Plowing through puddles on I94 with lightning electrifying the morning sky, en route from Milwaukee to Wausau. Listening to Lucinda Live, Change the Locks.
From The Last Tycoon; There are a lot of ways through the mountains, one of them optimal, others less so, but the important thing is that someone has to choose how the tracks are laid.
Last night, Boswell’s, enthusiasm for Fiercely as well as Orphanmaster. Newton and Edith thank you.
On to Janke’s in Wausau at 5:00, last event on this tour but scattered gigs back east in the Fall.
For now, a stop to pick up 10 year old cheddar at the Maus Haus.
Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman
Chimes of Freedom
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, The Orphanmaster
Under Construction
Swimming in Lake Michigan is like swimming in the Atlantic and taking a shower at the same time. And drinking a glass of water as you go. We had a chance to stretch out on the sand this morning after the Original Pancake House and before Interstate 94.
Last night at The Book Stall in Winnetka was cozy and great, a few people I knew — including a woman I hadn’t seen since we were girls shovel-scraping together on a summer archaeological dig so many years ago! — and a bunch who were new to me. (The store was ranked #1 indie book store by Publishers Weekly for 2012.)
I like talking to a combination of people who had read The Orphanmaster or had not, taking them by the hand and showing them some of the oddities of European culture in Dutch New Amsterdam in the old days, New York before it was called New York. And I’m finding that quite a few people have read not only the novel but Love, Fiercely. Tonight in my talk at Boswell’s, in Milwaukee, I’ll be talking about both books and the differences between writing fiction and nonfiction. The event’s at 7pm if you happen to be in the neighborhood.
Our hotel in Milwaukee is the only thing in the neighborhood not being rebuilt; we’re surrounded by dirt and earth moving machinery and jack hammers. Restful if you’re in a certain mood.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Beefy
I rolled us into Chicago and Gil headed us out, and in between we visited one of the city’s major attractions, just beneath the Navy Pier and the Sears Tower: Mr. Beef, the downtown locus of all that is juicy and meaty and our first destination whenever we’re in town. The Italian Beef Sandwich pairs hot shaved tenderloin with a melange of finely diced vegetables (called giardinera, if you must know) and a soft bun, all of it dipped in a special beefy broth which runs down your chin with each bite. Crush a vanilla milkshake at the same time and go take a nap.
You’ll Find It on Orleans
This is all good fuel for a talk I’m giving tonight at The Book Stall in Winnetka, one of Chicago’s northern suburbs. It’s an early event, 6:30, but should be fun. I promise to wash the Mr. Beef grease off my hands before I arrive.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster
Travels With Oliver
Speaking tonight at the Hudson Library in Ohio, sponsored by The Learned Owl book store. Nice drive today through elk country– fishing camps lined the backroads, and broke down vehicles of all kinds lay like beached porpoises in every yard. The stench of dog breath permeated the back seat.
Maud Keeps Oliver in Line
Not sure if we’ll have time to explore Cleveland, but I had a swim today so everything’s all right.
Filed under Dogs, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster
Fruit of the Earth
“Are the stars too distant? Pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.” Margaret Fuller
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster
Strontium Plums and Beryllium Bears
The morning glories were raging as I, Gil, Maud and Oliver pulled away from Cabin World to start on our road trip to the midwest., leaving the hovel-in-the-marsh in the capable care of our friend Javert.
We crossed Pennsylvania to find a farm stand with a prematurely aged man making change out of a prematurely aged leather wallet. The plums he sold were the most delicious I’ve ever eaten.
Gil has his own take on the region we’ve hit, staying at a biker bar/motel so remote that a denizen of the bar exclaimed, “I’ve never seen anybody stay at the motel!” So here are his ruminations:
Researching a writing project, we’re embarking on a vacation tour of Fifties nuclear sites, the first one being the Quehanna Wild Area in west central Pennsylvania. As part of Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program, the Curtis-Martin aeronautics company tore a huge swath out of the wilderness and installed a reactor as part of an experimental nuclear-powered jet engine development. But in 1960 the U.S. Air Force crapped out of the whole Jetson-style concept altogether, Curtis-Martin pulled out, burying some of its waste underground, after which area black bears and other animals rummaged through the stuff. Beryllium dust anyone? How about some strontium-90? ARCO inherited the hot cell in the woods. One of its subsidiaries had the brilliant idea of irradiating plastic-infused hardwoods to create a sort of super-flooring product, which Permagrain, Inc. installed in basketball courts and gymnasiums around the country (shades of flubber!). Several Quehanna clean-up efforts tried and failed to remediate the site, the robots were sent in, and the whole mess was eventually buried out of sight and out of mind. Even today, though, there’s a hexagonal “restricted area” on the maps. Another local attraction is a coed boot camp correctional facility for wayward youths, just up the road from where we’re staying. Escaped juvies wander into nuclear twilight zone? Sounds like a killer horror flick. The Forest Has Eyes…
Filed under History, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster
Marrow Bones
“I wish to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life. I want to cut a broad swath, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms. If it proves to be mean, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world. Or if it is sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.”
(Henry David Thoreau, 1817 – 1862)
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Writers, Writing
Good Link
Coupla nice items from the blogosphere:
BookTrib: The All-You-Can-Eat Literary Buffet
and
It feels ridiculously good when a reviewer understands what The Orphanmaster is all about.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
110 Degrees in the Shade
Jim Neeley’s Interstate Barbecue. Nuff said. Even in an airport terminal outpost, a chopped pork sandwich so genuine I bit down on a knucklebone the size of a quarter. In the Memphis Airport, everyone’s flirting in the Tennessee manner, and one bookstore clerk is reading aloud to another clerk from a volume off the New Fiction shelf. Not my book, but you can’t have everything. It was a good trip. We tempered the desert furnace (115 degrees well after the sun has sunk) with ice cream and braved the weather advisory to visit the Poisoned Pen, the largest independent bookstore in the Phoenix area. My web chat there will be up for some time to come. Now home to Gil, Maud and Oliver, who probably spent fully six hours awake in the five days I was gone. G’boy.
Filed under Cooking, Jean Zimmerman, The Orphanmaster
Poisoned Pen Interview Redux
This should be the webcast link.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster
Poisoned Pen Interview
Here is a link to a webcast of my interview at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, AZ.
We may look cool, but outside it was 112 degrees in the dark!
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Poisoned Pen Talk
I’ll be conversing with Barbara Peters at her store The Poisoned Pen tonite at 10 EST. You can listen to the webcast or contribute a question through this link. Should be fun, please take a look!
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
Hot Sage
So I took a break. I’ve been blasted by the 105-degree Arizona heat (go out quick, feel the fire, duck back in), and have enjoyed the delicious sage aroma in the air and the sight of baby jackrabbits drinking moisture from the putting green turf. I’ve found that sushi tastes great in the middle of the desert. Oh, and I’ve enjoyed talking about The Orphanmaster with 75 gracious seniors at a place called Silverstone, in Scottsdale, home to mom and dad.
It’s always interesting to share pictures related to 1660s Manhattan when you are in 2012 and across the country from Manhattan. You can show the intricate, drawn-to-scale street plan of New Amsterdam dating from 1660, and it looks not so much like historic fact as it does magic, a fantasy of a place invented, a tale out of a story book, not possibly real. And yet it all was. The sights and sounds of that Manhattan could be experienced as vividly as the hot gale off the desert here today, or the sumptuous sage, or the nibbling bunnies on their sea of acid green.
In 1660s Manhattan, sea lions sunned themselves on rocks in the surf at the base of the island, where Battery Park is today. You could look up in the sky at noon and witness pigeons wheeling in clouds so dense they blotted out the sun. Ox carts clogged Broadway. Bears climbed in the orchard trees. Noise. Scent. Knockaround drunks. Dazzling meadows of wildflowers.
What I wouldn’t give to set foot there, step into that 1660 map for just a split second.
Filed under Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
Orphanmaster Goes to Arizona
Salt, sand and a riptide. The day was hazy at Jones Field 5. Seagulls, serious and prim, were everywhere, and three tiny sandpipers had flown in from a wilder beach somewhere.
I’m flying to Arizona tomorrow, and will speak at two locales while I’m there. But I hope to get some non-beach relaxing done too. (Probably not outside in the 105 degree furnace of the southwestern climate. But air conditioning is extra delicious in Scottsdale.)
The sheer poundage of books I am bringing might necessitate an extra charge at the airport. But that’s a vacation to me.
Filed under Jean Zimmerman
Aromas Now and Then
The air of the city smelled like hot dogs yesterday as I made my way to Bryant Park in a spattering rain.
Luckily there was a tent set up for the Reading Room, an area of the park along 42nd Street where I took part in a panel with three other debut novelists: Cristina Alger, Karl Taro Greenfeld and Karen Walker Thompson. They were each of them charming and thoughtful, so I tried to live up to their example, and the event went well.
I wonder what the air of New York smelled like in August 1664? Waffles? Manure? Clover?
Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, The Orphanmaster, Writing
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