Mysticism and Highway Robbery in Chelsea

Well, my day at work wound up not being so quiet after all. I had several tasks to complete, putting together packets for middle school book clubs, clearing a display, re-shelving a cart of books about ancient Greece, etc etc etc. I wound up eating lunch at my desk and didn't even have a chance to respond to blog comments! So that wasn't the day I expected at all. Today might be better.

After work, my co-worker Staci and I went to see Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the author of "Fleishman is in Trouble" and "Long Island Compromise," both of which I read and enjoyed. She was appearing at a bookstore in Chelsea, and because I've long admired her writing I was eager to see her in person. She was in conversation with Jesse Armstrong, the screenwriter for "Succession," so it was a bonus to see him too.

I got down to Chelsea a bit early, and Staci was running late and couldn't meet me immediately. So I wandered around for a bit. That's St. Luke's and Christ Church, above, off Sydney Street. I had my AirPods in and was listening to my iTunes, which I recently "weeded" to remove some music that caused my heart to sink every time it came on -- mainly classical or show tunes. (One feature of iTunes that I disdain is, when you're shuffling your music, it tries to mix up the genres, so you go from rock to pop to classical to jazz and back to pop, and that causes me musical whiplash. I do not want to go from a light Dionne Warwick pop song to a nine-minute Mozart concerto, and then to "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" or George Winston on piano. I could fix this with playlists but instead I just removed the more specialized content, which I don't listen to very frequently.)

Anyway, I was grooving up and down the King's Road with my iTunes, and I wound up in Sloane Square, home of Morrissey's hairdresser. (Whether or not you like Morrissey or The Smiths, that linked video, with footage from British Pathé studios, is completely weird and well worth watching.)

I made my own more sedate video of Sloane Square, with its trees wound with fairy lights, and then made my way back toward the bookstore. I stopped in at the Chelsea Potter pub, where I paid an outrageous £8.15 (!) for a pint of Neck Oil IPA, before meeting up with Staci. I enjoyed Brodesser-Akner's talk, including the tale of how her agent told her both books "weren't very good" before she decided to find a new agent and wound up selling them to great acclaim. Tales of perseverance in creative endeavors are always inspiring, right?

She said that working in journalism -- she writes for The New York Times -- trained her to have less ego about being edited, which I'm sure is true. Newspaper editors don't have much patience for a prima donna. (When I spoke to her afterwards I told her I'd worked at the Times too, so we had that bond!) She also mentioned a celebrity profile she once wrote about Nicki Minaj based on an interview where Minaj actually fell asleep, and I'm thinking I need to find that story. (Addendum: Here it is!)

Anyway, it was a fun evening out and I had her sign our library copies of "Fleishman" and "Long Island" (the latter was originally my copy before I donated it to the school). I think there's something so cool about the thought of a writer laboring over a pair of books, the books being published by the thousands, and all those copies going out into the world, shipped in boxes and stacked in bookstores, and then two random copies coming back around years later to be signed by the very author who wrote them. It's almost mystical.