…it’s not my favorite skyscraper, it’s not the roof of the Met, it’s not the bridges, it’s not the statuary. Mostly it’s the bleary light on the tiles and the free papers in the gutter and the sharp smell of dyed carnations. It’s the traffic island at the mouth of Second Avenue and the sensation of giving yourself over to other people’s movement.

My point is, New York, I’ll see you tomorrow. It’s been a while and I want to get real mundane with you.

If you ever find yourself hungry in Lennoxville, PQ, be advised that “Jerry’s Special Chicken Sandwich” at Jerry’s, which sits on the right-hand corner just after the beer hall, consists of the following: a processed breaded and fried chicken patty, crackling hot; one slice tomato; two slices iceberg lettuce; three small strips of bacon; and a demure schmear (this is not a word in French Canada, I know) of mayonnaise, all on a sesame bun toasted within an inch of its life. It will cost you $3.95 Canadian and it is delicious.

By that point you’re not far from Sherbrooke, which feels simultaneously like a frontier city and a university town and a manufacturing hub and as far as I can tell is all of the above. The girls outside the convenience stores have restless eyes, they’ve already plotted their escape. If you are from New England the rest of the drive will feel familiar-yet-alien and you will notice that the land looks as if a large hand had lifted Western Maine and tugged its edges, spreading it out, giving the hills more space. The barns lack the distinctive roofs of La Beauce to the east, but the houses are pinker, tidier, giving off an ineffable whiff of something you might be tempted to call European. Depending on your inclinations you may also indulge in the greatest Canadian sport of all (high-speed, competitive driving).

The nice thing about a destination where there isn’t much to do is that there isn’t much to do except stroll one way and then the other, stop for tea, watch people and dogs strolling one way and then the other, repair to your room and read, rinse, repeat. A decade had passed since we last drove through Magog and in the interim things got built up, more shoppes, more traffic. The finished product is a little ode to various mindless pleasures at the northernmost tip of Lac Memphremagog, and therefore it contains elements of Old Orchard Beach: the line of Harleys at the outdoor bar, the bronzed women in denim bustiers, the men with potbellies and blinking cell phones. But everybody was happy because there was no reason not to be.

At the local version of Reny’s I found these wigs, not to mention provincial flags for hand, home, and car; fleur-de-lis beer cozies and pendants; blue-and-white garlands. I laughed even as I recognized the sentiment. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

The creaky remnants of my French were a source of great shame, and I sheepishly anglais’d my way through most transactions — knowing words but afraid of how they’d sound — until a late-evening stop at an ice-cream parlor put an arrêt to all that. “Non, pardon,” shrugged the teenager at the counter. Not wanting to fail my traveling companion and her dietary restrictions, then, I managed a rendition of “Do you have anything that’s sugar-free / Oh, good, a sugar-free mocha for her / Yes, one scoop / Thanks.” A man looked up from his strawberry sundae and said “You speak French well,” ahh, sir, but you tell me in English….

We dawdled our way out of town, stopping in the shoppes to buy souvenirs to prove we had been there. Which, I suppose, is the same reason we write books and have children and establish historical societies.

But I want to end at the beginning: a notch in the woods between Us and Them, the fiat geography that people obey and deer disregard. For a moment I thought should turn off the music but Britt was singing she’s never been the places she oughta so I let it play, and then the Canadian guard ambled over to ask how we were and where we were headed and was it business or pleasure? (A hearty chuckle to think there was work to be done in the town on our map.) We had our documents and we handed them over for inspection, official-like. No guns, no knives, no pepper spray? Well who knows, ladies, you might meet a bear. And that was that. Window up, accelerator down, the southern edge of the Laurentian shield ahead, Welcome and Bienvenue.

When it finally came the envelope read With a United States passport the whole world is yours. I am a reasonably articulate person but I cannot even begin to tell you how true this feels.

Let me tell you another story first: I once saw a man with his remaindered books. They were in three cardboard boxes that had been unsealed and they were all that was left. The phone had rung; it was official. These books would be more valuable as pulp than as books. It was like having a dead body in the room. I understood the rules, but I still wanted to drape a sheet over those gaping boxes, or close them, or bury them. Books are meant to be the permanent ones, aren’t they? The things that will become archaic yet outlive us and our blogs. For me and perhaps for you books are anchors in time and space and memory — not the idea of books, not the stories within them or stories about them, I mean the books themselves, the tangible things.

The problem with tangible things, of course, is that they are subject to the laws of economics. Costs must be calculated against benefits and that means the bill from the warehouse vs. the revenue projections. I can accept this. Actually, I embrace this, most of the time. The laws of supply and demand will outlive us and our blogs and our books, and the system has its ways of working, however strange it seems. Like democracy (and like me) (and you too) the system is flawed and noble, full of hope and probably, ultimately, hopeless. It helps me sleep at night.

Back to the story.

I found out about this book called YOU or the Invention of Memory just last month, even though the copyright date is 2007. The book’s story is this: the book was published and then its small publisher “folded,” is the word that gets used, and what a pleasant but inaccurate thing to think of a small publisher being turned corner to corner, in half then again, and tucked away in a cedar chest. Really, though, what got tucked away was this book. Fell through the cracks! Dustbin of history! Crammed under some old towels in the cedar chest of forgetting! Tough break, man. Too bad you spent all those months writing that book that no one will ever read. Cue nagging grief, two years.

At which point the book’s author picked himself up and did what any right-thinking artist these days does: he emailed a publicist. Not just any publicist, either, but the smart and discerning Lauren Cerand, whose work I have admired for quite some time. [She is one of perhaps five publicists about whom I can make that statement.] This touched off a classic “girl meets book” plotline, followed by a “new publicity campaign” denoument, or should I say exposition? Rising action?

In order to help the author character tell the book’s story, the book publicist character began mailing copies of the book, for free, to anyone who sent an email requesting one. I heard about this offer on Twitter, in a sentence that must have contained fewer than 140 characters. I sent an email with my address information, and after a brief interlude in which the United States Post Office forgot the way to Maine, a copy of YOU arrived on my doorstep.

I opened the envelope and turned the book, which is pleasantly slim, over in my left hand. The NYTBR blurb on the back jacket refers to the author’s previous collection as “more than thirty years of work from an underappreciated writer.” In this context the word “underappreciated” is meant to convey both the quality of the author’s work and the quality of the NYTBR, for recognizing the quality of the author’s work when few others did. Perhaps also the quality of you, for the discerning taste that led you to hold this underappreciated thing in your left hand. Pats on the back all around.

(A pause for honesty. I am not well-versed in modern fiction. I lack the, ahh, the critical faculties. Left to my own devices I tend to read nonfiction about manufacturing and/or political intrigue. I become impatient with books about Love & Relationships unless there is also a good description of a factory strike or a corrupt governor or a boss with bad intentions. The author of YOU is the father of a filmmaker whose films I don’t like except this one.)

But this is a rare moment, an adventure! An owl, if you will, on my windowsill!

Cast in the role of reader, the reader character reads, and fortunately for the heroes — all of them — the book is good, funny and sad and gentle in its awareness of itself and the tricks it is playing. It is also, despite some shifts in setting, wholly steeped in New York. Listen:

I come home to my lonely apartment after spending the long escapeless day, parading through museums so crowded that someone’s head has morphed into almost every art work.

It is a sentence that would not apply in Boston, thinks the reader, who is now 70 pages in and feeling grateful for the experience. Not because YOU is the best book the reader has ever read — but then what is? — but because it is miserable and happy at the same time, a reflection on the twin ruts of longing and ambivalence. And also because it entered the story at just the right time and in just the right way, despite the system’s forces, a small reminder that a line is the shortest distance between two faces.

Tobias Wolff Wins $20,000 Story Prize

and then this video screencap:

And my first thought was 1. Included in this amazing $20,000 prize was the privilege of sitting on stage with John Darnielle! My second thought was 2. Or maybe sitting on stage with John Darnielle WAS the prize! Valued at $20,000! Third thought, overlapping: 3a. How would you value a thing like that? Maybe they asked Tobias Wolff for an estimate?/3b. Best prize ever!

Anyway, turns out none of it is related at all, the prize and the sitting on stage. Oh well.

Congratulations still deserved, Mr. Wolff.

The headline: Wamp Replacement May Have Been at Choo Choo Breakfast.

And, as if on cue, the intrigue ensues…

Rep. Zach Wamp was working the crowd at the Chattanooga Choo Choo on Saturday morning in the governor’s race, and some potential candidates for the seat he now holds were also shaking hands.

Tommy Crangle, an electrical engineer who is now an investor, said he is making plans for a Third District race.

Mr. Crangle, who lives on Signal Mountain, said he is a staunch conservative who wants to carry out those principles in Washington.

Then there are several paragraphs regarding other upstart candidates, all of them cagey re: their plans for Wamp’s seat, and it is only at the very end that we get to the meat of the story:

This would be Mr. Crangle’s first run for public office.

He lives with his wife, Pamper, and their dog, Foxy, who was kidnapped and recovered in 2006 near Signal Mountain.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

But the Chattanoogan already covered l’affaire Foxy.

“It’s like a miracle. People have been praying this would happen,” said an excited Pamper Garner Crangle of Signal Mountain on Tuesday afternoon.

She said Luther, the famed WDEF radio personality who specializes in lost dogs and cats, helped solve the mystery.

Indeed.

10. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

9. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

8. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

7. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

6. Phantom Buffalo – Take to the Trees

5. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

4. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

3. The fun part of the Beyonce record

2. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

1. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride

Best live performance

The Mountain Goats @ the Brooklyn Masonic Temple (w/John Oliver opening!)

Runner-up: the Mountain Goats @ the Music Hall of Williamsburg

Honorable mentions: DraculaZombieUSA East Coast Annex, DraculaZombieUSA Yankee Ingenuity

Edited to add

Sources have informed me that DZUSA ECA did not, in fact, perform live in 2008. I counter that our ‘07 gigs were memorable enough to carry over into another year.