This week in people I love:

My father has been nominated to the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association, after 40 years of hard work in a hard, honorable business. To regurgitate some words from his acceptance speech for an award granted him a few years back:

For over thirty years we’ve been trying to live up to some simple principles: to conduct business with integrity and common sense; to treat our customers and booksellers with dignity and respect; to listen and respond to their concerns and ideas without compromising our own principles and standards; to provide the best literature, writing, & thinking of the ages and of our own age; to link past, present and future in constructive, instructive, even occasionally provocative, ways; to provide a meeting place for people interested in books and ideas.  Words matter, language matters, poems matter, stories matter, books matter—in myriad ways that I need not amplify to an audience of supporters of the literary arts.  We believed that then and do still, despite the various threats to such belief in a culture that too often seems to belittle, undervalue, undermine and consume it. We wish to further the dialogue and to be a part of it, independent, idiosyncratic, attentive, respectful, responsible, but never uncritical.  The honor given us tonight, and the resilient strength of the literary community here, both indicate that we’ve managed some of that well, that we didn’t overburden or unduly strain or otherwise contaminate that fertile soil in which we first took root.  Like good gardeners, we always strive to enrich it more than we exhaust it.

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I sat in a spellbound, whooping audience at the Annex Theatre Friday night, watching a piece of gorgeous dance theater called The Council that my boyfriend spent more than half a year producing text for and pouring so much of his soul into. It ran two nights but it was an enormous, sold-out success, and I feel inspired and graced to know so intimately the mind and heart responsible for a portion of that. The choreography, sound, dance, were also stunning.