Rick Simonson

My Ten Thousand and One Nights 3-1/2
August 20, 2007

Invoke certain presences and certain things happen. Last Friday's post was written - with an ending that went on from what is on the site - but some combination of PW blog god-doing and the possible hand of The Arabian Nights' Shahrazad herself meant it ended prematurely, and ended the way it ended.I was almost the last to know. Once upon a time, if the text exceeded space limits, you got some warning. This time, not. The ending, such as it was, vanished. And 'someone' gave the thing more of one than intended, though those were my words.

To resummon/resume: I was having a certifiable, down-and-out, end-of-last day of BEA blue spell a year ago, was adrift somewhere in suburban Virginia with two books, an advance copy of Bill Buford's Heat, and an Everyman's edition of The Arabian Nights. I was reading the latter, when my cell phone - surprisingly - rang.

Had that call come 90 minutes earlier, I'm not sure I would have answered. I was in too much a woe-is-me wallowy place, not really ready for human companionship (and knowing it, somehow) ... I had hit a point where I needed to be off by myself a spell. These books could put up with me, and seemed to be. The reading had even started to revive something. I laughed at the Buford. And Shahrazad, these viziers, these dervishes, these stories ...

I did, now, answer this call, still, surprising myself a little that I did. Did I yet know I was in a 'better' place? I don't think I was sure. On the phone was one of the walkaround party from earlier, a group of us that had left the convention, walked the monuments, started re-entry into the world, bid each other farewell. Now this person was returned already to the ABA hotel. Dinner plans had been scuttled, the other party was ill. Had I eaten? Did I feel like a bite?

Where I was, physically, outside, it was getting dark. Body parts were stiffening from the concrete. And hunger?Food? Part of the time and day of re-entry into the world post-BEA is realizing you have to go back to doing such things for yourself as your meals. There were no rsvp invites for drinks, for dinner. You had to go back to figuring this out. You had to go back to looking at patty melts and little bowls of salad with shaved carrot and radish bits on menus. You had to go back to paying for this all. This was just starting to occur to me again.

I said yes.

As an event, this little dinner wasn't much on any  big scale of measure. Two weary booksellers eating in the hotel's lobby restauarant, considering (ordering?) items such as those mentioned. Some good one-to-one conversation happened. I felt slow, a few steps behind in the talk, did better with some realizing later, but felt present enough to know that it was good to hear more of what this well-regarded colleague did, what some favored reading was, to say some of this for myself,  for each of us some of how we had gotten the call to this strange way of work, of doing in the world, what had been accident, intent, and/or provident. The night did not go on long. There was exhaustion, there was packing to do, the checking out in the morning, the various ways home. As earlier in the day, wishes for faring well, and the hopes for catching up again the next time.

It was later, back in my room, facing solitary existence again, beginning the packing up of clothes and book clutter, that I realized that this quiet dinner and talk, coming out of the blue as it did, coming after the book convention was over, had been actually the best moment of the whole time. Not that it was big, or had portent. The simple spontaneous gesture of it  perhaps was its key, its element of being unplanned. It's something that comes from the mix of people and books, which happens in daily life in the bookstore, but also, in special ways, at gatherings such as these. Perhaps looking too hard (perhaps also feeling I needed it, which is its own issue) or with too much expectation, I hadn't felt such a moment this year. Now, by surprise, when all was ostensibly over, here it was.

My bit of realizing this, though, also had/has to acknowledge the part the books played. First, there was my part in reading  (the places we go when we do so), and where it helped bring me back from. I was more ready for human company - especially normal, not bustle bustle, mix and mingle, human company - after reading them.

Then there were the books themselves. With the Buford there was all this exuberant, boisterous, heated (yes) energy, his own and the others he portrays, the various appetites it helped kindle  ... and there would be the scene up in New York City a few days later in the week, where I was having lunch with an editor friend at one of Mario Batali's places, when who should stride in, but one Mr. Buford. Words of congratulation were said  there for a book well done, which were followed a few weeks later, by a wonderful evening's visit out in Seattle - a big crowd for him at Elliott Bay, a terrific reading, terrific sales, all the good things you might hope such a night could be.

With The Arabian Nights, I want to be careful, given what powers might be at work. I remembered it was a new old book I had gotten at the show. And that I was along in reading it, those old words so present, when my phone had rung, and that that was my last real memory of it. And that when I went to look for it a few weeks ago, having read Raja Alem's forthcoming novel, My Thousand and One Nights, I had looked high and low and hadn't found it.

 ... just mentioning this book is causing mischief. Again, an ending was ended a-foretime. There is front-on, block-headed persistence (not working) and there is weaving on and around which ... I beleive a certain book in question embodies .... not that this would be confused with that. There really is an end, such as it is (next post), and there will be other subject matter ... soon ...

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 20, 2007 | Comments (0)