At Laser Wolf last night, Javier was expressing admiration for graphic novels. I told him I enjoyed the one by Jonathan Ames that he lent me. He asked me if I ever gave it back to him. I said I did, months ago. Melanie quoted an old Arab proverb: "Only a fool lends books. Only a fool returns them."
I've not only written a review of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, I've come up with a revolutionary solution to the explosion: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/getting-there_708836.html
Yesterday in the New York Times Book Review, Karen Russell was asked to name the best books about Florida. I mention it because, until today, this blog may have been the only place the young author's name hadn't appeared this month.
I also mention it because I would like to add to her list. She left out, not surprisingly, the best travel book about the state: Florida Ramble by Alex Shoumatoff. And she omitted, perhaps because it's a short story, the greatest piece of writing about Miami Beach: Cynthia Ozick's Rosa.
Reading this weekend about the Federal Writers' Project - I'm speaking on the subject this Wednesday at the main library - I came across a familiar name: Jerre Mangione, the man who served as national coordinating editor.
I got to know Jerre in the 80s in Philadelphia. Searching my bookshelves I came across his book, The Dream and the Deal, and, opening it up to the title page I read the inscription he had written to me and Hania. It was dated "Labor Day, 1987."
The inscription reminded me of a meal we had shared, at a cafeteria in Center City. We both took spaghetti, but only I took bread with it, which I thought was necessary for sopping up the sauce. I asked Jerre why he had refrained.
"Italians never eat bread with pasta," he said. "It's redundant."
I have not eaten bread with pasta since.
Three posts ago, instead of "memoir" I should have used the word "autobiography" - it would have been funnier - but I didn't want to send my young readers to the Wiktionary.
I've been claiming for years that the memoir knocked the travel book practically out of the bookstore, but its real crime has been to kill off the autobiography. Autobiographies were once written in a state of reflection by accomplished men and women in the latter stages of their life. In our relentlessly democratic day, the memoir reigns, written as it is by anyone at anytime. As with poems, there are some great ones but there are also a lot of duds.
Not only has the autobiography disappeared, but its disappearance has gone unnoticed. There have been countless essays on the purported death of the novel - which continues to thrive - yet none that I've seen on the actual death of the autobiography. It's time for either its rebirth (unlikely) or its obituary.
I had some time to kill yesterday afternoon so I pulled into the shopping plaza on the south side of the 17th Street Causeway and, to my surprise, saw a sign that read: "Books." I parked and entered.
"How long have you been here?" I asked the owner. She was sitting behind the counter in the back, listening to WLRN.
"Ten years," she said.
A lot of the books were paperbacks with colorful spines (I generally associate bright covers with bland writing), but there were sizable sections of more serious books. I paged through two collections of George Orwell essays just down a shelf from a Nabokov novel (King, Queen, Knave). Nearby was a shelf with a sign that read: "Better Than the Movie."
The section of Florida authors was exceptionally colorful, though, on a middle shelf, the brown spine of A Way to See the World shone out brightly.
Donna told me she had enjoyed it. She was a bookseller who read. I reminded her that it contained a story about Larry McMurtry's bookstore in Texas. She said she'll sometimes suggest a McMurtry book to customers and they'll say they don't read cowboy books. "But he writes a lot more than cowboy books," she said. "He wrote a travel book."
"About a cruise in the South Pacific," I said. I was in Fort Lauderdale talking books.
Donna said that she loved the recommending aspect of owning a bookstore. She also told me that she hosts occasional readings, and now devotes one wall to the works of local artists, hence the store's name: Well Read: Bookstore and Gallery.
We got on the subject of the Miami book fair. She said she used to go as a vendor. She enjoyed the party they held on Saturday night for all the vendors - I told her there is one for authors too - but it just wasn't worth the trouble of hauling all the books down there. I quoted her a line from my story about my author tour for A Way to See the World that started at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago: "Ultimately, there is a lot of heavy lifting in literature."