On Sunday night, Becky got back from New Orleans for the American Booksellers Association's 2012 Winter Institute. Exhausted from meetings, loggy with shrimp po' boys and beignets, it was all she could do to keep her eyes open long enough to tumble into bed. Mere hours later, she was sitting at the computer in her pajamas, on her day off, listening to the ALA webcast. She had an open purchase order for Books & Books ready to go.
If you check out Newbury Winner Dead End in Norvelt and Caldecott winner A Ball for Daisy, for example, you'll notice that both titles say "special order - subject to availability." That's because they're in reprint. Every time a book wins an award (or an author dies), you can bet the publishers and wholesalers will go from hundreds of available copies to nothing in a matter of hours.
But we've got them. We've got the winners, because Becky is so dedicated that she spent her one day off in two weeks ordering them.
If you wonder what makes Books & Books continually successful. . . well, sure I'm biased. But Becky Quiroga is a big reason.
This year opened with Christopher Paolini's Inheritance on Sunday afternoon. The Miami Writers Institute, Student Literary Encounters, and the heavy hitters - Dorothy Alison, Harry Belafonte, John Sayles, Ron Suskind, Calvin Trillin - have been hitting all week long, but these next three days are key. The Street Fair is its own monster, and Books & Books is 90% ready.
It's ten minutes to six am. Becky and I are dropping Dylan off at school in the dark so we can finish the job of getting the tents set up.
Some retailers have the holiday season; at Books & Books, we have Miami Book Fair International.
Tensions are high. Illness runs rampant. Three of us have almost quit this week, including me. When the gates open in about four hours, we'll find out if it's all been worth it.
There have been more cancellations. I read an apologetic email from an author just recovering from the flu. This author knew that flying down to Miami for the weekend would cause the flu to return, so... he can't make it, sorry.
Not everyone at Books & Books is or has gotten sick but there's a fairly sturdy illness making the rounds on some key players. I worked a sixty-hour week, spent a miserable Friday night and all day Saturday in bed, and then worked another sixty hour week starting Sunday. 14 and 16 hour days are just as beneficial for your health as you'd imagine.
I'm putting more effort into stocking Authorton McFluwhiner's books than he is into promoting them.
As Becky says, "His loss, don't it so personally." I don't. Much. I just get annoyed when people have the kind of jobs where they can make those choices. I wonder what it is about me that I have never had the kind of job where I can take a sick day. It is me, refusing to take one? People call out all the time at every job I've ever had, so maybe it is just me.
Anyway, I've gone off topic and now the alarm is going off. My point is, there's stuff I wanted to do. I haven't written in forever, and not just blogs. I've been sleeping in until seven, because waking at five would be pushing myself too hard, and this cold keeps nipping at my heels. I wanted to morph that post about the wedding books into something Book Fairish for The Heat Lightning, because a ton of those authors are appearing. I wanted to interview someone awesome like Vera Brosgol or Hillary Jordan for THL, too. I wanted to drink juice and eat soup.
Well, I did that last one. Just not enough.
By the end of every day, I'm in that mode where I have to keep moving, because if I stop, I'll crash. It was over a hundred degrees in the tent yesterday. I think I lost ten pounds of water. I know I didn't pee once. It's supposed to rain all weekend.
God forbid you have a successful tour. Poor you, having to meet folks who adore your work. You don't want attention, then guess what? Don't tour. Before that, don't publish what you write.
Clearly your work has struck a nerve, but screw the fans whose purchases have assured you'll never need a real job again, right? Screw the folks trying to schedule hundreds of authors around your event, huh? Fuck that guy in the buying office beating his brains against his desk trying to find copies of your book somewhere, anywhere, because your publisher is caught by surprise and your book is in reprint, yes?
Fuck those people because it's all about you, and flying in an airplane, checking into a hotel, sitting in a chair, and signing your fucking name is just too much. You know why David Sedaris signs for four hours at every gig, even after all these years on tour? Because he knows that real work is much, much worse.
Get a fucking job.
Google Images doesn't have much in the manner of book beatings.
And if your tour is not successful, so what? You published an honest-to-God book. In this climate, where publishers are leary of anything not rambled (or co-rambled) into existence by some "celebrity," you did it - you didn't self-publish, you didn't CreateSpace, you didn't offer your book on the Kindle for 99 cents. A publisher looked at your work and thought, "This. This will keep the doors open a while a longer." That's not enough affirmation for you?
I get it, it's frustrating to think you have something to say and that no one will listen, like this is your one big chance to shout your message to a mass audience but the crowd went, "meh." I have no idea what that feels like. But you know what it feels like being the guy ordering books for the guy for whom that's not good enough? It sucks. It's soul-crushing. It sets my teeth a-grinding.
So think of me, pull your head out of your ass, and woo the half-dozen people who care what you have to say so hard that they'll have no choice but to tell half a dozen others.
Of the two book beating images on offer, this is the clear winner.
And if this is your second year canceling... oh, Authorton. Nothing could make me agree to this again, order everything for Miami Book Fair while doing my regular job. But to see you come in, give your presentation, and melt down because your books aren't here, thinking of that almost makes it seem worth the effort.
Better yet, maybe we'll just have you sign copies of our return paperwork. Fuckwad.
Because the days are just packed! If you're unfamiliar with the Miami International Book Fair, it's in its 28th year.
Circa 1984. That's my boss on the left.
Because of Mitchell's involvement with MBFI, and because of our rather large sales tent, folks assume that Books & Books always handles sales for the author events. This has been true from time to time over the years, but it's never a given. 2011 is a make or break year. We're trying to be more organized than ever, looking at everything as hard as we can, to determine once and for all whether handling event sales at MBFI makes us money, or if we should hand event sales off to someone else (again).
I mention all of this because MBFI is consuming me. I do the event appearances for Books & Books, among other things, and I've been tapped to order for this event as well. It's like being handed a second full-time job on top of my regular full-time job.
Thankfully, some co-workers have stepped up to lighten my load. Not a lot, but enough to where I haven't actually torn my hair out.
I know, I know, I'm lucky to have a job in this economy. Particularly a book-industry job.
Then there's being a husband to my love, a father to my other love, Halloween, the After-Wedding Karaoke Jam Party, costumes, cleaning, meals, scratching the cat (no, that's not some gross metaphor). You know- life. I could be selfish and lock myself in my room until I'm published, but I don't think that would make me happy.
Besides, art doesn't happen in a vacuum.
I'm trying to keep the faith. Pushing the cursor isn't coming as easily as it has at certain moments in my life, but I still tell myself most days that it matters. I will dream big, and not listen to people who aren't. I will stop listening to the little voice in my head that says "It's been five years, Curtis, who you trying to kid?" I will follow The Rumpus's rule and Write Like a Motherfucker.
In the meantime, you'll probably find me in Books & Books buying office. Please send dark chocolate peanut M&Ms and Tito's Handmade Vodka.
You never know when banana bread is going to be part of your life. It's out there, waiting for you to leave your bananas out too long, then you notice there's a little too much black on the peel. A few more days they'll be completely unappetizing but a few degrees shy of disgusting, and it'll be banana bread time.
I'd forgotten that the perfect banana bread recipe requires three bananas rather than the two I had. We have more bananas for smoothies but they're entirely too yellow. Because you can't will a banana to rot (what an awesome super-power - ripening), I immediately switched gears into muffin land.
I don't want to think about how much seeing the video above played into this decision. Do I make my own decisions, or do I just react to stimuli? Let's just admit that Adaptation is one of the most brilliant movies of all time and move on.
This is a rare real-time post. I can smell the muffins as I type. I woke up at five am, thought about my writing-work-dinner-wedding prep agenda for the day, and looked at the bananas in their now-or-never ripeness. My upbringing won over my longing to write. Wasting minutes I could've spent writing is intangible; throwing two perfectly usable bananas into the trash is real waste.
My posts have thinned out lately, and I expect them to get thinner. If you look over the proceeding, you can imagine why. I'm a bookseller. Unless you're Cory, there's not a lot of drama in the day-to-day. Well, maybe for those of us in the business. But Indie vs. A-Word, paper vs. ebook, dying industry vs. renaissance of the story - those posts can only go so far. I want to write about anything and everything.
The downside is that I sometimes end up writing about nothing.
I flatter myself that my thoughts on books, movies, parenting, relationships, food, and life are worth sharing. Still, I like to polish these thoughts up a bit before I share them. More importantly, especially for things I've started to write for reasons I'm not aware of, I want these posts to have some meaning. This sometimes means opening the same file dozens of times, revising, rearranging, looking for a point. Since Sweet with Fall and Fish doesn't have a unifying theme (apart from being the Official Blog of Aaron John Curtis), it's important to me that the individual posts try to have a point.
I have thoughts about Borders closing, and Amy Winehouse dying, and mass killings in Norway, but by the time I decide how I really feel and the best way to express it, those feelings are years out of date. Witness the post I've been working on about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, movies which came out in 2008. Not because I just got them on Netflix, but because I wasn't sure how to express my feelings about Heath Ledger's death. After all that microscopic consideration, the challenge becomes making someone care. But I suppose that's always the challenge.
Did you know I saw Patti Smith at the Miami Book Fair International days afterJust Kids won the National Book Award? As part of letting the standing room only crowd know about the upcoming (at the time) OMiami! poetry festival, I was one of dozens who helped P. Scott Cunningham perform Arthur Rimbuad's Vowels, a random act of culture about which Smith said, "I've never seen anything like that."
I've mentioned Hilldawg from time to time? That's her holding the sign.
Did you know Patti Smith performed three songs during the reading, and that the last one became a sing-along? Did you know I loved Just Kids? Did you know I met Patti Smith? Of course you didn't. I worried too much about capturing the magic on the page, I procrastinated starting, then so many months had passed that it seemed silly to try and remember how I'd felt at all. There have been many nights like this I've passed over, but I offer this as an extreme example.
There's a lot of pressure in my life right now.
I'm getting married in 32 days. The marriage doesn't stress me at all, but there's a lot of prep involved in the event which marks the beginning, especially since this is DIY wedding.
Also, I know in this economy I should be pleased to have a job, but the work load I'm saddled with lately is ridiculous. Our week's run Thursday to Wednesday, and I'm over 32 hours for the week. These thoughts occurred while I was baking and I wanted to share, so I'm pushing back biking in to get this posted. I'll probably take Wednesday off to be with Dylan - Becky and I are taking turns watching him this summer since we can't afford camp or daycare - but I can't be sure. I could live in my office and work there every waking minute and it would take half a year to get on top of things, and even then I probably wouldn't be on top of things because they'd find even more for me to do. Grawr.
Finally, I've had a setback in my writing life. The mighty Carl Lennertz has left Harper Collins to become CEO of the North American branch of World Book Night. This is excellent news for the world of books which is semi-devestating to me personally.
As I've written my stories and taken time polishing my novels, it's always been in the back of my mind that my first published essay was a given (I've had pieces published online and in print, so I guess I mean published by the Big 6). I know I acted like it wasn't, but I was fooling myself. I'm glad I chose not to shout State by State from the roof tops, but I no longer have that foot in the door, that significant set of eyes which has looked at my work and deemed it worthy and which invites prospective agents and magazine editors to do the same. I'm back to square one.
In some ways, it's good. It gives my morning writing time more focus. With the help of my writers group, I am polishing four or five of my best stories until they will knock a magazine editor on her ass, so that she'll share the story with her readers, and I'll have a nugget of something to put in my cover letter to an agent, something more substantial than hopes and dreams. I need a credit. As Laura Munson writes in This is Not the Story You Think it Is, "You can't put good rejection letters on a resume."
What this doesn't bode well for is Sweet.
Of course this comes as my gradually-increasing readership reached its zenith in July. I should be writing more to keep you guys coming back, but something's got to give. I'll try to take a day to myself (if I can find it) and automatically schedule a bunch of stuff I've been tinkering with so it looks like I'm active while I take a break (or maybe it will be like today's post: write it, look for glaring errors and hope I didn't miss any, then publish post). Just because I don't see the point doesn't mean you won't, right? Reading is a relationship, and finding a piece's moral and sharpening it to a point is just me trying to bully your reaction. Of course, you might just get nothing but this for a while. We'll see.
Meanwhile, WLRN's Under the Sun released a CD of the last Lip Service event.
"What's this? A CD of a live Lip Service event recorded for broadcast by Under the Sun?"
"And who is that at #5? Why, it's me. Remember when I freaked out over the edits...
Wait, I never blogged about this, either? Fuck me."
As I sat in Books & Books cafe, reeling from the realization that Carl Lennertz left Harper Collins before he could publish me, a favorite customer approached and told me he enjoyed hearing me on NPR. Co-workers told me they'd heard and enjoyed me on the way in to work. It's the only thing that kept me from a meltdown that day.
Since then, strangers have come to the bookstore looking for me. One asked, "Which one of you is Aaron?" while I happened to be there. She didn't shop, but just stopped off on her drive home to tell me how much she enjoyed the piece (thankfully, I wasn't in the buying office at the time). Customers have congratulated Becky on her upcoming nuptials (which I mentioned in the Q&A after the reading). Apparently, I also "sound cute" on the radio. I feel like my writing career is foundering, but more people are aware of me than ever. It's fairly surreal.
So take heart. Even if you don't see much of me here in the coming weeks as I prepare for my nuptials, you may hear me on the radio.
And the muffins? They smelled better than they taste, but they are solid, moist, and they put two rotten bananas to good use. Here's to a morning well spent.
Despite what you may have read in the Miami Herald, I've been drinking Cuban espresso since 1991, not 1997. It was too complicated to go into. My ex-wife worked at an office in Miami with a group of viejitas who refused to leave their desks but who insisted she make their cafecito each morning and afternoon. She brought the stovetop coffee maker to Syracuse with her, along with bricks of Pilon. I was already hooked on the stuff when I moved to Miami.
Becky told me I had it all wrong. Bustelo, not Pilon. Don't leave the grinds loose so the water shoots through it easily, tamp it down tight. Don't eyeball the sugar and the first black spit-up of espresso for the espumita, measure it. I was even using the wrong brewer.
Whatever, I had been brewing delicious Cuban coffee for a good eighteen years and I never heard any complaints.
"Listen," Becky said. "Don't mess with my Cuban cofffee. I'm Manny Q's daughter."
Or words to that effect, which, if you knew Papa Q, would be saying something.
Of course she was right (being right is one of her strengths). Her espresso was darker, richer. Her espumita the perfect caramel color each time, without adjustments. She served her shots with a good quarter-inch of creme across the top. I drink my "American-style" coffee - as they call it in Miami - black and sugarless, but those little shots of sugary espresso goodness are something special.
Miami brewer Rowland Coffee owns the two most recognizable and successful of the local coffees - Pilon and Bustelo. Really, they're like Coke and Pepsi. Some people taste the difference, some don't, but those who do are fierce advocates of their choice.
Rowland's patriarch, Jose Angel "Pepe" Souto, died four years ago. His sons just sold Rowland to Smucker's for $360 million. In cash, for some reason. Jose Enrique Souto, who co-ran the company with his brothers Jose Alberto and Angel, called it, "The all-American dream to start a little business, sell it to a big company, and then go enjoy life." I suppose. But it sounds like Pepe dreamed of coffee, and Pepe's sons dreamed of money.
Souto claims this deal honors his father's legacy - "The future of our brand is assured with this deal." Rowlands made $115 million a year, but we all know that won't be enough for a corporation that makes $4.6 billion a year. People who need "creative ideas" to justify their jobs will get in there and try to make something happen. They will decide a red and yellow package design is too loud for a mass audience. They will kill the charm.
But that's just speculation. The reality is that part of this deal entails closing Miami's facilities and folding those operations into Folgers, putting 150 employees out of business. This also affects local businesses whose services Rowland purchased - pest control, linen delivery, area eateries, etc.
Hundreds of people are blown out of the water so three dudes can roll around in $120 million each.
Simon & Schuster wants to brand this chick lit, but I liked the hardcover cover better;
you should see the Norwegian cover.
I sounded off on Fabiola Santiago's Facebook post of the link above, so she asked me to elaborate in a side email. She writes for the Miami Herald, and coffee and books are my passion, so this happened.
Talk about books for years and no one gives a hoot. Talk about coffee one time, the world listens.
My post originally stated that "Miami brewer Rowland Coffee began in Cuba in 1865, and they own the two most recognizable and successful of the local coffees - Pilon and Bustelo." I got this info from the Rowland Coffee website. A reader graciously pointed out that this isn't the case (in fact, "Pepe" Souto's obituary mentions that they were primarily ranchers in Cuba before they lost their businesses to Castro).
Manuel Jesus Bascuas started the very popular Pilon in Cuba. According to his daughter, this was in the early 1900s.
Rowland purchased Pilon in 1967.
(As far as Bustelo, Gregario Bustelo started making coffee in 1920s and Rowland bought them in 2000.)
We have Manuel Jesus Bascuas to thank for the packaging and flavor we know today.
When I fell in love with Garth Stein’s Art of Racing in the Rain, it was in spite of the subject matter, not because of the subject matter. I have a cat tattoo, which should be sufficient evidence of my feelings about dog books. Yet despite not caring a whit about car racing, and active hostility toward dog books, Art of Racing in the Rain charmed me so much that I resolved to name my next pet Enzo.
I might need to start a Goodreads shelf because of Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods. I never collected baseball cards. My cousins Shane, Shawn, and Shannon did, and I looked through their collections a few times growing up. This passing acquaintance with card collections made the language of Cardboard Gods a little familiar. I knew there were different teams and colors and statistics on the back, anyway.
My cousins loved sports, excelled at playing them, captained and co-captained teams with players who went on to start for Division 1 colleges. No pros, but their hometown holds only 6,000 souls, and even fewer people lived there twenty years ago.
I followed football and basketball because Syracuse is a college town and those are the two sports you must follow or they send you to Utica (laugh if you’re an upstate New Yorker). It was also a means to connect with my cousins and the other men in my family.
Sports, TV, and any reading which wasn’t for a class got whittled from my life and swept away. I found reading again after college, but never sports.
Of course this post isn’t supposed to be about me, this is supposed to be about Cardboard Gods. But that’s what the best memoirs do - get you thinking about your own life.
Josh Wilker examines his life honestly, poignantly, and with little regard to how it will make him look. He uses a different baseball card in each chapter as a metaphor for what he’s going through in that chapter. It’s a brilliant hook. It gives a decent memoir an edge, something extra which pushes it into a great book. Cardboard Gods is about more than Wilker. It’s about what makes us obsessively collect, it’s about trying to find common ground with family, it’s about why we love the things we love and need the things we need.
I’m putting Cardboard Gods in a care package to my cousin, along with David Benioff’s 25th Hourand Lane Smith’s It’s a Book for his daughter. As much as he loved City of Thieves, as much as he loves seeing his daughter’s face light up, I know Wilker’s book will be the best of the lot for Shannon.
If you’re not one for sports, you’ll love Cardboard Gods anyway. But if you do love sports, or card collecting, be careful; you might become obsessed.
