Don't Tread On Me

Verona, Italy

"The city either destroyed a person or else it made him merciless." .... -- Paul Theroux, The Kingdom by the Sea

Love/Velo

The Liberties, Dublin

This line -- "Is it about a bicycle?" -- is culled (rather shamelessly) from one of my favorite books, The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien. Considering the novel's brilliance, it seems a travesty to quote from the back-of-the-book copy, but in the interests of midnight deadlines, and because it's a delicious thought to remember what drew me to the book in the first place, that's exactly what I'm going to do. Consider this an appetizer for the all-you-can-eat Flann O'Brien-a-thon that has been threatening to surface for some time now. The teaser reads as such:

A murder thriller, an hilarious comic satire about an archetypal village police force, a surrealistic vision of eternity, the story of a tender, brief, unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle and a chilling fable of unending guilt.

How easily can one confuse love with bicycles? It's not just some fanciful notion -- it's written right there in the alphabet.

The Love of Novelty

Milan, Italy

Bad Route Road

I-94, Montana

Every few months or so, it seems the badly-named places of North America are dragged out from their various dark corners of the world and given a good airing in the papers. Car bombs, economic bailouts, and crooked politicians all make for a heavy slog through the newsprint, which may go a long way in explaining the presence of recurring fluffy features on Boring, Oregon or, as is the case with today's Guardian, plucky headlines that ask, "Anyone fancy a break in Asbestos, Canada?" (No, but thanks for asking.)

I will be the first to admit that I welcome a good chuckle at the expense of Hell, Michigan and Intercourse, Pennsylvania as much as the next person. A few place names in these features are old saws (Truth or Consequences, New Mexico) while others (Purgatory, Maine) delight anew. But no matter how many silly lists of oddball place names I've perused over the years, nothing beats the thrill of unexpectedly spotting one of these rare beasts out in the wild.

Take Bad Route Road, Exit 192 off I-94 in Montana. This ominous sign came into view through the cracked windshield of the Balthrop, Alabama tour van last summer on our month-long tour of the U.S. We were hauling out to the west coast from Fargo, North Dakota, recovering from our show the night before opening for the wonderful Josh Ritter, lulled by long stretches of road in Big Sky Country and driving through a steady grim drizzle. The first road sign whipped past at 75 m.p.h. There was a pause, then an uncertain voice from the front seat: "Did that just say Bad Route Road?" "Yep. I think it did."

Among the well-documented entries in the Ministry of Silly Names, I have yet to come across a list as bizarre as those in Bill Bryson's amusing Made in America, but in the meantime, here's the regurgitated list from today's G2 magazine, which brought me a few much-needed grins on the downtown number 2 train. The list came with the following promising headline: Some more holiday ideas: Other North American towns that might struggle to attract the tourist pound. I don't know about the tourist pound, but you can bet there's a whole lot of nudge-nudge wink-wink going on at the city limits of these towns:

Intercourse Pennsylvania

Boring Oregon

Dull Ohio

Ordinary Virginia

Spunky Puddle Ohio

Mosquitoville Vermont

Hell Michigan

Slaughterville Oklahoma

Tightwad Missouri

Roaches Illinois

Dildo Newfoundland

Crotch Lake Ontario

Bummerville California

Gas Kansas

Purgatory Maine

But enough laughter at the expense of my fellow countrymen and continent-folk. I'm off to sigh over more fetching photographs of Nick Clegg read the serious news of the world, and when I'm done with that task, I think I just might kick back with a beer from Fucking Austria.

Nobody Knows

Francis Street, Dublin

When Called By Name

Assisi, Italy

Do Not Write To Me As

Rome, Italy

A beautiful feature of books is that they, unlike their fashionable electronic counterparts, are not only written, they can also be written in. Annotation is an act of intelligent vandalism that I -- unable to participate in such defacing myself, having spent too much time in book conservation -- can appreciate. When you read with a pen in hand, it's less monologue and more dialogue, and that's exactly the sort of thing that can make reading so enjoyable. That is, unless you're an OCD freak like myself, in which case your pen is firmly capped, your pint of Smithwick's placed at a safe distance, and you check all your rearview mirrors before turning to the next page.

Fortunately, technology is on my side. Thanks to the invention of the mighty Post-it, and because I'm always hunting for excuses to crack open a freshly minted 3-pack of Moleskines, I tend to keep track of the stuff I read in places well outside of the book's sacred margins. I'm calling to mind an essay I read in the New York Times Book Review some time ago on this very topic. I flip back in my own small notebook, dated December 2008, a cream-colored Fabriano journal with red spirals on the cover, and sure enough, there are my notes on the article by Henry Alford: You never know what you'll find in a book.

There is nothing quite like walking into a used book store, taking down a book from the shelf, and unwittingly stumbling onto clues of the lives of others, revealed to you by what they have left behind in the margins -- or sometimes in the leaves of the book itself.

You open a book in a university library and out falls a yellowed letter with this curious first line: "Do not write to me as Gail Edwards. They know me as Andrea Smith here." Torn-out drink menus. Grocery lists. Business cards. Who were these people? Why is there a full-page Rimmel ad in the leaves of Faust? Forget CSI -- I want to join the ranks of UBI: used book investigator.

Because of my previously mentioned, er, tendencies (did I mention I go into tremors at the sight of a dog-eared page?), an inspection of my own bookshelves would yield little in the way of my own marginalia except for a three-month binge where I read everything by Nabokov I could get my hands on and was so blindsided by my enthusiasm for the stuff I just had to underline. I've left behind some loose-leaf evidence: crosswords from the Irish Times (I don't do them -- I just enjoy reading the out-of-context cryptic clues). BookCourt bookmarks. A few wayward Post-its. But more interesting are the strange confetti that fall from the pages of a used book unexpectedly. These offer far more cryptic clues, and they act as reminders that the book's journey started before me and will continue after I pass it on to another.

Which brings us to inscriptions. I tend to be, frankly, a little creeped out when I find these in the front cover of a book, most of all because I can see only two reasons for giving away a book with a personalized inscription: 1) the sentiment, heartfelt when it was written, has since been discarded, scorned, or forgotten or 2) someone died. Owning one of these marked books can be even worse. That heartfelt inscription is a constant reminder that the book will never be truly mine. It was intended for Marjorie, Merry Christmas 1962, and always will be. If it says on the ornate sticker Ex Libris Bradford J. Sebsad, then Bradford, as far as I'm concerned, that book is yours and always will be.

The Book Inscriptions Project is a great online collection of these mysterious hand-written dedications. But I find these a little easier to look at, maybe because they have already creeped somebody else out, and I'm just getting the morbid fascination secondhand.

I have to half-retract my scorn of reading things on a screen, though, because first of all, I write a blog, and secondly, I've spent enough time scrolling through the scanned marginalia of writers I love to understand the pleasure of seeing things written in a writer's own hand. If you want to know how to get me to waste a good half hour of precious time when I could be reading my Twitter feed, you'll give me the link that answers the question, "What words did David Foster Wallace circle in the dictionary?" Simply put, I love seeing the notes writers make in their books and manuscripts. Think of it as a literary version of the breathless Us Weekly feature about how stars are just like us. Famous Writers: They Scribble Notes, Too! I'm still waiting for the windfall that will allow me the extra pocket change to get Nabokov's The Original of Laura, which has been published, quite awesomely, and among much hullaballoo, as a series of scanned index cards with Nabokov's carefully pencilled script. Not quite the real thing, but deliciously close.

In the meantime, if you've come across a curiosity in a book -- whether it be a note scribbled in the margins, an odd underlined passage, or a sliver of ephemera that slid out when you first opened it -- I'd love to hear what you've found.

Curbstone Brokers

Wall Street, NYC

Golten Marine

Red Hook, Brooklyn

The "A" in A-Team Stands For Aristotle

Red Hook, Brooklyn

Most everyone of a certain age who grew up around Chicago has an apocryphal Mr. T story. He not only played the meanest mutha ever seen on nightly NBC television, he was also our most famous neighbor. While I never ran into the fella myself, a friend from college liked to tell the story of the time she and Mr. T got into an elevator in a high-rise building and were thwarted by some kids who pressed all the buttons between 2 and 14 before dashing off. "Oooh, you kids," Mr. T was rumored to have said before shaking his fist good-naturedly at the brats. Even though I wasn't there, I find myself cadging that line every time I'm in an elevator that's making a whole bunch of unplanned stops.

Draped in gold chains with a mohawk clipped clean as a Bonsai, Mr. T was the icon of my youth. I can recall a year when not a day on the playground went by without someone pityin' some other fool. I suppose he fell off the radar for me once I moved on to junior high, but imagine my delight when, through the magic of the internet, his pro-momma song, "Treat Your Mother Right" came out. ("When you put down one mother, you put down mothers all over the world.")

After seeing the Banksy movie last week, "Exit Through the Gift Shop", I've had my antennae out for the aerosol-ed faces I see on the streets around me. Shepard Fairey -- the street artist also responsible for the iconic red-white-and-blue Obama "Hope" poster -- has spray-painted so many Andre the Giant OBEY faces in cities from coast to coast that it seems there's hardly a billboard, street lamp, or wall that hasn't seen Andre's stern command from on high. But given the choice between the two, I like to think that this shabby Mr. T on a shorted-out electrical box in Red Hook is the one I'm going to listen to.