May 26 2011
How to Sell a Book in America, Part VII: Road Trip Round-up
I’ve just finished the last major leg of my Kiss Me, Stranger book tour, reading exclusively at independent book stores and sharing the stage on many occasions with fellow Baltimorean and hilarious raconteur Jessica Blau. The tour took me to Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, San Francisco, Santa Rosa (CA), Alameda (CA), Denver, and Cleveland. I met lots of lovely people and, generally, had a great time. My method of book selling included give-aways of candy (Presidential toffee), bookmarks, and posters of illustrations from my novel, so every stop seemed festive to me, despite the number of books I did or did not sell. Here’s my list of travel highlights:
Things I forgot to take: nail clippers (had to use scissors), sun glasses, ear phones, one all-important computer file that contained my itinerary, compact mirror, and hard copy of my itinerary. I should have taken the time to print out the itinerary while on the road, but I didn’t and so I sweated through my guesses about when and where I was supposed to be. When you’re renting 3 cars in 6 days, for instance, it’s hard to keep the car companies straight: is today Dollar? Thrifty? Budget?
Best reading partner: Jessica Anya Blau. She’s funny, generous, and kind. At every stop, she called on her friends and I called on mine, and together we had great readings, with lots of laughs.
Most surprising element of the TSA lines: shoe advertising at the bottom of the plastic TSA bins (in Denver). Who sells the ad space? Who gets the ad revenue?
Tiffany surprise: Cleveland is home to one of the Louis Comfort Tiffany’s impressive creations, the Wade Chapel, which has a huge stained glass window flanked by two huge glass-tiled murals.
Biggest triumph in passing through the TSA lines: nobody confiscated my container of hummus.
Best walk: up the coastal hills in Half Moon Bay, CA. Amazing path through red woods and ancient douglas firs took me above the fog-line and through several eco-systems on a sun-stunned, too-blue-sky morning. The spring flowers were in bloom. My naturalist friend, Ken, identified every one. He also told me storeis about mountain lions, which have returned in significant numbers (you’ve probably heard stories of them snatching unsuspecting bicyclists from mountain parks in southern CA).
Best radio: Seattle. Hands down. It must be the alt-rock capital of the world. Denver came in a surprising second.
Worst radio: San Francisco Bay Area. Schlock, oldies, and top-forty. Where’s the rock?
Best bread: Acme bread in Berkeley and San Francisco. Substantial, crusty, with a tinge of old world smoke.
Best pizza: Pizzaiola in Okaland, CA. They have coal-fired ovens. People line up outside before they open. It’s that good.
Worst pizza: Boston. I’m going to keep trying, Boston, but you’ve got me worried.
Best toy store: Mr. Mopps in Berkeley, CA. I love a good toy store, where I can immerse myself in the giddy, kiddy world of colorful gew-gaws and endless play. Mopps isn’t looking as robust as it once looked but it’s holding on. I bought something to support the cause.
Worst swimming pool: Ramada Inn, Denver airport. The water was greenish from algae.
Most puzzling encounter: In Oakland, CA, as I was coasting to a stop at a light (in my rental car), I glanced out my open window and saw a well-dressed man sitting at the bus stop. He was staring at me. He said, “Can you spare a few dollars? I need to get to Sunnyvale.” I could hardly believe that he was a panhandler. Still, I shrugged in answer, then drove on. I don’t give hand-outs to anybody except street performers.
Biggest culinary disappointment: I missed getting focaccia at the Liguria’s bakery in San Francisco’s North Beach. Theirs is thick crust, with a light coating of tomato paste and garlic oil and topped with a scatter of scallions (a very west-coast touch). I arrived at noon, only to find the “sold out” sign on the door. Inside, the woman at the counter was reading a newspaper. I said, “How late am I?” She said, “I could give you frozen.” I asked her if anybody else had good focaccia I could try. She shook her head doubtfully, then said, “You could try the place up the street.” Then the older woman sitting nearby — she was counting dollar bills — said: “It’s not as good.” I knew this. Still, I went up the street, bought a piece, tried a bite, then put it away. Nobody makes it like Liguria.
Biggest gaff among sports lovers: In Denver, a friend mentioned the Rockies baseball team and I asked, “Are they triple-A or big league?” The Denverite said, “They went to the world series in 2007.”
Most puzzling photographic moment: I peered into a cluttered, colorful vintage clothing store in San Francisco and decided that it would make a good picture for Jill, who loves vintage clothing stores. The place had the atmosphere of a old Brooklyn dress shop, just this side of a rag dealer’s den. As I aimed my camera, suddenly a woman appeared from the dress-cluttered gloom and shouted, “No pictures! No pictures!” She was middled-aged, with long hair she had dyed blonde. She spoke with an eastern European accent, which made me speculate about her suspiciaion “No pictures?” I asked. She waved me away. “NO pictures. NO!”
Quickest ad lib at a book reading: At Books Inc., in Alameda, CA, Jessica Blau noticed that there was a child or two in the store, so, as she read an excerpt of Drinking Closer to Home, she abruptly changed the word “penis” to “menis” and “fuck” to “feh.”
Best grocery: Berkeley Bowl. If you’ve never been to California, you can’t imagine how remarkable a super market produce offering can be. Berkeley Bowl shows you produce glories east coasters can only dream of. You want root vegetables? How about ten varieties? How about seven varieties of banana? How about the season’s first peaches? (This was May, mind you.) Oh my, I wandered the aisles in a daze.
Most interesting bar: After the reading at Denver’s fabulous Tattered Cover, my friend Doug took me to My Brother’s Bar, an atmospheric corner tavern that is old enough to have been the haunt of Cassidy, one of the infamous beat poets, who, from prison, wrote a friend and asked him to pay Cassidy’s bill at the bar. A copy of the letter hangs at the back of the bar, which, with its dark wood interior and waxed paper-wrapped sandwiches, seems to have changed little in many years. The bar’s music of choice is classical.
The most amazing jewelry: Ann Marie Montecuollo makes it from scratch in her shop in Healdsburg, CA.
Silliest review from an Amazon reader: I can’t help it; I keep checking my reader reviews on Amazon and Good Reads, even when I’m on the road. Let me remind you that Kiss Me, Stranger is about a mother and her 14 children who are trying to survive a civil war in a fictional country built on landfill. The illustrations in the book are supposed to have been drawn by these children. A reader on Amazon gave the book one star and wrote the following: “The so called pictures gave nothing to writing, not to mention they were poorly done. They looked like something a young child would do in Paint.”
Most amazing natural sight: a first-growth redwood stump, twenty-feet high, from which is growing a couple of new red woods, each about fifty-feet high. Redwoods are nearly indestructible. Their wood — impervious to pests and really hard — built much of California. There are still a few first-growth, 1,000-year-old monster red woods hidden deep in the forests of Northern California. Their locations are a closely guarded secret. Thanks to my friend Alan, who took me to this impressive relic.
Best oatmeal: organic, steel-cut oats at Blue Sky cafe in Half Moon Bay, CA. I never make steel cut oats at home because they take too frigging long. But, when somebody else makes them and makes them well — moist but not soggy — I love them.
Most sentimental stop: I visited the house I used to live in 30 years ago in Berkeley. Back in the day, i shared the first floor with two Berkeley coeds. Three others lived upstairs. The house is still a rental and still full of coeds. One of the girls happened to be holding a yard sale. As soon as she heard I’d lived there, she brought out the whole house. Everyone was eager to hear what the house had been like before they were born.
Biggest musical surprise: My friend Ken, in Half Moon Bay, has a drum set in his basement. So I got to get in some drum practice.
Most interesting gallery: Out of the Blue Gallery, Cambridge: floor to ceiling paintings from artists of widely divergent abilities crowd the walls of this tiny, one room building, home to the Dire Reading Series. The gallery owner is a small, graying tweedy man who would look at home in an Irish pub.
Strangest thing overhead in passing: a teenager said to his mother: “it went out the chimney and into the night.”
Biggest surprise while flying: the huge United Tri-jetliner from Denver to Chicago offered a pillow and blanket at every seat and — are you ready for this? — a doily over every headrest. Do you remember headrest doilies?
Most exotica per square foot: San Francisco’s Chinatown. It’s so authentically a Chinese melting pot, Chinatown defies its throngs of tourists and gets on with its business in the same old way. If you get off the main drag (Grant street), you could be in Shanghai.
Best falafel: Maha’s cafe in Cleveland’s Westside Market. Smooth and savory hummus with fresh-fried falafel. Did you know that the mid-west (and Detroit specifically) has the nation’s largest population of Middle Easterners? Maha’s is the best falafel I’ve had in a long time.
As a child, I liked Brussels sprouts right from the start and never hesitated to eat them. I liked their miniature aspect, their hunkered-low-in-the-bowl humility, their quirkiness, their infrequent appearance in the grocery store, their deep-green handfuls heaped in little wooden or roughly-textured green cardboard boxes. Like cabbage, they are an autumn vegetable. This month, they are at their peak. You can find them budded on startlingly large stalks at the farmers’ market.
Brussels sprouts belong to the family of Misunderstood Vegetables. It is THE most unpopular vegetable in Britain — probably because the Brits don’t know how to cook them. Cooks of older generations boiled Brussels sprouts. Boiling does justice to no food except pasta or eggs. Vegetables should never, ever, be boiled. I think most cooks nowadays have learned this lesson. Jill and I like ours steamed and then slathered with butter, with plenty of salt and pepper. A little dill gives them extra punch. I also like them chopped up (after steaming) with butter and soy sauce.
As the name suggests, Brussels sprouts originated in the Netherlands. Why, nobody knows. The French brought them to America, which makes sense because 1) the French will eat anything and 2) the French never hetitate to boast of their latest, odd food find: Oh, pardonnez moi, but I have just found thees splendid leetle nugget that, when fried, is oh-so-heavenlee! It ees, how you say, a squirrel turd? Webster mentions Brussels sprouts in his early dictionary: he calls them “delicate,” as in “small.” Brussels sprouts are not miniature cabbages, though your mother might have told you this to charm you into eating the things. They are in the cabbage family, though, and, like cabbage and broccoli, are cruciferous, which means they’re high in anti-oxidants and good at preventing cancer. As we are making menus for 
If you have never had truly fresh Brussels sprouts, cut from the stalk, you owe it to yourself to go out and find them. Apparently they are easy to grow, which means you don’t have to submit yourself to buying a container of wilted two-week-old sprouts that have been trucked across the country. If you have a dog, you can feed them the stalk. Most dogs will look upon it as a bone and chew it down happily. Frieda, our Basset Hound, loves the stalk of Brussels Sprouts.
Saturday, Jill and I went candy hunting with 
Americans are NOT big on toffee and most aren’t even sure what it is. The Brits are fanatics about it, probably because it’s heavy on butter and cream. Americans are more familiar with taffy, because taffy is cheap (just sugar and syrup) and easy to make. Making toffee is an art. A lot of toffee you find in American candy stores is either imported from Britain or a cheap imitation that tastes something like caramel. Like most Americans, I’ve never been a fan of toffee.
So why was I looking for toffee? I need it to promote my new book, 
I love watermelons. In the summer, I will eat one a week. All by myself. If the day is particularly hot and I’m especially thirsty, I might eat half a watermelon in one sitting. So imagine my surprise and dismay when, just yesterday, I realized that I haven’t eaten a single decent watermelon all summer. Then I realized this: every watermelon I’ve bought this summer has been seedless. These are the only melons available in my two nearest grocery stores. So, what gives? Do the grocers think that seedless is best? Is this some kind of watermelon conspiracy to support corporate farms that are manufacturing the inferior but costlier seedless melon?
Are you kidding? Seeds make eating watermelon fun. What’s more, that little bit of work augments the joy of eating — our mouths take delight in the exercise, which only increases our appetite. So let me say it straight: traditional — seeded — watermelons are more robust in size and flavor and, significantly, better looking, a rich dark green, which seems to say it all about their goodness. With the rise of the bloated, tasteless seedless watermelon, is my old favorite going the way of the tomato?
Jill and I took the dogs berry picking. The dogs don’t pick berries, but they like to be with. Thanks to a wet, cool summer in Baltimore, the black berries and raspberries have done well. Every year we go to the same place, ten miles north of the city—a county park so remote, it’s not even marked. If you don’t know which dirt road to turn down, off a winding two-lane blacktop, you’ll never find it. We seldom see others at this park. Its paths run adjacent to corn fields, then wend into hilly woods and settle down to the Jones Falls river, which isn’t much of a river this far north.
Inevitably the dogs get muddy. Frieda is a fan of wallowing. She’s also fearless about water and will jump into any pond, puddle or pool. We forgot to bring buckets for the berries – you really need plastic buckets – so we used plastic sandwich bags instead. Plastic bags always leak. Towering blackberry and raspberry bushes grow in the sunny weedy margins of the corn fields. Best way to pick berries is to wear hiking books and trample the bushes as you go. Mind you, they can take. They are weeds in the best sense—hardy, rampant, irrepressible. To stand among berry bushes in the fly-droning midday heat, surrounded by more fruit than a day’s picking will allow, fingers stained with sweet berry juice, an atheist might contemplate the existence a God.
No matter how hot the summer, it’s never too hot for a berry pie. A few tips on pie-making: corn starch is the key to keeping the filling solid. Heat your berry mixture in a pot, with a quarter cup of apple juice, then sift in corn starch until the goop stiffens (keep stirring). Add a few tablespoons of maple syrup and a few of lemon juice, some lemon zest (peel), a dash of cinnamon, and — if you’re feeling evil — brown sugar. Pre-bake the bottom crust for about ten minutes (keeps it firm). Then assemble your pie. Bake at 350 until the top crust is browning. Always put foil below the pan because berry pies bubble over.
