Roy Miller's Blog, page 235
March 25, 2017
On the Trail With a Biographer Bringing Lost Lives to Light
With a preternatural gift for place, Holmes qualifies as a virtuosic landscape painter. He has also regularly joined his subject on the page, an outgrowth, he reveals in his new book, “This Long Pursuit,” of his double-entry notation system. On one side of his notebook he documents his research. On the other he delivers his impressions. Empathy — “the biographer’s most valuable but perilous weapon” — joins the two. For Holmes, biography truly is an affaire de coeur. He measures his life in those doubly accounted descriptions. Fifteen years with the cyclone that was Coleridge equals 30 notebooks for 900 pages, or two volumes, of biography.
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Robert Louis Stevenson, circa 1885.
Credit
Adoc-Photos/Corbis, via Getty Images
Holmes bought his first notebook for Stevenson; it is today one of nearly 200. Which leads him to reflect a little on what he has learned since that summer in the Cévennes. He has been down this discursive path before. With “Footsteps” he began what has turned into a cycle of works by a “Romantic biographer,” shapely nonfiction stories about lives and the art of writing them. He billed “Sidetracks,” his second, as a “personal casebook” or a sort of “sentimental education.” With “This Long Pursuit” he completes the trilogy. Holmes sees his new volume as a “declaration of faith,” though it is as much a book of parables. It includes as well his 10 tongue-in-cheek commandments. In his ninth Holmes prescribes an immodest pride in biography, an English gift to the world on a par with cricket and the full-cooked breakfast. With his 10th he advocates humility, as “we can never know, or write, the Last Word about the Human Heart.” The master admits, after all these years, that he remains mystified by his elusive art.
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While Holmes divides his essays into sections, each can be read as a riff on Virginia Woolf’s sly observation that the actual length of a person’s life is open to dispute. Lives don’t necessarily end on deathbeds after all. Biographically speaking, Holmes points out, the dead are immortal, the more so if you acknowledge the essential open-endedness of the exercise. Documents surface. Memories fail. In an especially loose-limbed chapter he takes his uncertainty out for a stroll, reflecting back to that seminal summer. On arrival in the south of France, he meets Monsieur Hugues in his field. Holmes can still see the cap, the belt buckle, the red-checked handkerchief with which the farmer swabbed his face. Or was that someone else’s handkerchief? Fifty years on, Holmes attempts to return it to its rightful owner. He will not succeed, though he will carry us off on a free-associative trek toward the physiology of memory, ultimately connecting the immortal madeleine of 1913 with an electrifying olfactory summons that predated it, from “The Wind in the Willows.”
Holmes devotes a third of his pages to a group of quiet revolutionaries; he has a soft spot for clever, rebellious, freethinking women. Throughout he remains true to the “reflections” of his subtitle: The biographer stays in the picture, a reminder of how history comes down to us and how it is shaped in the process. So we get a discussion of Geoffrey Scott’s 1925 classic “The Portrait of Zélide,” in which the unnervingly modern 18th-century writer and composer takes a back seat to Scott’s exhumation of her. A young architectural historian, Scott stumbled on Zélide more than a century after her death. Rakish biographer overidentified with rakish subject; Scott made her story a version of his own. He also took to seeing her everywhere. He would assure no fewer than four women — Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West among them — that each was Zélide, lightly disguised.
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Margaret CavendishCredit
Bettmann/Getty Images
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Holmes does not so much resurrect five highly original women as explore how and why they have confounded (seduced, traduced and plainly exhausted) their chroniclers. He can’t really answer the question of why Madame de Staël isn’t better remembered today — is it possible that with all the caffeine, the lovers, the travel, the talk, the turbans, she simply wears us out? — but he does arrive at some essential wisdoms. Among his scientific heroines is Margaret Cavendish, the polemicist, poet and cross-dressing naturalist, a woman Woolf described as “quixotic and high-spirited, as well as crackbrained and bird-witted.” So she may have been, though she leads Holmes to note something about exclusion, in this case about women at the edges of the scientific establishment: “Observing from the outside, they saw the inside more clearly.”
He is particularly eloquent about Shelley, with whom he has lived intermittently for decades and who met his end in an 1822 shipwreck. In Holmes’s 1974 biography, Shelley never exactly died: The waves close in as a storm gusts ominously over the Gulf of Spezia. A page later the body washes up, difficult to identify but for the white silk socks and the bundle of poems in the jacket pocket. One might assume Holmes circumnavigated the actual drowning as others had stalled there; Shelley’s tragic end was rewritten so many times that it loomed, in Holmes’s phrase, like “some sinister biographical coral reef.” In truth he did not detour on account of that reef. Holmes simply could not bear the gruesome scene. He suspects that some “subliminal identification” arose when it came to drowning Shelley. Both men were 29 at the time.
Holmes has noted that biography begins “in passionate curiosity.” No one knows where it ends, if only because it never does; it is impressionistic, elastic, closer to archaeology than to sculpture. The shapes shift and the view clears as the path suddenly veers to the left. The emphasis in his title is decidedly on its final word; the closer we get, the more a subject shimmers from our grasp. “They are always in motion,” Holmes has wistfully observed, “carrying their past lives over into the future.” The biographer alone remains fixed in time, his shadow bending across the page. Sometimes a glint of moonlight plays around the edges.
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Monthly StatShot, October 2016
Sales of adult trade books fell 13.1% in October 2016 compared to the same month in 2015, while sales in the children’s/young adult segment rose 1.9%, according to figures released by the AAP as part of its StatShot program. The decline in adult trade was led by a 24.1% drop in hardcover sales, and there was also a 21% decline in mass market paperback. Sales of digital audiobooks rose 7.6% in the month, and e-book sales were up 2.6%. For the first 10 months of 2016, sales in the adult trade category were down 3.2% compared to the same period a year ago. The 1.9% increase in the children’s/young adult category was led by a 14.4% gain in board book sales plus a 4.2% rise in paperback. Hardcover sales fell 1.8% compared to a year earlier, and e-book sales were off 17.7%. Total sales of the 1,207 publishers that report to the AAP fell 9.3% in October and were down 6.4% in the year-to-date.
Category
Change Oct
YTD
Adult Hard
-24.1%
-7.0%
Adult Paper
0.1%
7.4%
Mass Market
-21.0%
0.5%
Physical Audio
-31.9%
-13.9%
Audio Download
7.6%
26.9%
Adult E-book
2.6%
-15.4%
Children’s/YA
1.9%
4.4%
Religious Presses
12.0%
7.0%
Professional
-21.7%
-21.5%
K–12 Materials
-24.0%
-8.6%
Higher Ed.
25.1%
-11.4%
University Presses
3.5%
-3.8%
(Comparisons of $ sales against same periods in 2015)
A version of this article appeared in the 03/27/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Monthly StatShot, October
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Letters to the Editor – The New York Times
NICOLAUS MILLS
BRONXVILLE, N.Y.
The writer is chairman of the department of literature at Sarah Lawrence College.
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‘Divided We Stand’
To the Editor:
In recent years, dozens of limitations on abortion rights were passed by a majority of states, while Planned Parenthood was severely attacked. Unfortunately, Gillian Thomas’s review of Marjorie J. Spruill’s “Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics” (March 12) gives no context for the successful rightist war on women. That context is the sharp decrease in democratic traits. In 1980, there were 13 billionaires in the United States; in 2016, there were 540. In 1965, the income ratio of C.E.O.s of the top 350 firms to that of their workers was 20 to one. By 2014, it had mushroomed to 296 to one. Nearly one-third of workers were unionized in the 1960s, but only some 10 percent are so today.
The attack on democracy was led by the rule of money, the war on labor unions, voter suppression — and the war on women. The most democratic countries (the Nordic ones), in contrast, had the strongest labor unions and the best women’s rights. Democracy, but not oligarchy, needs strong women’s rights.
ROGER CARASSO
SANTA FE, N.M.
The writer is a professor emeritus of political science at California State University, Northridge.
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Dane Ways
To the Editor:
Thanks to Judith Newman for a great column (Help Desk, Feb. 26). I am not alone in my obsession with lighting; having a guest bed; drinking tea and coffee at certain times during the day; and always having soft covers and sweaters around. I might have to move to Denmark. Fortunately, I got old and don’t have to work anymore, so I can indulge in my hygge needs most of the time. As you can imagine, I don’t get much else done.
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CYNTHIA CADDELL
COLLINGSWOOD, N.J.
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After The Royals
To the Editor:
In his review of “Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, Russia, 1917 — A World on the Edge,” by Helen Rappaport (Feb. 26), Owen Matthews goes in a few lines from Alexander Kerensky to the efforts to “prevent the Bolshevik Revolution.” Kerensky was a leader of the February 1917 revolution, becoming the chairman of the Socialist provisional government of Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution ousted him in October (November, New Style) 1917, resulting in a Communist government under Vladimir Lenin. The review is not inaccurate, but how many readers today know that Lenin overthrew a democratic government, not that of imperial Russia?
JEROME F. WEBER
UTICA, N.Y.
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A Proust Solution
To the Editor:
Lisa Brown’s graphic rendition of how to read Proust (Sketchbook, March 5) is hilarious.
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It took me six months and every ounce of determination I could locate, borrow or steal to get through his prose. It was tantamount to slogging through a brier patch in a submarine.
If anyone really wants to find out how to fill a whole page with one sentence, Proust is the master, but I highly recommend Brown’s method, especially No. 5, “Stop caring about Proust.”
N. CANAAN
BEACON, N.Y.
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The Book Review wants to hear from readers. Letters for publication should include the writer’s name, address and telephone number. Please address them to books@nytimes or to The Editor, The New York Times Book Review, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Comments may also be posted on the Book Review’s Facebook page .
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Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We regret that we are unable to acknowledge letters.
Information about subscriptions and submitting books for review may be found here .
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Spaceman of Bohemia | Literary Hub
The following is from Jaroslav Kalfar’s novel, Spaceman of Bohemia. Kalfar was born and raised in Prague, Czech Republic, and immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. He earned an MFA at New York University, where he was a Goldwater Fellow and a nominee for the inaugural E. L. Doctorow Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn. This is his first novel.
The Losing Side
My name is Jakub Procházka. This is a common name. My parents wanted a simple life for me, a life of good comradeship with my country and my neighbors, a life of service to a world united in socialism. Then the Iron Curtain tumbled with a dull thud and the bogeyman invaded my country with his consumer love and free markets.
Before I became an astronaut, the bogeyman and his new apostles asked if I’d like to change my name to something more exotic. More Western. Something befitting a hero.
I refused. I kept it as it was: common, simple.
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* * * *
Spring of 2018. On a warm April afternoon, the eyes of the Czech nation gazed from Petrˇín Hill as space shuttle JanHus1 launched from a state-owned potato field. The Czech Philharmonic Orchestra wafted the national hymn between the city’s Gothic towers, accompanying the countdown until, finally, the crowd gasped as the shuttle sucked and burned its cryogenic propellant and exploded upwards, all nine million kilograms of it, give or take the eighty kilograms of its single human inhabitant.
In a flash, JanHus1 branded the hundred spires of the city with a dove-like stencil. Citizens and tourists alike followed the shuttle on its spherical climb until at last it vanished in the sunrays, reduced to a shadow captured by a few sharpshooting camera lenses. Leaving the vessel to its new fate in the heavens, the chattering citizens then descended Petrˇín Hill to quench their thirst for beer.
I witnessed my nation’s triumph on a flickering, soundless monitor. It took about an hour to get used to the vibrations of the seat savagely bruising my buttocks. One of the chest constraints had cut through my suit and into my areola, and I could not ease its grip. The launch chamber in which I sat was the size of a broom closet, a collection of phosphorescent screens, anorexic panels, and the spaceman’s throne. The machinery around me, unaware of its own existence, quietly carried me away from home, indifferent to my discomfort. My hands shook.
I had refused to drink water before the launch, despite the insistence of my handlers. My ascent was the fulfillment of an impossible dream, a spiritual experience that could not be matched. The purity of my mission would not be stained by such an undignified gesture of humanity as urine making its way into my Maximal Absorption Garment. On the screen before me, my people waved flags, clutched sweating bottles of Staropramen, traded koruna bills for plastic shuttles and spaceman figurines. I searched for the face of my wife, Lenka, hoping to catch one last glimpse of her sorrow, a reassurance that I was loved and feared for, and that our marriage could withstand my eight months of absence, or worse. Never mind that my throat was parched, that my tongue scraped along the rough flesh of my gums, that the muscles in my body tensed and cramped as every basic comfort of human existence disappeared mile by mile, sliced away by the layers of atmospheric divisions. I owned these moments of history. Schoolchildren would repeat my name for centuries to come, and a sculpture of my likeness would inevitably join the lineup at Prague’s wax museum. Already the billboards littering the horizons of Bohemia displayed my face looking upwards with practical gusto. Gossip magazines had suggested that I kept four mistresses and struggled with a gambling problem. Or that the mission was fake and I was merely a computer-generated image voiced by an actor.
Dr. Kurˇák, my state-appointed therapist, had insisted that my launch would be filled with pure terror—a lone human being traveling to the unknown, living at the mercy of technology, indifferent and silent. I did not like Dr. Kurˇák. He stunk of pickles and was a pessimist disguising himself as a man with experience. He had been in charge of preparing my fragile psychology for the mission, but mostly he had taken notes on my fears (food poisoning; caterpillars; the existence of life after death, as in the possibility that life could not be escaped) with a ferocity that suggested he hoped to pen my official biography. He had recommended that during my ascent I consume my favorite childhood candies (Tatranky, layered wafers dipped in chocolate, which I’d stashed in the compartment to my left) and ponder my scientific duties to the world, the immense privilege I was honored with, to bring the Czechs their greatest discoveries since Jan Evangelista Purkyneˇ had recognized the individuality of fingerprints, or perhaps since Otto Wichterle had invented the soft contact lens. My imagination embraced these ego arousals, and into the silence of the chamber I began to whisper my Nobel Prize acceptance speech, until my thirst became unbearable. I violated my resolve and pressed the H2O switch, and the liquid flowed from the container underneath my seat to a straw attached to my shoulder. I was subject to my own physicality, a dwarf climbing a beanstalk to arm-wrestle the colossus, a cellular structure of banal needs for oxygen, for water, for the release of waste. Banish the dark thoughts, drink your water, I whispered as shots of adrenaline sharpened my senses and dulled the aches of my body.
Nearly a year and a half ago, a previously undiscovered comet had entered the Milky Way from the Canis Major galaxy and swept our solar system with a sandstorm of intergalactic cosmic dust. A cloud had formed between Venus and Earth, an unprecedented phenomenon named Chopra by its discoverers in New Delhi, and bathed Earth’s nights in purple zodiacal light, altering the sky we had known since the birth of man. The color of the nighttime universe as observed from Earth was no longer black, and the cloud rested, perfectly static. It posed no immediate danger, but its stoic behavior tantalized our imaginations with dreadful possibilities. Nations scrambled to plan missions that would allow them to capture the particles of the mysterious Chopra and study these microscopic pieces of worlds beyond our own for chemistry and signs of life. Four unmanned shuttles had been sent to test Chopra’s qualities and to carry samples back to Earth, but the probes had returned with empty bellies and no useful data, as if the cloud were a fata morgana, a collective dream of billions.
The next step was inevitable. We could not trust machines with the mission. A remote-controlled shuttle transporting German chimpanzee Gregor was dispatched to fly through the cloud and ensure that, with adequate protection, a human inhabitant could survive within Chopra long enough to observe and analyze samples manually.
Gregor had returned to his laboratory cage unharmed just as a new behavior was observed in the cloud: it began to consume itself, the mass of its outer layers dissipating and vanishing inside the thicker core. Some spoke of antimatter, others assigned the cloud organic properties. The media offered speculations—which of the world’s governments would be brazen enough to send humans four months from Earth, toward a cosmic dust cloud of unknown and potentially lethal particles? Whispers, nothing but whispers from the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, even the Germans, who had declared themselves the most serious about Chopra, given their offering of Gregor.
At last, an announcement came from a country of ten million, my country, the lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. The Czechs would fly to Chopra and claim the mysteries it held. I would be their champion, the one to bring home the fanfare of scientific glory. In the words of a poet drunk on absinthe, reprinted in every major newspaper the next day: “With JanHus1 lie our hopes of new sovereignty and prosperity, for we are now among the explorers of the universe. We look away from our past, in which we were claimed by others, in which our language was nearly eradicated, in which Europe covered its eyes and ears as its very heart was stolen and brutalized. It is not only our science and technology traveling through this vacuum; it is our humanity, in the form of Jakub Procházka, the first spaceman of Bohemia, who will carry the soul of the republic to the stars. Today, we finally and absolutely claim ourselves as our own.”
As I prepared for the mission, my daily routines became public property. The street in front of the apartment building where Lenka and I lived was so littered with media vans, snacking journalists, photographers situating their elbows on cars like snipers, stray children looking for autographs, and general onlookers that the police had to put up barricades and redirect traffic. Gone were my lone walks around town, the quiet contemplation of which apple to choose at the market. I had been assigned a posse that trailed me everywhere, for safety (already unhinged letters from fans and would-be lovers had flooded in) and assistance—helpers for grocery shopping, for fixing stray hairs on my head, for speaking. It wasn’t long until I couldn’t wait to leave Earth and, again, enjoy the simple luxury of solitude. Silence.
Now the silence was another unwelcome noise. I opened the snack compartment and bit into the Tatranky wafer. Too dry, a bit stale, tasting nothing like the childhood peace it was supposed to evoke. I needed to be elsewhere, in the comfort of a time I could understand, the life that had brought me to JanHus1. Existence runs on energy, a fluid movement forward, yet we never stop seeking the point of origin, the Big Bang that set us upon our inevitable course. I turned off the monitor broadcasting my nation’s festivities and closed my eyes. Somewhere in the deep circles of time colliding with memory, a clock ticked and tocked.
* * * *
My Big Bang occurs in the winter of 1989 in a village called Strˇeda. The leaves of the linden tree have fallen and rotted, and those uncollected have spread their brown mash across the fading grass stems. It is the morning of the Killing, and I sit in my grandparents’ apple-scented living room, etching the image of Louda the pig in my sketchbook. My grandfather rubs the blade of his killing knife on the oval sharpener, taking a break here and there to bite into a thick slice of bread covered in lard. My grandmother waters her plants—the massive foliage of purple, red, and green surrounding every window—while whistling to the rhythm of a ticking clock. Below the clock hangs a black-and-white picture of my father as a schoolboy, smiling widely, the expression so earnest and unguarded, a smile I’ve never seen on his adult face. Šíma, our fat cocker spaniel, sleeps beside me, breathing hotly, reassuringly, onto the side of my calf.
This is the slow, silent world of a small village hours before the Velvet Revolution. A world in which my parents are still alive. In my near future awaits freshly cooked goulash, pigs’ feet with homemade horseradish, and capitalism. My grandfather has banned us from turning on the radio. The Killing Day is his day. He has been lovingly feeding his swine, Louda, with a mixture of potatoes, water, and bulgur every morning and afternoon, scratching the animal behind the ear and grabbing fistfuls of his fatty sides, grinning. Louda is so fat he will burst if we don’t kill him today, he says. Politics can wait.
This living room, this fireplace warmth, these rhythms of song, blade, dog, pencil, growling stomachs—perhaps somewhere around here a spontaneous release of energy occurred, sealing my fate as a spaceman.
My parents arrive from Prague at two o’clock. They are late because my father stopped by a field of daisies to pick a few for my mother. Even in an old blue parka and a pair of my father’s sweatpants, my mother looks like one of the redheaded, milk-skinned actresses who play comrade damsels on TV, replete with the look of strong femininity and fierce dedication to the Party. Father’s whiskers are grown out more than I’m used to because he no longer has to shave for work. He is skinny, his eyes are puffy from the slivovitz he has been drinking before bed. Over forty of the neighbors gather, along with the village butcher who will help Grandpa with the slaughter. My father avoids eye contact with the neighbors, who aren’t familiar with his line of work. If they find out he is a collaborator, a member of the Party’s secret police, they will abandon my grandfather, my grandmother, they will spit on our family name. Not publicly, but with the quiet hostility born from fear and distrust of the regime. This revolution speaks against everything my father stands for. The neighbors are nervous with their hunger for change, while my father blows smoke through his pale lips, knowing that the same change would put him on the wrong side of history.
The yard is long and narrow, lined on one side by my grandparents’ house and on the other by a towering wall of the next-door cobbler shop. On any other day it is littered with cigarette butts and Grandma’s gardening tools, but on the day of the Killing, the dirt and patches of grass are swept clean. The garden and sty are separated from the yard by a tall fence, creating an arena, a Colosseum for my grandfather’s last dance with Louda. We form a circle around the yard with an opening for Louda’s entry. At five o’clock, Grandpa releases Louda from his pen and slaps him on the ass. As the pig runs around the yard, excitedly sniffing our feet and chasing a stray cat, Grandpa loads his flintlock pistol with gunpowder and a lead ball. I say good-bye to Louda, who’s growing tired and slow, by patting him on the nose before Grandpa drags him to the middle of the circle and knocks him on the side with his boot. He puts the gun behind Louda’s ear and the ball cracks through the skin, the flesh, the cranium. The pig’s legs are still twitching when Grandpa cuts the throat open and holds a bucket underneath to collect the blood for soup and sausage. A few feet away, the butcher and the village men build a scaffold with a hook, and pour boiling water into an industrial tub. My father frowns and lights a cigarette. He isn’t fond of the animal-killing business. Barbaric, he would say, to harm animals just going about their existence on this earth. People are the real bastards. My mother would tell him to stop putting such things into my head, and besides, he isn’t exactly a vegetarian, is he?
The bristly hairs fall off Louda’s pink body inside the tub. We hang him from the hook by the legs and slice down the middle, groin to chin. We peel off skin, carve bacon, boil the head. My father checks his watch and walks inside the house. Through the window, I watch my mother watching him speak on the phone. No, not speak. Listen. He listens and he hangs up.
In Prague, five hundred thousand protesters flood the streets. Broken riot shields and bricks line their path. The ringing of keys and bells overshadows the radio announcements. The time for words has come and gone—what exists now is noise. The chaos of it, the release. Time for a new disorder. The Soviet occupation of the country, the puppet government backed by Moscow, all collapsing as the country’s people call for freedoms of the West. To hell with these parasitic, ungrateful fucks, the Party leadership declares. Let the imperialists take them straight to hell.
We boil Louda’s tongue. I pierce cubes of it with a knife and bring it to my mouth, hot, fatty, delicious. Grandpa cleans the pig’s intestines with vinegar and water. This year, I am given the honor of the grinder—I stuff the sliced chin, liver, lungs, brisket, and bread into a hopper plate and push down while I turn the lever. Grandpa scoops the mash and stuffs it inside the cleaned intestines. He is the only man in the village who still makes jitrnice with his hands instead of using a machine. The neighbors wait patiently for these party favors to be done. As soon as Grandma divides them into packages, still steaming, the guests begin to leave, much earlier than usual, and half of them are not even close to drunk. They are eager to get back to their televisions and radios, to see about the events in Prague. Šíma begs for scraps and I allow him to lick lard off my finger. My mother and grandmother take the meat inside to bag it and freeze it, while my father sits on the couch, looks out the window, smokes cigarettes. I walk inside to enjoy the sharp scent of dinner goulash.
“Too soon to tell,” my mother says.
“So many people, Markéta. The Party wanted to send the militia out to disperse them, but Moscow said no. You know what that means? It means we’re not fighting. The Red Army isn’t behind us anymore. We’re done. We should stay in the village, safe from the mobs.”
I go back outside to see Grandpa, who places a wheelbarrow in the middle of the yard. He loads it with dry logs and uses them to make a small fire. The dirt underneath our feet is soggy with organ blood. We slice bread and toast it to go with dinner as the sun sets.
“I wish Dad would talk to me,” I say.
“The last time I saw this expression on his face was when he was a kid and a dog bit his hand.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Don’t tell your father, Jakub, but this is not bad.”
“So the Party will lose?”
“It’s time for the Party to leave. Time for something new.”
“But then we will be imperialists?”
He laughs. “I suppose so.”
Above the trees lining our gate, a clear horizon of stars blankets our view, so much clearer when not obscured by Prague’s street lamps. Grandpa hands me a slice of bread with a burnt edge, and I accept it between my lips, feeling like a man on television. People on television eat slowly when faced with a new reality. Perhaps it is here that a pocket of new energy bursts through the firm walls of physics and singles out a life so unlikely. Perhaps here I lose the hope for an ordinary Earthling life. I finish the bread. It is time to go inside and hear my father’s silence.
“Twenty years from now, you will call yourself a child of the revolution,” Grandpa says as he turns his back to me and urinates into the fire.
As is usually the case, he is right. What he doesn’t tell me then, perhaps out of love, perhaps out of a painful naïveté, is that I am a child of the losing side.
* * * *
Or perhaps not. Despite the discomfort of my spaceman’s throne, despite the fear, I was prepared. I served science, but I felt more like a daredevil on his dirt bike, overlooking the powerful gap of the world’s greatest canyon, praying to all gods in all languages before making the leap for death, glory, or both. I served science, not the memory of a father whose idea of the world had crumbled over the Velvet Winter; not the memory of pig’s blood upon my shoes. I would not fail.
I slapped the Tatranky crumbs from my lap. The Earth was black and golden, its lights spreading across the continents like never-ceasing pebbles of mitosis, pausing abruptly to give reign to the uncontested dominion of dark oceans. The world had dimmed and the crumbs began to float. I had ascended the phenomenon we call Earth.
Excerpted from the book SPACEMAN OF BOHEMIA by Jaroslav Kalfar. Copyright © 2017 by Jaroslav Kalfar. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company.
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Irish Fiction – The New York Times
EGGSHELLS
By Caitriona Lally
273 pp. Melville House, paper, $16.99.
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Lally’s whimsical first novel is narrated by the exceedingly peculiar Vivian, who believes herself to be a changeling and roams the streets of Dublin every day in hopes of finding a portal to some other world where she might fit in. Obsessed with signs and words, she is as literal-minded as she is fanciful. Thus Dawson Street appeals to her because “it’s nice to be on a street that’s one letter away from a damson.”
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Vivian’s very original strategies for daily living provide the greatest pleasures of the novel: “I pour a dash of my great-aunt’s wine into a mug. It tastes sweet and sneezy but it isn’t cold. There’s no ice in the freezer so I drop some frozen peas into the mug; now it looks like a diseased pond. I sit on the blue velvet armchair, the kind of chair an off-duty policeman might sit in, and drink with my lips pursed to keep the peas out.”
Vivian traces each day’s trek on a map of Dublin, then notes the consequent shape of the journey: “Today I walked a winter-bare tree that was knocked to its knees in a storm, with a coffin and a flower suspended between the branches.” When she sticks posters on a tree to advertise for a friend who must be named Penelope (“When I know her well enough, I’ll ask her why she doesn’t rhyme with antelope”), a bizarre character with personal hygiene needs as minimal as Vivian’s responds. They are well-matched in complementary strangeness, and this surprising person might just be the actual friend for whom Vivian longs (even if her name isn’t, as it turns out, really Penelope).
“Eggshells” is wildly funny, though the charm and velocity of Vivian’s relentless narrative become more familiar and less startling as the story progresses toward the novel’s satisfying, though muted, resolution.
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SLIPPING
By John Toomey
149 pp. Dalkey Archive, paper, $15.
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This third novel by the Dublin-born Toomey is a sly, layered story about how a writer constructs a narrative, and how elusive the absolute truth always is. A schoolteacher named Albert Jackson has murdered his wife. This is beyond dispute. Not only did one of his pupils help Jackson load the body into the trunk of his car, but Jackson was discovered in a weird, trance-like state at the edge of the sea, with the tide coming in, holding his wife’s corpse. Now confined to a mental hospital under the care of its pompous head psychiatrist, Jackson, motivated to offer up a complex and self-serving account of how he was driven to murder, has recorded an incomplete confession. And so he has requested the services of a novelist, Charlie Vaughan, someone he has never met, whose retelling of his story will, he hopes, “save me in the eyes of my children.”
Jackson wants Vaughan to reconceive his descent into the madness that led to murder, believing that a novelist’s imaginative sensibility will transmute the information of his case into a narrative that can “imaginatively reconstruct” and “reflect the fullest complications of what happened.” To this end, Vaughan listens to the recording of Jackson’s confession several times. “In a split second, within one sentence, Albert Jackson sounded amiable, smug, arrogant, egotistical, tender, violent.” Vaughan recognizes that if he agrees to take on this assignment — delving into all the documents of the case, questioning Jackson himself as well as the police, witnesses and family members — he will be turning the evidence of a methodically planned killing into a literary work “neither true nor untrue.” But how can he turn away from such a tempting artistic undertaking?
Can the conflicting accounts be reconciled? Are Jackson’s omissions deliberate or unconscious, damning or exculpatory? Will Vaughan’s reputation as a novelist depend on creating a successful narrative that succeeds in telling Jackson’s story with more than verisimilitude? Toomey has constructed an engaging weave of competing stories that unfurl in multiple parallel ribbons, some never destined to converge.
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Lit Hub Daily: March 24, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
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Spaceman of Bohemia
The Losing Side
My name is Jakub Procházka. This is a common name. My parents wanted a simple life for me, a life of good…
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DC Entertainment Goes All-Out in Marketing Rebirth Book Collections
Launched in summer 2016, Rebirth is an editorial reworking of DC Entertainment’s entire superhero line that has proven enormously popular with fans. Since the launch, sales of DC Entertainment comics have soared, thanks in large part to the restoration of a number of significant character relationships and plot points that had been dropped in the New 52, an earlier editorial revamp. Now DC is looking for similar success for the Rebirth series in the book trade.
After Rebirth’s successful introduction in the comic shop market (also known as the direct market), DC Entertainment is in the process of releasing 25 trade paperback Rebirth collections between January and May. The series includes Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, as well as iconic DC heroes such as Batgirl, Cyborg, and Harley Quinn, and features such star DC creative teams as writer Scott Snyder and artist John Romita Jr., writer Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Amanda Conner, and writer Hope Larson and artist Rafael Albuquerque.
Rebirth periodical comics ship to stores twice per month (rather than the usual once per month), and new trade paperback collections come out every four months. Trade paperback collections are to be followed by multivolume hardcover compilations of each series, giving fans a chance to collect “sturdier editions,” a DC spokesperson said.
“Rebirth was a game changer in the comics market,” said John Cunningham, senior v-p of sales and trade marketing at DC Entertainment, noting that the series shipped 18 million copies in the five months after it debuted. With that much interest, Cunningham said, “Rebirth is the best opportunity in years for booksellers to grow their graphic novel business.” He noted, “These are the superhero stories both core fans and casual fans want to read.”
Cunningham added: “We continue to put additional focus and resources on servicing the book trade. Graphic novels are now the largest portion of our business, showing double-digit sales increases year after year.” He also emphasized the power of a strong network of comic shops—DC’s primary retail channel—working in tandem with other channels. “We see the symbiotic relationship between success in the direct market and success in the mass arena,” he said. “The rise in readership then transfers over to the book market. When the comics deliver, the readers will come.”
DC is mounting an aggressive marketing campaign to support the book collections, and retailers can expect to see a wide range of online advertising, co-op ad placement, samplers, galleys, and swag for fans. Eddie Scannell, DC v-p of consumer marketing, said the support campaign began with the initial launch of Rebirth at WonderCon 2016 in Los Angeles. Next came TV advertising, he said, and there are plans for in-store marketing, print advertising, and social media campaigns “to drive consumers to the direct market and book trade.”
DC has partnered with National Cinemedia, a national movie theater advertising network, to offer comics shops’ co-op dollars to advertise DC Rebirth titles in theaters planning to show the Wonder Woman and Justice League films coming in June and November, respectively. Scannell said the company is also working with PlayStation to reach gaming fans via PlayStation Now magazine and ads in certain video games.
“The total ad campaign is unlike anything DC has done before,” Scannell said. The overall campaign, which began last summer and continues into the fall, is already paying off for Rebirth titles released since January, he said. He took note of Batman Rebirth, Vol. 1: I Am Gotham and Nightwing Rebirth, Vol. 1: Better Than Batman, both of which made the BookScan graphic novel bestseller list after their January releases.
“DC continues to hone its strategy to maximize the value of our stories—superhero or other [genre]—from concept to periodical sales, collected editions, and original graphic novels,” Cunningham said, outlining DC’s expectations for the book market. “We believe there is a diverse mix of publishing formats through which our stories can be told, and sold, successfully.”
A version of this article appeared in the 03/27/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: DC Entertainment Goes All-Out in Marketing Rebirth Book Collections
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How a Scrap of Red Paper Enthralled a Century of Collectors
It went for $9.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2014.
Credit
Michael Nagle for The New York Times
THE ONE-CENT MAGENTA
Inside the Quest to Own the Most Valuable Stamp in the World
By James Barron
276 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $23.95.
If it’s a small marvel that a stamp, a spot of paper backed with adhesive, can send a parcel around the world, it’s incredible that a person might spend $9.5 million to own a single one.
Stamps are easy to dismiss as the province of fusty collectors, but James Barron, a longtime reporter for The New York Times, focuses on the power of one particular stamp and promises characters “crazed and crazy, obsessed and obsessive.” The stamp, known as the “one-cent magenta,” is on its face nothing special: a reddish rectangle with faded lettering and clipped corners. An expert once described it as “the ugliest stamp he had ever seen.” It is made remarkable by its rarity — it is the only known stamp of its kind — and by the people who bought it for that reason, driving up its price until it became the most expensive stamp ever printed.
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The story of the one-cent magenta begins in what was then British Guiana in the mid-19th century, when a functional, efficient postal system was a mark of power and stamp collecting, a new and trendy hobby, was adventure by proxy. As routine as stamps might seem now, they were still a recent innovation, which had replaced a clumsy system that relied on cash-on-delivery. Stamps had a romance to them, too. These slight pieces of paper had been to faraway places, and by possessing them a person could own a tiny bit of the expansive world.
Guiana was a backwater of British colonialism, though, and the postal system did not always work as planned. In 1856, a resupply of stamps that was supposed to arrive by ship did not. The one-cent magenta was a temporary fill-in, one of a batch of hundreds, it’s reasonable to speculate, created on the printing press of a local newspaper. That obscure beginning elevated the stamp to its elite perch. It was so insignificant that it became unique.
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The stamp was discovered in 1873, by a 12-year-old boy sorting through his uncle’s old letters. Within five years, the world’s most renowned stamp experts had recognized its rarity, and the one-cent magenta was transported into the world of the ultrarich, where its value began to appreciate rapidly. Its first wealthy owner was a Parisian aristocrat who would leave bundles of money hanging on a wall and trust stamp sellers to take the amount they were owed. The stamp passed through the hands of a crass New York textile magnate; the young wife he had tried to disinherit; a consortium of investors from Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; and John E. du Pont, the chemical-company heir now most famous for murdering the wrestler Dave Schultz (and being portrayed by Steve Carell in “Foxcatcher”).
Though the men who buy the magenta are linked by their interest in stamps, they are unusual specimens of power and privilege. Since the stamp’s first two owners are average-enough men, this short book could have been even more compact: It is only once the stamp travels to Europe that the truly crazed and crazy collectors appear and Barron’s detailed attention to each one pays off.
Interlaced with the history of the magenta is the question of its worth today, when the prestige of stamp-collecting is all but obsolete. Barron first learns of the stamp from a Sotheby’s auctioneer and strings along the small drama of its sale throughout the book. The resolution of the auction and Barron’s unveiling of its winner are less satisfying than the new owner’s reason for buying the magenta: He’s not interested in stamps so much as one-of-a-kind treasures. Barron recognizes that for most people stamps’ romance has long since dissipated, but he succeeds in showing why this one stamp, at least, is still alluring.
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How to Eat a Really Big Lunch with Jim Harrison
In November of 2003, less than a month before his 66th birthday, the poet and writer Jim Harrison—who died last March at the age of 79—left his farmhouse in Montana’s Paradise Valley and drove some 25 miles through the state’s aspen and fir woodlands to Bozeman, where, overcoming acute claustrophobia, he boarded a plane to Chicago’s O’Hare International Terminal 5. There he caught a connecting flight to Charles de Gaulle, and then a train to Burgundy . . . all to eat lunch.
Harrison arrived around noon at Marc Meneau’s L’Esperance, translation: “The Hope,” a storied Michelin three-star in the village of Saint-Père-sous-Vézelay. He had a seat among 11 others. A day later, after consuming 37 courses drawn from 17 cookbooks published between 1654 and 1823, plus 14 bottles of wine, all of which “likely cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon,” he took a bath, wandered around Paris, then went to Thoumieux for a few bottles of Gigondas, two vegetable courses, and a duck confit.
So I was more than a bit relieved when, moments after sitting down to lunch with him at just after one o’clock on Valentine’s Day last year, Harrison asked our waiter, “What can I eat that’s small?”
It was almost spring in Patagonia, Arizona, where he had spent the last 25 years in refuge during the months when Montana got too cold and snowy. The cholla cacti hadn’t yet bloomed, and the rare gray hawks he’d mentioned in an email hadn’t yet migrated north from Mexico. The creek behind his casita was a little low but flowing, and, earlier in the day, when we drove down it to look for vermillion flycatchers on the emory oak branches, we found that they hadn’t shown up yet either.
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The waiter pointed towards the cheese enchilada a la carte, which we both ordered.
“You want a beer?” Harrison asked, then got us each a Pacifico with lime. “Bring extra red chili,” he added, sounding more like the man I’d expected, who famously bragged that he holstered a bottle of hot sauce wherever he went. “And can I have a glass?”
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A Day with Jim Harrison, 2015
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Harrison grew up a hardy farmboy in rural Michigan, where, in his words, “the assumption that we eat to live, not live to eat, was part of the Gospels.” Call it behavioral development, or simply rebellion, that he grew into a writer who once summed up his lifetime MO as an attempt ”to eat well and not die from it.”
In 2001, he claimed a kind of heavyweight belt among food writers with an expanded re-publication of his book from 1992, The Raw and the Cooked, a collection of feature stories that had originally ran in magazines like SMART and Esquire, under titles like “Outlaw Cook” and “What Have We Done With The Thighs?” In the introduction, he champions the term “food bully”—first coined by master eater Orson Welles, his culinary sensei, with whom he’d consumed a series of gigantic training meals, including “a half-pound of beluga with a bottle of Stolichnaya, a salmon in sorrel sauce, sweetbreads en croûte, a miniature leg of lamb (the whole thing) with five wines, desserts, cheeses, ports” . . . in one sitting.
If you ask me what sounds more fun—peace and quiet in Cedar Rapids with the Sterns, or vodka and wines with Orson and Harrison—I’m not sure how anyone would call that a contest.
But the book’s reissue, combined with Harrison’s exuberant approach to life itself, also left him lumbering in the crosshairs of critics like Jane and Michael Stern, NPR’s darling foodie couple and co-authors of the “Roadfood” series, who panned him in a tag-team Times review, claiming “The Raw and the Cooked made us yearn to sit quietly over plates of pan-fried chicken and chocolate layer cake at the counter of some modest cafe in rural Iowa.” They didn’t love Harrison’s aggressive, assertive, macho style of eating, nor were they charmed by what they interpreted as his aggressive, assertive, macho style of writing. Which is understandable. But if you ask me what sounds more fun—peace and quiet in Cedar Rapids with the Sterns, or vodka and wines with Orson and Harrison—I’m not sure how anyone would call that a contest.
And so it was to much fanfare, a few groans, and relatively little surprise when, in September, 2004, about a year after his time in France, Harrison’s diary of the occasion—and most ambitious project to date—“A Really Big Lunch,” appeared in The New Yorker. The characteristically greasy, meandering, poetic narrative churns between the writer’s mind and esophagus and stomach, turning around a somewhat dumb question: “Is there an interior logic to overeating?”
To that end, Harrison had, in just over 24 hours, consumed all manner of organs from a small zoo of fauna—poultry and crayfish soup; tartines of foie gras, truffles, and lard; another soup of cucumbers and squab, served with cock fritters; a crayfish bisque; oysters on toast; jellied poultry loaf; Baltic herring; tart of calf’s brains; sea urchin omelet; fillet of sole; monkfish livers; pike and parsley; oven-glazed brill served with fresh cream, anchovies, and roasted currents; another stew of suckling pig, slow-cooked in a red-wine sauce thickened with its own blood, onions, and bacon; a warm terrine of hare with preserved plums; a poached eel with chicken wing tips and testicles in a pool of tarragon butter; glazed partridge breasts; a savory of eggs poached in Chimay ale; and then a mille-feuille of puff pastry sandwiches with sardines and leeks; bites of stuffed ravioli; more poached eggs; squab hearts; a “light” stew of veal breast in a puree of ham and oysters; gratin of beef cheeks; more squab (“spit-roasted”); wild duck with black olives and orange zest, a buisson (bush) of more crayfish with little slabs of grilled goose liver; a terrine of the tips of calves’ ears; hare cooked in port wine inside a calf’s bladder—plus crispy breaded asparagus, a sponge cake with fruit preserves, cucumbers stewed in wine, another few rounds of salads, cream of grilled pistachios, meringues, macaroons, and chocolate cigarettes. The night concluded with an entire additional dessert course in the restaurant’s nearby salon, followed by 80-year-old brandy and some Havana Churchills.
“A Really Big Lunch” is now the title essay of a new, posthumous collection, which debuts on March 24, two days before the one year anniversary of Harrison’s death. It includes 275 pages of his fringier food writing—poems and essays from lesser-known, alternative venues like Mike Golden’s Smoke Signals, Kermit Lynch’s Wine Merchant, and Ondaatje’s Brick, plus an introduction by Mario Batali.
And while a meditation on gluttony might at first seem a little tone deaf, there’s much more to the book than its author’s enormous appetite—just as there was more to Harrison than his appetite, and more to his appetite than mere indulgence.
*
“This is the bar with my people,” Harrison said, gesturing his giant, callused hand—basically a paw—towards a sign that read WAGON WHEEL SALOON. It was by far the busiest establishment among the handful of shops on the bordertown’s main drag, where, he explained with an obsessive attention to the details of his purview, “they used to have cattle in corrals to ship out on the train.”
In younger author photos, he had the athletic build and Midwestern grace of a Ditka linebacker, often sporting a dark mustache and always a cigarette below it. One memorable image captures a confident young sportsman in overalls, arms spread out as though crucified between the haunch and withers of a large brown mare. By contrast, the man I had followed through the bar and into the open air cantina out back looked like a mythical creature you’d find guarding a bridge in Narnia or throwing back grog at a tavern in Middle-earth. He moved as if underwater, slow and wise and obviously old, with the long white beard of an Old Testament patriarch, wispy gray hair, and the kind of smokey eyes that swallow light, like little ghosts below what could only be called owlish eyebrows.
But none of this is what I or anyone else new to the Wagon Wheel that afternoon would have noticed about Harrison—rather, it was his ass. His mobility had been severely compromised several years prior in a spinal surgery that “wasn’t entirely successful,” which rendered him less than 100% for so long that his handicap had become a new normal. Consequently, he was in constant pain, especially when moving. And today, when he did move, his gray elastic shorts sagged lower and lower down around his atrophied quads revealing his pale crack and butt cheeks, a spectacle that was clearly nothing new for the locals, who treated him as one of their own because he was.
“Jim, how you doing,” a guy called over to our table.
“C-minus,” Harrison, still standing, shouted back. “I rate myself for people,” he explained. He was down a full point from 2013, when he reported “about a B-minus” to Jeff Baker of the Portland Oregonian.
I asked if he was ever an “A”?
“Almost never,” he said. “I haven’t had much good happen in this last year.” He groaned and ached visibly as his body crashed into a plastic lawn chair. “Fucking back,” he said.
I asked if it was his spine, which he’d gone into detail about earlier, over breakfast.
“No,” he corrected, “this is something else up here. I had shingles three years ago—but it developed into what they call ‘post-herpetic neuralgia.’ Which means that where all the shingles sores were on my scapula, the sores have all gone, but the pain remains because of the quarrel between nerves and my scapula. So it’s very unpleasant to deal with the spine problems and the shingle problems—plus the wife’s death.”
Linda, his wife of 55 years, had died the previous October.
“I was trying to sing a song the other day,” he said, then launched into broken verse, his voice high and crackling and sort of inching along with the same broken pace he used whenever he read his poems aloud—“There stands the glass—that will ease all my pain—that will settle my brain—it’s my first one today.” He considered the lyrics for a few breathes, then took a swig of beer. “I’ll remember who it is later. I listened to it for years.”
I asked what he did most days.
“Write,” he said. “I don’t know what else to do. It’s my way of seeing the world.”
His first book of poems, Plain Song, debuted in 1965, when he was 28, and in the years since, he’d put out a whopping 13 more books of poetry and 21 of fiction, plus several collections, a prodigious career that had earned him comparisons to Faulkner and—although he disputed any similarities—Hemingway. In the first two months of 2016 alone, just months before his death, he released a new book of poems, Dead Man’s Float, and a new novella, The Ancient Minstrel. Later in our meal he mentioned a developing collaboration with Batali called “On The Track of The Genuine,” and, at the end of our 8-hour day together, he revealed that while we were talking, he’d composed a scene from another novel in progress, which he’d tentatively named, The Girl Who Loved Trees.
“I used to hunt,” he continued, “But I’ve hunted enough in my life. Now I just let my friend take off with his dogs and I’ll sit on a stump for an hour or so.”
He reached into his pocket and removed two packs of cigarettes, one blue and one black, both of which, while back at his house, he’d carefully selected from a pile of more than a dozen more packs, both blue and black, stacked neatly on a formica countertop next to a bowl of nuts, a bowl of fruit, and a bottle of Cahors.
I asked about the packs.
“I’m a Democrat and I like to be fair,” he joked, then explained that the black ones were stronger and therefore better, but also harder on his lungs—which, to be honest, seemed like an odd precaution for someone, like Harrison, who so rarely didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth. “I have to have my dysfunctional esophagus operated on. But I can’t bear it after my spinal surgery—I ended up having to go to Mayo for a couple months and learn to walk again. The neurologist said ‘If you’re patient you’ll walk yourself out of this.’ I said ‘How long?’ He said, ‘That’s what people always ask . . . it’ll probably be years.’”
I asked if he was patient.
“Yeah,” he said, flicking the lighter several times with a kind of dumb touch, eventually getting the thing to stay lit, then glancing down sideways at the flame as he slowly drew it closer and closer to his face and the cigarette, which looked like a baby carrot enveloped between his enormous, chubby knuckles. He smoked this way, too, with one palm entirely obscuring his mouth, as though he was speaking into a CB radio. “St. Augustine said a remarkable thing: The reward of patience is patience. Which is true.”
After several drawn-out poufs, he continued: “I meet writers in New York who actually say to me, ‘You’ve had all the luck.’ I say, ‘Well, I did the work, too.’ Forty books. They want to do a book or two and get famous.”
“If you aren’t sufficiently interested in other people to ask them questions,” he said, “then what’s it all about?”
He coughed—a long wet cough that carried on for several seconds—then moved his hand away from his mouth and looked down at the cigarette. “What writers need—above all else—is humility. Would you agree? What are you gonna write about if you’re just a fucking narcissist? You know? You have nowhere to go.”
His focused shifted slightly as he spotted something on the horizon outside town. “You can see just the tip of the fire tower over there. A local woman spent 15 years up there. She loved it.” Then his focus shifted again, and he asked, “Where did you stay last night?”
When I told him I’d camped just north of Tucson on Mount Lemmon, he launched into a story about the place: “They’re trying to get my help renaming part of that park after Chuck Bowden—a writer and friend of mine who died. He was a profound Mexican violence observer, wrote a lot about Juarez. Five thousand people murdered in one year because of quarrels between the drug cartels”—then his story hopped slightly, shifting gears the way his writing does, following a sort of associative poetic awareness. “In the 25 years I’ve been here in the winter we’ve had no civilian deaths. So the danger of the border is much overrated unless you’re a member of a cartel. I’ve seen migrants come through, but rarely drug runners. I see them while hunting. We had a very young couple come down the creek. I remember talking to them. Sadly enough they wanted to know how to get to Chicago.”
Next he wanted to know my shoe size, where I got my briefcase, my favorite bird’s voice. “If you aren’t sufficiently interested in other people to ask them questions,” he said, “then what’s it all about?”
He asked about my last name, my family’s nationality, my grandfather, my sister, my father.
“I wanted to be a writer since I was 14,” he said. “My dad was full of support for it but my mother wasn’t. She was more like most mothers—always worried about me making a living. After my dad died, she went back and finished college and became a social worker. And then she confessed to me later that work was a sad thing to waste your life on.”
By the time our enchiladas arrived, Harrison had segued into a story about his dead brother, John, who taught the great American ornithologist David Sibley in a Connecticut Sunday School. “You gotta be careful, people die,” he said, just as the waiter let us know that our plates were still hot, which Harrison disregarded, immediately instructing “go for it”—then exclaiming, a bit panicked—“She didn’t bring the chilis?!”—then spotting them behind a beer bottle and correcting himself—“Oh, yes she did! She’s my darling. That red chili is the best. Suzie makes it fresh every day.”
But before he started in on his food, Harrison rose from the table, and, over the next several minutes, struggled to remove a worn gray t-shirt.
He stood there for a few seconds in the sun, his left shoulder hunched high, his body in decline, so much so that seeing it brought to mind the awesome power of a very old elephant—along with the palpable feeling that it is incredibly rare and respectable for someone you barely know to let you in so close to their world, especially when their world is full of fragility and pain and vulnerability and dying and death.
*
“Barking” by Jim Harrison
The moon comes up.
The moon goes down.
This is to inform you
that I didn’t die young.
Age swept past me
but I caught up.
Spring has begun here and each day
brings new birds up from Mexico.
Yesterday I got a call from the outside
world but I said no in thunder.
I was a dog on a short chain
and now there’s no chain.
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Every Amazon Books Location, Mapped
With the opening of Amazon’s Chicago bookstore in the city’s Southport Corridor section last week, the company now has five Amazon Books outlets and announced plans for five more. Though Amazon took 10 months between opening its first store in Seattle and its second in San Diego, Calif., the pace of openings and announced openings has quickened.
The e-commerce giant opened two outlets last year and added one in Dedham, Mass., in February. Amazon has announced plans for stores in Bellevue, Wash.; Lynnfield, Mass.; New York City; Paramus, N.J.; and Walnut Creek, Calif.
The stores share some basic characteristics, such as displaying their books face out, carrying digital devices and accessories, and only stocking books that receive high ratings from Amazon reviewers. In a new wrinkle added after the first few stores opened, customers who are members of Amazon’s Prime membership service receive the same discounts they get for online purchases; books are full price for nonmembers. Most stores, which range from 3,500 to 6,000 sq. ft., employ around 20 booksellers and staff.
There are some differences between the outlets, however. The two newest stores, for instance, have small cafés (the Dedham store serves Peet’s coffee, while in Chicago it’s Stumptown), and each store carries books that Amazon has determined will appeal to neighborhood buyers in such categories as travel. The Chicago outlet is also the first store not in a mall and is the only one whose doors open at 8 a.m. rather than 10 a.m., as at the four other locations.
Though no specific dates have been announced for when the new outlets will open, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that all are on track to open this year. How many more stores the company will open remains a mystery, but there have been numerous media reports that Amazon is looking in the Los Angeles area. If true, that would be in keeping with the company’s preference for coastal state locations.
A version of this article appeared in the 03/27/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Amazon Books Spreads Out
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