QUIZ: Should you fire your Muse?

Guys I can't figure out how to embed a quiz function in Blogger so get out a pencil & paper or iPhone or neurally-embedded microchip or whatever the kids are using nowadays to write things down.

Should you fire your muse? A quiz:
Choose one answer per question. No cheating.

1. I am currently reading:
A) Dude, like, thirty different books. I'm running out of bookmarks. It's kind of a dire situation actually. I just can't resist that dollar cart.
B) It's this novel about this guy whose father is a drug-dealer and he recruits his son to mule drugs through small-town airports for him but then this guy double-crosses his dad after falling in love in a diner and I don't want to tell you what happens because it's really gripping but also a super moving portrait, like you really connect with the character, I swear I was moved to tears, you really have to read it, here you can borrow my copy.
C)  Something featured on NPR.
D) Something with a spaceship on the cover.

2. My ideal work space is:
A) 4am me my desk and coffee coffee coffee all the coffee
B) Around people/out in public (not necessarily at a cafe because that's a major cliche and originality is more or less the point of this whole venture but also a coffee counter within ambling distance wouldn't be too shabby either let's be honest).
C) A lush private garden. Y'know like the overgrown kind with ancient trees dripping with ivy and small woodland creatures and maybe a dilapidated hedge maze.
D) I have all my best ideas in the shower. 

3. Preferred timepiece:
A) Wristwatch/Pocketwatch
B) Phone
C) Little digital screen on the microwave 
D) Position of the sun

4. I'd dump a potential significant other if they:
A) Gave me a cutesy nickname.
B) Ate the last potato chip and then left the empty bag in the cupboard and THEN didn't even write it on the grocery list.
C) Touched my butt in public.
D) Get annoyed when I pop the bubble wrap that comes in the packages I order from ebay for the express purpose of getting bubble wrap. Life's little pleasures. Come on.

5. I believe in:
A) God
B) Myself
C) Anti-oxidants
D) Whichever answer sounds the most cynical.

Results: Yes you should fire your muse. Internet quizzes are the lowest circle of inspiration hell; the last bastion of bored procrastinators. Your muse is clearly not even trying.

Fear not, citizens! Your scores have been tabulated by our most advanced computers (they beep!) and your ideal fount of passionate creativity assessed. Google your new muse, bask in their genius, then go forth. Make art.

If you answered:
Mostly As - Natalie Portman (admit it, most gorgeous person ever, also brilliant, also I think vegan or at least vegetarian).
Mostly Bs - Junot Diaz, my favorite writer to ever speak here, by the way. Oh my god he shook my hand.
Mostly Cs - A majestic wild beast who nonetheless possesses some startlingly anthropomorphic feature(s), (eyes of measureless wisdom, can talk, is good at scrabble, etc.) Go reread C. S. Lewis.
Mostly Ds - George Takei, god-king of the internet.

From Blizzards to Tropics

Today was the first day I ventured out to work after the blizzard. The first customer I found in the travel aisle was shivering in front of our wide selection of Caribbean guidebooks. I asked if she needed any help. She peered up at me from beneath a wooly hat and pleaded, "I want to go somewhere warm!"

Don't we all? That's why we're celebrating the sunny Caribbean as our Destination of the Month of February. After puzzling over how to get to Cuba for awhile, my customer determined she would go swim with the migrating whales off the coast of Belize. If, like me, your February will be spent trudging between work and home through ice and snow and sludge, our destination shelf is brimming with titles ready to transport you to the blazing heat of a sun-baked beach.

Travel alongside the erudite classic travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, as he wanders among the old colonial capitals of several Caribbean Islands, including Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti. Fermor's first published travel narrative, Traveller's Tree, describes the culture and people inhabiting the paradisaical landscape, from steel drum bands to Voodoo practices.

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is an engaging history book to supplement your knowledge of the Caribbean Islands and the surrounding waters, which, just after the Spanish Inquisition, were often populated with Jewish Pirates. Edward Kritzler describes the adventures of such ships as the Prophet Samuel and Queen Esther and the prospects of their fascinating crews.

Tropic Death is a collection of short stories set in Barbados, Panama, and other Caribbean landscapes that filled the childhood memories of author Eric Walrond. Although fictional, these vivid depictions of life in the tropics transport the reader into the lives of island residents living in the aftermath of colonialism.  If the Dominican Republic is your destination, Junot Diaz's short story collection, Drown, reveals the lives of residents of the villages and barrios of the DR. Both of these short story collections would make a great read for a flight to the Caribbean. And of course, for a sultry romp through Puerto Rico, all you have to do is pick up Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary and you're off to 1950s San Juan.

If you are looking not only to escape the cold, but also the city, pick up Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and let her take you to a ten-by-twelve mile island, her home of Anitgua. Watch the changes that came with colonialism and tourism, and learn about the lives lived out in this small place in the Caribbean.

Earnest Readers at the Boston Book Festival

Booksmith was back at the fourth annual Boston Book Festival this past weekend. Luckily the hurricane held off so we didn't have to fight the winds and rains, and instead enjoyed a crisp, sunny autumn day. For those of you who didn't make it to Copley Square to wander among the publisher, bookseller, and all-things-book-related booths or to attend one of the author panels, we were parked just outside of Trinity Church, sharing the  main circus tent with Information and WBUR. We had the privilege of selling books for the authors speaking at Trinity's two venues. Those of you who stopped by to say hello or browse our tables would have seen stacks upon stacks of--among others--Junot Diaz's latest This is How You Lose Her, Brookline's own Edith Pearlman's Binocular Vision, Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, and a pile of books resembling bricks of gold (and weighing almost as much)--that was Eric Kandel's Age of Insight, a beautiful hardcover with Klimt's "Golden Phase" on the cover, which sold out after his event.

In fact, we sold out of many of our books in the charged atmosphere of the festival, as readers met their author idols and shared their favorite reads. It's this particular atmosphere that makes me excited to work the book festival each year. I love wandering among the booths and seeing all of the organizations that make up my writing and reading life in Boston. Everyone around me is, in some form or another, a reader. Don't get me wrong, Booksmith is full of book-loving customers, but at the book festival, there's a particular eagerness to the readers that come by our booth. They're excited about the ideas they just heard, the free book bag they just won, or the prospect of getting a copy of their book signed in person. It's more than eager--there's something earnest about these readers, which instantly endears me to them.

That's why I was so sorry to disappoint one young man who came out of Junot Diaz's event looking for Diaz's novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I had to tell him we had just sold our last copy. He looked at me, stunned. "Are there any bookstores in the area?" he cried desperately. I couldn't think of any close by. "How long will Diaz be signing?" he asked. We both looked at the long line of readers, stretching out of the tent as far as we could see. "I think he'll be here for awhile,"  I guessed.

Not more than thirty minutes later, Diaz was still signing, and the customer was back. "I made it!" he cried, dripping with sweat, completely out of breath, and triumphantly holding up a rather worn copy of Oscar Wao. He told me he had run home three miles to get his copy of the book so Diaz could sign it. I watched him proudly join the end of the now-dwindling line, and when, a few minutes later, I looked up, I saw Diaz congratulate the runner with a hug before signing his book.

Dispatch from Book Expo America, or the "Halapalooza of Reading Quietly in a Room by Yourself"

New York is a city of extremes. As soon as I arrived I remembered how it was possible to love and hate the city at once. “You either sink or swim here,” Pat Carrier of the former Globe Corner bookstore told me as he guided me through the labyrinth of  publisher booths crammed inside the illogically (it seemed to me) laid out Javits Convention Center. I had come to NYC for two days of Book Expo America, beginning with an author breakfast with Stephen Colbert, Barbara Kingsolver, Junot Diaz, and Jo Nesbo, the last of whom, I thought, proved funnier than our host, who kept his punch lines to Fifty Shades of Grey jokes.

After coffee with Colbert (okay, it wasn’t quite as intimate as it sounds, and listening to Colbert crack Fifty Shades jokes over blueberry muffins wasn’t exactly an appetizing way to start the day), I stepped onto the exhibition floor full of publishers, authors, booksellers, librarians, and readers all conducting the business of books, which included much elbowing for the latest free advanced reader copy. I wandered disoriented among the chaos for quite some time, unsure of how exactly I fit between the world of swanky New York publishers and the woman in front of me who just jammed a display copy I am not certain was free into an already burgeoning shoulder bag of ARCs.

Unidentified BEA attendee with bags full of free books.

I felt exactly as I had when I first stumbled off my train from Boston the night before, weaving through Penn Station crowds and onto the metro–instantly overwhelmed, intimidated, and drained by the city. But when, 15 minutes later, I had emerged from the underground up onto a quiet, tree lined street in Greenwich Village, where I was lucky enough to find a room, I discovered that I could breathe again, and deeply. Perhaps it was the refreshing contrast from home, the thrill of new streets and shops to explore, perhaps it was the contrast with the crowds of the metro that made the sudden space and sunshine more charming than was their due, but I was enamored.

These extreme reactions continued at BEA, leaving me baffled at first, overwhelmed, then charmed and grateful at once. By the second day on the exhibition floor, I began to take a few faltering strokes. I found space to think and even to be inspired in a few of the educational sessions, and I began meeting people within the book industry, talking, exchanging cards. Once conversations began to open up, I began to see inside the work that was going on before my eyes. Though I had much to learn, I was no longer an outsider.

As Booksmith recently expanded our travel section, the session that most interested me at BEA was a panel of travel publishers talking about recent trends and changes in the travel industry. Yes, people are still traveling post 9/11 and economic crisis, but their habits and tastes and itineraries are constantly shifting, as are the sources of information travelers turn to when faced with an unknown destination. This was an interesting conversation to listen in on as a bookseller trying to find the perfect guidebook for each unique traveler to visit the Globe Corner at Brookline Booksmith, and also as a traveler myself who was at that very moment trying to be at home in a city she felt somewhat intimidated by.

On the exhibition floor.

Publishers of travel guidebooks are doing their best to meet the needs of today’s travelers, who are inevitably turning to the most convenient and local sources for information. I understood this impulse myself when selecting which coffee shop to frequent in my New York neighborhood. I didn’t use a technological device, but I did look at the lines. Where were the locals going? I followed suit, and was rewarded by freshly baked bagels smothered in so much cream cheese that my breakfast resembled a whoopie pie. Local tastes can sometimes seem infallible. And when choosing where to go or what to eat, technology allows us to access our college roommate who lives in the city, or general local opinion, in seconds. The publishing industry has to answer.

And they are. I was impressed with the thoughtful conversation going on around me at BEA regarding how to get the best, trusted, local information to readers, how to edit, filter, and control that information to make sure it is accurate, and how to remain a trusted resource for travelers. The conversation renewed my faith that the guidebook is not obsolete, a belief that is backed up every day I go into work and find our freshly-widened travel aisle crammed full of travelers who want to hear from their chosen guide, be it Rick Steves, Lonely Planet, Michelin, Frommers, Fodors, Moon, Eyewitness, or other trusted sources.

The title of another session I attended intrigued me: “Discovery, Recommendation, Serendipity.” The panel discussed the role of serendipity in getting the perfect book into a reader’s hands and how to create a context for these magical moments. Might it be possible, if not to do the work of serendipity  itself, to at least do the work that might create a space—physical or virtual—in which these moments between a reader and a text, might occur. After all, wasn’t it in the service such moments as these that we were all gathered at the convention, “the halapalooza of reading quietly in a room by yourself,” as Colbert put it?  Most of the discussion surrounded the tools we have to create such contexts, such as blogs and websites, which can be used to reveal the inter-connectivity of stories and make apparent the threads of culture that make up those stories, in the hope that one of these threads might cross with, connect to, coincide with, a reader’s life experience–thus creating a serendipitous and meaningful moment.

Boy practicing violin on the street in my neighborhood.

On either end of my days at the convention, I was getting to know my neighborhood, striking up conversations with the local baristas and booksellers I discovered along the charming streets of Greenwich Village. That evening, as I stumbled back to my room, I passed a used bookshop, just two doors down from my own that I had somehow missed upon my arrival. I did not stop in at first—I had to take off my shoes after a day of traversing the exhibition floor. But I ventured out again an hour later. And there, staring out at me from the store front window, was Fernando Pessoa. I have had a fascination with the poet and his city of Lisbon for years now, and I ducked inside to inquire about the book.

“I just put that out, 90 seconds ago!” the bookseller inside told me, and I reflected that had I stopped by earlier, Pessoa and I might never have exchanged that potent glance that sometimes passes between a reader and a book. The thin volume, I sensed, was something of a rare find, from a 1985 London exhibition and full of precious autobiographical information surrounding the life of the elusive poet and his over 72 alter egos, or heteronyms.

“Can you part with it so soon?” I asked the bookseller, whose name was Zeke. He was soon convinced that he could, once I had told him of my obsession with Lisbon and opened my wallet. After we completed our conversation and transaction (which was, Zeke admitted, the fastest sale in Left Bank Books history), we exchanged cards (I’d gotten into the habit at BEA). I stepped out the door into a fresh downpour but did not mind. I knew that I had just experienced the serendipitous moment we had been discussing at BEA. There was the work of the artists, writers, curators, publishers, and a bookseller about to make his fastest sale behind it, but there was also the sense of a connection made up of countless threads beyond my control magically coming together in that moment when Pessoa caught my eye. I suddenly saw the chaos of the exhibition floor at BEA as many of those countless threads weaving and interweaving and creating a web of meaningful conversation that, at its best, might somehow converge to create a moment for a reader like the one I had just stumbled into. And I left BEA motivated to work to create a context and place for others to discover their own moments of serendipity, when a story they had no idea was coming, converges with their own.

Whenever I visit NYC I always end up, on my last day in the city, seated on the banks of the Hudson with my back to the skyline, staring out into open space, absorbing it, if at all possible. Perhaps it’s the Midwest in me, longing for horizons. For while I have learned to love the city, I have also discovered its pace: sprint and recover, sprint and recover. This was the strategy my Iowa high school basketball coach once instilled in me, and the mantra I found myself repeating under my breath whenever overwhelmed by the crowds. And while I can’t say I prefer the pace to the slow laid back swagger of the West Coast, almost lackadaisical in comparison, or to the industrious steady tread of the Midwest, or to the unceasing marathon that is Boston, I find that somehow it works—I lose my breath but always find it again, I sink, but then—buoyed up by some unlooked for thrill or serendipitous moment—I float.