There are no Sams on Italian Trains



Date: July 30, 2019

Venue: Books Are Magic

Authors: Emily Nussbam, Willa Paskin

Free Drinks: No

DroneoMeter Readings: Negative

Benefits: expired

 

On the train last week going to the Emily Nussbaum reading at the Books Are Magic bookstore in Brooklyn, I found myself standing over a young woman who had resting on her knees six or seven books.

The top one whose title I couldn’t make out looked new. The books were held in a bag from the Green Light Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

There are some summer nights in the city, when everybody is off at posh writers’ retreats in Italy, when because of a certain electrical current in the heavy air, the inevitable meetings among those left behind, those of us stuck in town, hum along pleasantly with a felicity wholly lacking in the colder months.

Before getting on the train, as I stood at the turnstile fumbling with various expired Metrocards, a young man who had just paid and gone through the turnstile ahead of me, noticed I was having trouble. He said, “Here” and opened the gate so I could go through.

After I did, and we were both standing on the platform, I said, “If this was a movie, you’d be a cop and I’d be busted for fare beating.”

My new accomplice in crime laughed.

I continued. “The first thing I’d do is try to act like a tourist and pretend I didn’t know anything. But then you’d check my license and see that I live about two blocks away so that wouldn’t work.”

As I walked away from my benefactor toward the back of the platform, I said, “Finish the script by the end of the week and we can take it from there.”

It was cooler that my free pass was handed out by a citizen who’d just paid his fare than if I was assisted by somebody who’d just jumped the turnstile himself.

So, buoyed by the delightful anarchy of having been given this favor, I was emboldened to ask the young woman if she could guess which independent bookstore in Brooklyn I was on my way to a reading at.

For understandable reasons, often women don’t appreciate strange men talking to them on the subway. But Sam, who works in publicity at Grove/Atlantic, didn’t seem to mind.

She said, “Books Are Magic.”

You may argue that to attribute her correct guess about which bookstore I was headed for to some midsummer’s night’s dream vibe that all the book people at all the Italian retreats, and even the relative plodders who were finishing their sessions upstate at Saratoga Springs and or who will be going to Broadleaf in August, would be kicking themselves for having missed out on is a bit fanciful.

It could more simply be explained by the fact that Sam is smart and correlated the train we were on to the independent bookstore I was headed for.

Well, obviously Sam is smart, they don’t hire dummies in the publicity department at Grove/Atlantic. But putting this obvious fact aside, how do the non-midsummer’s night dream believers account for the sign that accompanies this story?

Duh, we know Italy’s not only coming, it’s already here. That’s why bloggers who post pictures of Italian castles and swimming pools and who write, “At the most wonderful dinner party in the Italian countryside where everyone summarized the plot of their favorite . . . “ are more to be pitied than scolded.

Always the know-it-all, as soon as Sam said she worked at Grove/Atlantic, I mentioned Morgan Entriken’s name as if he and I went way back, which is only true in as much we both could have gone to Woodstock. (OK, I don’t know how many 13 year olds were wandering around Woodstock, but there must have been a few.)

Sam was probably relieved when her stop in Brooklyn finally came and she could get away from even a harmless gentleman like myself who wanted to gossip about books and writing, but she was gracious all the way from Chambers Street to Brooklyn.

When I got to Books Are Magic, I found the store packed. You could get in the front door, but just barely. Nussbaum covers TV for the New Yorker and before that she wrote for New York magazine. She was promoting her new book “I Like To Watch.” The overflow crowd was evidence of why publishers like authors to have a plattform, which means a pre-publication following from somewhere, magazines, TV, social media, stadiums, theaters or this blog.

It is, of course, ironic that what ammounted to a sell-out crowd, had there been tickets, was for a book about TV. I’d gone to another reading at the store two weeks ago for a novelist, a fairly, well-known writer and the turn-out had been respectable, but nothing like the numbers drawn by Nussbaum.

Books are magic and so’s TV, but the TV magic results in standing room only author events. Yeah, that’s another joke I inflicted on Sam. Within the publishing industry, I think you call readings author events so I had to show off that I was aware of that distinction if it’s even true.

I went around to the store’s backdoor where it was also full of people who were content to be sitting behind the stage, not able to see Nussbaum and her interviewer, the Slate TV critic Willa Paskin. I kidded around with the store’s readings, no, author events director, Michael, and asked him if I could get credit for showing up even though I was about to duck out because it was so crowded.

Michael, another person who has tolerently listened to me opine about bookish topics, said that I could and assured me my brief stay wouldn’t be held against me when the summer school semester’s grades were tabulated.

I was sorry to miss the program, but I’ll definitely buy the book at an independent bookstore and read it.  Had our train ride been longer, I would have pulled out one of my readings joke staples to entertain Sam about how important independent bookstores are, how they preserve a multiplicity of voices, how they give small presses equal footing with the bigger outfits and how they are much easier to shoplift from.

I found myself out on Smith Street in a jiffy, ready for whatever chance encounter might come next. Suck on that, Pasolini.

I went to Catholic school in New Jersey. The Italian kids used to punch me in the bicep. I never really got the hang of that game and I did not enjoy it.

I’ll read the new Natalia Ginzburg when it gets colder. For now, my brothers and sisters in the stuck in town community, remember to listen respectfully when everybody gets back from Vermont, Tuscany or Newark. They’ll never know what they missed. There are no Sams on Italian trains.