Rick Simonson

My Ten Thousand and One Nights 3
August 17, 2007

... Then books which lead to books which lead to ...

While reading Raja Alem's forthcoming My Thousand and One Nights: A Novel of Mecca (Syracuse), as related last post, the notion occurred to dip once more into its touchstone, The Arabian Nights. The first place I checked in the home entertainment dept. was the old growth heap of tomes kept by the bed, a stack of mythologies, epics, holy texts, medieval poets, romances, Marie de France, folk tales, sagas, almanacs, and whatnot. There are all the new books we read and then there are these, which somehow keep measure of what this all is, where it is, what time it is. They're kept right by the bed for a reason, but on numerous perusings I wasn't finding my Arabian Nights. Not that I had direct recollection of putting it there. It only seemed that that was where it should be. Other places were checked. No go.

What I could remember was where I obtained my copy and the last moments I was reading it. It was, interestingly, the BEA between these two New York shows, last year's in Washington, DC. It was, for the most part, an odd show for me, somewhat dispiriting, or off-kilter, at least. Some of that was that I got there late, off my proverbial red-eye, missing all the Thursday festivities. It was the show where at the first night's dinner Margaret Maupin told me it was her last show, she was retiring, and to keep it mum, and where I changed dinner plans to be at the last dinner she would be at. I was sad. No more Margaret to enliven proceedings and pronounce bunk where pronouncing was needed. Then there was where many of us booksellers were quartered, in the ABA hotel across the Potomac in Never Never Land, Virginia. The good hotel rates are appreciated, but  I'm sorry, Arlington, or wherever it was, is not to D.C. as Brooklyn is to Manhattan. If nothing else, there was Boeing, which has long maintained a dowdy presence in its original hometown of Seattle, flashing in red neon off a shiny office building, making goo-goo eyes at the Pentagon. That romance has found its way into a few hearings and courtrooms..

On the show floor, amidst the usual grazing and procuring of the newest of the new, it was in a Knopf Everyman's Library display that my eye was arrested by its Husain Haddawy translation, first published and still available in paper from Norton, of The Arabian Nights. While fnished copies such as this are not generally there for the giving away, James Kimball, somewhat bemusedly (you want this?) said, do, please take.

Come the day it all wound down, the BEA that is, and Mr. Yamazaki of City Lights and I partook of what is generally a wind-down, post-show ritual ... some form of walking about, re-acquainting ourselves with the world outside the convention hall or hotel doors, trying to make some sense of where we actually were. In Washington, between staying in Virginia, being underground in Metro, then the convention hall, there had been a lot of sensory deprivation. This was Washington - the marble columns, the monuments. Most every year, Paul Y. and I do some form of this, here and there in the company of others. So it was this year, a group of four we were that traipsed the Mall, and did see the monuments, most powerfully those to the dead of our wars. There was some other walking - rather dishearteningly through the State Department's security-laden compound (it didn't used to be this way) - and then what felt like the premature unravelment of our ensemble, though it was known this day would be that way. Paul had to be on to a Granta meeting, then out to the suburbs for his in-laws. Another had New York to get back to, and the other, some further bookseller business and a dinner. So it was, parting by here, parting by there, it was good, see you next year, and back to Virginia by Metro for me.

There it was solitary time. Everyone else of the Elliott Bay troupe was gone. Everyone seemed gone. It was a melancholy that one can get dipped into, not entirely voluntary: what am I doing here? why this? I did have the prospect of some days ahead in New York City - plans in place to see people. That would begin the next day. There was all of that. And there were these books, the many gathered, the many there wouldn't be time to read once back and at it in Seattle.

I took two outside - an advance copy of Bill Buford's Heat and my Arabian Nights. The Buford I was well along in and enjoying immensely; its publication and a Seattle/Elliott Bay visit imminent, in fact. The Arabian Nights? It seemed like a good time and place to be in another time and place.

A concrete ledge to some glassy-surfaced office buildings entry did service as lean-against bench. In the weakening late day sun, I both laughed in the heated presence of Mario Batali's world as rendered by Mr. Buford (whom I wondered, had he not ever done food work as a young person? for those of us who did that in high school or early years of school, paying the bills, there is much less midlife fascination with what's behind the scenes), and I began the back and forths of the timeless, beguiling book of tales. From one point to another, story leading improbably but probably to another ... two months earlier I had heard Elias Khoury tell of how they influenced him, being told these as a child, reading them as he grew older - now here I was, lost here, found there.

Then I was found another way. My cell phone. How could this be? I figured I had either talked to everyone I knew already or that all were plane- and train-bound home. Who on the planet?    

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 17, 2007 | Comments (0)