Day Job

I suppose a more skilled self-promoter would have promoted this a bit more than twenty-four hours in advance, but, to to take Donald Rumsfeld's hideous blitheness in vain (and add a bit of Johnsonian self-knowledge), you blog as the blogger you are, not the blogger you wish to be.

My friend Dmitry Samarov, author of the wonderful Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab, has roped me into a thing: tomorrow night, February 20, at 8:30, a post-martini hour in which I'm usually considering what book will ease my transition to bed, I will be up on stage with him and seven other readers at LivingRoom Realty talking about the Day Job.

If you're in Chicago and able to come out, here's what I can promise you:

1. Dmitry, who is personable and entertaining and a great raconteur.

2. At least one Tolstoy quote.

3. At least one Samuel Johnson quote.

4. At least one brutal dis of Jack Kerouac.

5. That I will talk briefly about my long-ago career as a radio DJ.

6. That I will be off the stage in under eight minutes.

7. Oh, and, crucially, that there will be drinks.

I don't do this sort of thing often, but I can't refuse Dmitry, and I've enjoyed working up something on the theme. If you're around, come out. If I don't know you, I'd love to meet you: in my relatively extensive experience thus far, it's never a mistake to meet people you've come to like through the Internet.

Full details in the image above, or at this link. Hope to see you there!

"With the most possible vigor and imagination," Or, To the new year!

I'll let Dmitry Samarov lead off the new year, with this bit about the holiday from his book Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab:

No one threw up in the cab. In other words, my most fervent New Year's wish had been granted. An indication of a fairly restrained evening. The hordes went about their celebrating with workman-like efficiency; collecting fares did not present any special challenge or above-and-beyond effort, every last rider remembering where he or she lived with a bit of encouragement, no unwelcome advances nor invitations to tussle.

I tend to refer to New Year's as my least favorite holiday of the year, for the simple reason that any holiday whose high point is pegged to an hour that represents the outer limits of my potential bedtime is inherently suspect.

It's not as if parties are really my kind of scene to begin with. I'm much more of a quiet-drink-with-a-friend, long-dinner-party kind of socializer; full-scale parties always leave me a bit at sixes and sevens, feeling that I ought to make an effort to meet strangers but stymied by the fact that they're, well, strangers.

That basic discomfort caused me to smile when I read, in Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, about the plans that Ed Cooke, a memory contest champion from England, drew up for his twenty-fifth birthday party. Held in a barn on his parents' estate (always a good first item for the party checklist, no?), the party was designed as "an experimental vessel fo his philosophy of parties," a framework, in Cooke's words, "for manipulating conversation, space, movement, mood, and expectations so that I can see how they influence one another." Foer, drawing on notes presumably taken early in the evening's imbibing, explains how Cooke did it:

Glittery textiles hung from the rafters to the floor, dividing the room into a collection of small rooms. The only way in or out was through a network of tunnels, which could be navigated only by slithering on one's belly. The space under the grand piano was turned into a fort, and a circle was formed around the fireplace out of a collection of raggedy couches that had been stacked on top of tables.

"The people who actually get through the tunnel networks have been through an adventure. They have had to struggle a tiny bit, and therefore upon arrival, they feel a sense of gratitude, relief, and accomplishment, and are committed to the project of having a good experience, with the most possible vigor and imagination." . . . I crawled behind him through a ten-foot-long pitch-black tunnel and emerged into a room filled neck-deep with balloons. Each room, he explained, was supposed to function like a chamber of a memory palace. His party was designed to be maximally memorable.

Clearly, Cooke's party wouldn't be for everyone, but I find it attractive: a party with an unusual purpose, a focus, an odd component or three would at a minimum provide strangers with a few minutes of conversational material before the awkward pauses begin to predominate.

This new year's found me laid up with, judging by my cough, some vigorously horrible bastard child of TB and the croup, so I was already asleep when the neighborhood's symphony of illicit fireworks and wailing sirens was just warming up. Dmitry Samarov, I trust, was out all night, just as on that earlier new year's:

The sky is beginning to lighten when I open the mailbox. A letter from the AARP, complete with member's card, awaits my attention. Had this night really lasted a decade? In any case, it is time to reset the calendar and start the whole damn thing over again . . .

Here's to 2012, folks. May it bring you good reading.

Four from the office

As I've noted before, I usually try to keep my life as a blogger and my life as the promotions director of the University of Chicago Press separate. This blog is, after all, something I write on my own time about my life as a reader, and while my reading definitely informs the work I do at the office, they're separate worlds, and, by design, the blog reflects that.

But occasionally they overlap--and this is a very good week for that. So, with apologies for seeming to be shilling for my employers, four notes about Chicago books that I've had a hand in and am thus particularly excited about:

1 The fifth Parker novel, The Score, is the free e-book of the month from Chicago for September--and this time, like with the Anthony Powell giveaway back in December, it's free not just from the Press directly, but also from all the major e-book retailers. I've been writing about Richard Stark ever since I first started reading the Parker novels nearly four years ago; being part of bringing these novels back into print has been one of the things I'm most proud of in a twelve-year career in publishing.

The Score is a great place to start reading Parker: it's one of the most exciting books in the series, but it's also got a lightness of tone that's unusual and welcoming--there's none of the gaspingly brutal violence of, say, Plunder Squad here. I'm confident that the thousands of people who download this freebie won't need much convincing to move from that to one of the other nineteen Parkers that Chicago now has available. If you need more convincing, check out my many posts about Stark in the archives, or visit Ethan Iverson's checklist of Donald Westlake's complete oeuvre.

2 George Pelecanos's new novel, The Cut, features a character who teaches literature to public high school students in DC . . . and one of the books on his syllabus is Stark's The Hunter. After reading aloud the opening page, he asks the students what the description of Parker, all hands and shoulders and implicit violence, makes them feel:

"Way his hands are swinging," said another, "it's like he don't care about nothin."

"He doesn't belong in that suit," said William Rogers, aka Moony.

"Exactly," said Leo. "The suit doesn't fit him, both literally and metaphorically. It's a costume to him. He'd be more comfortable walking naked through a jungle. The Parker books are crime novels, but they're also about a man whose physicality stands in contrast to a working world that, at the time, had become increasingly mechanized and deskbound."

"I don't get what you're sayin, Mr. Lucas."

"Parker is a man of action. He's defined by what he does rather than what he says."

Later, in a touch I suspect Westlake would have appreciated, when the teacher asks the class what they liked about the book, a kid pipes up, "It's short."

3 Another book I had a hand in returning to print has just arrived in bookstores, and it couldn't be more different from Stark's work: Francoise Sagan's A Certain Smile. Sagan's second novel (after the explosively successful Bonjour Tristesse), it is, I think, better than her famous debut: its characters are more convincingly imagined, its prose--full of quotably pithy lines--more stripped-down, its world-weariness feeling a tad more earned. In the Economist, Molly Young called it "a popsicle of a book," and that's not far off, if you can imagine a popsicle leavened with a delectable dash or two of bitters. As autumn draws in, what better way to spend some time than sighing over the prematurely cynical love affairs of a beautiful young French student? Lay in a stock of Gauloises and enjoy!

4 And, fnally, what is perhaps the book I'm most excited about this fall, Dmitry Samarov's Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab, should be showing up in bookstores everywhere any day now. I've been a fan for a few years now of Dmitry's blog about the people he meets and the strange things he sees while driving a cab, and I'm pleased to have played a part in transforming that blog into a book. If you're fascinated by urban life, and you've always wondered about that slice of it that only cabbies see, this is the book for you: it's full of wonderful (and some horrible) anecdotes and unforgettable images of people with their guard down, revealing things to this stranger behind the wheel that, you sense, they don't even tell their closest friends. It's an amazing book, and it's powered by Dmitry's deep empathy: up against people at their worst day after day, he somehow keeps from being crushed. Indeed, what makes his stories stand out is that even as he marvels at oddity he never loses sight of the fact that it's human oddity, and thus worthy of our forbearance and care.

Dmitry will be appearing at a number of venues in Chicago this fall, including a launch party on October 1 at the Rainbo where I'll be one of the many readers (and certainly the least famous). And if you're on Twitter, definitely follow him: you'll get plenty of late-night stories of unusual fares.

Publishing's a job, like any other. But once in a while, you simply feel lucky to be a part of it. With these books, that's definitely where I stand.