Tag Archives: New York City

Hey Ho for the Open Road – – –

Posted on by
6

Since moving to the U.S. I’ve had many a long road trip. Coming from a country where the opposite coast could be accessed by a  2-hour drive (but the trip required packets of sandwiches, a thermos flask of coffee, and other emergency supplies) you can imagine how I’ve adapted to a place where 7 or 8 hours is the norm!

Usually Wendy and I do these long trips together and she does most of the driving. In a couple of weeks, though, I head off solo to Colorado to attend the annual PVS conference (Prison Visitation and Support, and by the way thank you for all those postcards).

Wendy was originally slated to go with me and visit with old friends who recently moved to Pueblo, so she organized a couple of book gigs along the way: LuAnn Locke’s Afterwords in Edwardsville, Illinois and in Wichita, Kansas at Al’s Old and New Book Store, managed by Anita Siemer. And we’d hoped to meet Hilda, owner of BookMedley, who helped arrange the KS gig.

And then—-

Unable to find someone to mind the shop in rapid succession over four road trips (we have the Southern Festival of the Book this weekend and a trip to NYC in November to see Wendy’s agent and visit Word Up Bookstore) not to mention the small matter of finding time to write her new book, and the brand new cafe upstairs in our bookstore, forced Wendy to call off. So it’s over to me.

My first big US road-trip solo! 8 hours on Tuesday to LuAnn, 7 1/2 hours on Wednesday to Anita, and 6 hours on Thursday. Then the whole thing backwards in a straight shot homeward, no stops, when the conference finishes on Sunday.

I suppose my biggest worry is navigating through the cities to find the bookstores and the conference hotel. Talking with the book clubs and guests at bookstore events is fun. Wendy wrote the book, but we both lived it, and over the months we’ve been doing events patterns of questions have emerged, yet pleasant and surprising insights as well.

Then as soon as I get back we prepare for New York, but that will be (at least partly) a train ride. And we will get to visit with last year’s live-in shopsitter, Andrew “perfect” Whalen, who promises to show us a good time in Brooklyn.

Should we be afraid, do you think?

Meanwhile, I have nothing to fear but the drive itself. I used to think, when a little boy, that the annual summer holiday trip from Dunfermline to Aberdour (about 15 miles) was a long journey and a real adventure. We took a break halfway at Otterson Loch–in the words of the famous old ballad: Half Ower, Half Ower, tae Aberdour–where I’d catch minnows and put them in a jar.

That was then, this is now! I’ll settle for finding the hotel.

Editor’s note: Wendy would like to mention that Jack may not be worried, but she is. He keeps telling customers that he’s driving to “Arizona.” She has pointed out several times that Colorado is a different place, but Jack just waves his hand. “Pshaw, it’s out west someplace, and it’s all America, isn’t it?” {sigh}

Firmin

Posted on by
4

My agent, Pamela, recommended a book to me awhile back: Firmin, by Sam Savage. The short version is, it’s about a rat who learns to read and lives first in a bookshop, then with a writer.

Pamela, who knows me pretty well, said she thought I’d enjoy the “post-modern ironic opening scene” of a mother rat ripping up an encyclopedia to make a word-lined nest for her infants.

This book is not unlike a rat’s nest: layers inside circles within layers. firmin

Firmin, the rat hero of this tale, grows up literate and confused; self-aware but not all that savvy, he finds out the hard way that humans assume he’s either vermin, or a cute fuzzy thing with pink toes and big eyes. (In a moment of pure speculation, I am assuming that’s how Monsieur Savage came up with his name: adorable fur, nasty critter, Fir-min.)

But deep down Firmin longs to be accepted, to be loved by the bookshop owner in whose place he squats, then appreciated as an intellectual equal by his writer, who gives him a home as his pet. The scene where Jerry (the writer) takes Firmin to see Old Yeller–or was it The Yearling?–is hysterical, but like all good humor it stems from pain, because Firmin’s been watching porn at that theatre all his life. Yet he mugs for Jerry, pretending to be frightened of the animals onscreen in a way that makes his “owner” laugh, while internally writing a scathing review of the film’s oversentimentality and other shortcomings.

This is on the one hand a complicated book, and on the other a simple one, depending on which layer one pays more attention to at any given moment. A neighborhood is being destroyed, its small shops giving way to urban planning (ironically enough, to get rid of the “vermin” among other civic-spun reasons). The bookseller who–in frustration at losing his shop– gives away his books one step ahead of the bulldozers is based on someone Sam Savage actually knew.

I don’t know that I can write–that I have written here–a review of Firmin; what I can tell you is that I loved it, and enjoyed it (two different things) and learned from it.

And I can tell you that one of the women who now works at Malaprop’s (the grandmother of Southern independent bookstores) was an intern at the publishing house where Firmin came as a submission, and that her desk was one wall over from the acquisitions editor who read it. She remembers hearing “laughing and crying and ‘Oh s^^^’s coming through the wall, as the editor read it.”

I can see why.