The Great Progressive Dinner

By this time next month, I will be in Zurich, maybe even Vienna already. Maybe I will have already taken the thirteen hour train ride. The engine a hot needle pushing through the frozen fabric of the Alps. And after the appropriate amount of days steeped in the city that "discovered" coffee for the West, I may actually float on a mediterranean zephyr down the gentler spine of the Apennines until there is nothing else but toss myself into the Adriatic, hoping to wash ashore some Greek spittle of an island.

Since the longing for this trip precipitated into a plane ticket (complete with layovers in Helsinki and Paris), I have been about the business of feeding my imagination for the land, the history, the people, and the food. I see this as an exercise in enlarging my appetite for a great progressive dinner (hm, maybe that should be more than a metaphor. should i be pre-eating too?). In my previous travels to other parts of the world, the less I've soaked in materials related to those places, the less I've been able to understand them, or at least express my understanding (which may be the same thing).

As Serendipity has proven herself time and again through the mouths of both familiar and unknown book advisors, I return to her altar again, seeking a kaleidoscopic, but somehow distilled, collection of golden pages and passages.

This is the list on which I have heretofore nibbled, gnawed, gnashed, and noshed: 

Henry James/ Italian Hours

Italo Calvino/ Road to San Giovanni

Ernest Hemingway/ A Moveable Feast

The Name of the Rose/ Umberto Eco

I, Claudius/ Robert Graves

Bella Tuscany/ Frances Mayes

Florence, Venice, and the Towns of Italy/ City Secrets

The Stones of Florence/ Mary McCarthy

Venice Observed/ Mary McCarthy

Enchanted April/ Elizabeth Von Arnim

Postwar/ Tony Judt

Where Angels Fear to Tread/ E.M. Forster 

This is the list of recommendations on my still growing "To Try" list:

Poems of Catullus

Poems of Sappho

The Decameron/ Boccaccio

What is Art/ Tolstoy

Art Objects/ Jeanette Winterson

Meditations/ Marcus Aurelius

The Pillars of Hercules/ Paul Theroux

I would like more. 

Anything: fiction,non-fiction, poetry, travel, guides, cookbooks, music, movies

Friends! Romans! Countrymen! Recommend me your reads!

Dear Diary of a Bookstore,

It's one of those rainy days in Lincoln Square that makes the store seem that much more cozy, what with our deep yellow lamp light drawing in the drowned passers-by, moth-to-flame-like. My favorite saloon playlist can just barely be heard wafting in the rafters (think 1920s blues). The shelves are extra padded with a load of volumes exhumed from a personal library estimated at a half-million books. The seller was a third generation merchant of magic paraphernalia. He's been steadily selling off his grandfather's library for five years.

Sir Jim has taken the week to revel in musical festivities and gator wrastlin. In his absence I've been strictly instructed to remind any and every book peddler how cheap we are, an unapologetic virtue of a dollar for hardcovers, a half dollar for paperbacks. The first peddler cried and said, "But I walked in the rain!" (We don't pay more for weather-related efforts (unless of course you bring us coffee in the snow)). The second peddler shrugged and said he was Kate Chopin's g-g-grandson just trying to make room for a nursery for Kate Chopin's g-g-g-grandson. He used to own a coffee shop in Lincoln Park that he decorated like a bookstore. What does that mean?

Little else happening except the addition of a new bookcase. Come in and see! If you can find it I'll give you a dollar. But if you guess the wrong one you have to give me a dollar (or a green tea latte). Other than that, just trying to fill the hole Jim left in in my heart with Cheeze-Its and horseradish hummus. Crunchy-spicy!  Oh and I nearly cut off my pinky. Never fear, it's still basically here. I can tell because there's blood all over the keyboard. I'll be spending the day reading Blind Assassin, which the blog says I've been reading for weeks now. That's a lie. I curled up with Anne of Green Gables for the first time in my life and cried for the first time in years (over a book, that is). Picked up Bachelard's Poetics of Space again, and once again had my mind blown to bits. I'll continue with it once I've gathered them back in. But no, today is Atwood's day. Savin all my love.

Over and out,
j.s.

Ps: found that coffee shop! Now I see what he meant, although it might be more accurate to say "I owned a coffee shop/library." And I'm sad it's closed now.

creep-chasin mug