So it turns out traveling from London to Perth, Australia, is about as miserable as imagined. From London to Dubai, I had the middle seat, from Dubai to Perth I had it again. Dubai to Perth was the long stretch. To my left an Iranian Babushka who needed her armrests, to my right a Pakistani dude who needed his--he fell asleep before the plane took off. And thus over the course of about 20 hours I ate my several tinfoiled cartridges of poached chicken as if conducting dissections, elbows in. And yet, we became friends, we three. The Iranian Babushka who spoke no English made clear via semiotics that she was visiting her son. She also made clear her pride, "P-H-D. University of Sydney. Engineering!"

To London! With Snail and Spit.

Traveling with small children is not easy, especially if one of them--the six year old--has strep. But The One Recovering From Strep is also The One Who Is Beside Himself With Anticipation That He Will Be Traveling to London, England, Tomorrow Night. This is his first trip abroad. He now has a passport. So does the other one--The One Who Is Tonight Excited But Perhaps For Reasons He Does Not, Being Only Two, Understand.

We're going to London to help launch the hardcover UK edition of Moby-Duck, the inaugural title of Union Books. Its cover is pictured here.

For the last few weeks, I've been preparing six-year-old B. and two-year-old M. for their trip to London by resuscitating a bedtime tale that I first began to spin for B. back when he was a two year old. It's the tale of a squirrel named Snail, who lives in a hole in a tree in Washington Square Park. ("That's funny," M. said the other night. "'Snail' is a funny name"--for a squirrel, he meant.) Snail's best friend is a duck named Spit, who almost always goes by his full title, Spit the Bulgarian Wedding Duck.

(Long story, short version: The night the spinning of the tale began, there was a story about a Bulgarian wedding band on the radio. Spit plays the trombone, and any trombone player will therefore guess the provenance of the name Spit.)

Basically, the tale is a highly derivative remix of Milne, Graham, and Henson, but that doesn't make it any less effective as a soporific. Last weekend, Snail and Spit stowed away on a big old jet airliner bound for London. We'll be catching up with them there tomorrow evening.

Time to pack.

This Month, Moby-Duck crosses the Atlantic

This month Moby-Duck comes out in hardcover in both the UK and Spain. Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the paperback is about to appear. I'll be rambling once again all over the northern hemisphere, and I'll be visiting the southern hemisphere, too. The book tour itinerary: London, Perth, Sydney, Chicago, Santa Barbara, Boston, other U.S. cities later in March. No stops in Spain, but there is this spanking new Spanish book trailer, subtitled by the translator, Darío Giménez.

Micro-Excerpt: 20th Anniversary of the Great Toy Spill

Detail of map from Moby-Duck.

It was twenty years ago today that the castaway bath toys went adrift. In honor of the occasion, here with bonus pictures is the opening section of the first chapter of Moby-Duck:


We know where the spill occurred: 44.7°N, 178.1°E, south of the Aleutians, near the international date line, in the stormy latitudes renowned in the age of sail as the Graveyard of the Pacific, just north of what oceanographers, who are, on the whole, less poetic than mariners of the age of sail, call the subarctic front. We know the date—January 10, 1992—but not the hour.

The Ever Laurel

For years the identity of the ship was a well-kept secret, but by consulting old shipping schedules published in the Journal of Commerce and preserved on scratched spools of microfiche in a library basement, I, by process of elimination, solved this particular riddle: the ship was the Evergreen Ever Laurel, owned by a Greek company called Technomar Shipping and operated by the Taiwanese Evergreen Marine Corporation, whose fir-green containers, with the company's curiously sylvan name emblazoned across them in white block letters, can be seen around harbors all over the world. No spools of microfiche have preserved the identities of the officers and crew, however, let alone their memories of what happened that stormy day or night, and if the logbook from the voyage still exists, it has been secreted away to some corporate archive, consigned, for all intents and purposes, to oblivion.

A container spill. Photographer unknown.

We know that the ship departed Hong Kong on January 6, that it arrived in the Port of Tacoma on January 16, a day behind schedule, and that the likely cause for this delay was rough weather. How rough exactly remains unclear. Although it did so on other days, on January 10, the Ever Laurel did not fax a weather report to the National Weather Service in Washington, D.C., but the following day a ship in its vicinity did, describing hurricane-force winds and waves thirty-six feet high. If the Ever Laurel had encountered similarly tempestuous conditions, we can imagine, if only vaguely, what might have transpired: despite its grandeur, rocked by waves as tall as brownstones, the colossal vessel—a floating warehouse weighing 28,904 deadweight tons and powered by a diesel engine the size of a barn—would have rolled and pitched and yawed about like a toy in a Jacuzzi.

Naked Children Wandering Around on the Dinner Table

"Life is full of doomed quests—and then it tosses up the weird happy ending, with naked children wandering around on the dinner table. See for instance Wyatt Mason’s amazing profile of Ai Weiwei, now an e-book from GQ."  —Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

It is an amazing profile, one of the best in recent memory, and the weird happy ending is perhaps the most amazing of its many amazements. Here's how Mason's amazing profile begins:

In late July, I flew to China not knowing what to expect, with one exception: I was sure, regrettably sure, that I wouldn't be able to speak with the person I needed to speak with, a man named Ai Weiwei. Who he is—and there's no shame in your not knowing; I was among the unenlightened until recently, too—it was my ambition to comprehend. And if I failed to meet the man himself, I hoped, at least, to see enough of the world he called his own to make sense of a matter of no small interest: why it is that not a few people of discernment now consider him to be one of the most significant artists working today; and why it is that the People's Republic of China considers Ai Weiwei to be, without question, a very dangerous man. . . .

More for free here. E-book here.

I Want to Go There: Keppler22b

When I read about and saw this picture of Keppler22b, the possibly terraqueous planet recently spotted in "the habitable zone" of a solar system 600 light years away, the first thought that leapt to mind was, "I want to go there." It's a perverse and dangerous thought I often have. It's the same thought I had when I saw, on The Atlantic's In Focus blog, this photo taken in an abandoned Chinese amusement park.

I don't really want to go to Keppler22b. I mean the flight alone would be miserable, never mind what the planet is actually like. Here on our own terraqueous globe, scientists recently announced the discovery of a species of "deep-sea carnivorous sponge" with "the jaws of a great white shark." Talk about strange shapes of the unwarped primal world! Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the benthic zone. Lord knows what sharkish critters are lurking in the depths of Keppler22b.

Wait. This just in. The first images of Kepplerians, after the jump.

D'Agata: "Those With Faith in Withheld Meanings"

And while I wasn't born there, and have since then moved away, during the summer I lived in Vegas I began to feel those claims, appealing in their hopefulness the way parades appeal, the way a list appeals to those with faith in withheld meanings: the dream that if we linger long enough with anything, the truth of its significance is bound to be revealed. 

 —John D'Agata, About a Mountain