The Night Bookmobile<\/strong>, a new release from Abrams ComicsArts, tells the story of a young woman named Alexandra who goes for a walk one night and comes upon a mysterious “bookmobile” that contains every book she’s ever read, igniting treasured memories of her past. The library eventually disappears, and Alexandra becomes obsessed with finding it again…<\/p>\nNiffenegger admitted that she has her own “bookmobile,” which is just the memory of everything she’s ever read and looked at<\/em>.<\/p>\n“It’s stocked with novels, comics, various books I’ve read for research purposes, poetry, printmaking manuals, art history books, travel guides, plus all the ephemeral stuff like signage, soup labels, math tests and so forth,” she said. “I have been reading avidly since I was a child, so my daily life is partially real and partially literary. It makes my imaginary world stronger, to feed it on a diverse diet of books. Too much ordinary life is limiting to the mind.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Got that? Not just everything she’s ever read; everything she’s ever looked at<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I was probably oversimplifying things back then, but it used to blow my mind that our brains (so I thought) stored everything they’d ever sensed. Imagine sitting in traffic at a near-standstill, approaching a toll booth on the New Jersey Turnpike, say. The AM radio in the dashboard of your Maroon AMC Pacer is playing Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train” (as it seems to at the same freaking time every freaking morning<\/em>). You look to your left. The guy in the blue Chevy Impala which keeps rolling forward, stopping, falling behind, and catching up with you — over and over — he seems to be listening to the same station. His head is bobbing and his open hand is beating on the steering wheel in time with the music, and that can’t be coincidence, can it? Noxious fumes from a battered Dodge pickup on your right are filling the interior of your car, reminding you of a factory your Dad used to work at — the one with the gigantic double cooling\/evaporation towers, from which smoke poured constantly (a smoke which never seemed to concern anyone who worked there). Alas, but you can’t roll your windows up because it is blazingly hot on this August day, and the Pacer’s a\/c makes alarming wheezing noises and anyway, does not cool<\/em>. Which is a problem, isn’t it?, in a car the total body weight of which is probably something like 60% glass. Behind you is a truck delivering ice — ice! people can still get ice delivered to their doors! — and its driver yawns, repeatedly. You yawn too. As you do, as the muscles in your cheeks and jaw and neck tighten, the passages of your ears momentarily constrict and Sheena Easton dwindles to a merciful dot on your attention. The yawn ends; Sheena Easton returns. At the wheel of a little old VW Beetle in front of you, the driver is smoking a cigarette, and faint smoke curls from the left window, but then you see it’s not a cigarette but a pipe: the driver has removed it from his mouth and is tapping it on the side of his car. The sharp, small, nock-nock-nock<\/em> sound it makes somehow makes its way to your ears over the surrounding noise of a hundred engines and beeps and curses, and goddam Sheena Easton anyway<\/em>. The passenger seat is hot to the touch, so you raise your right arm and drape it — awkwardly — over the high back of the passenger seat. (You don’t leave it there, though, because you can feel the eyes of the Impala driver watching you and, no doubt, he is wondering how the hell that pose can possibly be comfortable. It’s not, really. It was just something to do with your arm, so it didn’t look like a stupid mistake that you’d put your right hand flat on a blazingly hot jet-black vinyl seat.) A small gap opens between the Beetle and your Pacer; you take your foot off the brake pedal and roll forward; you re-apply the brake. An ad for Earl Scheib auto painting (“Any car, any color for TWENTY-NINE NINETY-FIVE!”) comes on the radio. You look down at the dial and wonder, not for the first time, why every number on the AM dial is a multiple of ten… except for the first, which reads 54<\/em>. The Beetle’s New Jersey license plate number is PAJ-804. P-A-J<\/em>, you think, and you imagine a blues song called “Papa Ain’t Justified” sung by somebody like Bessie Smith, and you have no real idea what the phrase “musical time signatures” means but you blunder on, imagining that “Papa Ain’t Justified” uses the rare 8\/4 beat, which is the reason the song is a legend to this day — Sheena Easton butchered<\/em> the thing when she tried it, no Bessie Smith she. A small sliver of silver crosses the sky, upper left to lower right of the windshield, a plane circling for clearance to land at Newark. The plane seems to intercept a small plane-sized cloud, and does not re-emerge. You think suddenly of a cinnamon-raisin bun you had, once, years ago, on a morning airplane flight from North Carolina to Philadelphia, and the powerful aroma and adhesive sweetness at the back of your throat come rushing back to you like you just bit into that bun a second ago…<\/p>\nI mean, jeezus<\/em>. Over and over. Every moment, every day. A wonder we’re not — or not all<\/em> — driven crazy by it.<\/p>\nOther than books, what kind of stuff clutters your<\/em> Night Bookmobile?<\/p>\n_______________________<\/p>\n
Update, a little later:<\/strong> I don’t know where that whole Sheena Easton thing came from. I actually liked<\/em> Sheena Easton — to the extent that the woman I was dating back then used to tease me about her, in ill-disguised jealousy. That said, ye gods<\/em> did they ever play that damn song through the floor… And yes, it really did seem to come on at the same time every morning — waking me every morning with its grating perkiness, courtesy of an AM-radio alarm clock.<\/p>\n_______________________<\/p>\n
P.S. The Night Bookmobile<\/em> appeared in syndicated form<\/a> at the Guardian<\/em> Web site a couple years ago. (Episodes are listed there in reverse chronological order.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, has for the moment taken up graphic novels. (She illustrates as well as writes them.) The first installment in a planned series of them, The Night Bookmobile, was published in September. From a recent interview with Niffenegger at the Newsarama.com site (italics added): […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,38,247,273,36],"tags":[61,2115,2116,2117],"class_list":{"0":"post-7969","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-backwards","8":"category-ruminations","9":"category-comics","10":"category-reading","11":"tag-memory","12":"tag-audrey-niffenegger","13":"tag-the-night-bookmobile","14":"tag-the-brain","15":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-24x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7969"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7970,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7969\/revisions\/7970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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