July 6, 2011, Seattle, WA: In many ways my big trip ended on Monday July 4th, when I took off from New York’s JFK and flew home to Portland. I hadn’t seen my kid in two weeks, and it was wonderful to arrive and head home from the airport with him. But one road date remained, and that was in Seattle, my old home town. My mother and brother still live there, so Mikko, my son, came with me, heading for a much-anticipated three days with his cousins. We stayed in the house where I grew up, where my mother and my brother and his children now live.

The launch dinner would be held in the penthouse of The Sorrento, a grand old hotel I had known in the early 1990s when I was a young novelist, recently returned home after ten years away (in New York and Holland). I’d spent some evenings in their bar, The Hunt Club, drinking with two poets. One was my old friend, Jan Wallace, a naturally gifted writer who had stayed in Seattle and wrote ad copy for the Bon Marche department store; the other was Denise Levertov, by then a legendary figure in American letters. Jan was Denise’s secretary. We drank. Denise spoke about whetever concerned her, and we drank some more. Jan was a superb listener. She could comment innocuously at precisely the right moment; whereas my version of listening involved frequent demonstrations of my understanding, usually in the form of anecdotes from my very thin store of experience. Denise waited patiently for me to finish, then went on with whatever concerned her. I thought I must be fascinating, and no one was ever rude enough to disabuse me of that conviction.

The Sorrento was glorious, even when faded, as it was then; but it has grown vibrant since I left, thanks to new owners and, more recently, the arrival of Michael Hebb. Hebb’s Portland restaurant empire collapsed, famously, under the weight of debts that some attributed to such extravagances as having a “writer in residence” (who, no doubt, ate and drank the highly regarded three-restaurant chain out of existence) and he had fled to Seattle where he built a new platform for the kinds of rich sociality he prefers. “The technology of the table,” as Michael calls it, found a wonderful home in the many public rooms of The Sorrento, where Michael initiated such programs as “Night School” and “Chamber v. Chamber,” pairing food, drink, music, and inquiry, often at a common table. Our launch dinner, centered on a conversation between me and musician John Roderick, was to be the next installment of Night School.

In stark contrast to New York’s Brooklyn Grange, the penthouse at the Sorrento was full of familiar faces. My mother and brother were there, alongside dozens of old friends from my many lives in Seattle. High School friends, fellow writers, an artist with whom I’m “in a band” (in quotes because our band is unnamed and has never rehearsed), old bosses, journalists, PS collaborators, plus the PS team from Portland, Patricia No and David Knowles, and their counterparts from Seattle’s Third Place Press, Vladimir Verano and Robert Sindelar.

The sense of homecoming reached its zenith when John Roderick played an opening welcome song, “Home on the Range,” and without hesitation the whole room joined in. My mother even sang the little-known second verse, along with Carlyn Syvanen and Steve Vause, three old Northwest “lefties” who know their folk songs and are not shy about singing. It was the perfect beginning to an evening marked by informality and the absense of any “fourth wall.” I read some scenes from the book and then Michael Hebb brought out the carne, pork and lamb grilled over an open flame and served on platters “in their own juice,” alongside fingerling potatoes and fresh corn.  By the time Michael brought out the dessert — ripe doughnut peaches and freakish Mexican candies on sticks — the sun was sinking behind the jagged profile of the Olympic Mountains, visible to the west.

I love the Olympic Mountains. If age or poverty do not intercede to stop me, I’m going to write a novel in which the Olympic Mountains determine everything. I’ve been enchanted by the Olympics since I was a boy. Their abrupt, spectacular beauty; their modesty and compactness; the fact that no white man ever crossed the small range until 1907 and no indigenous tribes had ever presumed to dwell there (at least not in the lofty upper reaches where, according to the Elwah tribe, the dead moved from this world to the next through a hole in the sky). My own interludes living in a small cabin at Lake Dawn and, as a child, hiking the Elwah, the Hoh, and the Duckabush into the interior as far as we could go, laid the groundwork for a stretch of writing that I am determined to take on soon. On this night, as always, the sun over Seattle set into the Olympics; and we saw it from the penthouse of The Sorrento as bottles of tequila were set on the tables beside the peaches and crazy Mexican candies.

John Roderick was a newsstand clerk in my Seattle neighborhood in the 1990s, when I first moved back and began boring Denise Levertov and others with my passionately held, if completely unanchored, views about literature. John was always bemused by whatever I was up to, some of which he observed in the panoply of magazines that moved through Steve’s Broadway News, where he worked. John was also playing music. He had a group called the Bunn Family Players, and then another called Western State Hurricanes, which practiced in the shed behind a literary arts center, Richard Hugo House, where I sometimes taught classes. He was an exceptionally talented song writer, though I didn’t know that then.

John now plays as The Long Winters and he’s well known. In 2009 we ran into each other in Seattle, and he showed me the peculiar narrative he’d composed on Twitter, sending out hundreds of 140-character messages (exactly 140 characters, so that no one could “reTweet” them by adding “RT” to the message) comprising a world of sharply observed anecdotes concerning someone very much like John. It was like a novel, but fractured, episodic, and strangely poetic. John told me he wanted to collect the Tweets as a single book and then erase them from the Internet. And so Publication Studio published one year of John’s Tweets as a book called Electric Aphorisms. That December, he visited Portland with the Canadian singer, Kathleen Edwards, and the three of us staged a conversation over a sit-down dinner, served by Michael Hebb, for an audience of 40 or 50 people.  The pleasure of that conversation, which focused on pop songs, Tweets, and literature, convinced me and John we should try another one.

John arrived ready to play cover songs on a grand piano, but the piano was in the other penthouse, as it turned out. He had a ukulele with him, and that sufficed. We talked about the book and my method of writing it. And then John played a cover of the Rolling Stones song “Sway.” Holding up the ukulele, he explained that you can’t force the instrument to do something that it’s not capable of; rather, you have to adapt the song so that the instrument can do its thing and yet still play the song. And then came his sweet, lilting evocation of the famously boozey “Sway.” It was beautiful, and completely a John Roderick song. What he had done was precisely analagous to the challenge I took on, trying to write LeCarré with my “instrument” (my own sentences and voice). I had to adapt the book, just as John adapted “Sway.” I had to turn it into the book that I was capable of writing. And so, by playing it, I transformed LeCarré’s original as completely as if I had written my own book. Which is what cover songs do — create an original out of the impulse to imitate. 

(Photos by Aaron Stadler, Patricia No, and Glenn MacGilvra.)

July 2, 2011, New York City (in the evening): Ben Walmer lives in Northwest New Jersey, in the agricultural countryside known as the Highlands. He is an architect whose interest in building design rests partly in a preoccupation with the structure and patterns of sociality. A house or a building can shape society within its walls. But so can a table and the food laid upon it. Ben, already a food-lover who cares about the sources and substance of what he eats, began to design tables and then meals and then he started to cook them. Now he runs the Highlands Dinner Club, a peripatetic assemblage of available parts that becomes the site of conversation and common cause wherever Ben decides to lay the table. In the past few years he’s cooked and served dinner in empty lots in Harlem, farm fields in the Highlands, and the streets of Manhattan, among many other places. I had never heard of him until June 15 when my friend Michael Hebb stepped in to help me fill a gap in a series of ambitious plans I’d made for dinners in Hudson, NY, and New York City.

“Matthew meet Ben,” the email read. Within an hour I had a chef and an excited collaborator. Ben posseses what I call a “can-do attitude,” the most potent form of capital I’ve ever encountered. Has anyone ever measured the economic impact of optimism or trust? The most moneyed societies can be crippled by the niggardly distrust of strangers or risk. Conversely, the cash-poor economies in which I typically function are vibrantly enriched by the simple presence of a default “yes.” I’ll never forget my first collaboration with Michael Hebb, the genius maker-of-tables and erstwhile restaurateur, into whose posh North Portland, OR, gastropub, The Gotham Tavern, I had wandered one lovely March day. Eating one of chef Tommy Habetz’s exquisite frisee salads, I said to Michael, co-owner and founder of the joint, “you need a writer-in-residence at this restaurant. Let me eat and drink all I want and I’ll do that for you.” And he said “I don’t know what that means, but let’s find out.” He said “yes.” From there sprang a project called “the back room,” and scores of dinners and new work from artists and writers, including Gore Vidal, Mary Gaitskill, Sutapa Biswas, Gregory Crewdson, Dodie Bellamy, Walid Raad, Anne Focke, and many more, all of which followed from Michael’s simple “yes.” And now Michael had delivered me to Ben Walmer and the Highlands Dinner Club.

The day I met Ben, the Hudson dinner I wanted him to cook fell apart. He weathered this sudden change in plans and listened sympathetically to my complaints about the lack of any chef for New York City. Last year Ben built a table in the middle of a one-acre rooftop farm in New York, an unusual place called The Brooklyn Grange. It’s actually in Long Island City, in Queens, but the Brooklyn Grange floats a verdant farm on the roof of a six-story industrial building, covering a full acre of Long Island City’s densely-built terrain. The sun sets over the Manhattan skyline, immediately to the West. When Ben and I hooked up and he heard what Publication Studio was doing, he said we should have our New York meal there, and we did.

I had spent most of the sultry July 2 afternoon wandering the West Village with a small troupe of bibliophiles who wanted to review the recent, sometimes-sad, history of bookstores by touring a few sites with me. Around 6 pm we concluded our tour and took the “R” train to Queens. Navigating the almost-empty sidewalks we found the Brooklyn Grange and took the elevator up to a small doorway that opened onto the farm. The soil of the Brooklyn Grange is less than two-feet deep and the crops are modest — lettuce, arugula, herbs, pole beans, cauliflower, broccoli; but the sight of one-acre of verdantly productive farmland on top of a Long Island City industrial building was just as stunning and transformative as it sounds. Walking through the sixth-floor door into the neatly tended rows of greens, was like walking into a vision of the future. Why can’t the food we eat be grown and cultivated within walking distance of where we eat it? Here was a vivid, irrefutable field of plenty, full of food we would be eating that night.

Ben had shaped his menu around the rooftop farm and around my book. His meal would be the meeting place of the two. When we arrived, Ben’s friend was extending the table with lengths of bamboo, twined into place one-at-a-time, adding room for six or seven more diners. Brian Quinn was mixing drinks on a small TV-tray at the West end of the farm. In the elevator on the way up, I’d met Carlos Cuestas, carrying his guitar, which he played for us before and after dinner.

All of the guests, save three, were strangers to me. This was very unusual, especially in a city where I’d lived for eight years. No matter what the outreach, almost every dinner I host begins with a core group of friends and family, intimates who have been looking forward to something special, and are happy to support my work with something less tedious or plain than attending another reading. Maybe it was the holiday weekend, or the fractured path leading up to the event, but the crowd around the table were an unfamiliar motley of strangers — lively, unrestrained, and further animated by Brian Quinn’s superb Palomas, Cuba Libres, and Honeydew cocktails. Most had come in pairs or groups; few of them had read my work before, or ever sat down at a table this size, let alone found a hand-made book on their plates. This many strangers at a single table is ideal for publication. It was possible to know no one going in and to come out with layered, enduring bonds. At the very least we all left with the same food in our bellies, the same stories in our heads, and the same book in hand.

Including the book in our tout compris pricing is an essential strategy for Publication Studio. The single ticket makes payment for the labor of writers and book-makers a given — a natural thing that no one is invited to question or negotiate. And so (while also offering hundreds of free events) Publication Studio regularly invites people into rich, convivial settings, like the NAFTA dinners, where a single tout compris ticket price effectively isolates the “consumer moment.” Having paid, we all cross the threshold into the event shorn of consumer habits or obligations. Everything is taken care of, and there’s is plenty of it. There’s nothing left to buy. Given the ubiquitous pressures of consumer choice and “smart shopping” this sort of deliberate isolation of a non-shopping social space — a fence thrown up to keep the pressures of shopping at bay — is needed.

Many observe these fundamental pressures and argue for more radical change. Money itself is criticized as alienating, and its hegemony as the token of our exchanges is displaced by “time banks,” “local currencies,” or systems of barter. I ardently do not want that kind of change. I want money for my work. I want it without question, as a matter of human rights. Where there is no money, I want barter and fair exchange. But where there is any money involved, I don’t want fake dollars. I want to be paid for my work.

By contrast, my attempt to isolate certain social spaces from money — or, more accurately, to make rich spaces of interaction that are free of shopping — is a tactic anchored specifically in literature and what I understand as publication. Literature is diminished by shopping. The greatest potentials within a literary text — its ability to embed its strangeness and reach deep into the synapses of a mind that cannot then pull the self apart from what has entered it; its permanent confounding of the division between what is ours and what is shared — gets compromised or eaten away at by the corrosive gaze of the “smart shopper.” The smart shopper approaches a book, looking for legible signs of its value. He tries to calculate its worth and gauge its potential impact. The interaction is succesful if he accurately assesses what he’s buying, and then finds a way to pay as little as possible for it. He wants to have without giving. This is the opposite of literature.

It is no wonder that bookstores are in crisis. The attempt to make books function as attractive commodities, to move vast acres of them at discount prices, to convince smart shoppers of their value, is doomed. Never have shoppers been smarter than they are now. And no low-down dirty trickster of a literary book is going to fool them. Yet literature is essential. It and the public that it shapes will only thrive if we strategize and sustain other relationships — not shopping, but reading; exchanging; understanding — and create the social space to host them. Ben Walmer’s table on the rooftop farm was such a space.

The pictures tell a better story than I can. Talk was loud, constant, filled with bursts of laughter and decorated with Carlos Cuestas’s lovely guitar playing. I drank. I had no plate, so I circulated around the table as guests offered me tastes and bites, empeñadas, tamales, and pig. The pleasure of standing on my chair near dusk and reading as loudly as possible to carry the words of my book across the great length of the table and into the night was considerable. We discussed NAFTA, money, and labor…all the subjects I’ve spent time on here. I can assure you, without any doubt or hesitation, that the next time Ben Walmer or Brian Quinn (our bartender) sets a table, it should not be missed.

The menu: Brooklyn Grange Farm greens dressed with chive blossom vinaigrette; vegetable empanadas w/ mole and queso cotija; ceviche with grilled shrimp; whole roasted suckling pig (set whole at table center); polenta/huitlacoche tamales; chipotle/coffee braised shoulder of lamb with fresh currants served on flatbread with mint/citrus salsa; various condiments (Brooklyn Grange radishes; pickled mustard greens; Brooklyn Grange cauliflower and broccoli leaf curtido; pickled garlic scapes; salsas; local sheeps milk yogurt sauce; grilled jersey sweet corn with chili powder); flan with fresh local raspberries. Drinks: Honeysuckle cocktail (tequila reposado, lime, honey); micheladas (light beer, with lime, worchestershire sauce, cholula sauce, Maggi); Palomas (tequila Blanco, fresh grapefruit, lime, agave syrup, soda); Cuba Libres (151 rum, fresh lime, simple syrup, Mexican Coke); Sancerre white wine, Sommet Doré 2009; Bordeaux red wine, Ch. La Grolet, Côtes du Bourg 2008; Mexican red wine, L.A. Cetto, Nebbiolo 2005 from Baja Sur; El Presidente and Negro Modelo beers; Corralejo reposado tequila after.

(btw, these photos are mostly by Tae Won Yu, which is why they’re so good.)

Last night I gave my talk, “What good are bookstores?” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Wonderful people, and a wonderful crowd. I’ll post the talk itself as a penultimate entry in the blog, following the New York City dinner and Seattle dinner posts. Those will be in place by the end of day Monday. Meanwhile, enjoy another song from Wednesday night’s sit-down dinner. John Roderick and his magical ukulele covering “Sway,” by The Rolling Stones.

7/6/2011 The Sorrento Hotel, Seattle, WA — John Roderick covers ZZ Top, “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” on ukulele (partial…the puzzling third verse). More soon.

July 2, 2011, New York City: Sam and Louis dropped me off at the old HQ of Nest Magazine, an Upper East Side apartment that is also the home of Nest founder, Joseph Holtzman, and his boyfriend, writer and translator Carl Skoggard. While two dates remained (Seattle and Portland), the New York dinner — to be served al fresco on a one-acre rooftop farm in Long Island City — was the culmination of a very long trip. The next day I would relax with Carl and the day after that  fly home to see my family in Portland, for the first time in two weeks. I was very, very happy to be in New York.

I moved to New York as a punk rock musician in 1981 and left it in 1988 as a writer. Everything about the city enabled this transformation, especially the milieu of gay writers I fell into when I took a job at Wendell’s Book & Card Shop on West 12^th Street and Hudson Avenue. Despite massive economic and surface change, downtown, and especially the West Village, still vibrate with deep meanings for me. I met many of my best friends there in 1980s, principally the three people with whom I shared a sprawling illegal loft in the Meat Market district: Larry Rinder, (he appears in my earlier San Francisco posts); Marianne Weems (a theater director, founder of The Builders Association); and Coco McPherson (a very talented actress and writer). In that time, I also came to understand how the things I cared about, politics and culture, could be thoroughly addressed through writing.

We’d had a tough time getting the pieces in place for a NY dinner. The weekend was a bad one (4^th of July), and the chefs who interested us were either out of town or too expensive to set a seat-price we could live with. Knowing that New York mattered to me, I went ahead and listed an event there without knowing what it would be, and as the first inquiries came in I decided to promise a reading/walking tour of some now-disappeared bookstores. It was the writer Matt Briggs’s idea. When PS published his second novel, The Strong Man, Matt planned a series of readings on the sidewalks in front of some of Seattle’s many closed bookshops. These would be announced as regular readings and attended by whomever showed up. Matt had done a similar series in Baltimore, when he was a student at Johns Hopkins.

For my reading/walking tour I picked some shops that had meant a lot to me when I turned from musician to writer back in the 1980s. The first was Wendell’s. Wendell’s was a corner bookstore and magazine, card, and gift store. It took up a tiny storefront that is now a micro-branch of Chase Bank, on the SE corner of West 12^th and 9^th Avenue. I was hired because I kept pestering them and was given an irregular shift standing at the front counter where we kept a baseball bat hidden, to use as a threat against suspected shoplifters. Wendell instructed us to “look at their shoes” if we were uncertain about a customer’s integrity. I didn’t know exactly what to look for, so I never reached for the bat. I just sold books and a lot of magazines to a rotating panorama of regulars that included an editor and writer named Patrick Merla.

Patrick, who had been Edmund White’s secretary for many years, was then the editor of the New York Native, a pioneering gay/lesbian weekly newspaper that beat the drum early for serious attention to be paid to a then-emerging health crisis among gay man: AIDS. Larry Kramer’s early activism as well as Australian writer Dennis Altman’s important work all got into print in The Native. As a bright-enough young punk rock musician working in a corner bookstore, I told Patrick (who regularly flirted with me, despite his errant conviction that I was straight) that I really ought to be a writer — could he suggest some best next steps? He suggested the only right next step — write — and said he’d be happy to read it. And so I wrote an essay about gay masculinity and the world of hard core punk rock, particularly a narrow band of it called “straight edge.” Patrick liked the essay and gave it to his friend Tom Steele who published it in a magazine called Christopher Street (“the gay New Yorker,” Tom always explained), where he was the editor. Patrick hired me to write for The Native.

I met a lot of writers at Wendell’s, some as customers who enjoyed the casual corner store, even though we rarely stocked any of their books (we mostly carried mass-market paperbacks and magazines), and some in print. A magazine called Straight To Hell, Boyd McDonald’s legendary series of sex reports, was written by an amazing cast of characters, including Boyd himself and many younger gay writers whose books I would later find and treasure. STH is what we read at the front counter during the many idle hours we spent failing to spot shoplifters.

Wendell’s was like a small town post office or a corner drugstore. Books were not what made it special. But it showed me how the casual socializing of a neighborhood store plays a part in the day-to-day life of literary culture. As with any other social set,  writers and readers need the happenstance of accidental meetings and casual conversations, and Wendell’s provided that, opening a door to me that led from an interest in writing to real opportunities.

Our reading/walking tour began at Wendell’s at four in the afternoon on a hot, humid Saturday. The Chase Bank branch was closed. Four of us stood on the sidewalk, trying to find shade, and I read a scene from La Cucaracha about pop music and its power to create bonds between strangers. In this scene, Carl Silas has just gotten into the car of two strangers and the music on their stereo is known to him, an old favorite. “Carl marveled at the flimsiness of time and geography, how such seemingly definitive separations could be powerless in the face of a common place, like music. Could blood or soil or history ever create a bond as powerful as music? The three of them had never met before, and might never cross paths again, but here they were, together.”

A series of disasters and good fortune had avalanched down on me in the wake of my decision to offer the reading/walking tour. In the course of two days I had to cancel a planned dinner in Hudson, NY, dream up a table and meal to follow the tour in New York City, and coordinate a growing list of interested parties who wanted to attend. My good friend, Michael Hebb, introduced me to Ben Walmer, an architect and chef who runs the Highlands Dinner Club, in Northeastern New Jersey. That was the good fortune. By the time I arrived in New York, Ben had assembled all of the parts for an incredible meal to be served al fresco in the middle of a one-acre rooftop farm in New York’s Long Island City, at a place called the Brooklyn Grange. 42 people signed up for dinner, and all were given the option of joining the reading/walking tour for the few hours leading up to it. Only four did; but, as it turned out, four was the perfect number.

From Wendell’s our small group walked fifteen or so blocks to 22 Jones Street, the former address of the Phoenix Bookshop. The Phoenix, much smaller than Wendell’s, was run by a man named Bob Wilson. Bob knew every book in the shop, intimately. I ended up there because Larry Rinder and I had found the work of Guy Davenport. The now-deceased American essayist and story writer published a short story, “O Gadjo Niglo,” that dazzled us with its easy eroticism and smarts, and Larry and I began to pursue all things Guy Davenport. Davenport was an astonishingly broad-minded and omniverous scholar. In the course of reading one of his stories you could compile a substantial reading list of other texts and artists that must be studied and learned; the lists from his stories led us to The Phoenix. In a small front room, Bob Wilson seemed to have every book Davenport had referred to in the many fictions and essays we’d read. Davenport was an Ezra Pound acolyte, and it was clear that Bob Wilson was too; both their lists stemmed from the decisive opinions of the American modernist who wrote Kulture and The ABCs of Reading, among many other pedagogical texts.

At The Phoenix Bookshop I learned to treasure a small number of great books. I wanted to possess them all. I made my first indulgent purchase — $20 for a rare Four Seas edition of Gertrude Stein’s Operas and Plays, a price that now stikes me as Bob Wilson’s gift to an impoverished young book store clerk. As we approached 22 Jones Street in the sultry July afternoon I saw that the small glass storefront was thick with advertisements for dry cleaning and other laundry services. Ah, well. RIP Phoenix Bookshop. On the sidewalk in front of the shop I read the opening scene of my book to the group and passersby before we moved on to the corner of MacDougall and West 8^th Street, where the great ghostly site of Ted and Eli Wilentz’s old Eighth Street Bookshop stood.

I call it “ghostly” because the Eighth Street Bookshop was not important to me as an actual repository of  books. It was important as the prototypical “great book store” that was now gone. A potent and essential node of meaning, the “disappeared legendary bookshop” (like its myrad cousins, those legions of disappeared greats that inspire us while also dwarfing the value of what we have in life) offers fertile ground for imagining what literary culture can be. It’s gauzy images and rich collapsing of tedious real-time into a string of pearl-like, singular moments help us shape ideals that we then pursue in life. The Eighth Street Bookshop was an inspiring place that I visited on trips to New York while still in college. It was always difficult to find; I was usually distracted as friends led me there, so that when I moved to New York, getting my first job at Wendell’s, I kept in my head the image of this other, great bookstore that was always nearby, but which I simply could not find my way to again. And here it was, gone!

It had been gone all along. The Eighth Street Bookshop closed its doors in 1979, and so the shuttered three-story building we found at the corner of MacDougal and West Eighth was the perfect backdrop to my reading of a troubling dinner scene when Carl Silas is humiliated by his host, Eric Fielding. “No hard feelings…when in fact, now there were only feelings, and every one of them as hard as stones, neatly hung around Carl’s neck. They put him right back where he’d been for so long, weighed down, sunk into a dark, inarticulate place.” The holiday weekend had emptied the city sufficiently to bring a measure of quiet and solitude to our street corner. Even as people passed and traffic coursed by in bursts, the interludes of silence let me read quietly and with the kind of indulgence and nuance that’s more typical of bedtime reading. I was very glad our group was four, a mix of friends and strangers who were immediately linked, intimate to one another, and bonded by our time together.

Scale is everything. Throughout this tour I’ve been forcefully reminded over and over of the importance of flexibility and scale. Neither big nor small will suffice; one must always transit between the two. The economies that matter to me — the transactions that allow a culture of writing to pay for itself — happen in the transit between big and small. They happen when a bookstore clerk knows a customer over many months or years and in a mundane conversation mentions the Spanish mystery writer he’s found in the remainder pile of a nearby megastore. They happen when a dinner table of friends and strangers start talking about the places where they’ve traveled. Conversely they happen when huge systems, such as Twitter or Facebook, connect communities in Sao Paolo and Tblisi who both need the same information, whether practical or literary.  Or when a musician like Phil Elverum spends three months traveling through twenty countries with a suitcase full of CDs, books, and records. The transit between big and small connects the most intimate scale to the broadest reach, and it is a mistake to regard either one as the starting place for getting to “the goal” of the other. Small systems do not exist as embryo versions of bigger ones. Nor do big systems sit at the top of evolutionary chains from start-up-chimp through growing venture-capital-ape to full-fledged-human global company. All scales function at once. Local groups are global, simply by living in a time of globalism. Multi-national corporations comprise, at the same time, a thousand local relationships, which are the essential stuff of their days.

Publication Studio, with its multiple siblings, has the advantage of enacting every scale with ease at any time. Flexible, nimble movement across the scales of small to big and back again, is the essential tool for a new economy of publishing. The most accommodating site for this flexibility is the dinner table, preferably a single table of 40 – 50 people. At such a table we find the richest interactions between big and small, public and private, strangers and friends. And we have the advantage of thousands of years of history that establish the table as a space of our commonality, a bridge that at once connects us and holds us apart.

Ben Walmer’s long, rough table for 45 set in the middle of the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm was perfect. I’ll post about the dinner separately, so I can give it some space and have room for more photos. It was a marvelous night; I can’t wait for another one. (And I won’t wait long, actually; in seven hours Michael Hebb opens the doors to tonight’s sit-down dinner at The Sorrento Hotel in Seattle. A New York dinner report, and then a Seattle report are forthcoming in the next few days.)

July 1, 2011, North Adams, MA: I left Toronto at six in the morning, bound for Syracuse, NY, on a Greyhound bus, probably the worst possible way to cross a national border. We were an unhappy lot, crowded onto the bus by handlers already tired of dealing with the mess of boarding. 20 or 30 people who held tickets were left standing in the bus station as we pulled away; apparently Greyhound had oversold the seats. I slept by the window as the day grew bright outside. The border was unpleasant. A guard stopped the line at one point, yelling “I’ve got radiation, I’ve got a hot one here, radiation,” which no one explained to us. We were just told to “freeze,” and we stood in line with the radioactive(?) passenger, waiting until other guards arrived to resolve the situation. A false alarm, as it turned out. The line shuffled forward for more grim questioning and random inspections until everyone was unceremoniously loaded back onto the bus and we sped into the USA.

In Syracuse my old friend Sam Gould, co-creator (with Mike Wolf) of Publication Studio’s “Midwest Radical Culture Corridor” sibling, fetched me in a big white van full of good cheer, great snacks, and his charming three-year old son, Louis. Windows open to the warm July day, we drove East on I-80 and arrived in North Adams, MA, an hour before the event at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). Sam has worked for many years as Red76, a shifting arts collective that typically engages non-artists in activities ranging from talk to handicraft to cooking and eating, to karaoke, to compiling and printing journals. Recently Sam’s focus has been on commerce, how it frames or enables the exchange of ideas. For example, taverns. At MASS MoCA he created a temporary tavern, more of a beer garden really, called Bartelby’s, where a guest artist or writer (this day, me) would sling beer and discuss his or her work, with the proceeds of beer sales going to pay the guest. He also set up the Publication Studio equipment onsite. Throughout the summer Sam and two volunteer helpers from nearby Bennington College will produce new books.

The result is convivial and straightforward, a lot like a tavern where the proprietor is a thinking man and profits don’t matter much. Sam’s work has always looked a lot like regular life. He opened a used clothes store in Portland, OR, but every item of clothing was tagged with a story; and you had to swap to get the clothes. He ran a restaurant, but each day’s menu was made up of whatever foods the customers brought in to cook and share. On karaoke nights in bars around Portland he would show up with lyric sheets for protest songs and “host” Protest Karaoke, a kind of symbiotic, thematic gathering embedded within the existing, unthemed karaoke night.

Sam’s work is important because it rigorously insists on a kind of flattened terrain of authority. One of his most beautiful projects was to make cardboard traffic signs, written in Sharpie, exactly the size, shape, and instruction of existing traffic signs. He went around Portland taping his signs over the real ones. Perfect. After initiating their activities, Sam and Red76 quickly, deliberately withdraw from the center of attention to become participants, coequal with others. At Protest Karaoke Sam handed out lyric sheets, then everyone signed up to sing as they could. Sam signed up too. At the restaurant Sam cooked the food he brought and helped where he could. If someone showed up with nothing they still got to eat. Sam isn’t bossy. And he’s genuinely interested in other people, more so than he is in proving a point.

I wrote about this pattern of work several years ago, reviewing Sam’s project, “Ghost Town,” in Artforum Magazine. I described it as “refusing any notions of depth or hierarchy,” and instead “spreading out across an unpatterned horizontal plain,” much like sprawl in the exploding cities of North America. Reaching always horizontally — neither up to appeal to any higher arbiter nor down to touch a dependent “audience” — this work produces “a particular political space quite unlike those which we arrive at through digging deeper or through struggle.” Red76 evacuates depth by becoming dauntingly present on the surface. “This strange effect — in which old hierarchies of meaning (hallmarks of modernism such as irony, repression, revelation, and subtext) are rendered nonsensical — marked every interaction” in “Ghost Town.” The waning of the center and indifference to its authority is an aspect of this horizontality, and cousin to the easy habits of improvisation I’ve, rightly or wrongly, associated with the West Coast.

It’s interesting that Sam, who is light years ahead of most of us in his articulation of these new, decentered relationships, felt he had to leave Portland in order to really pursue his work. He lives in Minneapolis now (notably home to railroad and timber money that came from cutting the forests of Oregon and Washington; the fortune that founded the Walker Art Center, for example) and is employed by institutions in Boston and Portland, ME. There was no job for him in Portland, OR, and no institution to frame what he’s done or shine a light on it. My feeling is that Sam’s unique ability to truly flatten the terrain of authority plays a part in the difficulty institutions have supporting him. He doesn’t brand his work suficiently, nor shout loud enough to win the imprimature of a nervous or uncertain institution. That might be a good move artistically, but it’s a significant handicap for career.

These tensions are at play everywhere. Every city has a center (or several); every city draws lines, so that wherever we live we can choose to position ourselves “inside” or “outside.” And in every city centrifugal forces have been tearing those lines apart for centuries, opening up ruptures in the hierarchical order of things that expose fertile ground for innovations, dynamic “places” located neither inside nor outside. These innovations grow and knit into new patterns, drawing new lines, defining new centers. And so it goes. As Michael Maranda reminded me in an email shortly after my last post, “us Canadians are all alike, despite the differences between TO and Vancouver.”

The event at Bartelby’s began as the evening cooled. The beer garden sits beside a concrete-embanked river, under the dappled shade of leafy trees, next to the vast industrial buildings that have been repurposed as MASS MoCA. Sam spoke about economies of exchange, asking us to pay attention to what we give and what we get. He explained Publication Studio as a kind of direct and transparent arena of exchange. Someone makes a book for you and you pay her for her labor. There is no print run of books made for a phantom public; no seduction of shoppers to move fallow piles of books out of warehouses and into consumer hands. There is only one book, made because someone asks for it, sold to that person by the book-maker. Publishing degree zero.

Whatever the landscape — old financial capital or young exploding city — transparent, direct relationships like these scale our exchanges small enough to let everyone play and improvise with confidence. While I can’t get a restaurant to grill a pig I slaughter over barrels of fire in their back garden, I can get my neighbor to do so. I might not get Random House to publish the novel I know my sister needs; but Publication Studio will do it. Sam has long been a master of returning politics and commerce back to this radically enabling “degree zero,” the people at a table — it’s just us sitting at this table here, now; we can do anything we all agree to do, with the means available.

Interesting to note (amidst all my speculations about East and West) that when this consumate improvisor, Sam Gould, brought his sit-down meal proposal to the keepers of Bartelby’s at MASS MoCA he was told “sorry, no food.” There are rules, sensible ones of course, and nothing Sam could say would change them. And yet, without MASS MoCA, we would never have been in the beer garden with Sam.

June 29, 2011, Toronto, Ontario: Flying from Vancouver to Toronto, I crossed as great a cultural divide as any I had encountered on this trip. Consider: Portland to San Francisco; San Francisco to Dallas (a fairly big leap); Dallas to Mexico City; Mexico City to Guanajuato (also big, but obscure to me); Mexico City to Los Angeles; Los Angeles to Vancouver; and now Vancouver to Toronto. This last flight took me from the scattered dynamism of the North American West into the long-inscribed vortex of a colonial economy, a network centered on powerful cities whose financial holdings organized the supply regions that fed them for many centuries. Like magnets, these banking centers, among them Toronto and New York, delineated the migrations of rich and poor, of money, labor, and raw materials, inscribing concentric rings of influence around themselves, a target-like hierarchy that still lingers like welts on a disintegrating landscape.

Money has moved of course, shifting addresses, fleeing to peripheries, and pooling just as definitively in West Coast cities such as, first, San Francisco and, later, Vancouver and Los Angeles. But in Vancouver the peripatetic appetites of 21^st century capital erupt in elaborate, scattered developments across a topsy-turvy landscape where finance speaks many languages and can never settle on a single address. Toronto is profoundly international and restless too; but the layout of the city, its well-worn grid and clattering subway, evince a nostalgia for the center, a tacit knowledge of the distance that separates what matters from what does not. Toronto is still a city of discernment that knows the correct name and address of “the best.” Disembarking from YYZ’s wireless-equipped airport bus to board a clang-clanging streetcar you trace a line into the heart of the city, thrown back into the concentric hierarchies of the North American East.

The differences can easily be overstated, and I’ve probably done so already. But some things struck me in Toronto. One was the pleasure of being recognized. The employees of a bookshop recognized me; and then a crowd of strangers at an event treated me as if they did. This kind of thing happens in many cities; but in Toronto, as in New York or Paris, the act of recognition — of knowing what matters and what does not — is delivered with an ease and certainty that makes it seem only natural. Anchored in the centuries-old concentric circles targeting the city, this confident drawing of lines is carried out with an understated grace that contrasts sharply with the enthusiastic hyperbole I regularly encounter in smaller, younger, or more peripheral places. In younger, less-central cities, the volume sometimes gets turned up to overcome a background hum of uncertainty.

A second, companion difference that struck me was how difficult it was to improvise. Anywhere there is an agreed-upon best or right way there are also a thousand wrong ways. The impact of this kind of strength of discernment was revealed in an interesting pattern. I had proposed sit-down dinners — that is, dinners improvised by friends and strangers outside of restaurants through an assembly of available parts — in all twelve cities. At the end of the day, we had improvised sit-down dinners in every West Coast city I visited (Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland) but in only one non-West Coast city (New York). Every other place indeed turned up remarkable publics, and remarkable, inventive settings and events. But in all of them, myriad barriers, all minor-seeming yet all of them insurmountable, kept us from setting the big common table I had initially proposed.

My Toronto host, Derek McCormick, had performed a kind of miracle on my first night there, mounting a literary “Fund Fair” that put cheap carnival games into the main room of an old community center. The event raised nearly $6000 for Toronto’s Publication Studio, the Book Bakery, with hillbilly music, carny-style hectoring, a raffle, a bean-bag toss, an “authors kissing booth,” and a huge bakesale.

Derek would be exceptional in any city, but in Toronto he is recognized and known for it. He is a uniquely talented writer who meddles brilliantly with the design and presentation of the work that matters to him, whether staging live events or packaging the stories he writes. An early story of his, about the great country singer, Hank Williams, came in a sewing kit for a cowboy shirt, with a pattern for the shirt Williams wears in the story.  Derek has offered courses via a fake correspondence school for which he designed letterhead and logos. One of his stories was published as a series of bulk-mail “advertisements” sent from a make-believe Halloween store.

It was not surprising, back in September 2009, when Derek showed up in Portland during the first weeks that Patricia No and I were discovering how to use our new machines. He immediately saw the advantages the PS approach offered him for working directly on books with writers he admires. Publication Studio Toronto was the very first sibling to be hatched, back in 2009. It incubated for nearly a year-and-a-half (during which time the Berkeley and Vancouver studios got up and running) before making its first books in a coffeeshop basement in April of 2011. Interestingly, while those West Coast siblings leapt swiftly from impulse to actuality, like drunks jumping from a motel balcony into a tiny swimming pool, Derek proceeded methodically. He assembled a team of collaborators (Alana Wilcox, also of Coach House Press, and Michael Maranda, who designs and assembles all of the books), applied for grants, shaped relationships with writers, and commissioned the design of logos and letterhead, putting everything in place so that the Book Bakery’s opening could be legible and could matter. He succeeded, in style, and Toronto recognizes that success.

Looking at Derek’s remarkable work, and the deeper history of innovation in Toronto publishing, I must admit that improvisation there is not “difficult” so much as it is simply the work of complete geniuses — innovators who are shaped, rather than squelched, by the city’s deeply inscribed history of discernment and intitutionalization. The city’s rigidness makes Derek’s improvisations matter, and helps insure their longevity.

At Derek’s Fund Fair I spoke briefly about Publication Studio and read from my novel. I was not assigned to the kissing booth, a relief for all of us, I’m sure. The Book Bakery edition of Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha is a refined and understated beauty, reminding me more than anything else of the Brazilian edition of my novel The Sex Offender — an elegant cover stock and high-end paper, with an understated cover that is mostly text (plus a single,small, colorful cockroach). Michael Maranda, who designs and produces all the Book Bakery books, told me about the ecologically-responsible Canadian paper company that makes this marvelous paper. If possible, we’ll begin stocking it in Portland too.

I stayed a second day in Toronto to read at a more private party that Derek had organized, a cocktail and carne en su jugo reception in the home of Micah Lexier. Micah, an artist and curator, has a remarkable collection of contemporary art and a lovely deck out back under the feathery shade of a chestnut tree. It was a warm summer evening. Raccoons frolicked in the under-structure of the deck. A pleasantly drunk crowd of a few dozen writers and artists downed white and red sangrias, tequila, icey cold beers, and the remarkable carne en su jugo, made by Derek’s good friend, a curator named Neil Brochu. This was an authentic carne en su jugo in the Jaliscan style — a soup of beans and meat rich with beefy broth. We dipped warm corn tortillas into the rich jugo and ate with our hands.

Dusk was sublime and the hot day cooled just enough to make the deck into a small paradise, lively with drink and conversation. By the time Derek introduced me, around 9:30 pm, the party was rich with liquor, laughter, and conviviality. Reading out loud was pure pleasure. People smiled and listened, and I think Derek sold every book Michael had made. It was easy, because all the hard work had been done before hand, over the many years of Derek’s presence in Toronto. People came because they cared; they trusted Derek’s good taste, and Micah’s too.

As a way to connect writers to smart readers who will make a difference for the book — and as a commercial activity — this casual gathering among friends was as or more effective than any bookstore event I’ve been a part of.  I wonder if the same impact can be had in the younger, scattered cities, cities without the history as a cultural capital we find in Toronto, New York, Paris, London? Probably it can and does happen. At its core, Micah’s party was closest kin to the dozens of Seattle garage parties of my youth, the kind where I played music for drunk friends. Those mattered too, though it seemed impossible to tell, to gauge their impact. There may ultimately be no sharp lines dividing these close cousins, only degrees of gray. The punk garage improvisations and the wonderful night on Micah Lexier’s deck may simply have been two instances of the very same cultural animal.