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GETTING READY
May 29, 2007

For the third year in a row, it's making ready to go all the way east for BEA. I love New York, but BEAs there are not my favorite. They seldom seem to be for the publishing people based there. The city, wonderful as it is to roam and peruse, too easily swallows this show and group up. I like the encounters that happen when most everyone is on the road - in Chicago, or D.C.

As usual, packing is strange business. With other trips, what one takes to read gets the most attention and weight. Here, knowing reading for whatever is left of the trip afterwards will be handed out in abundance, you plan for the way east, perhaps a quiet day or two before. Similarly, you try to gauge weather and figure what clothes. In Seattle, where it's seldom breached 60-some degrees, seeing newspaper listings that say '85' carries a certain incomprehensibility. What could that mean? That the long-sleeve shirts, worn in the day-to-day here in Seattle, might not be the thing for New York? This conclusion is usually arrived at after the seemingly decisive trip to the cleaners. Instead, shirts from the back or bottom have to be rooted out ... uncrinlkled to the degree possible ... and then made ready to go.

At least going this year is not preceded by such immediate busyness as has happened the past few years. A year ago, it culminated in coming late - arriving in D.C. late Thursday - after we'd hosted and presented Eduardo Galeano for two nights. BEAs come every year; Eduardo Galeano does not. Two years ago, it was swooping into Memorial Day weekend and making ready to come to New York, and being carried on wings of great energy from having helped present a group of visiting Arab women writers, seven women who had blown audiences away in a series of readings and talks ... All of that had been wonderful, but totally distracting from the lists, orders, invitation organizing and allocating that goes into getting ready. There's a weird synchronizing effect that seems to have many of us in its sway. A few years ago, when BEA was in Los Angeles, which tends to mean needing access to a car for the various social places to go, there was the hilarious moment of talking with Mr Paul Yamazaki by phone - what are you doing? O, doing [name your map quest/google thing] the maps for where this dinner or that is ... which was what this party was doing at the very same moment.

On to go. More when 'we' are there. No one has time for reading - or writing - this stuff, do they?

Posted by Rick Simonson on May 29, 2007 | Comments (0)