather than pre- or post-apocalyptic book/film/series, maybe it's because we kind of are, and that phrase "new normal" drives the plot. Forbes magazine seems particularly obsessed, but it crops up everywhere ("Europe Tiptoes Toward New Normal as Spain Keeps Schools Shut"; "Masks, temperature checks mark 'new normal' at restaurants").
Is right now, which seems like present abnormal, really the new normal? The phrase has certainly proven to be a useful buoy in dangerous waters:
- "For nonprofit bookstore Dog Ears Bookstore and Café, delivering books to peoples' homes has become the new normal." (WKBW Buffalo)
- "Rainy Day Books' new normal is faster paced and filled with late nights of organizing and readying books for shipment." (Kansas City Business Journal)
- "There's never been a better time to give back to the community than right now," said [A Novel Idea Bookstore owner Cinnamon] Dokken. "We're all adjusting to the new normal...." (Lincoln Journal Star)
- Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan is "trying to imagine what the stores will look like 'after the new normal kicks in. Retail is getting hurt as hard or worse than anything else.... It's a very difficult nut to crack. I'm very confident that Books & Books will survive this, but it'll be a rough, rough, rough period." (boca magazine)
- Book and record stores "are considered 'non-essential' businesses in the context of a pandemic stay-at-home order, and that's appropriate. But these labors of love are essential to any city's soul, to its texture. They're essential to any city I want to live in when we return to whatever our new normal will be." (Daily Memphian)
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| White Birch Books, North Conway, N.H.: "Basically, our new normal is still normal." | |
Our fierce attachment to normal seems to be a necessary coping mechanism. Lately, my new normal is learning something about our industry every day I did not expect to encounter. More than ever, it seems like you can't step into the same normal book biz river twice.
In Forbes, Josie Cox observed: "Pedants might be quick to point out that it's simply a paradox. If something is new, can it really be considered totally normal? And can normal things be brand new? Perhaps more fundamentally, the phrase assumes there's such a thing as normal in the first place--a sort of blanket status quo: parameters outside of which everything is a bit strange."
That's where things get confusing. "The new normal, in other words, changes what was wrong but keeps what was right with the old normal," Brandon Ambrosino wrote for BBC. "But if the old normal was wrong, then why did we call it normal? Similarly, if the new normal is different from the old one, how can we pretend we're still dealing with 'normal?' What does 'normal' really mean, anyway?"
Is your head spinning yet? Don't worry. That's just the new normal.
Maybe we should call this era the after-normal. I stole that one from The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet by Nicole Walker and David Carlin (Rose Metal Press), an intriguing conversation in book form.
"The catastrophe has already occurred; we must remember that. The catastrophe occurred a long time ago," Carlin writes. "The catastrophe occurred this morning and it will occur this afternoon and it will go on occurring for another hundred thousand years. Give or take."
So, is that normal, new normal, after-normal? Carlin also notes that "there are a lot of people in the world working hard to make the now better. People with something small and fragile they are making to survive or help others survive: something they are trying to make, stumbling over, worrying at, in the now."
In a recent q&a, Oregon ArtsWatch asked Sylla McClellan, owner of Third Street Books in McMinnville, if she had anything special planned "for when you finally open up like normal? Or will there be a new normal?"
She replied: "Nothing planned, but I dream of Third Street being closed to traffic and people just wandering around eating, drinking, laughing. Live music is playing somewhere, shops are open late, and everyone is relaxed and happy to see each other again. That probably won't happen, but one can dream!"
Welcome to the after-normal.