Nonfiction Pizza Party
I spent last week visiting family in Tennessee and North Carolina. My stomach says, “Gurgle gurgle. Too much food. Need salad.” Anyways, here are some writing-related notes from my day walking the Hillsboro Village neighborhood in Nashville:- At BookManBookWoman bookstore, I buy two used titles, Tinkers by Paul Harding and Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.I know I should support writers by buying more new books, but I'm a grad. student, so you can guess my finances, and few sensations beat finding artifacts inside a book, like the 1994 plane ticket of Susan B. Schipani I discover inside Zen, and her note on the bottom of page 40: “write about the cherry tree”¦the hedge”¦the snake in the iris.”- On the sidewalk, a street-dude gives me a, “What's up? Where you from?” We slap hands. He wears a bright orange University of Tennessee t-shirt and I can't tell if he's actually homeless and keep walking.“Hey!” he yells.I turn.“What books did you buy?”- After lunch I settle down on the patio of Jacksons Bar and Bistro to drink beer and read. The server (cute, quirky short haircut) tells me that right now drinks are two-for-one and asks if Ray Bradbury wrote some long title I've never heard of and quickly forget. [Hindsight note: probably Something Wicked Comes This Way.] I mumble for a while until she walks away.- Zen offers little practical advice, but is pretty entertaining. The craziest parts are when Bradbury claims to remember his own birth, in detail. At one point, he writes, “I remember the day and hour I was born. I remember being circumcised on the fourth day after my birth. I remember suckling at my mother's breast.”!- I'm doing work on my second round and Orange T-shirt walks by. He approaches my table at the edge of the patio.“I need 55 cents so I can buy a sausage biscuit. I haven't eaten in two days.”I notice his basketball sneakers—I grew up infatuated with kicks—and they look new-ish. They look like Nikes, but I don't see the swoosh.An employee sees Orange T-shirt and barks at him, “You got to go. You can't be here.”He's leaning over the fence and I look into his eyes because I'm buzzed on beer and science fiction and believe I might be able to read his character, but I'm wrong. What I know: I'm drinking and reading in public, in the middle of the afternoon, in a state that isn't my own, and he looks like he needs it more than I do. I palm a single into his hand as the voice behind me grows louder.- My server says, “You shouldn't give them money. They wait until we get off and mug us. It's happened three times this month.”And I think about how many odd, humanizing things happen each week that I don't write about because they don't involve books, and then return to my story.--David Bersell