Desperately Seeking Salem

The audience at the Salem Public Library fell into a hush when Diana Gabaldon took the stage in a purple, black and gold sequined cardigan yesterday to read from her latest novel from the Outlander series, An Echo in the Bone.

A fan had bought the sweater for her.

“Why did someone buy you a sweater with sperm on it?” her husband had asked her.

Gabaldon isn’t your ordinary novelist — she’s kind of like the Stephen King of historical fantasy romance.

And this wasn’t an ordinary reading. In fact, it was the raunchiest, sexiest, most stifled giggle-producing reading I think I’ve ever been to.

Gabaldon opened with the story of her launch as a writer — a lot like what I wrote of in the little preview I did for Salem Monthly — but she fleshed in that story with some very funny anecdotes and lots of talk of the compelling image of men in kilts, who feature prominently in her books.

“A German journalist once asked me: Why men in kilts?” she said. “I explained to him that it was the idea that you could be up against the wall with him in a minute.”

Judging by the crowd — many women aged 18-65 — it’s easy to see who she touches with her stories of a time-traveling 20th century nurse and her 18th century Scotsman husband, whom some have called “the most perfect man on earth.”

And then she read from the book itself.

She picked a sex scene.

Gabaldon stayed for an hour or so, answering questions about the fate of beloved characters, filling in details of plot sequences that have spanned seven books. And then she went out into the hall to wait for about 150 people to get their books signed.

It was a near-perfect book event. She even threw in a bawdy rhyme that got the gals hollering.

In days of old
When knights were bold
And condoms not invented
They strapped some socks
Around their cocks
And babies were prevented.

Who wouldn’t like to see more of these around town. Readings by great authors, I mean, you cheeky monkeys. Who wouldn’t like to hear more salacious Highland rhymes performed by hot women in their 50′s? These things aren’t always confined to the space between women and their books.

Just got word that Diana Gabaldon, author of the fabulously successful “Outlander” series, will hold a free reading at the Salem Public Library on October 5 at 12:30 p.m.

The catch? Well, the mid-day event scheduling may pose a problem for some of you, but if a woman can be a 20th century time-traveling nurse married to a 17th century Scottish Highlander (the premise of her series), I’m pretty sure you can wrest some time away from your cubicle over lunch to sit at the feet of Ms. Gabaldon, probably the biggest-name author to read in Salem in a while.

Yes, the tickets are free. But the library will start doling them out at the reference desk beginning September 1, with a limit of four per customer.

Gabaldon first came on my radar when I was living in Germany, where her books are ubiquitous bestsellers and she is much more of a household name.

This new book, An Echo in the Bone — the seventh in the Outlander series out of nine planned — is a narrative juggling act of an epistolary novel. She’s got the usual: time-traveling wife, romance and conflict across centuries, cameos from historical figures. But she adds to the mix letters that tell the story of the wife’s parent’s love story.

Sounds like a wormhole to me. I’m game for climbing in.

Either way, I’m stoked for the event.

If you walk through the entrance to Mission Mill Museum, veer past the information, steer clear of the gift shops, and wind your way to the northwestern most end of the facility, you will find Max Marbles, probably the most interesting person I have interviewed in Salem thus far.

My story on Max, called The Fixer, appears in the current issue of Salem Monthly.

Now, if you’ve been following the monthly since Editor Eric Howold took over in February, and since I started writing for them in March, then you might have noticed that I have been tearing up the WORD section, a back-of-the-book column about all things literary and bookish in Salem. So far I’ve covered:

Local romance writers on Obama

Reading therapy dogs

And I’m not done yet. A profile of Max Marbles — one of the nations’ premier bookbinders and local all-around intellectual nut and cool guy — is my latest attempt to discover if Salem has not, as I had feared when I moved here, a scrapbooking culture, but an actual book culture. Max is the local go-to-guy for salvaging those most precious books in our collections.

So far so good.

I have a couple of books I wouldn’t mind taking down to Max. There’s my baby book, which my mom left in the basement as it flooded, there’s my German university transcript that my husband spilled red wine all over (in Germany you have to keep track of these flimsy pieces of paper called “Scheins” in a more flimsy book, there is no central registrar…), there’s that copy of Spy Magazine: The Funny Years, which my friend Jason’s daughters scribbled all over.

But none of these books, have really earned their wings, as Marbles says, as a venerable object of time.

Maybe someday I’ll take him my munched on copy of Dr. Suess’s Yurtle the Turtle. I liked that book so much as a child, I used to eat it.

If you can get past the Kevin Costner image on the front of most copies of  The Postman floating around in second-hand bookshops these days, it isn’t difficult to get swept away in David Brin’s images of a post-apocalyptic Willamette River Valley, in which men and women struggle to survive in a new world chaos where rogue factions  and peaceful communities fight to have their ideas for the future live on.

The Willamette River Valley has long seemed to me like an excellent place to wait out the post-apocalypse. My husband and I actually considered this fact before moving here. We had a map of the United States spread out before us and contemplated the possible cataclysmic events that could shape our future by attaching ourselves to the wrong geography.

Both being from agriculturally-based regions – Lancaster County, PA for me and Ames, IA for him — setting ourselves up in a food-producing region was paramount. And if you read this blog, you might wonder if I’ve already begun storing my calories away, squirrel-like, for just such a ground-shaking event.

Something about the ruggedness of Oregon’s landscape and the imagination and ingenuity of its best citizens strikes me as rich soil for planting post-apocalyptic narratives. Also, I’d feel well-inclined to band together with a group of people whose biggest laugh during Pixar’s Up came when the fat little Asian wilderness scout couldn’t pitch his tent (I’ve confirmed this, having seen Up twice).

But back to The Postman, which has all the hallmarks of great post-apocalyptic lit: the world after great tragedy, torn apart by competing ideologies for the future; a lone hero with a grip on reality, but who never loses his sense of hope; a culture that has moved backwards each year as generations lose access to education, rogue bandits whose survivalist motivations bring out the true evils in man; and limited pockets of technology that are never as helpful as humans might wish.

But the real subject of The Postman is the stories and lies we tell ourselves to get through the day.

Near the beginning, hero Gordon Krantz, a travelling storyteller and one-man theater troup — stumbles onto a dead postman and dons his uniform for warmth. But in this world, where men can’t expect to be allowed peacefully to enter new communities, the uniform serves a bigger purpose. He soon concocts a tale that he is an actual postal officer from the Restored United States of America — a lie that establishes himself as a trusted figure, bolsters the hopes of everyone he encounters, and sends the main events of the book spinning into disaster.

I’m not a huge fan of older science fiction, and some of The Postman grated on me. Specifically, Brin has this habit of writing through the perspective of the hero but also explaining what he is thinking through annoying italicized phrases that add little insight to the narrative. Brin does this a lot when Gordon encounters women, leaving me to believe that the hero responds to females like a nerdy 7th grade science-fair champion.

Also, I wouldn’t recommend getting too attached to anybody but Gordon, for the obvious reasons.

What Brin does best is create characters that move beyond type, and which act in a way that seems entirely plausible in this imagined world, which is based so much on the places we know.

If you’ve spent a lot of time in this valley, you’ll recognize some of the settings — in Eugene, Corvallis, Roseberg, Cottage Grove. Sadly, Salem — which I imagine sometimes as the setting for its own doomsday novel — only figures into one page of the book:

“Dena had pestered [Gordon] to bring along her own list of presents. Needles and thread, base-neutral soap, samples of that new line of semicotton underwear they had started weaving again up in Salem, just before the invasion.” – p. 219

But that line alone sent my mind wandering to underground underwear-weaving subcultures, perhaps founded by the little old ladies who weave outside of Max Marbles Book Bindery at the Mission Mill Museum, perhaps putting their “flags” on the Oregon Pioneer in a sign of hope…

Next on my journey through Post-Apocalyptic Oregon is William Stirling’s Dies the Fire, first in a series of newer novels also taking place in the Willamette River Valley. Anyone know of any more to add to my list?