Few prospects fill the auctorial amygdala with as much dread as that of a book signing. The crest falls in anticipation thereof. Imagine: the forlorn author, sitting disconsolately behind a table stacked with untouched copies of his or her pride and joy, as embarrassed bookstore patrons avert their eyes or detour down distant aisles, while those with weaker humiliation antennae – the sort who rubberneck at grisly accidents – stop at the table, scan the title and perhaps back-cover description and blurbs, then replace the book in its stack, at most offering the barest hint of a smile and nod. It calls to mind the time I was persuaded to serve as the sitting duck in a carnival dunk-tank. Get me outta here! Just one look – that’s all it took – for me to swear off book signings forever back in 1989, though I’ve had much better luck with talks or readings, and a signing afterward for those who tarry. That’s what I’ll be doing a few days from now at a very fine independent bookstore in rural New York to promote my latest non-bestseller, Upstaters.
I wondered if some gremlin in the machine were trying to lure me to a watery grave
I have resolved not to channel my late landsman, the novelist John Gardner, who confessed: “In those days I would wear a crushed velvet robe – I’m shameless, right! – with a huge silver chain. I felt that every time I did a reading I was cheating the people because they came hoping for something very exciting. I wanted them to think that their $5 or $7 or whatever was worthwhile. So I wore this robe, so that when they went home, at least they could say, ‘I went to the most boring reading in history, but, boy, did that guy dress funny!’” Unless a blue button-down or autumnal flannel shirt pass for sartorial splendor, I’m outta luck in the visual showmanship department.
Besides, I’m in a valedictory mood. Upstaters is a gathering – a florilegium, if I may wax Mencken-esque – of my writings about my native ground, 1990 to 2025. Its arrival coincides with my gradual recovery from a rather nasty affliction that laid me up for half the summer. I shan’t trouble you or embarrass myself by sharing the details, but suffice to say I was under a kind of medical house arrest, and in my rare outings I wore what loved ones jeeringly referred to as “pajama pants.” (They were not velvet.) I was told that George wore these in an episode of Seinfeld, whereupon he was informed by Jerry that such vesture was a confession that “I give up.” (Fear not: I’m back in the high life again.)
Upstaters came about thanks to the intercession of the avant-garde poet/critic/artist/anarchist Richard Kostelanetz, who suggested to the good folks at State University of New York Press that they might publish a volume of my regionally themed greatest hits, for which I am grateful.
A decade or so ago Kosti figured in one of the strangest coincidences – or “coincidences” – of my lifetime. I was sitting in the backyard reading Joseph Mitchell, the North Carolinian whose beautifully drawn character sketches for the midcentury New Yorker were a rebuke to that middlebrow rag’s supercilious claim that it was “not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” (Mitchell knew that old lady had a soul.) I was reading “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” Mitchell’s profile of an elderly black sexton in a Staten Island cemetery. Suddenly inspired, I walked into the house and said to my wife, “Neither of us has ever been to Staten Island. Let’s just go.” Before returning to the book I checked my emails. Top of the list was one from Kostelanetz, from whom I had not heard in years. “Comrade Bill,” he began, “will you be accompanying the Muckdogs [the minor-league baseball team of which I was vice president] when they play Staten Island this summer?” I was stunned. Surely this was a sign! We must visit Staten Island! Though given my suspicions this whole internet thing means us harm, I wondered if some gremlin in the machine were trying to lure me to a watery grave as the Staten Island Ferry capsized. We didn’t go. I still haven’t been.
For decades, the Fresh Kills Landfill gave Staten Island the malodorous nickname of the “garbage dump of New York City.” Today, Fresh Kills is being developed into a green space that will dwarf Central Park; most of the trash generated in what Edward Abbey called the Vampire City is now shipped to places without clout or money – for instance, rural shires in the colony of Upstate New York. So if, amid the loving profiles of poets and prophets and even politicos that people Upstaters, you sense an undercurrent of pissed-off provincial populism, you’ll understand why.
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