Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders. “Uber for books”: a same-day service that would deliver library volumes to your door. “Fitbit for books”: an app that blocks incoming calls and buzzes your phone with reminders to get back to a book. That literary pedometer meets its real-world counterpart in LitCity: “Imagine walking down a city street and feeling that familiar buzz of a push notification. But instead of it being a notification on Twitter or a restaurant recommendation, it’s a beautiful passage from a work of literature with a tie to that place.” I thought back to the nineteenth-century guidebooks that inserted a snippet of Shelley next to their map of the Alps; the book has always been about bringing worlds together.
I keep reminding myself that it’s not all that bad. There will always be new books about New York. And there will be bookstores; in fact, there are some very cool new ones, such as Word and the Center for Fiction, both in Brooklyn. These stores may well thrive if they are able to evolve with New Yorkers’ consuming habits, like Brooklyn-based Books Are Magic’s robust Instagram presence or McNally Jackson’s South Street Seaport expansion that will serve beer and wine. The Strand—props to them—is clearly doing what it must to succeed. And the store has not lost its soul; recently, in fact, there was a “No Place Like New York,” window display. Still, the socks made me realize my late-blooming identity as a New York author is a flickering projection of an anachronistic ideal.
The elevator doors opened onto a loft-like space throbbing with music. Organizers in T-shirts that read ASK ME ANYTHING ABOUT MY BUTTHOLE were setting up booths by the entrance, helping a strange panoply of performers prepare for the evening. A woman wearing all-but-invisible underwear sat on a perch while a companion covered her naked flesh with yellow paint. Another woman organized a kissing booth, dressed in a flesh-colored bodysuit and a pillowy hat shaped like a butt that covered her entire face. Her face cheeks became butt cheeks, her nose became an anus—she was a human butt.
The room was of a kind common in New York, where the walls are thick with layers of white paint applied slapdash over decades. It was the sort of room that could work for a wedding, or an art gallery, or, if someone nailed together some drywall partitions, a chiropractor’s office—a blank canvas that could become anything. On that sweaty evening in August, the room was transformed into an event called Butt-Con.
Groucho Marx once joked, “Anything that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all.” You might think he was referring to sleeping and sex. But humans, at one time or another, have done just about everything in bed.
And yet, despite the fact that we spend one-third of our lives in bed, they’re more of an afterthought.
“If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.” With these words, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard” announced a paradox of modern Italian history, as elites frenetically cut deals to protect their privileged status on the eve of national unification in 1861. In “Lampedusa,” Steven Price’s fictional account of how the novel came to be written, Lampedusa himself is no wheeler and dealer. Diagnosed with emphysema, he seems like one of those Sebaldian characters so weighed down by memory and history that he has never really been alive. As Price puts it, “He could not recall a time when his own pleasure had been untainted by loss, by sadness.” Lampedusa’s ancestral palazzo was destroyed in World War II; his family was harrowed by murder and suicide; his mother was a mix of raging disapproval and smothering love.
All genre expectations are dutifully met and cheekily subverted. But that doesn’t stop this story strand from being curiously engaging, even as it becomes increasingly daft. I found myself feeling sorry for poor old Daniel James, in spite of my residual resentment about being led into a never-ending hall of mirrors. In the final reckoning, I’m not sure that the book amounts to much. But nor am I certain that there isn’t more to it. Maybe if I read it again, I’ll see it entirely differently. It’s that kind of book. Which is to say, it’s singular.
“Night Boat to Tangier,” like Beckett’s “Godot,” is about the wait. It’s about hunkering down and admitting the presence of old ghosts. The reason “Night Boat to Tangier” works is that Maurice and Charlie are vivid company on the page, a couple of battered and slightly sinister vaudevillians on a late-career mental walkabout. They might have fallen out of an early Tom Waits ballad, a chest fever splashing over minor seventh chords.
She brings the same revelatory eye to the Links of Noltland on Westray. A recent storm has revealed a 5,000-year-old Neolithic settlement to rival that of nearby Skara Brae. The Orcadian essay is divided into three sections, the last of which is written in the second person and seeks to reconstruct imaginatively the lives of the inhabitants of this ancient place. It’s wonderful writing, testing the limits of nonfiction, and seems to be the launchpad for the more impressionistic, personal later chapters of the book.
One magpie always means watch out. One magpie in the yard means stay in the house. Two magpies in the lane mean don’t go farther than the roadside.