First Edition Tuesday: FLIGHT TO CANADA

It's First Edition Tuesday.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store and bought two lobsters for the Fifty-first Annual Valentine’s Day Prance-around and a first edition of FLIGHT TO CANADA by Ishmael Reed.

This is a book I read my first semester of college, for an American literature survey taught by a patient man who endured a whole semester of the older woman who sat beside me, every class, in the front row of a room with only a couple dozen people in it, and flirted with me whenever he was talking.

She was relentless. I wanted to hear what the professor had to say about Ishmael Reed, and she was inviting me to come stay at her apartment.

I’m not kidding.

I complained about my dorm room often. My neighbor stayed up late, selling drugs. I couldn’t sleep at night.

She had a solution to offer me: come stay with her.

She never even asked me out on a date!

Maybe she was just being nice. She had blonde hair and a smile.

But you know what? I don't think she was just being nice.

I was a good-looking young guy. Moreso than most guys. This kind of thing happened to me pretty often, then.

Now I'm just regular; I'm aging and look weirder than ever; I have to collect first editions in order to increase my sex appeal.

I never went to the woman's apartment. When I asked what music she liked, she said she liked whatever was on the radio. She didn’t really care about music, she said.

That answer was disqualifying.

I was protective of myself, a lot of the time, when I was young, in ways that I don’t exactly regret.

Sure, I missed out on a lot of good times. But good times can turn into bad times, without warning.

FLIGHT TO CANADA introduced me to the magic of anachronism and to history as seen through a radical lens. It's about slavery and capitalism. It starts with a poem.

Why do I get excited about first editions? I mean, it’s not strictly because they make me more desirable.

I'm not sure what it is about them. This first edition isn't worth much money, the one by Ishmael Reed.

I guess it's because a first edition is a true literary artifact. It's not quite Cormac McCarthy's typewriter, but it's a thing I can hold in my hand and convince myself it connects me, via a chain of touchy hands, to its author, or to a moment in time in literary history that you can’t go back to but which you can feel.

Cormac McCarthy auctioned his typewriter, years ago, the one he wrote some of his novels on. And when I was thinking about it a second ago, I pictured a guy who was really upset and furious that he was doing that.

What if there was a guy that was like that? A literature professor who was furious with his colleagues because they didn’t care that Cormac McCarthy was giving away his typewriter? Who didn’t understand that McCarthy could just get another typewriter, or use a pen or a computer?

Thank you for visiting me and my friend Bloggie, on First Edition Tuesday!