Of tiny soaps and books

Let's be honest: whether you're chilling on a cruise ship, lying pool side in a tropical oasis, or hoofing it in the big city, whatever kind of vacation you prefer, your hotel room is your sanctuary. It's the place that anchors you even though it can be as foreign as your environs, where your feet rest, your domination plans take shape, and you can start to remember who you are before you head back out to character-shaping adventures. 

And for those of us who tourist around to bookstores, CNN has a great lil mashup of literary hotels the world over. Though CNN sadly missed Boston's own Omni Parker House, where Emerson and Longfellow had their literary salons and Charles Dickens read from A Christmas Carol in 1867. This week a grip of new guidebooks are swelling our shelves, from the rebooted Frommers EasyGuides, to the new Lonely Planet Best in Travel 2014 (ranking the places to go next year) and, perhaps the most lush and exciting of all, and pertaining directly to places to lay thine traveler's head, the new crop of Mr. and Mrs. Smith guides to the chicest hotels in tout-le-monde.

For the uninitiated, Mr. and Mrs. Smith guidebooks feature lush photographs of lavish hotels--the creme-de-le-creme boutiques--as well as what to do beyond the bedroom. We just received the France and Italy guides, so come snatch them and book your dream room before anyone else. 

Tattoos, Denny's and other Japanese literary symbols

Last week I wrote ad nauseum of my forthcoming trip to Japan. In order to prepare for said trip (and also because I'm super excited) I've been reading all kinds of Japanese literature to get my head in the game as it were. Here are some of my favorites thus far:

Kenneth Roxroth's 100 Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, in addition to Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu's poetry compiled in The Ink Dark Moon are some of the most beautifully selected words placed in a deliberate arrangement ever. I wish I could describe to you how beautiful enigmatic it is all at the same time, reading these are like feeling you're made of glass and slowing filling with curls of smoke. I can't do them justice, just read them all.

If we're going to talk about epic literature from Japan I'd be remiss in not including Tale of Genji. One of the first novels in the world, written by a LADY, it really is the coolest thing ever. But I've never finished it. I'm SORRY! Gosh.

What I have finished are some of the best modernist novels ever. Natsume Soseki could teach Raymond Carver a thing or two about deeply psychological interiority belied by understated language. The Gate is an amazing, slim novel in which the main character and his wife live childless in an idyllic picket fence house. But that's about as peaceful as it gets. The main character hates his job. The couple are spurned by their families as they married without consent, and suddenly his wife's reckless little brother squeezes the strained couple for help on top of it all. So taught, so beautiful, suuuch a good book.

Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes is unmissable, and Yukio Mishima's short stories in the collected Death in Midsummer are among my favorite reads of all time. His characters have amazing strength and fatal flaws and you'll need to read each story several times for the feeling that there's a detail in one word (or absence of one) that casts everything in a new light. I also recently finished Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales ... one story in particular, "The Tattooer" has left quite the indelible mark on me (pun fully intended). This man is an expert tattooer and only tattoos on people when he's inspired, and he finds ultimate inspiration in a beautiful maiden walking down the street. Convinced she is a demonic scroll come incarnate he is gripped with the need to tattoo her, and as she consents the art embellishing her back begins to imbue her with magnificent power. KAPOW!

For a more contemporary Japan (the one I'll actually be in) there is the incomparable Murakami. Thus far I've only read After Dark, to be honest it's a little daunting to decide where to go from there. After Dark is amazing. It's set in Tokyo around midnight and follows all the different sorts of people that only come out at night, in addition to a young runaway who may or may not be related to a rebooted magical Sleeping Beauty dozing in the literal center of the novel. But as I said, Murakami's got sprawling epics and copious short stories. I know I'll love them all but how to decide?! Maybe I'll take 1Q84 on my 16 hour plane flight? I might be able to bang it out...

Destination: Elsewhere

Last week, I was chatting with a coworker as she prepared an after-shift smoke, carefully rolling the tobacco as we discussed the day and her present need, at the end of it, to be elsewhere. "I like to sprinkle a little dried lavender in," she said. "It has a nice effect."

I gasped and wouldn't let her go smoke the lavender-and-tobacco bundle until I had dragged her down to Destination Literature to show her the essay I had read the night before, entitled "Lavender."

The essay is the first in a new collection by Andre Aciman, Alibis: Essays from Elsewhere. The book begins with the scent of lavender, as vivid as if you had been smoking it yourself, emanating from Aciman's father's aftershave. In the next pages Aciman will be tracking the essence of this memory and the essence of the self, trying to determine what fragrance best expresses, epitomizes, and may one day, for his own son, immortalize, him.

The Proustian shadow is eminent in this as well as in the essays that follow. All the reader has to do is replace the scent of lavender with the taste of a tea-soaked madeleine to understand that Aciman is on his own hunt for lost time. Aciman acknowledges his emulation of Proust, accepts it as a part of the self he explores, as a Proust scholar and editor of The Proust Project. A Proust fanatic myself, I forgave any parasitic tendencies in these essays, as Aciman does not just evoke the style and philosophical musings of my favorite author, but continues Proust's exploration of the romantic relationship that our imaginations hold with alibis, elsewhere.

Aciman left Egypt with his family when still a young man, an exodus captured in his work Out of Egypt. In Alibis, Aciman returns to the streets of Rome, his first city of exile, to discover if anything of the past remains from his three years in the city. Instead of memories, however, he finds the streets paved with scenes from the literature he escaped into as a young man absented from any homeland outside of his imagination.

Aciman's tendency to read place through the literary imagination infuses his travel essays with beauty and nostalgia for places never to be returned to. Sometimes literature overrides his experience of reality, and the reader is left believing that the places she longs for can only be found within the confines of the self. But every once in a while the spell works in reverse, as art, such as a cherished Monet painting, leads Aciman on a pilgrimage to a place never before experienced in the immediacy of a present moment. Aciman's descriptive, winding prose captures such moments and tantalizes the reader in much the same way that scenes from literature and art inspired his own travels--to Rome, Venice, Tuscany, Barcelona, Paris, Alexandria, and New York.

The reward of reading these essays in getting to travel with Aciman, not only into new landscapes, but into the reflective depths of the self. After all, much of what the traveler sees in a city is simply a projection of the self. This is what Aciman calls "the miracle of intimacy with a place that may be more in us than it is ever out on the pavement."

Reading these essays is, in fact, not far from the experience of an after-shift smoke: breathing in a new atmosphere, a fresh scent, looking up from the page to letting the reflections swirl about, deep within the self, before exhaling the ephemeral language that inevitably leads your imagination back out into the surrounding streets of your city.
As I neared the end of Aciman's book, I went back to the initial essay, this time with a lavender-laced tobacco pipe in hand. The essay ends in a lavender field in Provence, where Aciman has traveled with his wife and sons. There is a sense of fulfillment in this ending, a comforting feeling that things have come full circle: here is the source of the scent, the thing itself, and, perhaps, a glimpse of the ever-elusive self, no longer dwelling in the past, no longer elsewhere, but finally, fully present, if only for a moment. As I read this passage, I exhaled and sniffed the air.

Like Aciman, and before him, Proust, I was remembering. I first read Proust while house-sitting in Seattle. For me, one of the greatest pleasures of house-sitting is getting to try out soaps, shampoos, and lotions other than your own. The lotion of that particular host, which I would lather on after a bath and before curling up with Proust, was scented with lavender.

Destination: Myanmar

About a month ago, my sister and her husband and their (as yet unborn) first child moved to Myanmar (formerly Burma), to teach at an International School. With their limited Internet connection and my nonexistent travel budget, I wondered how we were going to stay connected. I knew that my sister had been reading abou the country to prepare for the move. On her recommendation, I picked up Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma, which I found conveniently on hand in our Destination Literature section at Booksmith, along with a surprising number of other books about Burma. I may not have the means to visit my sister, I reasoned, but I could follow her (and, coincidentally, George Orwell) at least as far as these books could take me.

Myanmar proves a fascinating country to read about. Soon after Burma became independent from the British in 1948, a dictator sealed the country off in order to promote Burmese Socialism. The country became poor, isolated, and its people neglected. Larkin reports that some Burmese refer to Orwell as "the prophet," and consider his novels Animal Farm and 1984 to be just as much about their country as his first novel, Burmese Days, which takes place during the last days of British rule (Orwell served with the Imperial Police).


I've discovered several other novels set in Burma during this time, including Daniel Mason's Piano Tuner, in which a taciturn piano teacher must travel through Burmese jungle on a commisson from the British War Office to tune a piano. Amitav Ghosh's Glass Palace, also set during the British invasion of the 1880s, follows a poor boy who befriends a woman in the court of the exiled royal family.

Reading these novels becomes even more exciting in light of the changes that have been taking place in the country over the past few years. Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi was recently released from a house arrest that was inflicted by the military junta in 1989. The letters of this extraordinary human rights activist, who left her family to return to Burma and fight for democracy there, are available for order.

With so many vivid descriptions, historical explorations, and compelling anecdotes told by extraordinary guides, I feel not only better connected to my sister's experience, but to the world of many others I would not have otherwise encountered. Feeling disconnected? Find more engaging reads from around the world in our Destination Literature section, located between aisles two and three at Booksmith.

Literary Destinations

I was about to write more about our new Destination Literature section, highlighting travel essays and literature in translation from different countries around the world. But then I read Kate Taylor's article in the New York Times, "Fiscal Woe Haunting Baltimore Poe House." Due to lack of funding, the Edgar Allan Poe house museum may be forced to close its doors. Ever since I read in a recent issue of Tin House, A.N. Dever's "On the Outskirts," about her pilgrimage to the Poe House, I have wanted to visit. The thought that the Edgar Allan Poe house museum may be nevermore, is haunting me.

Our Destination Literature section at Booksmith is full of literature meant to lead your imagination to new destinations. When I heard about the threat to this specific literary destination, I began to think about the importance of our nation's literary sites. Like many readers at Booksmith, one of my favorite reading experiences is witnessing the very real connection between literature and life. Nowhere is this relationship more tangible to me than when I am touring the old haunts of an author, walking through their landscapes, enjoying the view from their writing desks. In her Times article, Taylor reports that Poe's presence is very much a part of the Poe House experience, described by guests as haunting and, well, creepy.

I also began thinking of other literary landmarks, even closer to home. One of these is the former site of the Old Corner Bookstore, located at Washington and School Street and once home to Globe Corner Books, which recently closed their doors to Harvard Square. Part of the impulse to expand our travel literature section began with the announcement that the Globe Corner would close for good. When the Brookline Barnes&Noble closed, we expanded our magazines, when Bob Slate closed, we accomodated with a new "Writer's Corner" full of beautiful stationary, journals and art supplies. Booksmith continues to strive to meet the needs of Boston's literary community as the physical spaces devoted to the promotion and provision of literature continue to shrink.

While most readers will remember when the Globe Corner Bookstore was housed at the Old Corner, few can remember the Old Corner's prior residents. The brick building was built in 1712 and from 1833-1864 was the site of a thriving publishing scene, at the center of which sat publishers James T. Fields and William Davis Ticknor. Next to Ticknor's desk was a chair reserved for Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ticknor's young partner Fields worked behind a green curtain in another corner, entertaining the writers on which America's literary foundations rest. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, even Henry David Thoreau all frequented the store in which Boston's literary conversation had its beginnings.

I like to imagine I can still here echoes of that conversation in the aisles of Boston's remaining bookstores. Yet the site of the former Old Corner Bookstore remains empty. For awhile, a Borders thrived across the street, but even that bookstore is closing. The last business I noticed on the Old Corner was a jewelers. Now the Old Corner Bookstore sits empty, its significance marked only with a small plaque, which took me four tries to locate when I first hunted the site down on the Freedom Trail. Services are still held in the church where Paul Revere hung his lantern, the famous harbor is still a thriving port. Yet another of our country's literary sites stands disreguarded at the Old Corner.

Even if a bookselling business can no longer be supported at the site, why not some sort of memorial, something like the first Museum of the Book, a site dedicated to connecting our literary scene today with those of the past? I'm ignorant of the financial cost, but aware of the cultural richness such an endeavor would create. And where better than Boston, seat of our nation's literary beginnings, for such a museum? And what better time than our era of change and innovation, to remember, record and reinstate the value of the enduring book and the spaces to which it takes us?