My Brilliant Careerism, part XII: The O'Briens at Three Lives Bookstore

I was glad, and grateful, to see the new Anchor paperback edition of my second novel, The O'Briens, front and center at the magnificent, amazing, and inspiring  Three Lives & Company bookstore in Greenwich Village. I did my first public NYC reading at Three Lives when my first novel, The Law of Dreams, came out in 2006.
     The O'Briens made the Paperback Row listing of new and notable p'backs in last Sunday's New York Times.

One of the greatest bookstores on the face of the Earth. Every single person who works there is incredibly knowledgeable and well read and full of soul. You can walk in and ask anybody, really, what they've read lately and they'll tell you something - very likely something you've never heard of. [But] it's always going to be something interesting and fabulous. I go there when I'm feeling depressed and discouraged, and I always feel rejuvenated.

- Michael Cunningham,
winner of the 1999
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

1962 Rambler American, Santa Barbara

1976 Suburban Silverado

I saw this meateater at Bob's Garage in Carpinteria, California. Owner wants to sell. Maybe you can get hold of the owner by calling Bob. (805) 684-2312. 

1967 Le Sabre. Moncton. Not Williamsburg

Brilliant blue day walking around the street of Moncton, N.B. with an old friend. That kind of April daylight makes the colors pop, and it was just the season in New Brunswick when guys are getting their old machines out of barns, sheds, and garages. I had not planned on liking Moncton. It isn't particularly stately, or quaint, like some other towns in the Maritimes. But it has a liveliness that you don't see much in American cities that small and that remote. Maybe it's an Acadian thing. The downtown really is a downtown, with traffic on the streets and the sidewalks, and all kinds of things going on. Streetlife. Doesn't happen in Bangor, Maine, or Colorado Springs. either. The Canadians have done something right with their cities. If Moncton were in the U.S., it would have been ringed with a freeway by the early seventies. And those "urban renewal" projects were often enough to knock an old town off its feet.
My favorite Acadian band? That's easy-- Les Hay Babies.

I figured a storefront like Isaac Lawson, Stylish Clothiers could only exist in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where it would be tiresomely ironic. Or in Moncton, where it's wonderful.

1962 Dodge Dart. Shediac, New Brunswick

This car has Florida plates, and spent some time on a military base in Hawaii, but I saw it for sale in Shediac, New Brunswick, on the Acadian shore. Those Chrysler Corp. cars of the early Sixties were remarkable-looking beasts. The designer, legendary Virgil Exner, king of fins, called the post-1962 cars "the plucked chickens" after his original concepts were downsized in a haphazard way by scared suits at Chrysler.

Cape Cocagne & Caissie Cape, New Brunswick

Spent the morning up  Caissie Cape & Cape Cocagne, both on a little peninsula jutting out into Northumberland Strait, up here in the Acadian shore of New Brunswick.  (When Acadians went south, they became Cajuns in Louisiane.) As I suspected, Caissie was originally Irish "Casey". There's a long history of French & Irish interconnection in these parts.

Visitation Parish, Grande Digue, N.B.

Good Life VW bus on the Organic Coast

The bus was parked a couple blocks back from the beach in Carpinteria,Calif.--a couple miles up from the Rincon. Wet suit hanging out to dry. British Columbia plates.

Friendship Sloop, Foggy Day, keel, Brooklin Boatyard