too many Daves

There’s a guy here in Ballard who shall rename nameless. We ran into each other one night on the other side of Lake Washington. We’d gone berry-picking or something and it was getting late. So we stopped in at one of the Whole Foods stores on the Eastside to get some dinner. (It occurs to me that it must say something demographically lamentable about me that the Whole Foods salad bar now functions for me in the same way that Denny’s or McDonald’s once did — as a safe, predictable, basically unvarying place to eat when we’re somewhere unfamiliar and we don’t know the local restaurants. But that — inasmuch as it has nothing to do with the point of this post — is for another time.)

We stopped at Whole Foods and right there in the Whole Foods was this man who, in my perfect solipsistic version of the universe, should not be in a Whole Foods on the other side of Lake Washington because I expect him to be in Ballard and it messes with the order of things if he’s suddenly showing up on the other side of Lake Washington. So then he said (note: all dialogue approximated because it’s rude to take notes during a conversation) … So then he said, “Are you here for Nibble Night?”

“Sorry?” I answered.

“Nibble Night,” he winked. “It’s Nibble Night, guy!”

He made a sweeping gesture (note: all gestures approximated because it’s rude to shoot video during a conversation). He made this gesture, which may or may not have been sweeping, and called my attention to the various free-sample tables in our immediate vicinity. None, it should be noted, bore any actual “Nibble Night” label, which I have since come to believe is simply this canny, frugal man’s pet name for The Night When They Put Out Extra Free Samples.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh! No, I’m not here for Nibble Night. Just a coincidence. We were picking berries and

“Well, they’ve got an excellent Nibble Night. You can make a meal of it.”

I think he elbowed me conspiratorially at that point. (See note above.)

***

Let us now stipulate to the excellentness and the stick-to-your-ribsiness of the Nibble Night at that particular Eastside Whole Foods and turn our attention to the title of this post: “Nibble Night & DeLillo & The Kindle App.”

I am here, without stooping to additional (possibly) falsified dialogue and gesticulation, to tell you that there is a Nibble Night for literature. I gorged at it last night and tonight.

It is not for everyone. It requires that you have an Amazon account and an iPhone or iPod Touch. I do have an Amazon account, which is nothing special. I also have an iPhone, which may signal the very same lamentable demographic profile as my reliance on Whole Foods for quick, out-of-town dinners with children.

Or not.

There seem to be a lot of iPhones out there these days. That’s fine by me since my desire to wield my iPhone as a status symbol is probably best summarized by my decision to protect the phone with a cover that adds so much bulk to the device that people often ask me “Is that an iPhone?!” Imagine a ballerina performing in 27 layers of opaque bubble wrap and you get a rough sense of my phone’s thwarted sleekness.

Anyway, some people have iPhones. If you are one of those people, you are invited to Nibble Night. Every day. Every night.

This involves two free things whose freeness is not in any way newsworthy: Amazon’s free Kindle app for iPhone and the free first chapter samples Amazon provides for books available through its Kindle store. Neither of these require that you own a Kindle — Amazon’s electronic reader which I alternately covet and fear for its potential to bankrupt me by turning my avid library patronage into a series of $9.99 e-book purchases.

So now, checking back on this post’s title, we have “Nibble Night” and we have “The Kindle App.” What we lack is DeLillo. The novelist Don DeLillo enters the picture here because my first-grader, after a bit of a hiatus, again asked me this week to pitch him a ball so he could recreate Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning home run that lifted the New York Giants over the stunned Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. For the uninitiated, that would be this.

So our dramatic recreation of the Thomson homer — complete with a small boy leaping into my arms to be hoisted onto my left shoulder in simulation of the adulation of all the teammates who emptied the Giants’ dugout — got me thinking of DeLillo’s novel Underworld, which opens with dozens of pages, if not a full 100 pages, set at the Polo Grounds on the day of that 1951 playoff game. I couldn’t remember the novel’s exact opening, but I remembered that I liked it.

So when I next found myself with a few moments to myself — OK, I was in the restroom and it’s best not to dwell on visualizing the particulars here — I got out my iPhone, launched the Kindle app, pressed the link for the Kindle store, searched for Underworld, found it, pressed the link to download the first chapter for free, and — within mere moments, it’s true — was reading the opening sentences of the novel …

He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.

It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him — this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and chopped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.

Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day — men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.

Now for all the self-amusement and faux bluster I’ve poured into this post so far, it is a relief in a way to be able to say something utterly sincere and plain: Retyping those opening words gave me chills. Literal chills. Good chills. The best ones literature can give.

For me, the opening of Underworld — especially the third paragraph — is one of the passages you would want to trot out if you were a long-ago lobbyist trying to sway some ancient Council of Tongues and Idioms on the merits of funding a pilot project to explore the feasibility of creating this new language called English. For me, again just for me and it doesn’t matter if anyone else feels this way, DeLillo’s prose alone would justify the existence of our beloved immigrant-torturing, I-before-E-except-after-C mess of a language.

And I get to carry this passage around now. On my phone. To read whenever I want. For free. (And yes, of course, if you love something as much as I love the opening of Underworld you should pay for it. I have at various times paid for or received as a gift a copy of Underworld itself, a copy of the slim hard-cover volume excerpting the Giants-Dodgers section at the start of the novel that was sold under the title Pafko At The Wall, and the audiobook of Underworld. (Note: Please read this post for full disclosure about my financial stake in linking to books I recommend.)

The point of what I’ve written here is not that everyone with a Kindle or an iPhone should carry the opening of Underworld around at all times. Rather, it’s simply that many of us have an Underworld. Some of us even have many Underworlds — books that we’ve paid for and read and revisited and loved in new ways over the years and decades. That we can have excerpts of these beloved books and carry them around for free and read them on the bus, in the grocery line, or even in the restroom if we so choose is an opportunity I’d feel foolish not to exploit.