I’m trying to get super excited about Scotland, much as I tried a year ago to get jazzed about Ireland.
We know how that turned out: I bought a flight to Dublin only to exchange it a week later for a flight to Paris. It was after I studied the destination with a flea comb, burrowed into my research, only to arrive at the great existential query: What am I thinking? (I ask this frequently in my life.)
I’m sure Ireland is splendid, despite the fact that pubs, pubs and pubs are invariably named the top experience in everything I read. A friend just returned from Dublin and said it’s terrific — for two or three days. Then you run out of things to do. At that point, of course, you rent a car for the verdant countryside and … yawn, you lost me.
I’m an urban traveler. I seek culture, cuisine, cobblestone. Art, edifices, bustling humanity and idiosyncratic neighborhoods. I also seek cool climates — I’m done sweltering in the tropics — for summer travel. Last July I went to Buenos Aires to, among many reasons, escape our heat. I slipped on my jacket each day with a big grin.
And so, Scotland. I’m eyeing a May trip to the capital Edinburgh and Glasgow, the largest city in the country, both of which brim with museums, castles, street art, music (here is where I make peace with bagpipes), hearty food (do I dare try haggis?) and, a-ha, whisky. May weather hovers in the mid-50s and below and I’m already happily shivering.
Like Ireland, Scotland is comprised of highlands, lowlands, islands, cliffs, crags, rolling pastures and billowing grass. It’s lousy with forts and castles. It doesn’t look like I’ll get into all that, though I might be whisked away on a day trip. I probably should.
Maybe I’ll spot Nessie, the wondrous Loch Ness Monster, and hitch a ride on her mythical scaly back through the chill waters. (As a kid, I used to love Nessie, that bashful and elusive lake dinosaur. I thought she and Bigfoot should get married.)
I am a wee nervous about the language, specifically the knotty Scottish brogue, which contorts familiar English into musical pretzels and thick-tongued tootles that leave some of us wincing with incomprehension. I once worked with a native Scot named Alan Black and I couldn’t understand a damn word he said. We got along swimmingly, but I’m sure I missed 60 percent of what he was telling me.
This worries me, the rogue brogue. I’ll be made the fool by cheery locals who will snicker at me between sips of lager and Glenfiddich, doing spit takes. I’ll be the dumb American carrying around an ear funnel, going, “What’s that, mate?”
I can do this. The more I excavate, the more Scotland attracts. I’m thinking seven days between the two cities, yet there’s more to explore. The trip could get longer, epic, out of control. It could go from a jaunt to a journey. I like that. (Cue: “Loch Lomond.”)
If that sounds like relief, bliss, accommodation, you’re mistaken. I like snow, but I also dread it in myriad ways. I think you know what I mean. Snow is pretty, all those crystalline scenes and twinkling tableaus. It facilitates novel outdoor activities — skiing, sledding, snowball fights, snow angels, murderous avalanches.
But it’s also drudgery: shoveling and scraping, slush and brown blech. I once, as a full-grown adult, slipped on my ass into a giant snow bluff. I was carrying groceries. And I’m still so goddam mad about it, I could punch a snowman.
It’s the last day of February and the planet chooses now to fart out four piddling inches of icy powder in our East Coast parts. It arrives all coy and cutesy after a stubbornly snow-free winter that I will blame on dystopian climate change. Better theories? Fire away.
You gotta walk in this crap. And drive in it. Both are treacherous outings. Somehow I lost my crummy winter boots — Frankenstein would’ve loved them — so taking the limping dog out for a walk in my sneakers felt like a high-wire act. I kept thinking: If I fall on my ass again, I’m cashing it all in. I’m just going to lie there and melt away with the snow.
But Cubby was digging it. He made so much yellow snow, it looked like neon graffiti sprayed across the endless white canvass. I think he wrote his name. (Another snowy pastime. Those were the days!)
The snow fell overnight. You go to sleep with black streets, gray sidewalks, bare trees, visible cars. And you wake up stuffed inside a marshmallow. Branches bowed with white, cars buried, streets streaked by road-ripping plows. It’s a winter wonderland. For about half a day.
Then, unless more layers fall, it’s ice and mush and puddles and mud. So we got lucky, spared the drippy drama of multiple winter snows. Right now the stuff is melting fast. Tinkles of water from rooftops drop like rain. The sidewalks are clearing for safe strolling.
People walk their dogs, wearing hats and muffs and gloves, sartorially overcompensating. It’s not that cold. But let them believe. Who knows when, or if, we’ll get blanketed in the white stuff again. Next month. Next year. Never.
A crisp Sunday morning and gaggles of children hoot, holler and gambol outside. It is the sound of chaos. (And, to these gentle ears, terror.)
Temperatures are far higher than the last couple of freezing days. At 47 degrees, the sky is a glowing gray, sun struggling to burn through the haze. A fine winter day.
The children are out at last, released from the arctic prison imposed by the polar vortex, or whatever hit us with only a whisper of snow, for which we’re grateful. Snow is lovely, until it’s a big brown Slurpee.
It will hit 60 later this week, an unwelcome augur of springtime. I’m all about the 40s and 50s. I have plans to go to Florence, Italy, in one week and the forecast says low 50s and I couldn’t be happier. I can see you frowning, and I don’t care.
But spring is a’coming. I had a dream last night that colorful leaves — red! green! yellow! — were blossoming on naked winter branches. A dream? More of a nightmare.
So save for the one-day dusting, there’s been no snow this season. The children above — those huggable hellions — have been deprived of sledding and hurling balls and making snowmen, however virtuosically deformed the creatures invariably turn out.
It’s been a mostly mellow winter, a zigzag of 20s to 60s, so heat lovers and outliers like me can split the difference. That rotund rodent Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow a few days ago, ergo we are promised — blessed with — six more weeks of winter, they say.
Hang tight. All this brisk glory will soon be usurped by sun and sweat and pollen and long days and children screeching outside and the warbling tune of the ice cream truck and picnics and baseball and tank tops and flip-flops and other fashion misdemeanors. It’s going to be a massacre. For now, I’ll do what I can: just chill with the chill.
Yesterday, the first day of fall, landed with a beautiful bang — low 70s, intermittent cloudbursts, followed by the gauzy autumnal light that streaks so nicely through the clouds and on breeze-blown trees. I almost wept. Today’s forecast: sunshine and 63 degrees. The soundtrack: rustling leaves. Be still my beating heart.
I banish sweat and sun, beach parties, barbecues and Birkenstocks. People moan about seasonal depression right about now. I get that in the spring; setting the clock forward is a ritual of exquisite distress. It was George Harrison who sang that euphoric earworm of misguided seasonal optimism, “Here Comes the Sun.” Damn him.
Harrison, in my book, is inviolable. Then there are the real musical scofflaws, whose seemingly every tune is a cloying summer anthem, trilling about sand, surf, girls, cars and other frolicsome “fun.” That’s why the Beach Boys are the worst band ever.
Fall is when I shop for clothing, like a trio of chilly-ready shirts and a Bond-worthy waxed jacked from Barbour (on sale, natch). They’re perfect for my annual fall journey, this one to Spain happening the day before that quintessential fall-iday, Halloween. Face it: Halloween beats Easter, July 4th and Labor Day in any back alley brawl.
I fall for fall. I embrace shorter days, cool weather, scattered leaves and natty scarves, while spurning the obnoxiousness of football and cutesy orgies of pumpkin-flavored confections. I read today there are people who suffer “autumnal existential dread.” The article said: “The melancholy we feel is a form of grief, mourning the lost sunlight, the ease of summertime, and the greenery that abounds in the warm weather.” Boo-hoo.
I pity you not. In fact I kick up my heels and do a leprechaun jig to the staccato rhythm of my own gleeful chuckles. Fall is here. And guess what? Winter, that frosty front of misery for most, is right around the corner. Bring it on. I’ve got the jacket for it.
Right now it’s 104 degrees at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, which seems appropriate considering the facility’s infernal namesake. I have arrived from the East Coast, where it was 74 at 10 a.m. — it will hit 94 — and I am connecting to a flight that will take me to the land of 54 degrees, for it is winter in Buenos Aires, my latest destination on my quest to see as much of the world as I can before it blows up.
Hours later, I write this in the dark on a punishing nine-hour redeye during that weird interval when the pilot douses the cabin lights so his human cargo can go sleepy time. I’m a jet-plane insomniac so that trick ain’t working. Instead I atrophy in my seat, reading a bit, maybe watching a few minutes of a movie (or eavesdropping on what others are watching — almost uniform tripe), but mostly fiddling my brain’s thumbs and sneaking the occasional mini bottle of scotch that I smuggled aboard. (Contraband. I rule.)
Of course, as always, the guy next to me is comatose, swaddled in a blue airline blankie, a rivulet of drool squiggling down his chin — paradise. And there I’ll be when we disembark, sleep-deprived, pissed-off, testy, tetchy, impatient — and singing glory hallelujah I’m in South America, my first time on the continent! Bloodshot eyeballs, bewhiskered, frowzy hair — who cares. The miracle of modern aeronautics has delivered me someplace new and far, uncharted and exciting. I have no idea what I’m getting myself into.
And that’s the gist of it. No matter how physically miserable I am right now — there’s six hours left on the flight and I’ll be burning untold calories fidgeting, not to mention enduring fearsome temblors of turbulence — I still have much to look forward to, lots of which I’ll probably share here.
Meanwhile, I have a funny novel to finish, some hooch to furtively sip and a few episodes of “Rick and Morty” to watch. Things could be a hell of a lot worse.
The plane is set to depart Sunday at 2:09 p.m. local time, and by 2:49 p.m. I plan to have a scotch resting on my drop-down tray next to my trusty laptop or a scintillating paperback, my carry-on tucked overhead, seat reclined and the fat, brushing butts and sharp, errant elbows of fellow fussing passengers over and done and in their seats, preferably nowhere near me.
Grrr.
Air travel, the great triathlon, the great grumble-thon. Packing, getting to the airport — in an Uber, no less, with those ubiquitous pine trees dangling from the rearview that reek of urinal cakes — boarding the plane sheep-like, the scrum of seating, and all the fun, head-imploding minutiae in between. (Security — fuck yeah!) As a blanket complaint, it couldn’t be more cliché. Deal.
I’m soaring from the East Coast to a layover in Houston, then off to Buenos Aires for nine days, which seems a little excessive but at this point I’m kind of stuck. (Note to self: check out Montevideo in nearby Uruguay, or ride a horsey with some dusty Argentinian gauchos. Eat steak. Mounds of it. I really don’t know.)
Dress appropriately. This one’s tricky. It will be 90 degrees at my departure and 53 degrees at my arrival in South America, where it is currently winter below the equator. I’ll wear jeans and a t-shirt and carry a mid-weight jacket on the plane. When I arrive in Buenos Aires I’ll figure out what to unpack and put on. A cinch.
I’m the fourth most neurotic traveler on the globe, and so of course I’m bitten with anxiety about what’s in store in a city, a country, a continent, I’ve never been to. Will I be dazzled? Will I have fun? Will my many plans pan out? Will I get robbed and beaten in a taxi cab?
My myriad trips always work out fine or better despite my weak-kneed worries. And of course I’m already scheming the trip after this, my annual late-October journey. I was leaning toward Budapest, where I’ve never been, and Krakow, where I have been and loved. Now I’m considering Madrid, where I’ve been, and Bilbao and San Sebastián in Basque Country, which are new to me.
But first things first. I have Buenos Aires to explore and get lost in yet. Museums and mausoleums; graffiti and galleries; tango and tours; all within sweeping European influence tangled with Latin passion and grandeur. A mad melange.
And before that, the flight. Oh, god, muzzle the chatterboxes, in my row or any row. Or the bewhiskered guy next to me who plays video games for 10 hours straight. Or, heaven forfend, the shrieking infant, diapered spawn of the devil.
I can do this. I always do. Excuse me, flight attendant, I need a tall cocktail of one part gin, two parts exasperation, and a splash of fizzy rage. Gee, thanks. And I wash it all down with one big Xanax. And from there we’ll see how things go.
It’s on days like this that I think I need a lobotomy. The sun is shining, a sweet breeze swirls the smells of freshly mown grass and bright new blossoms, children squeal and play, and all I feel is vague dread. What’s wrong with me?
Now here comes the ice cream truck, that pied piper of push-ups and popsicles, and the kids squeal even more. Bees buzz, birds sing, dogs yawp. It’s Sunday in the springtime. What next, the 90-degree sweat fest of summer?
I’m playing devil’s advocate, as today is actually pleasant, what everyone refers to with unabashed triteness as “such a nice day.” Highs barely nick 65 degrees and wisps of clouds filter the sunshine for a matte finish. You can even wear a light sweatshirt and not have a stroke.
(Oddly, many people are wearing shorts, that most unflattering of attire, when it’s not even close to called for. But humans do love their shorts. And, equally unbecoming, their flip-flops. “Summer fashion” — the great oxymoron.)
No, really, I like this day, and I’m not a spring or summer person. I start to get nervous when the 70s encroach, and when it’s 80 or more I’m gone, chilling with the AC set on igloo.
I’m sitting on the patio writing this, the dog basking in the sun on the toasty deck, a leaf blower roaring in the distance with fossil-fuel fury, a babel of voices in the air. “I think your sister has a crush,” a girl no more than seven informs her friend as they pass by and I wish I could hear more of that gossipy gab. “Jason. Come. Here. Now.” says an aggravated mom. A man calls his dog. Its name is Swoosh.
I feel like an interloper, because, really, I’m not supposed to like this weather, this kind of squeaky, sunshiny suburban idyll. But on this day it’s alright. Now I’ve really lost it: I think I’m going to take a brisk walk.
As I write this, 35,000 feet in the sky on a jet back to the States from nine fine days in Italy, I’m swollen with that cruddy reverse homesickness in which you miss the place you visited instead of your actual home. Rome and Naples were wonderful and I wasn’t ready to leave and I wanna go back. I’ve got the home-bound blues.
Still, my last rueful day in Rome was brilliant, quite literally — balmy mid-60s, cloudless, cerulean skies, sunglass weather. The kind of conditions that make people dress way too skimpily for the actual temperature. I was perfect in jeans, a light jacket and t-shirt. The guy in the short-shorts and tank top, not so much.
Especially if he wanted to get into the Pantheon, the almost 2,000-year-old Roman temple turned Catholic church, where modest dress is a must. Leaders, popes and artists, including Raphael, are buried in the cylindrical building, which is famous for its oculus (or big hole) at the tip of its dome, shooting down a thick beam of sunlight like a celestial Bat-Signal.
Our lovely tour guide in Naples told us he gets chills whenever he enters the shrine. I did not get chills, but I was aptly awed by the ambient beauty and unimaginable feats of engineering. So often in Italy, if you regard your surroundings for just a moment, astonishment floods in and you wonder what hit you. It’s called the sublime.
I didn’t care if I found it or not, but fate planted an unmistakable sign in front of me — a literal street sign — so I ambled over to the vacantly majestic Trevi Fountain, where mugging selfie dolts and preening sun-worshippers congregate on days like this, as if Nicola Salvi’s pompous 1735 fountain is a swimming pool or the beach and not just a glorious repository for Bernini-style sculpture. I do respect this extravagant splash machine, but it’s a brief pitstop, not a gawk spot, despite its iconic role in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” a personal favorite.
A local beer, a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich, and a cappuccino later, I headed to the Vatican for a guided tour of the Vatican Museum, a riot of artistic riches. Our tour guide barely made it on time, and my mood was starting to curdle. But she materialized at last, a petite Italian who used a plush Woodstock doll dangling from a stick in lieu of the boring old tourist-group flag for us to follow amid the crushing, claustrophobic crowds (many of them terrible teenagers, lolling, laughing and leering).
She gave each of us little radios with ear buds so we could hear her literate narration of highlights in the museum. But the contraptions were on the fritz, all buzz, fizz and crackle — sonic flatulence that drowned out her spiels about each grand piece of art, from writhing statues of men and lions and Raphael’s “The School of Athens,” to the visual commotion of Michelangelo’s peerless Sistine Chapel ceiling. The works spoke for themselves.
As we finished, I asked the guide for the nearest taxi line, and she warned me to be careful with them, that they quote outlandish prices and don’t use the meter. And so it was. I approached a driver and told him my address and he promptly said it would cost 40 euros because of, you know, that zany Tuesday traffic. I scoffed and said, “You’re crazy,” and he responded, “You’re crazy.” Genius.
I hailed a passing cab, got in, and paid 14 euros back to my hotel, where I wound down, went out and ate pasta, sipped wine, and, reflecting on the past nine days, sighed: perfetto. Which in English translates simply as: damn.
Farting thunder and crackling lightning preceded the cloudburst that tried its damnedest to drench our small tour group at Pompeii, the ancient city of dramatically preserved ruins just outside of Naples yesterday. Umbrellas aloft, my brother and I winced at each other and agreed we didn’t want lightning to blast us into human beef jerky like the displayed bodies caught in squalls of volcanic gas and ash from a spewing Mt. Vesuvius way back when (79 A.D., to be exact).
Weather-wise, Rome was better, but Naples, Italy’s third largest city, set south and known as the country’s black sheep and mischievous scamp, might be more atmospheric, vaguely sketchy and intimately enthralling. It’s got kick and fizz.
Sure, Naples has offered lashing schizophrenic weather — enveloping sunshine, then muffling fog, then a glimmer of sun, then a 10-degree temperature drop and downpours — but it has character to burn: crazy winding backstreets streaked with old churches, lavish, looping graffiti, bristling bars, sensational food, boisterous people. And do mind that Vespa tearing down the cobblestone street bustling with fleet-footed pedestrians.
Speaking of food I might kill for — last night’s grilled octopus and the pasta carbonara in Rome surely count — we waited about 40 minutes for a seat at the famed Sorbillo pizzeria, known for the best pies in the world and certainly in Italy. Get the basic Margherita — mozzarella, basil, zesty homemade tomato sauce and thin, chewy crust (huge and about $5). It will recalibrate your pizza expectations for life.
But I’m not here to peddle pizza. I’m here to report that we tracked down the three (stunning) Caravaggio paintings in Naples; found a go-to watering hole, Libreria Berisio, which is a cozy working bookstore by day, heaving with volumes, and at night dims the lights and serves a boggling array of cocktails, with funky seating, including stacks of hardbacks for stools (books and booze!); and took a private four-hour city and food tour with the spectacular Gennaro. Just the three of us.
Gennaro, who speaks with a lilting, comically tangy Italian accent and shoots off sparks of wound-up energy, whisked us along in a gust of breathtaking erudition, knowledge, information and raw charm. Food, history, literature, opera, architecture, art, politics both local and global, film, geography — he seems to know it all, an effusive polymath who makes you feel intellectually undernourished.
But we weren’t undernourished, because Gennaro fed us a feast, including pastry, fried seafood, buffalo mozzarella, deep-fried pizza (!!), beer, Limoncello (a local lemon liqueur), pasta with meat sauce, and more.
He’s also something of a one-man chamber of commerce for Naples, fervently defending the city, exalting its virtues with fist-shaking passion, and angrily blaming city leaders for underrating and underselling their jewel in the rough. Five years ago, he says, Naples still carried a bad rap — piles of garbage, crime, mafioso, and other underbelly lesions — but it’s enjoying a surge of respectability and much-needed tourism. He wants the world to see his native city as he does: a top draw, a world-class player, a tourist mecca. He wants it to be loved, adored, appreciated.
Expectedly, knee-jerkingly, reviewers have stumbled over themselves to praise the foppish funnyman’s latest collection of personal tales (often tall), diary entries, cultural observations and social sniping.
Snicker-worthy at his very best, Sedaris, a humor essayist for The New Yorker, has made a cottage industry out of wan, admittedly embellished autobiography, droll stories about his family, his husband and his privileged moves to the French and English countrysides.
Turning life into literature, he is frank, irreverent, sassy, yet sensitive, as any good writer should be. And he is a good writer, even if his language is baldly prosaic, stylistically flat-footed, determinedly unadorned, dare I say drab. (I said it.)
Overrated, with thousands flocking to theater-sized readings to hear his nasally, high-pitched deadpan — I’ve been there — he’s not exceptionally funny or insightful, though he taps a reservoir of honest empathy. He’s a queer, urban Erma Bombeck, flattering a particular strain of hipster and sophisticate with teeny tee-hees.
***
I’m pumped about Portugal. Barely back from Paris and already I’m poring over books and sites about Lisbon and Porto, legwork for a weeklong stay in mid-January, when I’ll probably get soaked by merciless rain (while temps hover at a balmy 58 degrees). Paris must feel like a betrayed mistress.
The flight, which cost less than a good winter coat thanks to an airline credit, is booked. Hotels, at seductive off-season prices, are booked. Two walking tours, including a Porto food tour, are booked.
I got back from Paris exactly one week ago. I am shameless, a monster.
Unlike Paris, London or Spain, Portugal isn’t front-loaded with blindingly spectacular sights and museums. It instead thrums with an old-world vibe, cobbly neighborhoods spread over San Francisco-y hills, views and plazas and churches and food, including unparalleled bounties from the sea, and of course the people. (My people. As mentioned before, I’m of Portuguese descent, though my ties to the country are tenuous at best. I’m a terrible ambassador.)
It’s a walking world, Portugal. I plan to amble, stomp and stagger through the country’s two biggest cities, with the very occasional — and very cheap — taxi for longer hauls. A picture says so much, and makes the heart do a jig:
Porto
***
Smarter, funnier, better looking and a brilliantly better writer — not mention an infinitely superior cook, natch — Anthony Bourdain and I still had a lot in common.
We’re both wanderers, seekers, a little profane and rough around the edges, smart-alecks, atheists, ironists and guiltless sensualists. We’re angry, fiery and melancholic. We’re easily bothered and bored, and don’t always know what to do about it, except, in many cases, hit the road.
And like him, for all my searching, I’m still not sure what I’m looking for. And I’m pretty sure I will never find out. Bourdain, a suicide in 2018, probably never did either.
This hits me watching “Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain,” a moving, multilayered documentary about the celebrity chef, author and influential television host by gifted filmmaker Morgan Neville (the Oscar-winning “Twenty Feet from Stardom,” another masterpiece).
Sure we had things in common, but Bourdain, in his books, shows and this remarkable movie, cuts a troubled figure, the classic brooding, almost romantic enigma who toggles manically between wonder and woe.
With his streamers of verbiage, buoyantly prickly charm, zeppelin-sized attitude (and ego), lanky strut, tats and designer shades, Bourdain was hipster as tour guide, a foodie philosopher, man of the world who was always just a little itchy in the role. He was the reluctant rock star — cynical, self-effacing — who still craved the glory, glamor, privilege and, alas, the drugs, including heroin, that came with it.
At his best Bourdain was an influencer before the term gained the narcissistic kiddie cachet it flaunts today. Before any trip, be it Toronto or Tokyo, I watch a rerun of “No Reservations” or “The Layover” to get a voluptuary’s feel for a city and nail down must-do destinations of plate and place. I’ll be rewatching his “Parts Unknown” episode about the food and culture of Porto soon enough. I trust him to steer me to the coolest and most coveted spots. He hasn’t failed me yet.
The programs, of course, are as much about the man as the places he visits. They’re about getting an earful, and a mouthful, from a dark, dazzling host who found so much joy between grumbles. He made the dangerous seem divine, just how I like it.
***
When in Paris, I always duck into the fabled Shakespeare & Company bookstore, smack on the Seine on the historically literary Left Bank, where Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Sartre tippled and typed, spinning the blank page into eternal art.
Cramped and crowded with tome-seeking tourists, the creaky-floored shop, honeycombed with nooks, alcoves and twisty aisles, specializes in French and English language literature — no junk, just the good stuff. It’s not snobby. It’s just smart. And the English-speaking staff are unfailingly cheerful and helpful, stamping your book with the store’s inky insignia. It’s a pulp paradise, the kind that makes a bibliophile go a little mad with delight and desire.
I went firmly middlebrow on my recent pilgrimage, grabbing a paperback (it’s only available in hardback in the States) of Sally Rooney’s new novel, the wincingly titled “Beautiful World, Where Are You.” I cracked it immediately, reading in bars and cafes with a Chardonnay or latte on hand.
The Irish Rooney (“Normal People”) is a reliably breezy read, plainspoken, occasionally lyrical, but mostly succinct and pinched. Her control is impressive and her sturdy, confident voice makes you want to follow her wherever she’s going, which often includes naked people.
I just finished the book on my return from Paris and enjoyed it. It covers Rooney’s preferred topics — love, sex and friendship, yearning and ambition among anguished millennials — with detour discussions about Marxism and life’s unfathomable purpose. (Rooney, a wunderkind at 30, is a professed Marxist.)
Coming from the famous bookshop, it’s not only a winning read, it’s a fitting souvenir from that most bookish of cities.
GNASHING. 