Across our canal, a handful of houses stretch along a private road. I drive down it once a year to see the elaborate Christmas display put up by one of the homeowners, who puts out a bench for people to sit on. The other day I rode my bike to see if the decorations were up yet and, for the first time, noticed the old-fashioned lampposts that line the road. At the base of each post were four small figureheads (facing north, east, south, and west) and above them were the words: THE MIAMI RIVIERA – FLA – CORAL GABLES. Apparently, they are old streetlamps from The City Beautiful that someone, at some point, brought to Fort Lauderdale. These are the things you discover when you get out of your car.
I was browsing at Barnes & Noble in Boca yesterday when I remembered that I was out of Cheerios. So I walked over to Whole Foods, where I found myself enveloped by a swarm of shoppers buying sweet potatoes, string beans, stuffing, pies. Lots of pies. Taking my cereal up to the cashier, I said, “We’re having a modest Thanksgiving this year.”
Went for a bike ride yesterday evening, for the first time in a while, along the south side of the New River. The three high-rise apartment buildings, two still under construction, looked unimpressive from close range. The ground floor of the River Lofts has tall windows looking out to the street and I wondered if behind them there will be a restaurant or just a lobby (or worse, a gym).
Farther east, the restaurant advertising Nikkei cuisine still has its “coming soon” sign up. The longer one waits for a restaurant to open the greater one’s disappointment when it finally does. Riding past the closed Downtowner was particularly sad, though, nearby, I saw a woman walking a 10-week-old husky.
On the way back, I rode past Tarpon River Brewing and noticed that the big communal table had been removed and replaced by several small tables, making the place look more like a restaurant. Appropriately, I guess, now that it’s owned by The Restaurant People.
Across SW 4th Ave., someone had placed a chair in the middle of the empty lot. It seemed a kind of statement, but I don’t know of what.
It was a perfect weekend for the Miami Book Fair. On Saturday morning, David Kirby – following two poets not from the School of Uplift – read a poem about gratitude that listed the many things he is grateful for. Afterwards, his book The Winter Dance Party, was nowhere to be found, something for which he was clearly not grateful. But, unfazed, he said he would tell people it had sold out.
Kirby’s old friend Billy Collins read shortly after in the frigid auditorium. Among the poems were some very short ones, like “3 AM.”
My hand is asleep.
At least it’s a start.
During the Q&A, a teacher of writing asked for some tips. Collins told her to get the students to read, admitting that that is difficult these days. Young people don’t read books, he posited, because they don’t want to be alone. With their phones they never are.
The teacher specifically asked about novels, and Collins said that poetry and fiction are “two different countries.” He added that “being a poet doesn’t require any interest in other people,” while novelists need to look into other people’s lives.
Yesterday, I went to hear Charles Bock, Priyanka Mattoo, and Carvell Wallace. In an interesting twist, Wallace read an excerpt from Mattoo’s memoir and Mattoo read an excerpt from Wallace’s. This worked surprisingly well, considering that Wallace’s memoir is about growing up Black and queer, and Mattoo’s is about her family’s exile from Kashmir. She said that she had never written anything (besides screenplays) before she sat down to write her memoir, excerpts of which were subsequently published in the New York Times and The New Yorker.
Following them were Eric Weiner, Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), and Shalom Auslander. Handler said that he carries a notebook with him wherever he goes; not a fancy leather notebook – he noted the Moleskin trailer outside at the street fair – but a cheap spiral notebook. I dug in my bookbag and retrieved the green memo notebook I had bought at Walgreen’s. An elegant notebook, he said, would make him feel even more pretentious than he already did taking notes.
Like many good writers, they had been precocious readers when young. Handler told of picking up Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal at the town library when he was a boy. Auslander said that, around the age of 16, he walked into Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan and asked the salesclerk if they had anything funny. The man gave him a book by Kafka. He enjoyed it so much that he returned and asked if they had anything else that was funny. The man gave him Beckett.
This is my week for classic Fort Lauderdale restaurants. Tuesday night we went to the soft reopening of the Mai-Kai. The food was OK (as I remembered it) and the drinks were excellent, though I sent back my Floridita Daiquiri - described as Hemingway's favorite from the Floridita Bar in Havana - because it arrived frozen. When I complained (I don't think Hemingway drank frozen cocktails) I was told that all the Mai-Kai's daiquiris are frozen. We were seated outside, as the dining room was not yet open, and after the meal we went in to look at the bar, which was as atmospheric as I remembered it, though I seem to recall the old one had windows with water continuously running down the outside panes, giving the feeling of being inside a waterfall. But it was good to see the place beautifully restored.
Last night, I went with some friends to Cafe Martorano. I had heard it was loud, and it was; a bit like eating in a disco - there is a disco ball over the bar - except that nobody was dancing. The chef-owner doubles as DJ. As Max Beerbohm once said: "For people who like that sort of thing it's just the sort of thing that they like."
Mark F. Brzezinski, US ambassador to Poland, spoke last night at the University of Miami. The tone of his talk was upbeat: In a world of bad news stories, he said, Poland is a good one. He told of the nine million Ukrainian refugees who arrived in Poland after the Russian invasion, and how they were taken in by Polish families. One million remain, most of them now with their own apartments, as they’ve integrated into Polish society. Except for the right to vote, they enjoy all the rights of a Polish citizen.
There are now, he said, 10,000 American troops in Poland, working alongside the Polish military. He described Putin as “a KGB agent who’s the son of a KGB agent. He’s not a politician like Yeltsin and Gorbachev.”
He talked about Poland’s progress with regard to energy: the fact that it no longer relies on energy from Russia, and is less and less dependent on coal. The country just signed a deal with an American company to build a nuclear power plant.
The talk was so positive he didn’t speculate on his fate under the new administration.