Jews are an historically stateless people, and so had to invest their time and wealth in that which could be transported without confiscation –education. – David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge, p12.
I used to be paid to be a pirate. This was before the Internet as we know it got big. I would get instructions and run all over my university campus to photocopy–with the company-provided copier-card–scholarly articles from any of the specialized libraries. It had to be fast, and it had to be clean. By clean, I mean, there could be no traces of my hands or watch, or face. And the copy had to be without blur or shadow. In other words, a simulacra of the scholarly journal actually providing the article itself. I would deliver the articles in campus mailboxes, also all across the campus.
I think my watch showed up in one medical copy. (Oh, the humanity!) That was the end of my career as a professional pirate. And to turn Dr. Thompson’s famous line¹ on its head, I turned amateur.
I buy most of my books used. I worry about it a lot, and secretly hope that I will one day meet a beloved author in person and be able to hand them 5 or 7 dollars per book, whatever their cut on a new book would be. Thankfully, most of the authors I enjoy are dead.
Tom Spanbauer, B”H, is not. His Faraway Places arrived on Friday. I had no idea what to expect as the cover in the online marketplace had only the title on it. Turns out, my copy is the discarded copy from San Leandro High School. And in a nice twist, I realized that had I been astute enough to hunt this down upon its publication, I would have read it in high school, myself.
But because this is an early printing, with a young Spanbauer huddled on the back cover like a football coach encouraging you to “get in there”, I missed out on what would become the front matter. (I was also stunned at the brevity of the book. It numbers 124 pages, total, and I thought I might be missing some.) A.M.Homes wrote a nice introduction, and she, like how Whitman snuck Emerson’s letter into Leaves of Grass, pasted in a letter from Spanbauer himself. As I said, my version does not have these things.
I checked the amazon page and its usually excellent “Look Inside” feature, mostly to check the page counts. Fair warning: it has *most* of the full introduction in it. Amazon cuts out the last bits from Spanbauer’s letter. I had screen-shotted the text, then cropped and plopped it into a Word doc for offline reading. (Pro-tip: Word’s landscape orientation with 2-column layout works like a charm for this.)
And, having found the gold himself, this pirate will now point you to his treasure map, the place where you can read the full introduction, and, I think most of the book with its exorbitant use of the n-word² (which he used to stay true to the language of his Idaho youth).
Here’s Faraway Places, although I do encourage you to buy an actual copy. I’m already into Spanbauer for 5-7 bucks. I can be on the hook for your tab, too.
-d
¹”When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” – Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
² 111 times. I counted. Buckle up.