Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun
Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz
The Acid House by Irvine Welsh
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
The Folly of Loving Life by Monica Drake
The Ice at the Bottom of the World: Stories by Mark Richard
The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis
The Night in Question: Stories by Tobias Wolff
The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Thom Jones
Through the Safety Net: Stories by Charles Baxter
A Postcard from the Tour
It was David Scholl who showed me the future. As proof of how small the world is, I’d known David in Portland where he’d been roommates with friends who’d thrown me my first—and I hope last—surprise birthday party. Dave had been among the seven partners who’d originally opened the restaurant Wild Abandon, insisting the plates should be white when other partners wanted to use an eclectic mix of plates and cups from Goodwill. The business had almost closed after failing to withhold enough for payroll taxes. When we’d first met I hadn’t put pen to paper much less joined a writing workshop. Later I’d be an author on tour, and David Scholl would be an executive who traveled the world opening new branches of the Borders bookstore chain. He would be living in Ypsilanti, and when my tour took me through Ann Arbor he would show up for old times’ sake.
Borders asked me to shoot a short video that consisted of browsing through a store and touting the books I recommended as good reads for the upcoming summer. I made them a counteroffer. Instead, I’d pretend to be making a training video about how to prevent “stock shrinkage.” Doing so, I’d select books and tell the camera each was so good it would be a likely target for thieves. Then I’d pretend to shoplift by stuffing the book down my pants, and move on to the next recommendation.
Our tagline was: “Do you have Jesus’ Son in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?” Dave and I worked it out, and afterward he showed me the future.
By this he meant the prototype for the new chain of space-age bookstores Borders would soon be building. This first, full-size mock-up stood in the suburbs, a drive from the original brick Borders in downtown Ann Arbor. The new store would occupy maybe one-eighth the total footprint of a current big-box store. He took me inside a single room, not much larger than a 7-Eleven. A couple of walls held shelves of the current bestsellers, but no other books were present. Instead, a large machine, like an oversize photocopier, would print any book a customer might want. It would be bound in a cover of the customer’s choice. All within a few minutes.
Maybe half of the store’s floor space was dedicated to author appearances. It was all very wood-paneled and carpeted. Rows of chairs faced a screen. Beneath the screen was a sort of built-in desk. “It’s for the LongPen system,” he explained. This was the brainchild of Margaret Atwood, who didn’t want to tour herself into the grave but did want to interact with readers. The way it worked, Atwood—or any writer—could sit at home and present her work to an audience at the store in real time. A camera mounted above the screen would relay the audience to Atwood’s monitor. She could answer questions, read selections. Best of all, and here’s the pen part of LongPen, readers could align their books on this fixed desk and the author could inscribe and sign long-distance.
Atwood or whoever would hold a computer stylus. At Borders a computer-guided pen would descend to the book. Atwood would write whatever, and the system would direct the pen to inscribe and autograph the book.
A video of the reader-author interaction would be archived online for the reader to later download and keep as a souvenir.
The major hurdle, Dave explained, was convincing the world’s authorities on autographs that this remote-controlled signature would constitute an actual, legal autograph. The convincing had taken a few years, but LongPen was finally ruled to be a real autograph. Borders was about to revolutionize the author event.
In these right-size stores around the world authors would be appearing on screens and computers would be signing books. The print-on-demand machine would eliminate the hassles of shipping and stocking books. And Margaret Atwood could stay home in Toronto and not have to drag herself around the world. Dave was justifiably proud. The future was so bright.
And then Borders collapsed.
And then we lost Dave to pancreatic cancer. The problem with loving so many people is that you lose so many.
To Margaret Atwood, I’ll continue to look for you on the road. May your investment in LongPen someday pan out. To date its success has been, for the most part, limited to allowing convicted criminals to do author appearances from prison.
Bless you, David Scholl, may one of your many, many graves always be inside my head.
Reading List: Nonfiction
Be forewarned. I was asked to read at a charity dinner and read the story “Romance” and noticed how one man seated at one table among many tables of well-dressed donors, this man was laughing very hard at the story, particularly at a sad joke about cancer. Go figure, but when I was shown to my seat, it was at this same man’s table. As our salads arrived he described his flight arriving earlier that afternoon. As they’d begun their descent into the Portland airport he’d been drinking a glass of wine while a very chatty woman beside him had said how much she loved wine. She’d loved wine all of her life. She’d enjoyed at least a glass of wine every evening until a few months before. Even back then the smallest sip of wine had begun to burn her throat. Soon the pain was so intense she’d given up drinking altogether. Wine, beer, liquor, it all burned her throat. So…she’d decided that God no longer wanted her to drink alcohol, and that was fine so long as that’s what God wanted.
