Realish

Sun., June 8, 2008

The new collection of essays by David Sedaris has brought with it the usual is it fiction or non-fiction fracas (though not on the level of Frey or Burroughs et al). Meh. According to the author’s note on the title page of When You Are Engulfed in Flames:

The events described in these stories are realish. Certain characters have fictitious names and identifying characteristics.

Good enough for me.

Tags: Books & Authors |

Books like Electricity

Mon., June 2, 2008

In my view, books should be brought to the doorstep like electricity, or like milk in England: they should be considered utilities, and their cost should be appropriately minimal. Barring that, poetry could be sold in drugstores (not least because it might reduce the bill from your shrink). At the very least, an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer in every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible, which will surely not object to this proximity, since it does not object to the proximity of the phone book.

Joseph Brodsky, from “An Immodest Proposal,” The New Republic, November 11, 1991. (At the time, Brodsky was U.S. Poet Laureate.)

Tags: Books & Authors, Epigraph | Comments have been closed.

Scoop

Sun., May 18, 2008

I often favor my satires broad, deadpan and British so Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop fit the bill. It’s a look at sensational war reportage, which despite predating television, manages to squeeze a recurring joke out of the telegraph, even.

In a case of mistaken identity, William Boot, a writer who of the sort who starts one of his nature columns with the infamous sentence, “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole” is sent to a region in Africa where civil war is expected to break out. He brings with him 500 pounds of luggage including a collapsible canoe, a canned Thanksgiving dinner, and for reasons unclear, a bunch of “cleft sticks.” He holes up with a crew of journalists in the state’s only hotel, which is guarded by a goat. The reporters wile away the uneventful rainy days drinking and otherwise abusing their unlimited expense accounts, milking lame “man on the street” commentary from the locals, and “insulting and betraying one another in circumstances of unredeemed squalor,” including filing inaccurate stories based wholly on gossip among themselves. Because of his ineptitude, Boot bumbles into reporting on the scoop of the war’s start. He’s granted the publishing world’s top distinction but refuses the award and get his contract at the paper extended—to continue writing his nature column.

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Chip Kidd

Fri., April 25, 2008

Books with jackets designed by Chip Kidd.

What do the books above have in common? As you may guess by this post’s title, their jackets were designed by Chip Kidd. That’s more than I thought I’d have on my shelves. But Kidd’s designed at least 800 jackets, according to his autobiography/retrospective, Chip Kidd: Book One, so the odds were good I’d have a few. At least one I hate: that wooden head sculpture on Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore (2002) freaks me out and the arced type already seems dated. And at least one I’ve always liked: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) and its juxtaposition of a small segment from a lush Bosch mural atop a grainy black-and-white photo of a nomad in a sandstorm.

Two book jackets designed by Chip Kidd.

His most famous design was for Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. You remember it: white jacket, blue title, red author name, a T. Rex skeleton silhouette and nothing else. Kidd drew every bone himself with a Rapidiograph mechanical pen and although he conducted research on dinosaur anatomy at the American Museum of Natural History, he reveals the skeleton is “cheated,” simplified and exaggerated in parts for dramatic impact. In an unlikely twist for a book jacket illustration, Chipp’s dino design was sold to MCA for a pittance; as a salaried employee of Knopf, he had neither rights to it nor say in its usage. It was then integrated into the movie’s logo and signage, both onscreen and off, and became one of the more recognizable logos of the ’90s.

Throughout Book One, Kidd fires potshots at the paperback versions of hardcovers he’s designed. Some, like Jurassic Park, utilize the hardcover design, at least for early runs. But Kidd takes pains to point out those he did not design—the jackets toned down for wider appeal. The English Patient is a good (meaning bad) example of this. The movie tie-in paperback, which I remember well from when it was released during my tenure at an independent bookstore in Cleveland, is based on one of the film’s posters and features an extreme amber-colored closeup of two of the characters locking lips. A cover line announces, “Now a Major Motion Picture From Miramax Films.” (Kidd notes that “Independent booksellers actually complained about it and demanded the original be restored, which it eventually was.”) Of course, the jackets of affordable trade paperbacks target possibly indecisive, “everyday” readers whereas hardcover books and their higher retail generally target “serious” readers willing to pay a premium for a sturdier format that will also look nice on their bookshelves.

Kidd admits early in his book, “I’ve been described as not having any recognizable style and that’s one of the greatest compliments I could hope for.” If he does have a signature look, it may be his self-admitted “fall-back design,” which he’s used on jackets from Cormac McCarthy to David Sedaris: a bisected, often quirky photo taking up a horizontal half of the jacket with simple type placed in the other half. Another signature look may be his “magpie method” of deriving his central image from an odd print or Polaroid, or a purchase from a flea market or antique shop that’s been scanned or photographed expressively, repurposed items that have included cheap toys, cowhide, scrapbook items, cigar boxes, linoleum patterns and type from ranch brands and playbills.

His designs are often “clean,” simple with direct imagery and uncluttered type, recalling the classic Esquire covers of George Lois. In this era of declining subscription sales and ad dollars, plus the presence of wordy cover-wraps and cover-lines, a mass-market magazine couldn’t get away with a Lois design today. But Kidd’s in the enviable position of “design for design’s sake” with his jackets, which are subject to differing market pressures than magazines or paperbacks.

Even his more eclectic jackets—or at least those more gimmicky by design—maintain a solid simplicity. Brett Easton Ellis’ Glamorama (1998), which appears inspired by Paul Rand’s “holey” die-cut jacket for Nicholas Monsarrat’s Leave Canceled (1943), simply lists the title but the white jacket is riddled with tiny die-cut holes through which color headshots of celebrities are visible. (The printer had to send the jackets through the punch-press thrice; fewer passes and chads would have gummed it up to a halt.) I also like the simplicity of Deen Koontz’s Intensity (1996), which features an abstract pileup of concentric triangles in Day-Glo orange and yellow, a pun on the title but a refreshing avoidance of a typical suspense-thriller design.

Here are ten miscellaneous things I learned about Kidd and book jacket design from Book One:

  1. Chip Kidd is gay.
  2. Chip Kidd has always hated Matisse.
  3. Chip Kidd loves Macs.
  4. Chip Kidd is “a shameless ham” who will “use the slightest excuse to go before the camera.” Whenever his jackets depict a photograph of hands or a head in silhouette, it’s likely Kidd’s.
  5. John Updike supplies sketches for his book jackets and “is nothing if not thorough” in the design process. Kidd demonstrates this by showing his mock-up of The Afterlife (1994) plastered with twelve Post-it Notes worth of handwritten edits by Updike.
  6. Chip Kidd designed a Swatch watch, the “Swatch decoder,” which looks like something Dick Tracy would wear.
  7. Chip Kidd often recasts the Knopf logo, a borzoi (Russian wolfhound), which appears on the book’s spine: it’s been turned into a mutant with five legs, a cartoon, a skeleton and a pit bull, among others.
  8. Chip Kidd’s first published jacket design was for The Photographer’s Sourcebook of Creative Ideas by John Hedgecoe (1986). It doesn’t hold up well today.
  9. A rejected design for David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim mimicked that of an actual teach-yourself-Swahili textbook. “If I saw someone carrying it I think I’d feel a little sorry for him,” Sedaris wrote Kidd. “It seemed like a book a person was being forced to read. This was exactly what I’d wanted, but when I saw it realized I understood that it might present a problem.”
  10. One of my favorite rejected jackets was for Richard Schickel’s biography of Clint Eastwood. It features an extreme color close-up of Eastwood’s squinting face from one of the Dirty Harry films riddled with three die-cut bullet holes. Schickel denounced it as a disrespectful aberration. Kidd counters: “I just liked the idea of some thug firing at the book and having no real effect on it other than just pissing off ‘Dirty Harry’ even more.”

Tags: Books & Authors, Photo | Comments have been closed.

Five Things I Now Know About Elevators

Thu., April 17, 2008

Having read Nick Paumgarten’s entertaining and trivial profile of elevators in this week’s New Yorker, I will share with you my new knowledge on the subject.

  1. In most elevators built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. “It is there mainly to make you think it works,” writes Paumgarten, who adds that firemen have keys to activate it in the event of a fire. It’s clear the door-close buttons in the elevators of my office building don’t work but impatient passengers stab at them anyway, presumably connecting the eventual closing of the doors with the fact they were pressing the button. This is similar to the way prayers and miracles work.
  2. Have you heard that you can survive a freefalling elevator by jumping just before impact? Yeah, that won’t work. You’d be moving too fast to counteract elementary laws of physics. Regardless, you wouldn’t know when to jump.
  3. Another element of elevators dictated by physics: “A single elevator can climb no higher than seventeen hundred feet.”
  4. It sucks to be trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. You can even watch a video of it!
  5. Despite what numerous explosion-intensive movies have led you to believe, you can’t escape through the hatch in an elevator’s ceiling. By law, it’s bolted shut from the outside. “It’s there so that emergency personnel can get in, not so passengers can get out,” Paumgarten explains.

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Tue., April 1, 2008

Jhumpa Lahiri read from her new book tonight at the Union Square Barnes & Noble. It was sold out and the crowd was mostly women. The reading was adequate; the most memorable part was the repeated pre-reading instructions from the noble Barnsies on staff involving increasingly complex details as to how and what Jhumpa would sign, how the lumpish cretins “saving” seats had to give them up, and how those of us with books to be signed were going to line up in a calm and orderly fashion afterwards with our dust-jackets tucked in the appropriate fashion for ease of title-page signage.

Going into it, I expected fireworks; Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize when she was 32 for her first book, the short-story collection The Interpreter of Maladies, which I like. I realize she's a writer, not an entertainer or a motivational speaker, and that her stories are about everyday people in everyday situations, only, you know, the Bengali-American thing. But the affair was as solemn and dry as a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing on proposed budget estimates for the Department of Education’s upcoming fiscal year. Even the Q&A session was dull, with Lahiri offering vague answers to all three questions, the groaner of which was, paraphrased, “Being a female, is it a challenge for you to write such believable male characters?”

Which is like asking a lumberjack whether it’s a challenge for him to cut down all those trees. Because if you were to ask a lumberjack that, he’d turn off his chainsaw and ask you to repeat your question, then tell you, “No, because cutting down trees is what I do. It’s my job.” Which is how Lahiri should have responded—not necessarily mentioning chainsaws and lumberjacks, although that would have been more exciting than her rambling answer which was, in effect, “No, because writing is what I do.”

Afterwards, Allison, Jovito and I took a short walk to the Flatiron Lounge for cocktails. It was busy so we sat on stools at a narrow wooden ledge in the long arched entryway of the bar. To our right, Hiroko Masuike was photographing drinks she’d positioned on the ledge, for a New York Times feature on Martinis in the paper’s Travel section. She asked for us pose with the drinks—which were apparently props and undrinkable—so as for us to appear blurry in the background as people having fun and enjoying their fake drinks. This sort of happened to Allison before and I’m beginning to think she attracts photographers: after attending an outing of the secret-dinner society Bite Club early this year, she found that she appeared blurry in the background of a photo in an accompaning Page Six Magazine article.

[April 12, 2008 Update: None of us appear in the photo published in the article (“Places That Put the Proper Prefix on the -tini” by Seth Kugel for the April 13, 2008 issue.). Although that could be us, blurry in the background.]

The Flatiron Lounge.

Post drinks, we ate dinner at LAnnan, a Vietnamese join that by nature of its proximity serves as a sort of cheap yet charming antidote to the hipster-mess-hall of Republic. I had a spicy curry made with string beans, eggplant, onions and peppers. It also featured okra, which, like sweaters and girls, I appreciate much more now that I’m no longer a child. My favorite awkward English menu moment was the “Steamed Grandma Recipes Soup,” wherein it is not immediately clear whether grandma is angry or the soup is hot.

LAnnan

Tags: 52 Meals Project (2008), Books & Authors, Friends, Photo | Photo by Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times. | Comments have been closed.

The Hodgeman-Campbell Connection

Wed., March 26, 2008

I was talking with friends recently about the genius of self-proclaimed “B movie actor” Bruce Campbell and his work in the Evil Dead trilogy, which inspired me to reread his funny and startlingly ego-and-bullshit-free autobiography from 2001, If Chins Could Kill. This time around, I noticed in the acknowledgments that Campbell reveals his inspiration to write the book was John Hodgeman, who worked as a literary agent before becoming a professional comedian-raconteur-anthropomorphic PC.

Campbell writes:

A hundred years ago, a guy named John Hodgeman contacted me by e-mail.

“Ever thought about writing a book?” he wrote. [. . .]

“Yeah, right,” I answered. “Another actor writes a lame-ass book. Snoresville, baby.”

John refused to back off, based on a series of rants and anecdotes I had posted on my website. He was convinced that if I could put together a “demo” book, a publisher would step up to the plate.

Campbell did just that, writing his first draft on the back of a lousy unsolicited screenplay some Dutch guy handed him at Cannes.

Hodgeman confirms Campbell was his first client in an interview with Cracked.com, adding:

Like many whose lives have been touched by the genius of Campbell, my road with him began when I e-mailed him blindly, and to my astonishment, Bruce swiftly and politely wrote back. He showed an enormous amount of trust in me. I recommended I help him find a, you know, experienced agent, but for whatever reason, he let me do it.

And that’s all I have to say, really. I appreciate finding small connections like these between my favorite actors, authors, artists and musicians. Someday I’ll graph them all on a chart.

Tags: Books & Authors, Movie | Comments have been closed.

Hitchens on Paine

Tue., March 18, 2008

I haven’t read any of his books, only his occasional articles, but I like Christopher Hitchens because, on one hand, he’s liberal in thought, and throws around adjectives like Promethean and Sophoclean, which sound better in his plum British accent, and he’s so intelligent that he made me feel slightly stupid by merely sharing a room with me, even though he was the one wearing bright red socks.

On the other hand, he’s conservative in thought (on record for supporting the war in Iraq, for instance) and occasionally strives to lose his female constituency. So he’s an intellectual, surpassing labels of convenience and unwilling to leave any serious thought or position unconsidered. The man loves an argument. That’s cool, but it makes for a rambling-ass lecture. I stopped by the New York Historical Society tonight to hear him talk about Thomas Paine, counselor to Jefferson and Founding Father footnote of Common Sense (which pressured and inspired the Declaration of Independence), “These are the times that try men’s souls” and little else.

Hitchens recommended additional points for Paine’s legacy. He wrote the first real secular manifestos, establishing himself as a speaker for a newly literate working class that was interested in science and technology. He was also the first person to use the word “democratic” as a compliment. He argued the American Revolution would be stronger without slavery.

Paine wasn’t a racist, opposed the death penalty, and held that “religion is a trick” and “the Bible, manmade,” even though he wasn’t an atheist, which Hitchens admitted prevented him from claiming Paine as his own. Paradoxically, Paine was also held dear by classic conservatives like Ronald Regan, who quoted the politician.

Perhaps this was because Paine was more a voice of a social force than a guy you could sew a label on; Hitchens confirmed Paine wasn’t after establishing a legacy, as were many of the Founding Fathers, merely a guy with a certain school of thought in the right place at the right time.

The Q&A session went on and on with Hitchens deeply engaged. I awaited the requisite idiot question but it took time because the average age of the audience was 50 and the average profession was “collegiate political science professor with tenure.” These guys could not ask their questions under a minute if you held a gun to their head and demanded it and Hitchens’ erudite answers, during which he would often start debating himself, were usually too complicated for me to fathom. At last, a chirpy woman mentioned that a town in New Jersey is erecting a statue to Paine (“excellent,” deadpanned Hitchens as he fiddled with his glasses) and what would Paine blog about today if he were a blogger? Hitchens waved away the question by dismissing blogs and the ’net in general as “a thief of time.”

Oh so true.

Things got exciting again when a question arose about Paine’s attitudes toward women. “He just didn’t have a light touch with the ladies at all,” said Hitchens, carefully and charitably, adding that Paine didn’t treat women seriously, like many early politicians. A couple in the audience shouted, “What about Aaron Burr?” and a bunch of people nearby were all like, “Yeah! What about Aaron Burr?” But by this point the crowd had already worn out its welcome and probably the old guy who locks up the society at night was tired because it was past his bedtime, so they wrapped it up and Hitchens attempted to continue answering questions even though the audience had been directed to applaud at him.

Tags: Books & Authors | Comments have been closed.

The Golden Record

Fri., March 7, 2008

Golden Record displayed with Voyager spacecraft.

In 1977, during a fit of poetry, optimism and metallurgy, some nerds at NASA shot into space a phonograph made from copper, plated with gold and jacketed in an aluminum sleeve. They sent up two copies, to be precise, each affixed to the interior of the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft, courses set for infinity. The hope of the nerds was that eons from now, aliens might intercept the record, listen to its 27 songs representing the world’s countries and cultures, and know more about us.1

The nerds acknowledged they were dealing with a low and particular form of audio technology, so they embossed pictographic operating instructions on the jacket. They also included a spare cartridge and needle, possibly recognizing that by the time of any interception—no earlier than 1990, when the Voyagers would pass Pluto—that even extraterrestrials would have upgraded to at least eight-track tapes.

Never mind the chance, remotely slim in the vastness of space, that any alien would find this object intact and know what to make of it. Never mind that the inhabitants of Earth, despite widely varying levels of intelligence, invariably assume that life beyond our planet will be an awful lot like us, only sporting pajamas and weirder foreheads. Never mind all that; this was a cool idea, to burn a civilization’s Greatest Hits onto a golden disc.

I’ve been skimming through the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record2, reading of the wrestling over that 90-minute mix, particularly the pop songs and music from America that were debated for inclusion.

In one instance, the resident conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington called the Smithsonian’s curator of jazz at 11 p.m. on a Sunday, awakening him to ask whether the Miles Davis version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” would be appropriate to send to the stars. It was rejected. So was the whole of country music, offered as an option because the people who built the spaceships listened to it. Further bickering arose over Elvis, Jefferson Starship (who volunteered music for the record), Bob Dylan (“would the music stand if the words were incomprehensible?” asked Carl Sagan, a model of perfect diction) and the Beatles, of whom Sagan writes:

We wanted to send “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles, and all four Beatles gave their approval. But the Beatles did not own the copyright, and the legal status of the piece seemed too murky to risk.

C’mon, Carl; you should’ve sucked it up and sent it out. What did you have to lose? You’re slinging the song into a void billions and billions of miles from Apple Corps and its pugnacious lawyers.

But no contemporary pop made the cut. The four pieces of American music pressed to disc were a Navajo night chant and three songs by African American musicians: Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

Other than praising Sagan & Co. for sidestepping Armstrong’s most-popular and least-representative track, the sappy “What a Wonderful World”, I’m impressed by the selection of “Dark Was the Night.”3. It’s just Johnson and his guitar, which he played by sliding his pocketknife over the strings; his hums and moans; and his blindness and loneliness. His stepmother blinded him, throwing lye in his face when he was seven. During most of his life, he played on the streets of Texas, “collecting tips in a cup wired to his guitar neck,” writes blues historian Jas Obrecht. Ailing and rejected by the hospital, Johnson died of pneumonia, sleeping on a waterlogged bed covered with newspaper.

For all the American flags waving in slow motion on Earth and those bolted to the moon, for all the space program’s hopeful rhetoric, not as much talk covers the fact that space is big and we’re little, looking for food, water, a dry place to sleep, and company. That’s just what you get—what you feel—with Johnson and his spooky little space-song, mankind’s most appropriate mix-pick.

Bonus mp3: “Dark Was the Night (Cold Was the Ground)” by Blind Willie Johnson, recorded on December 3, 1927, the same version pressed to the Voyager disc.

Related: NASA’s page on the Golden Record.

1 Also encoded in the audio spectrum of the record are 117 pictures, greetings in 54 human languages and one from the whales (remember, this was the ’70s) and 19 “sounds of Earth,” but for the purposes of this post, I’m only interested in the music. [back]

2 It’s out of print. Snaps to the Strand for having a copy. [back]

3 In the middle of writing this post, the internet informed me that The West Wing incorporated this song and its involvement in the Voyager mission as a plot point. I missed that episode. But now I kind of want to see it. [back]

Tags: Books & Authors, Music, Photo, Playlist | Photo of Golden Record and Voyager spacecraft from www.jpl.nasa.gov. | Comments have been closed.

How to Defunktify a Book?

Wed., February 20, 2008

The offender: a musty hardcover copy of Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme from 1981, purchased on the cheap from a third-party seller on Amazon.com. I imagined that unlike, say, the way professionals remove sticker residue from a book’s dustcover1, there would be a dozen suggestions for defunktifying a book. Hey, presto; I was right. I Googled a batch and rewrote them concisely for the table below. Any suggestions as to what works and what doesn’t, whether or not it’s listed here?

ActionDuration
prop the book open in front of an ionizing air purifier24 hours
apply vinegar to the book’s spinetwo days
vacuum the book with an upholstery attachmenta few minutes
sprinkle baking soda or unscented talcum powder between the book’s pages“a few days”
seal the book in a plastic bag or container with charcoal briquettes, diatomaceous earth, unscented2 dryer sheets, an open box of baking soda or kitty litter3“a few days” to “a couple weeks”
put the book in the freezer“for a while”
use J. Godsey’s Book Deodorizer???
seal the book in a cardboard box with several crumpled sheets of newspaper“for a while”
heat an oven to 250°, shut it off, then put the book in, “flairing the pages as much as possible”what’s “flairing?”
leave the book in a closed car in direct summer sunlight, as you would a small dog or child???
take the book to a dry cleaner and see if they can put it in their “ozone chamber” (if they have one, whatever it is)???
“pull the book out from the rest of the books and burn it”a few minutes

1 Lighter fluid. [back]

2 Unscented or the book will smell like dryer-sheet perfume and nothing deodorizes that. [back]

3 Do not let the book touch the kitty litter; it can stain the book. [back]

Tags: Books & Authors, How-To | Comments have been closed.

50/50

Tue., December 11, 2007

I’m late to the wide world of Chuck Klosterman yet amused to read this sentence from the intro to an article in his book A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. It sums up blogs well (including this one):

This article is a combination of two forms of quasi-journalism: it’s 50 percent a “Look at All These Misplaced Weirdos” story, and it’s 50 percent an “Enjoy My Self-Reflexively Peculiar Personal Experiencere” story.

Tags: Blog News, Books & Authors | Comments have been closed.

New Apartment

Thu., October 18, 2007

As a youth, I read the series The Three Investigators, the biggest Hardy Boys rip-off ever. But awesome nonetheless because the chums’ hideout was located in a junkyard. A concealed corrugated drainage pipe passed under a mountain of stray auto parts and emerged into a buried trailer which the Investigators had refurbished inside as their clubhouse/workshop/crime lab.

I’m signing a lease on a new apartment tomorrow, still in my current Inwood neighborhood but with a better layout and amenities like a bedroom door. It shall become my new hideout, a secret oasis in the junkyard tip of Manhattan. I don’t enter it through a pipe but I do have an elevator. Stop over sometime after my lease starts November 1st, why don’t you?

Tags: Apartment, Books & Authors | Comments have been closed.

Writers Behaving Cockily

Sun., October 7, 2007

William Safire brings up a question in his “On Language” column today that I’ve stewed over in the past: “Should writers show off their erudition by deliberately using unfamiliar words on occasion?”

Despite being unable to resist a quip that “you’ll always get a few easily annoyed souls who find the use of an unfamiliar locution rebarbative,” Safire agrees that, foremost, plain words communicate best.

On the other hand, he advocates “stretching a readership’s vocabulary” if the audience is “inquisitive” (although shouldn’t any reader be assumed inquisitive?), noting that it’s easy to look up words nowadays with these computers he’s heard so much about.

He also brings up the tired writers’ trick of using a “hard word” in context or near a synonym. That works, although the latter is repetitive and unnecessary; any savvy editor would recognize it as grandstanding on the author’s part and redline it for removal.

My take: Safire’s first point is the best. Cut the wishy-washy; most of the time a writer should keep it simple for the win. See here: the best writers use common, concrete words in uncommon combinations or contexts to create beautifully memorable phrases that remain clear. That’s the best single line of advice I can think to give anyone who wants to write well.

I could go on forever with favorite examples; libraries brim with them: “Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time.” (Herman Melville), “...still he kept up a flow of sarcastic talk, just to exercise his wits and to have the fun of disputing” (Aesop), “Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.” (Haruki Murakami), “The howl of clashing colors, the intertwining of all contradictions, grotesqueries, trivialities: LIFE” (Tristan Tzara) and a favorite lullaby, “Dream tonight of peacock tails/Diamond fields and spouter whales/Ills are many, blessing few,/But dreams tonight will shelter you.” (Thomas Pynchon).

And especially in light of yet more looming from that screenwriters’ strike, the classic brass nugget from 1930s studio executive Irving Thalberg: “What’s all this business about being a writer? It’s just putting one word after another.”

Tags: Books & Authors, Language | Comments have been closed.

Journey as Narrative

Mon., September 24, 2007

Authors of course draw on experience from travels for fiction. They can’t make up everything from scratch, after all. This isn’t a revelation: Hemingway’s adventures in World War I informed his novels and Melville’s trips at sea informed his, and so on. But I read two articles today discussing a novel and a screenplay centered around spur-of-the-moment journeys, each of which were written based on trips taken explicitly to inform said novel and screenplay. Which also probably isn’t unique, though I find the coincidence appealing.

In a review of the Beats in general and of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in particular, reviewer Louis Menand writes in the October 1st issue of The New Yorker that although Kerouac began the book before his first cross-country drive with Neal Cassady, the trips for On the Road “were made for the purpose of writing On the Road. The motive was not tourism or escape; it was literature.”

Likewise, in a profile of Wes Anderson this week in New York magazine (“The Life Obsessive With Wes Anderson”), author David Amsden writes that Anderson and his cowriters, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, reserved a month to travel through India by train in order to write most of the script for the director’s newest film, The Darjeeling Limited:

“I guess we went to India as research,” says Anderson, “but the more precise-slash-romanticized description would be that we were trying to do the movie, trying to act it out. We were trying to be the movie before it existed.”

A USA Today article further notes the trio ended up in the Himalayas with a bulky printer in tow, just like one of the characters in the movie. “We literally finished the script on the highest mountain we went to,” Anderson says.

Tags: Books & Authors, Movie | Comments have been closed.

Red Hook & Books

Sun., September 16, 2007

I met Carmella this afternoon at the Red Hook Ballpark, where I’ve been once before, for a sunny, hearty lunch of grilled corn-on-the-cob and Salvadoran pork-and-cheese pupusas while kids played soccer on the field nearby. We biked over to check out the monolithic New York Port Authority Grain Terminal nearby, then pedaled up to Borough Hall for the Brooklyn Book Festival, where we learned many of the panels require free but advance tickets and waiting in really, really long lines.

Tags: Books & Authors, Brooklyn, Friends | Comments have been closed.

George Saunders

Thu., September 6, 2007

The first book review I wrote in adult life was in 1996 for a writing class in college for a deadpan-comic dystopian-future collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, by George Saunders. He’s come a long way, baby, now author of a novella, a children’s book, two more story collections, far-flung assignments from GQ, and a column in The Guardian. He’s not exactly a household name, but in the same world in which Dave Barry can win a Pulitzer Prize, it’s sensible that Saunders should win a MacArthur Fellow “Genius Grant.”

Tonight at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble, he read three selections from his new book, The Braindead Megaphone, his first collection of non-fiction and humor pieces. During the Q&A, he explained that he gradually shifted from writing exclusively fiction to much more nonfiction, or “journalism lite,” as he called it, because of 9/11 and the Iraq War and subsequent occupation. Elements of those events kept creeping into his fiction in ways he didn’t like or found overly didactic.

He first read a few short sections from “The Great Divider,” a very funny article written on assignment from GQ, which cast him into a group of militiamen in Texas who’ve taken it upon themselves to guard the Mexican border against illegal crossovers. It’s written in the style of the best type of travel writing, casting a regular person into curious environs populated by even stranger people. He noted later that he took the plunge to do more travel writing when one of his daughters asked him to name all the exciting things he’d done in his life, and he realized with a start that they all dated to the late 1970s.

A professor of creative writing at Syracuse University, Saunders arrived sort of looking like one, with thin-framed glasses, a full but neatly trimmed graying beard and a dark suit that could have been corduroy. His hairline has receded from his high forehead, save two gossamer tufts that jut forward like a small but majestic bird taking wing from his brow.

This guy is literate and funny. He could do standup, no question. He talks at a rapid clip but clearly, and in a pinched tone. When he read the story “Nostalgia,” it was creepy how nearly his content and delivery reminded me of Woody Allen, back when he wrote for The New Yorker in the ’70s and still did standup, complete with the perfect pauses between the tumbling phrases, self-obsession and self-deprecation, even non-aspirated H’s in words like “huge” (e.g. sounding like “euge”).

A strange question from the audience asking about his obsession with theme parks and roller coasters in his writing revealed how he came to realize he’d be better off as a humor writer than a realist. The first time he wrote about a roller coaster, he said, it was because he’d pictured one in a dream. At the time, he’d been attempting to write stories like Hemingway, but they kept turning out as watered down imitations. So he used writing about roller coasters and other lighter topics as a writing exercise to block his literary pretensions.

He also offered an interesting tidbit that I hadn’t seen mentioned elsewhere, that CivilWarLand had been optioned for a movie, and that two years ago, Saunders wrote script for Ben Stiller’s production company, though he hinted the project was now in development hell. (A Variety article from December 2004 noted the adaptation was Stiller’s “true passion project” at the time.)

Andie works not far from the Chelsea Barnes & Noble and was burning the late-night oil, so after shaking Saunders’ hand, telling him I enjoyed the reading and having my book signed with a double-looped scrawl that resembles neither “George” nor “Saunders” nor any of the letters that comprise those words, I met up with her and we got a bisque-and-salad dinner at Markt on its new location on Sixth Avenue at West 12th Street.

Walking back to the subway, we passed a bus stop at which sat the mumbling woman from Andie’s commute yesterday, an odd coincidence.

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Spook Country

Thu., August 30, 2007

'Spook Country' cover.Spook Country is the most realistic yet of the novels of William Gibson, an author commonly lumped into the sci-fi sector. It takes place only last year and, like Gibson’s previous novel, Pattern Recognition, combines “futuristic” technology from the pages of Wired: virtual realty, overseas shipments via cargo container, GPS surveillance and tracking and a strange preoccupation with using iPods as hard drives, which is so five-years-ago. The structure is a round-robin, alternating a chapter per main character, until the group collides at the end on the West Coast for a payoff that while, unexpected, isn’t entirely rewarding seeing how much it’s been built up to. I enjoyed a certain familiarity with New York City topography; there’s an action sequence that takes place in a geographically accurate Union Square, complete with Greenmarket and a near-showdown at the W Hotel, while a pair of other characters room at the Hotel New Yorker and eat the Gray’s Papaya two blocks north, right across the street from where I work.

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The Body Artist

Thu., August 9, 2007

Studies peg various society’s belief in ghosts at 50%, at least according to one of those factoids that pops up on the tiny TV screens in the elevators of my office building. Coincidentally I finally read Don DeLillo’s novella from 2001, The Body Artist, today on the subway, and I think it’s a ghost story.

A newly widowed woman is the “body artist” of the title. She’s sort of living piece of performance art, possibly like Kafka’s Hunger Artist, and who is able to change the shape and character of her body, taking on the voice and mannerisms of others. This isn’t fully revealed until late in the book, which I didn’t fully understand.

She spends most of the book in the lonely old house near a shore soon after her screenwriter husband’s suicide and soon finds a wan man-child who seems displaced in time and able to mimic her husband’s mannerisms and voice at times.

The language is more sparse, often vague, and always poetic, every word chosen precisely, than I remember from the DeLillo I read in college (but that was long ago).

With the dead husband in the book a screenwriter, might the book be making a meta-statement? Finishing it, I was reminded of a quote from awhile back by Laurie Anderson:

That’s what books are really. Talking to ghosts. It’s the way that the dead talk to the living.

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Love is a Mix Tape

Wed., June 27, 2007

Love is a Mix Tape.I like music and if a story’s about mix tapes, I’m bound to read it. High Fidelity: naturally. The hipster coffee-table book Mix Tape: the Art of Cassette Culture: yes. Even lesser-known classics of the genre, like Sarah Vowell’s “Thanks for the Memorex,” a tale of a long-distance love affair by cassette tape: “While we cared for each other, we cared little for each other’s taste in music. I sent him lovey-dovey lullabies like Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’ and he sent me back what could have been field recordings of amplified ant farms by bands with names like Aphex Twin and Jarboe.”

So it was a given I’d eventually read Love is a Mix Tape, the thesis of which is “Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.” It’s a memoir by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield of his girlfriend-then-wife Renée, and how their shared love of music and mix tapes shaped and enlivened their relationship until her sudden death at 31 of a pulmonary embolism.

Renée was a saucy Southern girl raised in Appalachia with coal-miner grandfathers. She was obsessed with funky clothes and fabric swatches and made her own dresses. Her (presumably) Southern-isms, made me laugh, aphorisms like “If it’s got tits or tires, it’s gonna cost you money“ and “we’re shittin’ in tall cotton now!” Crushing on Evan Dando, she says, “He must get more cookie than the Keebler elves.” As an adventure-seeking, outspoken woman, she’s exactly the right counterpoint to Sheffield’s introvert. They meet when they’re each 23, at a college bar in Charlottesville, and learn they not only both love Big Star but share the same favorite Big Star song (“Thirteen”).

It’s an easy yet humorous and heartfelt read. I’d invested enough in Renée’s character and her relationship with Sheffield that I’m not too ashamed to admit I cried at the point in the book where she dies. The book’s of definite appeal to a Rob Gordon-type such as myself. Each chapter is prefaced with the actual mix tape playlist that was part of Sheffield’s life at that time, from the late ’70s through last year. Musical references abound: favorite songs, worst songs, songs that stoke memories and crack heartstrings, songs modified for personal reasons (“The only one who could ever reach me/Was the Makin’-the-Pizza Man”).

Music sneaks into the mix indirectly, too. Part of a pop song, often edited slightly to fit the surrounding sentences, will pop up in the middle of Sheffield’s narrative1. There’s Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (“Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”) and Human League, by way of Philip Oakey and Giorgio Moroder (“Together in electric dreams”), among other picks absent from the college-radio-DJ playlist, like, um, Poison’s “Fallen Angel” (“Rollin’ the dice of her life”). None of these are attributed and to Sheffield’s credit, they fit where they’re placed although they distracted me at times.

The writing gets looser and more rumpled in the chapters after Renée dies, which I guess I can chalk up to the narrator himself getting shoddy. He lives a widower life on frozen steak burritos and Bushmills and sits in his back yard at night, staring into the woods at nothing. All of Renée’s things are boxed and left out in the apartment and it all reminds him of her. After too many nights dining alone at Applebee’s and returning home to watch old movies on TV, he snaps his act together, leaves the South and Renée behind and moves to Brooklyn. There’s a marvelous bit of closure during which he walks the row of benches on the fringe of the Great Lawn in Central Park and leaves one of Renée’s hats on each: a derby, a pillbox, a straw hat. Stuck to each is a Post-it on which he’s written, “Free,” and when he returns 20 minutes later, every hat is gone.

1 Maybe you have and maybe you haven’t noticed topical references to songs and lyrics in my post titles. Glancing at my post log, this year so far I’ve referenced R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Les Applegate, Rod Stewart, They Might Be Giants, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra, Mariah Carey and the Hungarian suicide song. [back]

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Brooklyn Book Party

Sat., June 9, 2007

I know a lot of people in the book business and I would have guessed that the book release party I was invited to tonight, for a picture book about Brooklyn strongman Charles Atlas, would have been a prim, family-friendly affair decked out with cake, stuffed animals and furniture with a minimum of sharp edges. Well, there was a cake, shaped like Charles; I got a mangled piece with one of his eyes. But other than that it was a funtime Brooklyn apartment party with no kids in sight and lots of literate, attractive hipsters. Could Knopf have done better? I doubt it.

The party was in the slightly grubby Spanish segment on the fringes of Williamsburg in the basement of an apartment building. On our way there, before stopping at a bodega for Tecate, we passed the fruitcake factory depicted below, which I like to imagine is haunted. It sure looks that way in my grainy, ominous photo. When has there ever been great enough demand for fruitcake to necessitate an entire factory, one member of our band wondered later. A fair question, and possibly the reason the factory is abandoned and haunted, or so I’ve heard.

Spilke's fruitcake factory.

We learned the party building overlooked the Hewes Street stop off Broadway on the J line when we made our way through a thicket of bicycles and up several flights of ancient wooden stairs to emerge on the roof with a panoramic view of Brooklyn, and Manhattan in the distance, with various bridges and airplanes visible. We were suprised to learn the group of party people on the roof actually belonged to a different party somewhere in the building, so we eventually retreated back down the spooky stairwells to the basement.

Jason, Katie and Eric on bicycles.

Rooftop party.

Skyline from the roof.

In the den area, someone was projecting episodes of The Prisoner from a PowerBook onto a painted brick wall, interrupted intermittently by shadow puppets and also when a millipede skittered onto the floor from under a couch. The apartment’s resident cat pounced on the insect and ate half of it. As the other half of the millipede attempted to escape, someone stepped on it.

Katie and 'The Prisoner.'

Party animal.

Party people.

There was plenty of beer and liquor, wine and champagne, and some PathMark brand cheese balls that were too salty. And speaking of salty, I enjoyed this note, scrawled on an envelope and pinned to a wall near the bathroom.

Lighters.

Tags: Books & Authors, Brooklyn, Friends, Photo | The good photos by Andie; others by Jason. | Comments have been closed.

Dime-Store Alchemy

Mon., May 14, 2007

There are poems illustrated with art by the poet himself (William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and poems as textual interpretations of art (André Breton’s Constellations (1958), which accompanied 23 gouaches Joan Miró had painted earlier) but Dime-Store Alchemy is something more unique and revelatory to me: a prose poem encompassing the life and work of an artist, in this case a sort-of poetic biography of Joseph Cornell written by Charles Simic.

I like Cornell’s work and I know a bit about it but the first I’d heard of this book was when it caught my eye at the Strand a few weeks ago. I bought it and read it and there’s something appropriate about having one artist profile another, as in the actor-on-actor interviews of Interview magazine. On the surface, such a collaboration could be considered a flaky “kindred spirits” match-up. Yet Simic’s story isn’t just an airy rumination, it serves as an ultra-compact biography of the artist, mingled with miniature dissertations on found art and collage, scraps from the artist’s own writing, parallels among the artist’s contemporaries and less likely spirits (like Emily Dickinson), imaginations and recreations of Manhattan in the ’40s and ’50s, and passages as clockwork beautiful and mysterious as Cornell’s boxes. What a marvelous concept and one I’d like to see applied to other artists.

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Kurt Vonnegut

Thu., April 12, 2007

Our PR man from Schenectady has taken to the ether. Let us bow our heads and pray for his blessing.

Kurt Vonnegut.

Tags: Books & Authors, Photo | Photo by Peter Yang from Rolling Stone, August 24, 2006. | Comments have been closed.

Bookcases

Sat., March 24, 2007

With great satisfaction, I completed assembly today of my Ikea bookcases. After reorganizing the furniture in my apartment, I lined them up against the wall in the nook of my long front hallway, previously underutilized and really not useful for much other than shelves. The three of them together measure approximately 6.6 feet tall and long by 11 inches deep, a cozy space.

I think bookcases are an important step in my development as a New Yorker because in general they count as nonessential furniture and indicate that one means to stick around the city for awhile. The shelves are mostly barren now although I’ve moved my collection of roughly 125 DVDs to a pair-and-a-half of the shelves to make it look fuller, like those professional seat fillers at the Oscars. Eventually of course I want to stock the shelves with books, but the remainder of my collection currently resides in milk crates stacked in an upstairs closet of my parents’ house in Ohio. I’ll eventually get around to moving them, moreso now that I have a home for them.

Until I read a recent New Yorker profile of clothing designer Karl Lagerfeld tonight, I thought I had a fairly decent-sized collection, somewhere in the low-hundreds and just enough to be cumbersome and curse-worthy in a move. But get a load of Karl’s collection:

Some years ago, he bought a mansion in Biarritz, where, he says, he spent millions of dollars refurbishing it, staffed it with servants, and stocked it with a hundred and fifty thousand of his books. In 2006, after realizing that he had not visited the place in two years, he sold it.

Good lord. I think that’s more volumes than most libraries own. And unlike my lowly particle-board shelving, Karl probably had, like, solid leather bookcases emblazoned with diamond-encrusted Chanel logos.

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Muji Opening in NYC

Fri., January 26, 2007

The Japanese chain Muji will open its first two U.S. stores in New York City, reportedly as early as later this year. To date I’ve been buying my Muji stuff, mainly pens for myself and socks as gifts, from the extremely limited selection at the MoMA Design Store. Here’s one of my Muji pens.

A Muji pen.

The brand, the name of which is an abbreviation of the phrase “no brand” in Japanese, is known for its lack of logos and simplicity, encompassing clothing, food and all manner of decor, utensils and office supplies.

William Gibson wrote a novel with a heroine who “likes Muji because nothing there ever has a logo.” He’s also mentioned the chain in an article he wrote in 2001 for The Guardian:

Muji [...] calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn’t really exist. A Japan of the mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced. I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes. I would vacation there and attain a new serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural fabrics and unbleached cardboard. My toiletries would pretend to be nothing more than what they are, and neither would I.

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The Boston Tea Party Bit

Wed., January 17, 2007

I don’t know why this pops into my head now, but back during an early semester of college, I was assigned to write a biography on a favorite contemporary writer and I chose Dave Barry, whose writing I was enamored with at the time. I remember learning about his own influences as a writer, so I read them as well for research. I don’t remember them all, but Robert Benchley and Woody Allen were prominent among them.

I specifically remember reading an essay Allen wrote for the New York Times in 1972 called “A Brief, Yet Helpful, Guide to Civil Disobedience.” Here’s a segment of it:

A fine example of a demonstration was The Boston Tea Party where outraged Americans disguised as Indians dumped British tea into the harbor. Later, Indians disguised as outraged Americans dumped actual British into the harbor. Following that, the British disguised as tea dumped each other into the harbor. Finally, German mercenaries clad only in costumes from The Trojan Women leapt into the harbor for no apparent reason.

This closely recalls a bit from a column Barry wrote in the late-’80s called “Way to Go, Roscoe!”:

We’ve been trying to get tax reform for over 200 years, dating back to 17-something, when a small, brave band of patriots dressed up as Indians and threw tea into the Boston Harbor. Surprisingly, this failed to produce tax reform. So the brave patriots tried various other approaches, such as dressing up as tea and throwing Indians into the harbor, or dressing up as a harbor and throwing tea into Indians, but nothing worked.

Did Barry subliminally borrow the structure of Allen’s joke? Is the joke a traditional one? Or would it have come up for anyone who thinks long enough about the humor quotient of the Boston Tea Party? I at least think Allen’s bit is funnier, because of that “for no apparent reason” that pops up at the end.

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The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Mon., January 8, 2007

Cover of 'The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir.'The ’50s were swell if you were a white kid growing up in Iowa. That’s the essence of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, which I finished reading tonight.

As he does in his popular travel narratives, Bryson blends in large chunks of factual background information. In writing about far-flung or under-covered travel destinations like Iceland, the Appalachian Trail, the whole of Australia and nooks of Europe, this works, but here it can break the mood or feel like padding. For instance, in reminiscing about his favorite comic book characters, he veers off on a discourse of facts about how many were produced in their heyday, when and why their downfall began, the Comics Code Authority, and so on.

When reflecting on his rambunctious childhood, he exaggerates like a grandpa spinning a yarn (particularly heights and distances) which made me wonder which of his facts were presented warped by the haze of years or embellished with artistic license.

The conceit of the Thunderbolt Kid of the title feels as it may have been added late in the writing process, maybe to give the book a point of difference in its marketing and to disguise the fact it’s in essence a wistful memoir by a baby boomer. The only interplay of the Thunderbolt Kid with the narrative is an occasional mention at the close of a chapter, wherein young Bryson switches into his imaginary superhero persona to zap a teacher or another authority figure he’s deemed stupid.

The final few chapters, which tip into the early ’60s, are tacked-on and rushed, especially the sudden bit about his integrated middle-school, although they do include the early misadventures of his best friend, Katz, who as an adult was Bryson’s surly and funny travel companion in A Walk in the Woods.

Ultimately, I prefer Bryson’s fish-out-of-water travel tales to his childhood adventures. (I like any fish-out-of-water travel tale, which is also why I’m a fan of the fiction and non-fiction of Douglas Adams). But Iowa in the ’50s is too much a confined white-bread universe in which nothing entirely unexpected or exciting happens.

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Stories in Your Pocket, Part IV

Thu., October 12, 2006

Below I’ve pasted a fine review by David Pogue from today’s New York Times of the Sony Reader, which I wrote about early in January. It answers most of the questions I had about the eBook reader: Intuitive interface? No. Mac compatable? Apaprently not (yet). Ability to accept uploaded text and PDF documents? Yes. Totally awesome screen technology? Yes.

Plus, check out the mention at the end of the article that Amazon.com is developing not only on its own eBook store, but its own eBook-reader device. Cool! Nothing like competition to spur innovation.

State of the Art: Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete

By David Pogue

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

Whoops.

The great e-book fantasy burst shortly after that speech, along with the rest of the dot-com bubble. In 2003, Barnes & Noble shut its e-book store, Palm sold its e-book business to a Web site and most people left the whole idea for dead.

Not everybody, however. Some die-hards at Sony still believe that, properly designed, the e-book has a future. Their solution is the Sony Reader, a small, sleek, portable screen that will be introduced this month in some malls, at Borders bookstores and at sonystyle.com for $350.

E-books may have flopped the first time around, but you can’t deny that they offer some intriguing advantages. You can add dozens of them to your luggage without adding any more weight or bulk. You can adjust the type size. You can search the whole book in seconds, or insert an infinite number of bookmarks. No trees are destroyed to make e-books. And you can read during lunch without having to prop open your novel with a dangerously full can of soda.

If you’re sold on the idea, then you’ll find a lot to like in the Sony Reader—and a few things to dislike.

It’s a handsome half-inch-thick nine-ounce slab, a bit smaller than 5 inches by 7 inches, “bound” in a protective leatherette cover. You can turn pages individually, or jump ahead 10 percent of the book at a time. A “mark” button produces a visual dog-ear on the page corner.

What distinguishes Sony’s effort from all the failed e-book readers of years gone by, however, is the screen.

The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white.

The result looks like ink on light gray paper. The “ink” is so close to the surface of the screen, it looks as if it’s been printed there. The reading experience is pleasant, natural and nothing like reading a computer screen.

There’s no backlight, however; you can read only by ambient light. Sony would probably argue that this trait makes the Reader even more like a traditional book, but it also means that you can’t read in bed with the lights off, as you can with a laptop or palmtop.

On the other hand, once those microspheres have formed the image of a page, they stay put without consuming any power. Amazingly enough, that means that you don’t have to turn the Reader off, ever. When you’re done for the night, just lay it on your bedside table; the current page remains on the screen without draining any battery power. (According to Sony, one prototype Reader in Japan has been displaying the same page for three years on a single charge.) Every instinct in your body will scream against leaving your gadget turned on all the time, but you’ll get over it.

The only time the Reader uses electricity, in fact, is when you actually turn a page. One charge is good for 7,500 page turns. That’s enough power to get you through “The Da Vinci Code” 16 times (electrical power, anyway). You can recharge the battery either from its power cord or from a computer’s U.S.B. jack.

The Reader can also display digital photos—they look surprisingly good, considering they’re being depicted using only four shades of gray—and play music files (noncopy-protected MP3 or AAC format) through headphones. With a good deal of preparation, you could even read along as the same audio book plays.

There are two ways to load up the Reader. You can copy your texts, photos and music to a memory card (Memory Stick or SD), which goes into a slot on the left side. That’s also how you can expand the Reader’s built-in storage (64 megabytes, enough for 80 books).

The other option is to import files into a somewhat buggy Windows program called Sony Connect. It’s the home base for the Reader in much the way iTunes is the home base for the iPod, although Sony Connect requires you to drag files manually; it doesn’t offer automatic synchronizing with the Reader.

This software is also the gateway to the Reader’s online bookstore. The catalog includes more than 10,000 books from a variety of publishers. Some, like “Freakonomics,” are priced like hardcover editions ($16); others, like “The Devil Wears Prada,” are priced like the paperbacks ($8). If you buy a Reader before the end of the year, Sony will include a coupon for $50 worth of books.

These books are copy-protected, of course. You can read them on a total of six machines, counting Readers that you own and Windows computers. You can’t give away or sell a book when you’re done with it, much less return it to the store.

The Reader also accepts standard plain text files and Word documents (only basic formatting survives), which means that you can help yourself to the 19,000 free, out-of-copyright books at Gutenberg.org. The Windows software can also download Web news stories (RSS feeds), which you can copy to the reader for daily train reading. PDF documents open on the Reader, too, but most are too big for the Reader screen, so the text winds up shrunk down to illegibility.

That’s not the only fine print, though. The Sony Reader has a few kinks to be ironed out.

Like an Etch A Sketch, the Reader’s screen has to wipe away each page before drawing the next one. Unfortunately, the result is a one-second white-black-white blink that quickly becomes annoying.

Tapping the “size” button cycles through three font sizes; holding it down rotates the page 90 degrees. The largest type is soothing to over-40 eyes, but also means that you have to turn pages more often, enduring even more of those distracting double blinks.

Sony has dreamed up some fairly baffling controls, too—not an easy feat on what should be a very simple machine. For example, the next/previous page buttons are at 2 and 8 o’clock on a dime-size desk. A circular control might make sense if it had buttons at all four points of the compass—but only two?

There’s no search function, video or clickable links, either. So much for those key e-book advantages.

Still, Sony got the big stuff right: the feel of the machine, the pleasantness of reading, the clarity of type. It’s not the only company hoping to resurrect the dream of electronic books, either. A spinoff from Royal Philips Electronics, iRex Technologies, sells a “work in progress” called the iLiad, which uses the same E Ink technology but offers wireless networking, a bigger screen, 16 shades of gray and a touch screen for scribbling notes, for $700. And last month, bloggers discovered that Amazon.com is working on an e-book reader (and store) of its own. (Search Google for “Amazon Kindle.”)

Is that it, then? Is the paper book doomed? Was it only a transitional gadget, a placeholder that came between stone tablets and e-books?

Not any time soon. The Sony Reader is an impressive achievement, and an important step toward a convenient alternative to bound books. It will make certain niche groups very happy: gadget freaks, lawyers with massive document stashes, doctors and pilots who check hefty reference texts, high school students with 35-pound backpacks and anyone who likes to read by the pool for 20 weeks at a time.

The masses, however, may continue to prefer the more established portable-document format. Those older reading machines never run out of power, cost about 2 percent as much and don’t break when dropped. You know: p-books.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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Bookbuying

Tue., October 3, 2006

The New York Times reports today that Coliseum Books, “a Manhattan bastion of independent bookselling since the early 1970’s,” is closing permanently by the end of the year. Same old story:

The reasons may be obvious to anyone who has shopped for book discounts on the Internet or spent time pawing through books that they have no intention of buying at one of the thousands of chain bookstores across the nation.

I’ve never been to Coliseum, but I must redouble my efforts to patronize the independent booksellers I like, such as the Strand, Westside Books and McNally-Robinson, instead of buying my books online, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately.

It’s just so tempting to me and my thriftiness to take the Amazon.com route. There, for instance, I can buy Haruki Murakami’s new short story collection today in hardcover for $16.47, without tax or shipping fees. An independent is likely to list-price the title at $24.95, not including New York’s 8-point-whatever percent sales tax.

An even more tempting bargain are goods purchased via Amazon Marketplace Sellers, third-party merchants that sell new and used media through Amazon’s site and order system. For example, George Saunders’ newest book lists for $23.95, is carried by Amazon.com for $16.29, but is available as a clean new non-remaindered copy via a Marketplace Seller for a mere $11.75. You do the math, as they say.

But consider those extra dollars for the independent-bookstore book are helping fund my favorite parts of book-buying: browsing amid funky décor, mingling with a clientele passionate about reading, the thrill of the hunt for a new favorite among the creative displays and staff recommendations, and most importantly, the knowledgeable, friendly and often cute salespeople. I should more carefully allocate my book-buying dollars.

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READ Photos

Fri., September 8, 2006

My first thought was that these photos from our Italian vacation would be perfect for Dana’s and my celebrity READ posters, except that I believe we’re both pretending to read picture books.

Jason pretending to read at a bookstore in Italy.

Dana pretending to read at a bookstore in Italy.

The settings are two unassailably cool Italian bookstores. The one I’m in is an expat operation featuring all English books, many of which are used. The one Dana’s in sells bound scripts, actor bios and other film books, plus an awesome selection of original movie posters from the ’60s and ’70s. (Check out the Italian Godfather poster on the right-hand side of Dana’s photo!)

Tags: Books & Authors, Italy, Photo | Jason photo by Dana. | Comments have been closed.

A Spot of Bother

Sat., August 19, 2006

Cover for 'A Spot of Bother.'There are benefits to having friends here who work in bookstores. One is to hear of juicy encounters with celebrities, as when Katie, who manages the children’s department at McNally Robinson, assisted David Bowie in buying a small toy guitar for his daughter, or when Sting grazed his tantric body against Andie’s in the elevator at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble.

The tangible benefit is the review copies the girls occasionally loan me. Review copies appeal to me because although they’re professionally printed and bound paperbacks, they’re uncorrected proofs rife with exciting typographical errors. Also, let’s face it: if you’re a bookworm, it’s cool to be reading something a full month or two before most everyone else. I often read books on the subway and when it’s a review copy, I like to think someone will glance at the cover with jealously, but this is a city where commuters barely register the sudden incongruous appearance of breakdancers and mariachi bands.

To the point, after our trip to Rhode Island, Katie loaned me a review copy of Mark Haddon’s second novel, A Spot of Bother, which will be issued to the public on September 5th. Haddon wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I haven’t read, nor did I know much about him. In deference of my usual practice, I made a point not to read up on the author or his books, even the promotional blurb on the back of Bother, so I could judge it on its merits.

Few authors I’ve read more accurately capture the disconnect between what people think, what they say and what they do. Really that’s what the book’s about. It’s the story of a middle-class English family, normal in its dysfunctions and miscommunication, and it’s laudable for a writer to capture the essence and dialogue of “real” people like these without resorting to tics, archetypes or other writerly schemes. Haddon especially excels at crafting believable dialogue for his cast. In many books, the characters stunt-double for the writer, especially when male authors are writing non-male characters of a different age; in Bother, they have independent voices and actions, accurate to who they are.

George Hall, the lead in that bothersome spot, is a retired designer and installer of playground equipment whose mind wanders and who fears three things: leaving the comforts of home, dealing with his family, and death. His wife Jean finds him difficult and loves him but is having an affair with one of his friends, David. Their daughter and son have their own issues. Katie, a stubborn free spirit, is torn over whether she should marry Ray, a caring lunk of a guy. She has a young son from her first marriage, Jacob, who speaks and acts precisely as I’d imagine a Bob the Builder-obsessed kid would. Jamie, the son, is a gay real estate broker who fears he’s losing his sister as he’s challenged by his own relationships.

The third-person narration shifts each chapter to another character, offering his or her thoughts, dialogue and points of view. Haddon sticks to this structure rigorously, which means the characters’ appearances, relations and ages are rarely described outright, although they’re inferred through action and dialogue. This structure is perfect for a novel about familial communication because it ensures the narrators are unreliable. Each character thinks and acts on his own, so whose view represents reality? Jean, for example, feels her lover David is charming and sophisticated; much later in the book, Jamie summarizes him as, “Dapper. Suntan. Roll-neck sweater. A little too much aftershave.”

There are many thoughts the characters don’t share or act upon, while misreading those of others. It’s like a real-life version of those movies where the guy and the girl keep missing cues and opportunities so obvious to the audience that you want to scream, “Just kiss her, you jackass!”

Everyone’s story thread gets sucked into the tempest of Katie’s wedding in the final quarter of the book, culminating in a sudden but long-time-coming action that sends cutlery airborne. The problems of the Halls get resolved by The End, although it seems especially sudden and convenient that George would so suddenly shake the cobwebs from his head. It also wasn’t until this denouement that I started sensing serious movie-treatment vibes. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book hadn’t already been optioned for a Major Motion Picture by the same folks who produced Four Weddings and a Funeral or any movie adapted from a Nick Hornby novel.

But the short of it is that I liked A Spot of Bother, with its conflicted characters, crisp, believable dialogue and a focus on the aspect of relationships that Jamie sums up well in two simple sentences: “He needed to be close to someone. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?”

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eBooks & the Long Tail

Sun., July 30, 2006

As much as I’d like to stop mentioning eBooks, I don’t see how you could write an essay as Rachel Donadio did in today’s New York Times Book Review without so much as mentioning them while lamenting the ability of the publishing industry to latch onto the Long Tail.

If you’re unfamiliar with the tale of the Long Tail, it’s the subject of a bestselling book by Wired editor Chris Anderson that theorizes businesses, particularly those online, can profit as tidily by selling lots of second-tier items as they can a handful of blockbusters. iTunes and Netflix are examples of this trend; they stock loads of unpopular or obscure items for little or no warehouse space. They make money off stuff that otherwise would be unavailable or catching dust in a brick-and-mortar store.

Donadio writes that book publishers haven’t figured out how to capitalize on the Long Tail because books take up too much physical space; it’s impractical to keep thousands of low-selling titles in a warehouse. She even quotes a Scribner publisher as saying the Long Tail would only work by employing “some kind of print-on-demand,” a costly and imperfect technology.

Maybe I’m missing some fine point of Economics 101, but wouldn’t it make sense to start selling books electronically for publishers to capitalize on this trend and open their back catalogs to moneymaking? I was under the impression juggernauts like Amazon and Google were already busy scanning and otherwise digitizing books for online viewing and searches, so it seems a practical extension to put those works in a format consumers can purchase and read on their iPods, Palms, PSPs or whatever the next great all-in-one portable media device is going to be.

I love books but aren’t they destined for extinction? Music has gone 100% digital triumphantly and movies are headed that way, with DVDs doomed for replacement by downloadable versions and all-digital on-demand services. I find it hard to believe publishing houses aren’t gunning to go digital, maybe at least with their back catalogs, and leave behind the expense, impracticality and storage demands of printing things on pulped trees.

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Drafts

Wed., July 19, 2006

You can have your John Hancocked Declaration of Independence. Today I was more interested in seeing the early draft on display at the New York Public Library.

Probably every writer has felt miffed over having his words pulled or mangled by an editor and Thomas Jefferson was no exception. On July 1, 1776, he sent his finished draft of the declaration to the Continental Congress, which made additions, deletions and other edits before ratifying it on Independence Day. Proud of his work, Jefferson handwrote copies of the original version for five or six friends, underlining the passages that had been altered or deleted. Only two of these copies survive intact.

The one in the library is on temporary exhibit in a tiny, dim room with marble walls and a wood parquet floor. Known as the Fair Copy in Thomas Jefferson’s Hand, it runs two double-sided pages, each of which is sandwiched between glass plates mounted upright and suspended in a glass box, so you can freely read both sides. When you approach these boxes, a motion senor activates a thin spotlight to illuminate the text temporarily.

Each page is sized a bit longer than a standard 8.5-by-11" sheet of paper. They’re the color of sand, creased and worn where they’ve been folded into quarters, as if to stick in one’s pocket. Jefferson’s cursive is neat and small in brown ink, lined precisely and double-spaced except for page three; the last few lines there are crammed onto the page, where it seems he noticed too late he was running out of room. Although most of the fruity Noun Capitalization was added later, Jefferson’s spelling and punctuation errors are preserved; in one passage, he even confuses it’s and its, which should be of reassurance to millions of poor spellers.

The text stands off the page in two places, where Jefferson breaks from his script into printed block capitals. One is the phrase UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in the document’s title. The other is within the document’s most significant deletion, the word men in a paragraph condemning slavery: the “execrable commerce” of an open market “where MEN should be bought & sold.” The delegates from Georgia and South Carolina weren’t keen on this passage, so to appease them, it was cut.

While the content of this draft is sobering and inspiring, I was immediately struck by its mere existence: edits noted on the page of a handwritten copy. These elements are nearing extinction in the computer world. Authors composing documents now in word processors make edits that aren’t recorded. Correspondence is similarily affected. Authors like Jefferson were active letter writers, often explaining the public texts they’d produced. Letters like these still exist, but digital documents are more perishable than paper, deleted and disappearing easily as systems, formats and machines change.

The British Library is one organization that’s recognized this problem. In 2004 it launched a campaign to obtain and digitally archive the emails of the UK’s top authors and scientists, including poet Ted Hughes and evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton. As paper is abandoned, more efforts like this will be needed to preserve edits and the words behind the words. Looking at an LCD screenful of historic text may not have the same drama as a few worn pieces of paper in a moodily lit room, but it’s the future.

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The Best Books and Cultural Importance

Mon., May 22, 2006

Earlier this year, the editor of The New York Times Book Review polled several hundred authors, critics and other literary types, asking them to identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

They decided on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but writers being writers, they first quibbled over every word of the question. By “American,” did the Review mean written by one or merely concerning the nation? What is original “fiction” in these dark days of Frey and Viswanathan? Amusingly, even “25 years” was scrutinized: what about, say, A Confederacy of Dunces, written in the ’60s and surely a product of that decade, but not published until the early ’80s?

But most pressingly, what is “best”? According to A.O. Scott, who formulated his commentary after reviewing the tally of votes, they are the books “that assume a burden of cultural importance.”

They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

Beloved fits this bill with its story of the African American post-slavery experience, but that’s not reason alone to make it “best.” Scott offhandedly defines a “classic,” a category “best” books would fit into, as one that has become “a staple of the college literary curriculum,” as Beloved did swiftly after its publication in 1987. As I wrote recently about what makes a photograph iconic, the arbiters of artistic taste are largely nameless: the curators, critics, dealers, auctioneers and teachers. Along with White Noise, The Crying of Lot 49 and Time’s Arrow, Beloved was one of the centerpiece works of discussion in my postmodern lit class in college, taught a mere five years after its publication by a passionate man named Zackel who resembled Bob Hoskins.

At any rate, I think Beloved also works because it functions on multiple levels. You can put down your CliffsNotes and read it just as a romance-drama or as an American Gothic ghost story, and it’s still a good read. It may have won the Pulitzer for its importance, but it’s still a perennially popular seller, if I’m not mistaken.

Perhaps paradoxically, Scott suggests, if I’m understanding him correctly, the best books are consciously written to be “important.” Scott agrees Ann Beattie, for example, “is among the most gifted and prolific fiction writers of her generation”

but her books are nowhere to be found on this list; not, I would venture, because she fails to live up to the survey’s implicit criterion of importance, but because she steadfastly refuses to try.

But the rare book can still be as “important” as it is publicly popular and accessible, and there in a nutshell you have a great literary work, one with lasting power that I can still throw in my bag to read on the subway.

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The Benign Spirit of Ralph

Sat., April 29, 2006

I stopped by Tishman Auditorium at The New School tonight for a free literary event produced by The Believer magazine and PEN American Center.

Host John Hodgman was the epitome of the unreliable narrator, which is to say The Believer/McSweeney’s signature style of humor, welcoming everyone with non sequiturs and lies issued unemotionally as fact (“like PEN, The Believer was founded in 1921 in London”). At one point, he got the audience to repeat what he claimed was a credo from Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, part of which involved promising to sharpen one’s teeth at night.

Ben Marcus introduced the first speaker, British-born visual artist Matthew Ritchie, with an unrelated discourse on the character of Ejlert Lövborg from Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.

Ritchie then gave a talk about...I’m not sure, really. Something to do with the creation and expansion of the universe, physics, philosophy, abstract expressionism and earthworks, world monuments and the disaster films of Charlton Heston, supplemented with PowerPoint slides.

Samantha Hunt, who reminded me of one of the women from Saturday Night Live’s Delicious Dish sketches, moderated a panel of writers talking about politics in their books, also touching on the ideas of self in fiction and doppelgängers. Two of the writers offhandedly mentioned that they had doubles; Yiyun Li said hers was Winnie the Pooh.

Salman Rushdie read a passage from his most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, dedicating it to Ralph Newsome, a presidential aide in Joseph Heller’s novel Good as Gold who contradicts himself in the second half of nearly every sentence he speaks. “I feel the benign spirit of Ralph hovering over us,” Rushdie said.

I’ve never read Rushdie before, but at least Shalimar sounds like a wicked farce on war and politics. (I’m thinking it wasn’t a coincidence that he chose a Heller quote.) Rushdie has a wholly engaging reading style, with eye contact and a clear, strong voice that gets caught up in the action when it should.

The program listed the event concluding with a segment of Okusama Wa Majo, a Japanese version of Bewitched, subtitled by Lemony Snicket and several writers from The Daily Show. Instead, we were shown an Errol Morris clip, produced in his signature white-backgrounded Interrotron style, of Donald Trump explaining the meaning of Citizen Kane in a way that’s impossible to tell whether he’s being serious. (I think this was an excerpt of the short film Morris produced for the Academy Awards in 2002.)

It was a strange evening, a jumble of often intriguing and unrelated stuff, but so is The Believer, which is part of the charm.

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Packed Like Sardines

Tue., April 25, 2006

The express train from 96th Street downtown was running late this morning, and as I crammed into a car, I thought I’d work out a brief but non-cliché phrase to describe of the situation. Clichés may be easy, but they’re lazy; there are so many words to choose from, why settle for the most common combinations? I often find myself making up word games like this to pass the time. Neither Shortz nor Sudoku satisfy me; Boggle and Scrabble aside, most of my word and logic games are played in my mind.

My first free-association on that subway car was that we were packed in like sardines. (It’s good to cleanse the system first by flushing out the obvious ones.)

Then I thought peas in a pod was a humorous choice because it’s also a cliché, but one used to describe friendly proximity. Is a cliché no longer a cliché when it’s used against type? Or it is too knowingly ironic? Maybe a qualifier is needed to signal that it’s a switchup: angry peas in a pod is pretty funny.

How about candy in a piñata, which covers the buffets and jostle of a crowded subway car? Mud wasps in a hive? I like bowling pins in a sack. That sounds appropriately uncomfortable, if you’re a bowling pin. But is a subway car too little like a sack? Inside either, it can be dim and disorienting, I suppose. Maybe gravel in a can, or something else in a hard container. Although I think that “can” and “capsule” have been used before to describe the cylindrical metal subway car before, as in “an air conditioned can hurtling underground.” I’m long off the subway and still wondering who we were and how we were smooshed into that car. It’s the name of my game, playing parlor tricks with words.

A related hobby of mine is to collect fresh phrases I happen across, or as Emerson put it, to “select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like the blast of triumph.”

My collection spans the past 10 years or so in a small clothbound journal. At first I thought I was merely compiling quotations, but much of what I have qualifies as a phrasal thesaurus.

There are marvelous turns of words. In a poem mourning a dead friend, Pablo Neruda could have written, “He was a great guy. I miss him and the fun times we had together.” But what he ended up writing was, “His smile was my bread.”

I have many others from lesser known writers, on things as mundane as spilt gasoline (“the fractal stain petroleum leaves in water”), the surface of an old painting (“web of fine capillary-like cracks”), a pet resting (“a cat pours his body on the floor like water”).

Then there’s Carl Sagan, who once asked his readers to imagine the universe as an unbaked raisin cake. “Worse analogies have been made,” he hastened to add.

The war on cliché: it’s what writing is about.

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Autograph

Fri., April 7, 2006

Andie gave me a copy today of Tom Tomorrow’s most recent book, Hell in a Handbasket that she had him autograph for me personally (“Hi Jason!”). It was after an in-store event at her bookstore and he had been packing up and getting ready to leave when she asked him to sign it. He got into a brief huff that he had to unpack his bag for his Signin’ Pen, but he did it, because Andie is very convincing.

Perhaps the first book I had signed, back in April 1998, was Revenge of the Latchkey Kids by Ted Rall, a Dayton, Ohio native and one of my favorite contemporary cartoonists. I spilled coffee on the book, a hardcover first edition, shortly before the signing. Ted not only inscribed his name and drew the head of one of the strip’s characters, he wrote, “Don’t drink too much coffee!” The damage has become one with the value, like the crack in the Liberty Bell.

Another cherished autographed book is Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris, which I chronicled here. That one I had read months before it was published via a typographical error-ridden first proof paperback temporarily filched from Andie. My autographed hardcover is still wrapped in a plastic Barnes & Noble bag and sits untouched on a shelf in my closet.

Others include a signed Dave Barry anthology from Joe and a Great Movies volume autographed by Roger Ebert from Andie.

I’ll add the Tomorrow book to these others, which strikes me as a strange cache for me to have. I’m not big on collecting things. I’m a utilitarian fellow and I like for the things I own to have some use, not just an existence.

A childhood collection of mine was matchbooks. I suppose it’s stretching it to say those would be utilitarian to a smoker, grill guy, arsonist or pyromaniac. More recently, I collected old consumer-model Polaroid cameras, the majority of which still work, although securing near-extinct film for them is a chore in this digital age.

I never understood the rigmarole of collectors amassing, say, action figures in unopened packaging or rare stamps or whatever. What’s the point? You get to look at them and brag about them, and your relatives, who never liked you much to begin with, get to sell them for a profit as soon as you die, probably from all that time you spent in your rec room with tweezers and museum-grade, acid-free archival slipcovers.

Which is why autographed books make me uneasy. They’re my first true decorative collection. “But Jason,” you say, “you can read a book.” Not an autographed book I can’t. I end up paging through it, if at all, with exceeding care, as if it was a Gutenberg bible, pages as dry and fragile as autumn leaves. I’m paranoid I’ll get too much finger oil on the cover, crease the pages, or loosen the spine so the thing lollygags and starts shedding pages. I don’t know why I should feel this way. Perhaps it’s because I’m a fan of these writers and their works are almost hallowed to me in the way that celebrities are hallowed to people who obsess over the Post or People.

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Moleskine

Sat., March 11, 2006

I enjoy writing and I have a porous memory, two sometimes related facts that necessitate I have a notebook and pen always at the ready. I’ve been through a huge number of notebook sizes, styles and brands and never been satisfied. About a year ago I bought my first Moleskine1 Pocket Notebook. (The first page of scribbling, dated Febrary 14, 2005, reminds me to check out Threadless and Digital Gravel for well-designed T-shirts, to “get keynote CHOF presentation for Jimi,“ and to give Tony Luke’s Old Philly Style Sandwiches on Ninth Avenue a try.)

Moleskine is a fashionable choice, but I was more concerned with the brand’s portability and sturdiness. I’ve had my share of dud notebooks: ones that were too thick or of an unwieldy size; flimsy cheapies that I had trouble holding open or laying flat when I attempted to write on-the-go; wire-bound models that unspiraled and nearly fishhooked me; perfect-bound types that contracted leprosy and shed pages; and varieties in which the ink ran at the first suggestion of rain.

I must admit, a year later and I’m impressed that my Moleskine has met the challenges I’ve thrown at it. It’s been dropped, stepped on, stuffed in all manner of bags and pockets, rained and snowed on, taken across the country and an ocean, even had pages unceremoniously ripped from it, and it’s made the grade.

The paper of the pages is thick enough to accommodate any manner of writing implement-not even a Sharpie will bleed through onto the next page. The oilcloth-covered cardboard covers haven’t warped despite being crammed in my back jeans pocket and sat upon. (It’s the perfect portable size.) The elastic band is a great feature to keep it closed and pages protected from the elements. The sewn spine holds the pages intact and allows the book to lie flat and mostly open when needed. The trademark secret pocket built into the inside back cover did get a small split, but I chalk it up to the constant removal and return of my indispensable Manhattan subway and bus map, a laminated 4-by-2.75-inch (when trifolded) Streetwise “Mini Metro.” (Available online and at some Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shops.) The end of the bookmark is frayed, but I can live with that; wear can be pleasant: the edges of the pages, like those of an oft-read book, have been worn smooth by fingertips. Great value, too: as I’ve mentioned before, New Yorkers can snag a standard 192-page Pocket Notebook for $9 at Pearl Paint.

My Moleskine Pocket Notebook, open.

My Moleskine is the Squared (graph paper) model, which I bought because I thought it would corral my spastic handwriting and save space. That didn’t happen. It wasn’t a deterrent, but I think I can stick with Plain or Ruled varieties now that the Squared one is pages away from reaching capacity. Thankfully, I have a backlog of Moleskines that I’ve received as gifts. On to more happy travels and fine writing with Moleskine notebook #2!

1A word on pronunciation: moleskin, lowercased and without the trailing “e,” is a sturdy cotton fabric, such as that which covered notebooks of the same non-trademarked name at one time. It’s pronounced as you’d expect: MOL-skin. Andie and Katie, who both work at bookstores that sell Moleskine notebooks, say that’s how everyone pronounces the brand name. But here and there you’ll find references to mol-a-SKEEN-a: on Moleskine’s Wikipedia page, on the front page of the brand’s American website and from the sort of jerks who will “correct” the pronunciation of words like Porche. A person billing himself as a Moleskine customer service rep cleared the confusion on a Moleskine message board in April 2005:

How do you pronounce Moleskine? Around here we say mol-a-SKEEN-a, as the books are currently manufactured in Italy. However, the books were originally manufactured in France, so we also say c’est la vie to any way you prefer, as there is no wrong answer.

Now that I know the rest of the story, I’m sticking with MOL-skin, thanks. [back]

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Sarah Vowell

Tue., March 7, 2006

I’ve been to my share of author readings at bookstores, but it’s safe to say I’d never previously attended one where an audience member questioned the author’s degree of involvement with John Wilkes Booth’s vertebrae.

It was part of a query posed to author and NPR commentator Sarah Vowell tonight after her reading at the Borders on Columbus Circle. “This is the first time I’ve been allowed to read above 14th Street,” she said by means of introduction.

Vowell, who has a sharply intelligent and desert-dry sense of humor, knew immediately that the questioner, who had asked if the author had touched the assassin’s bones at Walter Reed, was misinformed: the medical center has a piece of President Garfield’s vertebrae, untouched by her, that was pierced by an assassin’s bullet in 1881. Vowell should know; she was promoting the paperback edition of her most recent book, Assassination Vacation, about the first three Presidential assassinations: Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.

She began by reading some passages from the book, pausing to interject comments. “I’m kind of an all-over-the-place kind of writer,” she admitted later, mentioning that she calls her frequent printed asides “shenanigans.” She had many verbal shenanigans during the reading, pausing to mention, for instance, that the soy milk that she added earlier to her tea (“because that’s how I roll”) had the same expiration date as that of Lincoln, April 15th. She also revealed her nickname for Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert Todd, is “Jinxy McDeath” because of his presence at his father’s deathbed and his physical proximity to the assassinations of McKinley and Garfield. He was also indirectly responsibly for some cannibalism during a doomed Arctic expedition, she added.

After a reference in her reading to her Jimmy Carter keychain, she interjected that she had met him recently at an event because they share the same publisher. Comparing their one-sheet press bios, Vowell pointed out to him that “39th President of the United States” is a pretty kick-ass way to lead-off a resumé and that her own bio was slightly less impressive. “I guess you could still win the Nobel Prize,” Carter offered.

She wrapped up by reading a recent op-ed piece she wrote about giving readings of her books at bookstores and getting asked stupid questions. Then she took some questions and, sure enough, some were stupid. The worst was, “Why are you a writer?”

“To make money,” she shouted. “It’s my job.”

Painfully close to the terrible classic, “Where do you get your ideas?”, was “How do you pitch your ideas to your editor?”, asked by a book editor in the audience. Vowell said it’s simple: she picks her favorite idea and tells her editor. “He says, ’I guess that’s not too terrible an idea.’ And then we get cracking.”

Responding to another question, she said she didn’t include Kennedy’s assassination in the book, not because it’s been overdone, but because she’s not historically interested in that president, nor was she comfortable making snide comments about a man who still has plenty of direct relatives living.

Also, she is allergic to wheat.

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Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Fri., February 24, 2006

Cover for 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'I wrapped up reading Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which one of you got me for Christmas or my birthday or something. It’s not bad; it’s not strictly a “language book,” like Simon Winchester’s excellent The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s not strictly a guide like Strunk & White’s classic Elements of Style, but a blend of both. This means it’s a fun read, but that I’m unlikely to refer to it as a reference, even though it somewhat attempts to be one.

Yet she’s able to turn a confusing system into something of humor and interest. She’s what would be known among readers of William Safire’s “On Language” column as a member of the “Gotcha Gang.” She takes pride in spotting examples of bad grammar in public and sharing it with others, alerting the signmaker or merchant, or correcting it herself—in the photo on the book’s dust jacket, she is poised, marker uncapped and ready to add an apostrophe to a Two Weeks Notice movie poster.

I enjoyed her capsule histories of each punctuation mark and her cheeky, learned citations, everything from James Thurber’s eternal comma wrangling with his editor Harold Ross, to Dorothy Parker’s denunciation of more or less every mark of punctuation. There are copious self-referential examples of correct usage, many featuring Opal Fruits, also known as Starburst.

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Pauper’s Books

Tue., February 21, 2006

A girl I know who lives in Jersey near the Passaic Falls had never heard of William Carlos Williams’ poetic ode to the city they’re in, Paterson, so I offered to lend her my copy. Tonight, while paging through it, I found this bookmark.

A bookmark from Pauper’s Books.

What an awesome bookstore that was. It was located in my college town of Bowling Green, Ohio, on Main Street, sandwiched between a bar frequented by underclassmen and the 24-hour diner they’d stumble to afterhours for alcohol-absorbing hamburgers. As a creative writing and journalism major at BGSU in the early-’90s, and because the Wood County Public Library was located conveniently just across the street, I spent entirely too much time at Pauper’s. I was surprised to learn years later that the place was still whisperingly referred to as an anarchist shop. I’ve been in anarchist bookstores before; they need an anarchist name (“Viva la Books!”), prints of Che hanging all over the place, and a battered card table in the back where subversives can meet, drink too much coffee and write manifestos. Now maybe Pauper’s sold a few rabble-rousing rags, but it had no additional anarchic features other than a sense of organization. We’re talking literally piles of books. That “drive you simply nuts” slogan on the Pauper’s bookmark isn’t only a cheesy clipart pun. Far in the back of the store, there was stack upon toppling stack of boxes and those flat boxes grapes are wholesold in, filled with books and reaching the ceiling.

You can get a small sense of this disarray looking at these photos I took during a trip back to Bowling Green in September 2002, although they don’t represent the store as packed as it once was. That day, as you can see from a sign in one of the photos, the merchandise was 50% off. The store was struggling to stay open then and was to close for good a year later.

Close-up of a bookshelf at Pauper's Books.

The length of Pauper's Books.

A pile of books Pauper's Books.

For a journalism class assignment, I had to write a business-related article and I chose to interview Pauper’s owner, Leo Schifferli, a skinny, gray-bearded fellow with Le Corbusier-like spectacles. He spoke slowly and with care and seemed to know everything about any book. I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t have an inventory management system for his thousands of books. Not only that, he had only recently upgraded to the computerized version of Books in Print from microfilm, although I frequently saw his 386 on but unused and him still squinting at projected pieces of film that he shifted expertly under glass. But he didn’t need an inventory management system. He remembered where everything was in the store and he was willing to go the extra yard to seal a deal. When I asked him for that copy of Paterson he knew there wasn’t one in the store but offered to bring in the spare copy from his home collection, a handsome New Directions paperback edition from 1963.

He’s the one who told me about Amazons, the infamous faux-memoir Don DeLillo wrote pretending to be the first female NHL player. He offered to sell me a hardcover copy for a reasonable sum and I wish now I would have bought it, if not only because it’s been wholly out of print since its original run in 1980 and is considered one of the great contemporary books written under a pseudonym—in fact, Keith Gessen wrote an article about it in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, “In Search of the Great American Hockey Novel.” Leo was a well-read gentleman who could make recommendations of new writers or classics books based solely on the last few books you had read. Learning what I liked, he introduced me to Richard Yates, selling me Eleven Kinds of Loneliness for $4.75. It remains one of my favorite short story collections.

My college roommate Scott and I were surprised to find Leo at the door of our apartment late one night, moonlighting as a deliveryman for our favorite pizza parlor, Pisanello’s. He was wearing the same gray knit watchman’s cap he always wore in his unheated store and was making his way across town for his deliveries on his beat-up 10-speed. Was he delivering pizzas because his store wasn’t making enough money or because he wanted to get out and about more? With Leo, it was probably a bit of both; he had a weird, absent-minded sense of humor. He’s the one who told me, “Pocket Books are called that for a reason” and would sometimes have fire-sales of moldy pulp-fiction paperbacks from a tall metal spinner rack he’d put out on the sidewalk on sunny days. He was kind of hoping people entranced by the cool retro covers would steal them and he wouldn’t have to regret throwing them in the trash.

Tags: Books & Authors, Ohio, Photo, Scan | Comments have been closed.

Here is New York

Tue., January 10, 2006

My previous boss at my real estate job takes a slightly different footpath from Penn Station each morning to our office building, and as we entered the elevator together this morning, she told me about a guy either passed out or sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the methadone clinic a block away on Eighth Avenue. Have New Yorkers become so jaded that we’ll literally walk over someone, she wondered.

Having not lived in New York longer than I have, I can tell you that there are two prevailing views of the city:

  1. It’s chock full of heartless, illiterate jerks and people sleeping on the sidewalk, so why’d you want to live there anyway.
  2. It’s the world’s capital, home of the best art, culture and tradition, and why’d you want to live there anyway ’cause it’s really expensive.

Some blocks away, at a nearby midtown hotel off Sixth Avenue, during a sweltering summer day in 1948, E.B. White wrote an essay, Here is New York, that encompasses both of these categories.

At the time, White hadn’t lived in the city in years, and hadn’t in fact traveled much at all. But he’d been a fixture in Manhattan for a full decade earlier, writing for The New Yorker and holding court with friends like James Thurber and Dorothy Parker. After that, he’d retired to a farmhouse in Maine to write children’s books about the spiders and mice that lived in his barn, and to live out his life. But that day, he was in town to write about the city, which he first noted, “can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

Reading Here is New York now is to realize that nothing and everything have changed in the more than 50 years since. There are bums on the sidewalks now, there were bums on the sidewalks then. White writes of the “cold guilt” walking the Bowery late at night, drunks sleeping on the “free bed” of the sidewalk. “Pedestrians step along and over and around the still forms as though walking on a battlefield among the dead.“

In a city that’s always been in motion, White focuses a deal on changes startling to him then, that remain ongoing today: gentrification, crowding, growth skyward, a change of “tempo and in temper.”

He touches on the resilience of New York, and this quality of his essay has caused any number of people to trot it out post 9/11, particularly in his conclusion, which foreshadows that event:

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

But what Here is New York mostly is, is a homage to its neighborhoods, camaraderie, celebrity and multicultural character.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry; it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without a doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

Tags: Books & Authors, Streets of New York | Comments have been closed.

William Gibson

Sat., January 7, 2006

For The New York Times’ fifth-annual Arts & Leisure Weekend, I went to the City University of New York Graduate Center to hear an interview with author William Gibson.

The interviewer, Brent Staples, an editorialist for the Times, I disliked immediately for his lime green socks and the red silk scarf draped over his otherwise black Manhattan ensemble. (Gibson, on the other hand, was dressed in solid black, as you’d expect, except for forest-green socks. Strange.)

But worse than Staples’ wardrobe was his inability to ask a clear, concise question. He’s one of these guys that blathers, whether editorializing, mentioning himself, fawning over or misrepresenting the author’s work, and just as you’re wondering if there’s a question in the near future, he drops one, and more often than not, it could have been asked without the windy prelude and/or it’s a near non-sequitur. Here’s a sample question, regarding Cayce, the protagonist of Pattern Recognition, as “an agent of standardization”: “Now, does that frighten you or is it just neat?” There were some snickers from the audience, but we were laughing at Staples, not with him.

Gibson wasn’t as dynamic as I thought he’d be, with a voice resembling worms dying, as he’s described it. Face it: you too thought he’d have a rich British accent, even knowing he’s an American living in Canada. I blame the moody Anton Corbijn photo of him that circulated circa his novel Idoru.

Anton Corbijn's portrait of William Gibson.

But, no, Gibson was raised in a town called Wytheville in southwestern Virginia, and my ear caught a curl to certain words he spoke—high school, them, endless, turns up—that could have been repressed Southern.

As have many writers branded Sci-Fi, Gibson began writing to escape the “extreme poverty of information” in his surroundings. He recalls subscribing to sci-fi fan-zines, crude precursors to blogs, with their fevered, mimeographed articles debated by post. At 14, he read Burroughs, believing surely he was the only one at that moment in his hometown to be doing so.

The most interesting theme in his writing that he discussed was what constitutes a sense of place and how that’s eroding. This crops up often in his work— for those unfamiliar with Gibson, he is best known with coining the word “cyberspace” in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. The “specificity of place erodes as more of us come into this circle of the expanding world,” he said, noting that he misses what Cayce calls “the mirror world,” or London’s small, strange differences from New York City.

In the U.S., he misses “the complexity of small places,” which have been replaced by prepackaged dullness: “Am I in Atlanta or the outskirts of Los Angeles?” In the world at large, he bemoans the fact that, say, Spain and France used to have “very distinctive flavors,” but that they’re running together into a generic European form, with the same ten shops on their High Streets, and standardized currency and electrical outlets. The world is tilting to a “Lonely Planet version” of itself where “every square inch of the globe is annotated.”

Gibson’s self-deprecating nature arose when he discussed how he has evolved technically in his writing. “When I started writing fiction, I didn’t know how to write characters,” he admitted, specifying that he took pains to give the ones in Neuromancer excuses as to why they had no discernable emotional depth. With each novel he’s also tried to stick more to a single point of view in real-time with not as much jump-cutting. As for his ritual of writing, he said, “If it didn’t get harder [to write each successive book], I would worry that I wasn’t doing it right.”

He’s also evolved to write more about the “real world,” instead of within the Sci-Fi genre he said he’s always had a friction with. He allows that he has a “European’s view of the future,” in which much at present remains recognizable, a vision proven to Gibson when he saw Blade Runner in 1982. “The future always consists, for the most part, of the past,” he said.

These “real world” themes, which featured strongly in his most recent book, will extend to the one he’s writing now, for which he gave up three small slices of detail. In it, he will deal with what he termed the “illicit facilitating” practiced by the people the “bad guys” hire to do their own dirty work, much like the Cowboys in Neuromancer.

“The NSA ECHELON base in Sugar Grove, West Virginia, will be mentioned at least once,” he added, carefully.

The only characters he mentioned were “America’s smallest ethnic crime family,” a Cuban-Chinese group by intermarriage that has “translated themselves” to living in Manhattan for the past decade, headed by a patriarch who used to be part of Cuba’s equivalent of the KGB.

Afterwards, I attended the event’s afterparty, held in a busy, dimmed room filled with couches and lounge-electronica. Because it was sponsored by a tasteful brand of alcohol, each attendee received a ticket for a free beverage. I ordered a martini with two olives, which I drank while eating crackers and wandering aimlessly among the crowd. With the lucidity of vodka, I caught a view of my seemingly rakish self in the restroom mirror and had a sudden simultaneous urge to be in the company of a beautiful woman and to purchase a book of Borges.

I took the subway down to Union Square, walked to the Strand, and found a single, excellent-condition used hardcover copy on the shelf for $20, as if it’d been waiting for me. One out of two isn’t bad. I thought about going to a bar by myself, but I must be going about such ventures the wrong way, because either the place is too crowded or it’s not crowded enough, and there’s no one at the bar but single guys such as myself, drinking their drink and possibly reading the newspaper.

Tags: Books & Authors, Photo | Photo by Anton Corbijn. | Comments have been closed.

Stories in Your Pocket, Part III

Thu., January 5, 2006

I’ve complained before about the absence of a portable eBook reader, and although there still isn’t one that’s flexible and truly pocket sized, yesterday at CES, Sony unveiled the U.S. version of the Sony Librié eBook reader. Named the Reader, it will hit store shelves here this Spring; no suggested retail price has been given yet, but the Librié was $380 when it debuted in Japan in mid-2004.

Random House, HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin-Putnam, Simon & Schuster and Time Warner Book Group have all agreed to support the Reader. Many independent and specialty publishers will also have eBook titles available for purchase and download to the device. Sony didn’t say anything about Digital Rights Management in its press materials, but I’m sure such offerings from major publishers will be crippled with copy protection, like iTunes Music Store tracks.

A major plus is that Sony will let users upload their own (or, theoretically, third-party) eBooks, among other digital content. Via USB, the device will accept unencrypted MP3 files (take that, iPod!), Adobe PDF documents, web pages and RSS news feeds from sites and JPEG photos.

Sony Reader opened.

Sony Reader in hand.

According to reports I’ve read, the Reader’s text is more legible and crisp than even newsprint, at a variety of viewing angles. It doesn’t have a backlight, however, which makes it just like a book, in that you won’t be able to use it in the dark. (But unlike on an LCD screen, the text is visible under bright sunlight, Sony points out.)

The device looks clunky—dig all the buttons necessary for “one-handed navigation.” But it is only a half-inch thick and weighs less than nine ounces. The Librié runs on off-the-shelf batteries, but the Reader uses an “internal rechargeable battery,” by which I take to mean proprietary—Sony estimates “roughly 7,500 page turns” per charge. Out of the box, it will hold 80 average-length books and can store hundreds more with the addition of Sony’s proprietary Memory Stick technology or off-the-shelf Secure Digital Flash memory cards.

Hurrah, Sony. It sounds as if they’ve covered all the bases and not made too much of the device proprietary, concerning uploadable files and memory (but apparently not the battery). I’ve still curious about the cost of the device itself and its media, and whether it could ever become as popular as an iPod among the literary hipster set.

Tags: Books & Authors, Photo | Photos from Sony Electronics. | Comments have been closed.

Bookwormery

Tue., December 27, 2005

My flight back from my holiday in Cleveland to New York this afternoon involved checking luggage, something I almost never do. As a single, non-gay gentleman, I can get away with cramming everything I need for dressing during five days into a smallish duffel bag or backpack. Granted, you will see me wearing the same pants for all five days, and may notice the same shirt surface on two of those occasions, but I like to think people don’t pay close attention to what I wear. As long as I’m moderately presentable and emit a pleasant odor, all is well.

But I had to check a bag, all 40 pounds of it, because every time I visit my parents, I’ve been retrieving books from my collection stored there to bring back to New York. When I moved from Ohio, I crammed all my essentials, myself and my sister (who drove) into a car, and that was that. Books, alas, weren’t considered essential at that time, but I’ve found myself missing them, my information-rich, highly flammable, musty-smelling children.

So I throw a few in my luggage every trip back to New York from Cleveland that I make. I went overboard this time. I had made a list in advance, my logic being that any books I desired enough to actually remember I owned were ones I truly missed and therefore deserving of a plane ride back. This list included both stout volumes of the excellent Poems for the Millennium series, two books of Kurt Vonnegut’s non-fiction, On Photography by Susan Sontag, a book of quotations (a small one, not the cement block-like Bartlett’s I own), and Me Talk Pretty One Day, my current favorite David Sedaris book.

Of course, I received three books as gifts that required addition to my cache: a collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales and David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster from Mom & Dad, and the popular punctuation epistle Eats, Shoots & Leaves from Andrew & Jess.

I also had two read-on-the-plane books in my carry-on that needed return: Geoff Dyer’s photography meditation, The Ongoing Moment, which Jimi gave me as an early Christmas gift, and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Inner Circle, which I’ve been reading very slowly and carrying around like a penance ever since I got it in October.

And naturally, I tossed in some extras from my collection that weren’t on my bring-back list: my first edition hardcover of Annie Proulx’s Close Range (because I recently saw Brokeback Mountain and wanted to reread the story on which it’s based), Paterson by William Carlos Williams, My Years with Ross by James Thurber, Blow-Up by Julio Cortázar, and, for good measure, a Dave Barry collection from the early 80s called Bad Habits.

The books I brought back to New York.

That bag was heavy, man, but it was worth it.

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Psychological Health

Thu., November 17, 2005

A shelver at the Strand had some fun with the P-touch in the psych section.

Sign in the psych section at the Strand.

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Stories in Your Pocket, Part II

Wed., October 19, 2005

Writing about eBooks last month, I asked “where’s my ultra-thin, wave-of-the-future folding LCD screen?” Well, it was introduced today. It’s not LCD, but it mimics that technology while sidestepping the issues of bulk, inflexibility and energy consumption.

The as-yet-unnamed display panel is a joint venture of LG.Philips LCD and E Ink Corp. and billed as the first “tablet-size flexible electronic paper display.” It has a 10.1-inch diagonal and is 0.01 inches thick, about as thin and as flexible as a sheet of construction paper; it can literally be rolled up and stored in a pocket or a bag.

It stays so slim in part because it works without power or a backlight. Instead, tiny “ink”-containing capsules, each about half the width of a strand of hair, switch between black and white depending on whether they are positively or negatively charged. The result is a crisp 600x800 resolution at 100 pixels per inch with four levels of grayscale; in layman’s terms, that’s “a lot like newsprint,” according to one report.

This underlying positive/negative display technology is already used in an eBook reader introduced in Japan in the summer of 2004, the Sony Librié.

A woman reads an eBook on Sony's Librie.

On the positive side, the Librié is portable—at seven ounces and 8x5 inches, it’s roughly book-sized. It runs on four AAA batteries, instead of proprietary, difficult-to-replace ones like certain other devices. Navigation is simple, with page-forward and page-backward buttons and the ability to digitally “bookmark” up to 40 pages. It has bells and whistles like magnification, a dictionary and a voice-reader.

But the Librié still most closely resembles a large PDA, not an ultra-thin flexible book, and when it debuted last year, it cost $380, which is steep for a single-use portable electronic device. Worse, although several hundred eBooks are available through a Sony-funded download service in Japan for only $3 each, DRM built into the Librié renders them useless after 60 days. It wasn’t clear to me from the reviews I’ve read of the device, but I’d bet the Librié doesn’t accept books in standard pdf or html formats. (Although as for Sony’s PlayStation Portable, I’d also wager there are hacks aplenty for the Librié.)

It will be interesting to see what becomes of the Philips/E Ink technology. I wonder how much bulkier and less flexible such a display panel will become once a CPU, storage device and user interface are necessarily added.

Tags: Books & Authors, Photo | Photo from the Associated Press. | Comments have been closed.

Stories in Your Pocket

Sun., September 11, 2005

Why haven’t eBooks caught on? It certainly hasn’t been for a lack of trying. eBook divisions popped up at major print publishing houses a few years back, only to close a short while later. In 2001 alone, failures included Random House’s AtRandom, AOL/Time Warner’s iPublish, and MightyWords, which was majority-shareheld by Barnes & Noble’s online division. (eTexts live on in places like the great Project Gutenberg, although only for works that have fallen out of copyright.)

At the time, Wired reported that eBook failure could be chalked up to the lack of a universal format and an “eBook reading device with a high quality screen and full PDA functionality” for under $100. To my knowledge, such a device has yet to materialize.

But look what we have now: the near-universal PDF format and, as demonstrated by Apple, the price structuring and marketing savvy to sell portable devices with high-quality screens—and, while not for under $100 and not with screens large enough for reading large chunks of text—sold for a price that hasn’t stopped everyone and his brother from snapping up an mp3 player.

Maybe the length of text involved has to do with eBooks’ failure. I know I get antsy reading anything on my computer’s screen that’s more than 100 words or so and usually I’ll print longer documents to read comfortably at my desk. And I still prefer traditional print news sources to their online counterparts, particularly when reading long articles or features, as opposed to comparatively brief news items.

One company that seems to have recognized this length issue (along with the associated pricing issue) is Amazon.com, which on August 19th quietly launched the unfortunately named Amazon Shorts section of its store, which offers short story downloads for 49 cents each in PDF format.

This sparks my imagination. Why couldn’t a concept like this be integrated with an iTunes Music Store interface or into the iTunes Music Store itself? Then my copy of iTunes could happily resemble the screenshot below. (Click image for a larger version in a pop-up window.)

iTunes with eStories Concept. (Click image for larger view in a pop-up window.)

I’d argue yet another reason eBooks failed was a lack of consumer knowledge that they were even available, much less where to get them. I can’t imagine most consumers ever heard of AtRandom, iPublish and MightyWords. With a iTunes Music Store-like delivery-system for electronic short stories and essays (eStories) you’d have:

  1. a storefront with ultra-high name recognition and ease-of-use
  2. a universal and low price model everyone can live with
  3. a universal format (PDF, presumably)

I picture assembling the equivalent of short-story mixtapes to read on the subway or an airplane: a “Magic Realism Mix,” “Minimalism Mix,” “Hemingway’s Greatest Hits,” and so on. Readers could discover new authors and genres they love! Kids could illegally trade short stories on the Internet! Celebrity short story playlists!

I would think publishers and authors would embrace the concept of getting their short works online, particularly now that the music companies have paved the way for digital distribution. Recording artists like the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson must make most of their greenbacks off their back catalogs, and as such, embrace avenues like the iTunes Music Store. Why wouldn’t print publishers and authors want to dust off all those copies of The Best Short Stories and various authors’ Collected or Complete Short Stories, rescuing them from the oppressive shackles of college courses and rejuvenating them by throwing them online where they could bask in a high profile and bring in some dough?

Although I think at least one missing piece in this potential equation for success is the lack of an appropriate device on which to read eStories. Although Palm devices could be ideal, where’s my ultra-thin, wave-of-the-future folding LCD screen?

Discussing the eBook matter at brunch with Jimi this afternoon, he suggested another reason for their failure is that people simply don’t want them. Consumers prefer passive entertainments—you can’t read your eBook while you’re driving or jogging, for example, but you can listen to music on your iPod. And comsumers already have the option of digital audiobooks.

But hey, I still want my cheap, high-quality reader for eStories! As Leo, the grizzled proprieter of Bowling Green, Ohio’s late, great Paupers Books, once told me, in reference to an oft-shoplifted segment of his stock: “They’re called Pocket Books for a reason.” I want 15,000 short stories in my pocket!

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Lego: The Coupland Connection

Sat., September 10, 2005

Building with Lego.

The kind wonks at Lego recently rolled out a new version of their Lego Digital Designer (LDD), a free, CAD-like program for PC and Mac that lets you drag-and-drop virtual Lego bricks. Completed models can be uploaded to Lego’s website to share or sell, and you can get a list of the physical Lego bricks needed to build the design.

This is the first I’ve heard of the program, although it’s been around in less-powerful versions at least a year. I’m reminded of Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel, Microserfs, my favorite book of his.

It’s about a group of young, overeducated, overworked and sarcastic Microsoft programmers. Some of them are working on Oop! (short for Object Oriented Programming), “a virtual construction box of 3D Lego-type bricks that runs on IBM or Mac platforms with CD-ROM drives.”

The base of this fictitious program does just what the real LDD does, although Oop! has additional features, some of which seem inspired by SimCity. An Oop! brick can be customized to have from eight to 8,000 bumps, custom colors and surfaces, and structures can be destroyed by earthquake, fire, decay or kicking (“elder sibling simulator”). Properly built kit models result in rewards; for example, King Kong will scale a successfully built Empire State Building and plant a flag on top. Maybe Lego can pick up on some of these ideas for the next version of LDD!

Coupland presaged or inspiried at least one other Lego-related development. In February 2000, he wrote on his website that Lego should make a “‘Fluffer’ Amateur Porn Movie Set.” That didn’t happen, but take a look at the lawyer-friendly named Block Structure Porn, posted in 2002 by Drew, the guy behind the Toothpaste for Dinner cartoon.

Tags: Books & Authors, Photo, Toys | Photo from Photobucket.com. | Comments have been closed.

The Strand Gets Fancy

Mon., July 18, 2005

On the subway to work this morning, I read an article in amNewYork about the ongoing renovations at The Strand, the best bookstore in New York City, and therefore the world.

The Strand, July 2002.

If you haven’t been there in the past year, you’d be surprised at the sudden changes, which I believe began without fanfare sometime late last year.

First, they’ve completely replaced the stairway between the ground floor and the basement, and added an elevator to bring the building up to code. The stairway’s now a standard wide-width, with sturdy handrails and steps covered with non-slip rubberized grips. For those who’ve never had the treat, I should explain that the old staircase at the Strand was like one out of a horror movie, creaky and twisty, and you would wonder whether you’d make it back up alive. Only one person could descend or ascend at a time, which lead to games of “chicken” at the halfway-point landing. The only way the old staircase could have been less accessible to the handicapped or elderly would have been to coat the steps with Crisco.

Also new is a loft area on the ground floor. The Strand is in an old building of very high ceilings, typical for that part of town and beautiful to behold, but when you get down to it, a waste of space, especially in a bookstore. Well, now, near the new elevator (which itself is right by the new stairs), is a mini treehouse-like loft that houses books of some genre I must not be interested in, because I’ve never been up there.

According to the amNewYork article, the Strand’s owners are in the process of adding even more sale space (although the author doesn’t specify how or where), as well as air conditioning for the ground floor. In the old Strand, on a summer day like today—86 degrees with 80%-90% humidity—the place would heat up like a Nazi crematorium, only not quite as comfortable. I don’t know how the old or the obese survive in there on a day like today. For me, and perhaps others, the lack of air conditioning was an invaluable sales tool for the store. After a sweaty trek throughout the ground floor, I’d stumble down the rickety stairs because there’s a drinking fountain down there and it was a good 20 degrees cooler in the basement, even though it was also teeming with review copies of books no one wants and the occasional cockroach. I’d spend enough time recouperating down there that I’d end up buying stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I’m glad to have experienced the Strand in “before” mode, unlike many other landmarks old-time New Yorkers like to gripe about, like Times Square and the Chelsea Piers. It sounds as if the place will still contain much of its grubby, cut-rate, crowded, largely unorganized charm, so I can’t complain much about the renovations. In fact, I think the place will become even more popular because of them.

Tags: Architecture, Books & Authors, Photo | Photo of the “classic” Strand (July 2002) by Jason. | Comments have been closed.

Mix Tape

Sat., June 18, 2005

Mix Tape.I bought and read the book Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, edited by Thurston Moore, he of Sonic Youth. It wasn’t quite what I had expected. I was thinking it’d be a history of the mix tape, which it kind of is, but it’s mainly Thurston’s recollections with buying and occasionally making mix tapes. In the book’s funny intro, which serves as Thurston’s personal history with the mix tape, he recalls buying a ghetto blaster for the band’s van which took 16 D batteries and which they still use. He recognizes that the mix tape has given way to the mix CD, and from there to things like iTunes Celebrity Playlists, “the Hallmark card of mix tapes—all you gotta do is sign your name to personalize it.” And there’s the obligatory but well-put bit against the RIAA’s position on sharing music:

Once again, we’re being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it’s not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing—by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along—is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.

Most of the book, however, consists of photos of mix tapes and mix tape playlists that Thurston solicited from his friends. Sometimes there’s a bit of text explaining the mix tape depicted, but the book really seems to be a showcase of “the art of the mix tape. ” It’s very well designed (and the book itself is shaped like a large cassette tape) but it’s really just a coffee table book, if you can call a book this small a coffee table book.

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Little Beasties

Thu., June 16, 2005

Wrapping up Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, I’ve reached the part about why a great number of animals on Earth have yet to be discovered. A chief reason is that so many are so small and easily overlooked. To illustrate this, Bryson has a great bit on the bed mite, which has existed since humans but wasn’t discovered until 1965. [Warning! Not for the squeamish!]

...your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites, which come out in the wee hours to sup on your sebaceous oils and feast on all those lovely, crunchy flakes of skin that you shed as you doze and toss. Your pillow alone may be home to forty thousand of them. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon.) And don’t think a clean pillowcase will make a difference. To something on the scale of bed mites, the weave of the tightest human fabric looks like ship’s rigging. Indeed, if your pillow is six years old—which is apparently about the average age for a pillow—it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of “sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung,” to quote the man who did the measuring, Dr. John Maunder of the British Medical Entomology Center.

Awesome! On a less personal and squirm-inducing level, Bryson also gives the example of scooping up a handful of soil from any forest floor. It will contain up to 10 billion bacteria, most of them unknown to science.

Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts, some 200,000 hairy little fungi known as molds, perhaps 10,000 protozoans (of which the most familiar is the amoeba), and assorted rotifers, flatworms, roundworms, and other microscopic creatures known collectively as cryptozoa. A large portion of these will also be unknown.

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This World is Big

Thu., June 9, 2005

The Universe is Big. Really big. It may seem like a long way to the corner chemist, but compared to the Universe, that’s peanuts.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

A Short History of Nearly Everything.Like a worm in rich soil, I’ve been making my way through Bill Bryson’s book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. I must admit, I wasn’t engrossed by the book’s first half, which deals mostly with the origins of the universe, the determination of its age, and the first scientists, their inventions and discoveries. I started getting more interested in the bits about the elements, followed by his chapters on geology.

I hadn’t realized that some of the most amazing Earth science discoveries are younger than I am. For instance, well into the 1970s, many scientists were insisting continental drift was a physical impossibility, whereas today it’s the most commonly accepted theory. And it wasn’t until 1977 that oceanographers realized why the oceans don’t get saltier with time. Deep sea vents, like those first observed off the Galapagos Islands, act as filters, keeping the oceans’ saline levels consistent.

Many discoveries await. Oceanographers have only explored perhaps a millionth of Earth’s underwater environments. As Bryson puts it, “It’s rather as if our firsthand experience of the surface world were based on the work of five guys exploring on garden tractors after dark.”

I also like how Bryson makes concrete the measurements of incomprehensible scope inherent in the scientific world. Two examples of this stick with me.

The deepest we’ve ever dug into the Earth is two miles (for gold mines in South Africa). That sounds deep, but as Bryson puts it, “If the planet were an apple, we wouldn’t yet have broken through the skin. Indeed, we haven’t even come close.”

And when looking at the apocalyptic possibility of a large asteroid smacking into Earth, he notes the closest one has ever come (at least that we’ve observed) is 106,000 miles. That may seem distant, but in cosmic terms, it is “the equivalent of a bullet passing through one’s sleeve without touching the arm.”

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Turbulence

Tue., June 7, 2005

Each of us has sat next to someone annoying on an airplane at one time or another. But only David Sedaris can write a funny, engrossing story about it. (Posted online yesterday and appearing in the June 13, 2005 print edition of the New Yorker.)

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Take the Cannoli

Thu., May 26, 2005

Take the CannoliI finished reading Sarah Vowell’s book of essays from 2000, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World. Great stuff! The essays, adapted from her This American Life broadcasts on NPR and assorted magazine articles, are loosely organized into four sections: her life growing up; travel pieces, such as an intriguing history of Chicago’s Michigan and Wacker intersection and a brilliant profile of New York’s infamous Chelsea Hotel; two essays on death—those of Frank Sinatra and the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears; and a batch of miscellaneous writing, including a perceptive essay on the art of making mixtapes and, in one of the book’s funniest bits, her battle with insomnia.

Her voice throughout is smart and wry, mixing personal history with travelogue, social commentary and journalism, much in the vein of other NPR commentators-turned authors that I admire, especially David Sedaris and Andrei Codrescu. (My good friend Joe described Vowell’s books as “Sedarisish,” a recommendation that convinced me to read her in the first place.)

I know I needn’t be impressed by this when judging her writing, but the company she keeps is way cool. In addition to Sedaris, she’s friends or associates with authors Nick Hornby, David Eggers and Greil Marcus, as well as John Flansburgh, who’s one-half of Brooklyn’s finest musical duo, They Might Be Giants. And she was the voice of Violet in The Incredibles1.

I’m looking forward to reading her other books of essays, as well as her new book, Assassination Vacation, a historical travelogue of sorts about the assassinations of presidents Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.

1 If you rent or own The Incredibles on DVD, make sure you watch the bonus featurette on the second disc, “Vowellet: An Essay By Sarah Vowell,” in which she details the process of voicing Violet, which she did during the same two-year timeframe that she was writing Assassination Vacation, drawing funny comparisons between the two. (“It’s just been so nice to be a part of something that I don’t have to convince people to be interested in,” she notes dryly at one point.) [back]

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The Believer

Sun., May 15, 2005

You know what’s a good magazine? The Believer, that’s what.

Despite the fact that its name resembles that of a vicious religious pamphlet, I just subscribed to the print version, based solely on two articles I read on the online version of the magazine. One was an inexplicably engrossing interview, conducted by Daniel Handler (author of the popular Lemony Snicket series of children’s books), of actor/musician Jack Black wherein they discuss nothing but weddings. That’s right: 5,000 words of two guys talking about weddings. And it’s great!

I also enjoyed the article on Morrissey, particularly the revelation of why a “skinny, effete Englander with his oblique references to dank Manchester cemeteries” appeals so much to Latinos.

The Believer is produced by the same guys that put out McSweeney’s, which contains more fiction and which I generally find more dense, smugly ironic and oblique. In comparison, The Believer is more of a literary pop culture journal, with articles compact and copious, some of which in the last issue alone included Rick Moody on the behind-the-scenes politics involved in judging the National Book Awards; a profile of James K. Baxter, New Zealand’s most famous poet; the lingering influence of the mysterious New Age author Carlos Castaneda; an interview, conducted over a game of Scrabble, with the National Spelling Bee’s “official pronouncer”; a list of books Ray Bradbury recommends you read; and an ongoing column by High Fidelity author Nick Hornby, reviewing the books he has both bought and read each month. Brilliant!

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CSS Cleveland Connection

Fri., April 15, 2005

I’ve been reading Eric Meyer on CSS, the author of which is enshrined in the nerdy known-by-last-name pantheon of CSS/Web Design Gods that includes, among others, Jeffrey Zeldman and Tantek Çelik. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, a language which defines how web pages look. It’s better seen than described: here’s what the current front-page of Jason’s Journal looks like without any CSS.

I rate my CSS knowledge at a mid-intermediate level, so I didn’t learn many new things from Meyer’s book. But his coding examples made me reconsider how I’d built portions of my site and led me to make some hopefully transparent optimizations as well as some alterations for increased cross-browser compatibility. Unlike a lot of books of this sort, Meyer’s got a down-to-earth writing style and uses plenty of detailed and practical examples, showing, for example, how to convert an existing table-based web site to use CSS and how to create pages such as press releases from scratch using a pure-CSS method. He is also standards-based and learned enough that even though the book was originally published in 2002 (eons ago in Computer Book Terms), his material hasn’t dated and holds strong as an accurate reference.

It’s trivial, but I found it interesting is that Meyer is a CWRU graduate who still lives in Cleveland, which, as his bio points out, “is a much nicer city than you’ve been led to believe.” As a proponent, he even has a handful of Cleveland shout-outs on his blog; I got wistful reading his Ten Things To Do In Cleveland Before You’re Dead. Hey, I’ve done all ten of those things!

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It’s All Happening at the Zoo

Tue., April 12, 2005

When I saw that a David Sedaris story was included in The New Yorker travel issue that arrived in the mail today, the first thing I thought was, “I wonder if he made that Australian zoo thing into a story?”

To explain, last June, when I attended the meet-the-author event Sedaris used to kick-off his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, he took questions from the audience, one of which was “Do you write every day?” He said he did, although he was only likely to expand a fraction of what he wrote into a full story. One promising example he cited was when he and his boyfriend Hugh accidentally got separated at a zoo in Australia.

It turns out he didn’t make a whole story from this anecdote, but it is prominently included as a key part of the story in The New Yorker. Entitled “Keeping Up,” it deals with the high speed at which Hugh likes to sightsee while vacationing, as opposed to David’s more leisurely pace.

Call it a stretch, but I’m honored to have been a tiny observer in David’s writing process.

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Springy

Mon., April 4, 2005

The Pulitzer Prize winners for this year were announced today and I don’t know a single one of the honored books. Man, am I behind. Strangely, though, I tend to read more when the weather’s nicer, as opposed to the way the weather has been, so maybe I can get caught up now that Spring seems to have finally sprung. The weather got up to the mid-50s today (60s tomorrow!) and there were a bunch of those giant, puffy white clouds milling around the sky this afternoon. Glorious!

On a related note, enjoy these two Late Show with David Letterman Top Ten lists, both from 1996 and with dated references intact. They’re funny because they’re true.

Top Ten Signs It’s Spring in New York

  1. Street vendors change hot dog water
  2. Air is filled with 9MM “NYC Hummingbirds”
  3. Cab drivers yell “it’s a lovely spring day, now get out of the road you stupid bastard!”
  4. Crews begin cleaning up litter in Times Square from New Year’s Eve
  5. Madonna switches from basketball to baseball players
  6. More than usual, people are mating in the streets
  7. Al Sharpton switches from basketball to baseball players
  8. The coffee in stage manager Biff Henderson’s head thaws
  9. Squirrels in Central Park are no longer storing crack
  10. Everywhere you look—adorable baby rats

Top Ten Signs of Spring in New York City

  1. New York City cab drivers go from wool to cotton turbans
  2. Streets are filled with the intoxicating aroma of thawing garbage
  3. Drug arrests soar as the Yankees return to town
  4. Street vendors start selling robin-kebabs
  5. Ed Sullivan Theater warms up to a balmy 38 degrees
  6. Number of murders committed with snow shovels drops way off
  7. All of the rats go down to Florida for spring break
  8. Rudy Giuliani has a spring tune-up done to his comb-over
  9. New York City cops start wearing nothing but a holster
  10. The Mets are mathematically eliminated from the pennant race

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Thumbs Up

Sat., February 19, 2005

Roger Ebert was at Andie’s Barnes & Noble store recently, promoting his new book, The Great Movies II, and Andie presented me with an autographed copy. Yay! Apparently, Roger’s a genuinely engaging, generous fellow in person, and Andie said he shared plenty of anecdotes about the movies he reviews in the book, and spent loads of time talking with each person who waited in line for an autograph. They actually had to suggest he hurry the hell up because he was taking up too much time chatting.

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Dreaming of Don

Wed., February 9, 2005

First of all, I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do, they make no sense. I had a dream last night about novelist Don DeLillo. Who the fuck dreams about Don DeLillo, other than maybe Mrs. DeLillo, and only then in a metaphorical sense?

I only have a wispy recollection that it was even him. We talked a lot because I think I was interviewing him, yet I remember almost nothing we said. It was one of those dreams during which I would semi-awaken, realize I was dreaming, then fall back asleep. At one of these pauses, I thought, “My next question in this interview should be to ask him how he feels about a crappy, flash-in-the-pan movie being named after his best-known novel.”

It didn’t come up during my dream-interview, but my favorite fact about DeLillo is that, under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, he wrote a book in 1980 that purported to be the memoirs of the first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League. Now that makes about as much sense as my dream.

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Defiant Newcomer

Wed., December 1, 2004

Yesterday, the New York Times wrote up the bookstore Katie and Eric start work at today. I though I’d post it here for y’all to read, so as to skip the Times’ annoying online registration procedure. (And I’ve avoided my usual blockquoting to enhance legibility.)

Eric, who is managing the store, said he wasn’t happy with the reporter’s attitude, or his framing of the article, particularly the opening and closing paragraphs. You could resort to that old adage that any publicity is good publicity, but only time will tell. They’ve certainly got my support, and they couldn’t have picked a better location (neighborhood hipsters + crowds of tourists = success) or time (Christmas shopping!) to open.

Defiant Newcomer Hopes Small Booksellers Still Have a Place

By Edward Wyatt

Opening an independent bookstore in the age of the megachain and the deeply discounted best seller—not to mention in the hometown of Barnes & Noble—might seem quaintly quixotic, until one recalls the many revered booksellers that have gone out of business in recent years. Then it seems downright batty.

Sarah McNally does not care, however, nor does she scare easily. “It’s not that hard to beat the chains,” she said recently. “We’ve done it.”

The “we” is McNally Robinson Booksellers, a Canadian company that operates four bookstores in three cities that many Americans would be hard pressed to find on a map: Winnipeg, Calgary and Saskatoon. Now, McNally Robinson is adding a fifth store in a city more easily placed: New York.

On Wednesday, McNally Robinson will open its first American outlet, a 7,000-square-foot store on Prince Street in Manhattan, in the district just north of Little Italy known as Nolita, between Mulberry and Lafayette Streets.

The opening of a new shop in a big-city neighborhood known for the steady comings and goings of fashionable retail stores might otherwise go unnoticed, except for the fact that among bookstores the goings have far outnumbered the comings in recent years.

And not just in New York. Across the country, independent bookstores and small chains have faced intense competition, not only from Barnes & Noble and Borders, but also from the growing book business of outlets like Costco, Wal-Mart and Target.

The American Booksellers Association, the trade group representing independent and small chain stores, says that its membership has fallen by more than half over the last decade, to about 1,800. In New York, several venerable names have disappeared, among them Spring Street Books, Books & Company, and Eeyore’s Books for Children. Nationally, epitaphs have been written for stores like the Cottage Bookshop in San Rafael, Calif., Ruminator Books in St. Paul and Waking Owl Books in Salt Lake City.

Those trends were instrumental in shaping McNally Robinson, Ms. McNally recalled. “Part of our family holidays was always spent going into local bookstores,” she said, particularly when the family was traveling in the United States. As independent booksellers began to suffer in the early 1990’s, her parents vowed that the same would not happen to their stores.

With the help of a large loan, the family closed two smaller stores in 1996 and opened a 20,000-square-foot site in the Grant Park section of Winnipeg. Two years later, a second store was added in Winnipeg, and another, with Ms. McNally at the helm, was opened in Saskatoon. The fourth store, in Calgary, opened in 2002.

Because of cross-border considerations, the Manhattan store will not formally be part of the Canadian McNally Robinson chain. But the Canadian company and the New York operation will end up owning 20 percent of each other, Ms. McNally said, an arrangement that is still being worked out with Ms. McNally’s parents, who own the Canadian company, and her sister, who is likely to take over the Canadian operations.

After getting the Saskatoon store off the ground, Ms. McNally traveled in Africa, lived in Berlin and then moved to New York, where she worked as an editor at the Perseus Books Group. Then, when she decided to open a store in Manhattan, she bought a map and colored in the location of all the bookstores she could find.

The obvious hole, she found, was between Greenwich Village and Wall Street, east of Broadway—an area with as many nationalities and languages as any in Manhattan, from the Hispanic neighborhoods of the Lower East Side to Chinatown. To draw customers from those neighborhoods, Ms. McNally plans to devote special sections to local small publishers and foreign language books.

Although Ms. McNally’s store may benefit from some volume purchasing because of its affiliation with the Canadian stores, it won’t enjoy the many other cost advantages of the large chains. The key to the survival of an independent store is to not try to imitate the big chains, said Bob Contant, co-owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop, an independent store in the East Village.

“They are the equivalent of a big supermarket or network television,” he said. “We’re a cable station or a gourmet store in comparison.”

Ms. McNally agreed, but added that there are features of the big chains that she could not afford to ignore. So her store will have a cafe, reduced prices on best-selling hardcovers and a membership program offering further discounts.

Still, she admitted, not many people expect her to succeed. “When I’ve told people, they respond as if I’m doing the most insane thing in the world,” she said. “Even my accountant tried to talk me out of it.”

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Jetlag

Mon., November 29, 2004

I had a hell of a time waking up this morning and I’ve been bone tired all day. Despite the brevity of my flight, I’m theorizing it’s jetlag, which William Gibson put poetically in Pattern Recognition:

....her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here.... Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

Jetlag. Or maybe just waiting around airports. Posture-deforming chairs, everyone slumping and shuffling about like they just got back from the labor camps, soul-softening muzak punctuated with unintelligible bursts from the loudspeaker about how much longer your flight’s delayed.

Or maybe it’s just watching movies about waiting around airports. I watched part of Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal on DVD last night. It was all right. Tom Hanks was convincing enough as the lovable Eastern European imp that’s trapped in a fairytale wing of JFK populated with fun-loving and ethnically diverse janitors, baggage handlers and other public servants. And the heartless Homeland Security bureaucrat who keeps hatching schemes to get Hanks out of his hair. And Catherine Zeta-Jones as the woman he loved. Merham Karimi Nasseri, the guy who inspired The Terminal, was initially expelled from Iran for protesting against the shah, landed at de Gaulle in 1988 and has been marooned there ever since. As a documentary, I think that would be a more interesting story.

On the positive side, it seems my Big Boggle skills are still somewhat sharp. After a long reprieve, Andie and I played 10 rounds tonight and I won 228 to 209. Nothing too crazy, no ten-pointers and only a handful of seven-pointers. There were a lot of “Jason words”: Saxons, hector, satire, sweaty, Cornish. But I cannot claim sweet victory as Andie was suffering a stomachache—hopefully not from the devilishly delicious slice of holiday nut loaf she ate earlier.

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Picture Pages

Tue., August 17, 2004

Over the weekend, Andie was reading me some Babette Cole picture books she enjoys and it got me to thinking about my own favorite picture books. My parents read bales of books to me as a child, so I had a lot to choose from. But as I think the case should be with an excellent picture book, I thought of my favorites without any effort, typically because both the writing and the illustration are so original. Sure, I remember Curious George, Where The Wild Things Are, the Berenstain Bears, among others, but they weren’t my favorites. So here are my top-five picture books (although I cheated and listed two books for Ezra Jack Keats):

The Very Hungry CaterpillarEric Carle :: The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1970)
Every day he eats more until he wraps himself in a cocoon and—shazam—butterfly. The pages are die-cut so it seems as if the caterpillar has actually eaten holes through the food illustrations. It’s gimmicky, but as a kid, I remember digging it. I also still remember the vividness of the illustrations. I can't vouch for the writing because I don't recall it, but I remember the caterpillar doesn't just eat normal caterpillar food, like leaves and fruit, but non-caterpillar food like sausages and ice cream. Kids can relate to that.

CorduroyDon Freeman :: Corduroy (1968)
What kid wouldn’t want to be locked in a department store overnight, particularly if that kid were a slightly second-hand stuffed bear? The best bit, which you can see illustrated on the book’s cover, is when Corduroy loses a button on his overalls and tries to pull one off a mattress as a replacement. I also seem to recall some shenanigans on an escalator. Then he gets bought by some kid and lives happily ever after; I just remember enjoying the adventure-in-a-darkened-department-store bit.

The Snowy Day & Whistle For WillieEzra Jack Keats :: The Snowy Day (1962), Whistle For Willie (1964)
Apparently, Keats’ books were the cat’s pajamas when they came out in the ‘60s because they were the first to feature an African American child as the protagonist. Also, The Snowy Day won the Caldecott Medal in 1963, so it was probably quite popular. As a kid, I wasn’t aware of any of this business, but what I do remember, and why Keats remains my favorite picture book author, is because his illustrations are so tactile. He mixes watercolors and other paints with cutouts from old cards, newspapers and fabric. The pages of his books are works of art and the stories are great, too. Snowy Day perfectly captures everything a kid would want to do after waking up and finding it has snowed outside overnight: exploring the snow-blanketed city, making snow angels, trying to save a snowball for the next day. Yesterday, I re-read both of these books in the Borders at the Time Warner Center; a wave of calm came over me and I became completely engrossed. That’s saying a lot if you’ve ever been to the kids section of the Time Warner Center Borders, which resembles downtown Los Angeles during the 1992 riots, only not as tidy and quiet.

The Tale Of Peter RabbitBeatrix Potter :: The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)
I had forgotten this is a moralistic tale about the bad things that happen when you don’t listen to your mom, because the story’s really about Peter’s adventures in Mr. McGregor’s garden. The book features beautiful watercolor illustrations and the hallmark of a great children’s book: it’s not written for children; it’s written clearly and economically, and contains concrete detail. The sentences are damn near Hemingwayesque, expect for the anthropomorphic rabbits. “Old Mrs. Rabbit took a basket and her umbrella, and went through the wood to the baker’s. She bought a loaf of brown bread and five currant buns.” “A white cat was staring at some gold-fish. She sat very, very still, but now and then the tip of her tail twitched as if it were alive.” I still remember the cadence of Mom’s voice when she read that key sentence: “But round the end of a cucumber frame, whom should he meet but Mr. McGregor!”

What Do People Do All Day?Richard Scarry :: What Do People Do All Day? (1968)
I think this was the one with Jason the Mason (“Jason the Mason made a foundation in the hole for a house to be built on.”) which of course amused me to no end (and still does). All the animals of Busytown are at work and you get to see in great detail what they’re up to; Richard Scarry’s strong suit was the extreme level of detail in his illustrations. And you could actually learn something from this book; I recall the section on making roads was rather fascinating, although I was probably in that young-boy-obsessed-with-heavy-construction-equipment faze, which typically peaks with the purchase of some bright yellow Tonka trucks. My favorite Richard Scarry character was Lowly Worm (or was he everybody’s favorite?), but Huckle Cat might have been a close second. I was checking out some reviews of this book on Amazon, and apparently it’s no longer a good book because there’s only three careers in it that apply to women: homemaker, nurse and secretary. So don’t buy it for your kids; in fact, if you have a copy, you should probably burn it.

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A Tale of Two Davids

Wed., June 2, 2004

David Sedaris kicked off his tour for his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, on June 1 at 7:00 p.m., with a free reading at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square.

I got a tip from my friend Katie, who works there, that wristbands were being handed out for the good seats at 4:00, so I arrived around 4:20, bought the book, and sat there listening to my iPod until 6:00. At that time, my friend Megan, who also works at the Union Square store, got off work and joined me; we had a nice chat to pass the time.

Getting there early was worth it because the place filled up quickly and was standing room only from about 5:45 on. Apparently they had to set up a video screen on another floor of the store for the capacity crowd, but I was sitting smugly in my catbird seat.

David began with “Blood Work,” a story from the new book that he said he chose because it takes place in New York. It deals with his days as an apartment cleaner on the Upper East Side, and involves masturbation and mistaken identity. I don’t think it’s one of the funnier stories from the collection, but it got a good reaction from the crowd.

After that, he read nine entries from the past several years of his book tour diary, which had been transcribed and printed out from a computer; I was amused to note him making corrections to the text with a pen from his shirt pocket as he read the entries. Several of them were lengthy and professionally written enough that he could easily turn them into stories for his next book; others were one-off jokes and anecdotes that were still quite funny.

He gave away several items he claimed had been kept in a New York storage space since his move to Paris and members of the audience raised their hands to indicate they wanted them: a Spanish translation of Me Talk Pretty One Day, an illustrated book of skin conditions, and a single wooden clothes hanger.

He spent a lot of time aggressively promoting a book that he enjoyed, and said he wished he would have written, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

He then took questions from the audience, which was surprisingly sedate by New York standards. I recall only three questions being asked:

  1. “Do you write every day?” He said he does, although he throws most of it away. He noted quite a bit happens in his life that is amusing, but that cannot be fleshed-out for a full story. As an example, he noted on a recent layover in Bangkok, he was confronted and fined by a cop for throwing a cigarette butt on the ground, despite the fact that there were items such as boiled duck heads lying on the sidewalk for sale. After arriving at his final destination, Australia, he had a misadventure with his boyfriend Hugh where they got separated at the zoo; he offered this as a more likely example of a full story and I got the impression it’s in the running for an upcoming book.
  2. “Do you like clowns?” “I don’t like anything that fucks with me,” he said, and proceeded to answer the question seriously, detailing a specific sort of Parisian clown he hates, but that clowns in the circus ring are OK.
  3. “What is your favorite swear word?” Although he admitted he only swears a lot when talking with his brother, he chose connerie, which he described as one of several French words for bullshit.

The whole talk took about an hour, after which he apologized that, because of the size of the crowd, he wouldn’t be able to personalize his book signings. However, he ended up taking the time to have a brief word with each person who had bought a book and queued up to get it signed.

When I got to the front of the line, my question from him was “What do you do?” I’m unemployed, I said, but used to write for a trade magazine covering the candy industry. He asked if I knew Richard Yates, and I said “Revolutionary Road?”, thankful I remembered the short story and novel author from my creative writing days in college. David recommended the “new bio” on Yates, which I’m assuming is A Tragic Honesty, by Blake Bailey. He said the book describes how Yates himself started out by writing for trade publications, “although not in the candy industry.” He then signed my book and wrote “To Jason,” and gave me a random bit of swag — everyone got a small item reportedly taken from the aforementioned storage space. I got some sort of French prayer card featuring a black-and-white photo of a nun.

Walking down from the dais, Megan wanted to speak with David’s sister, Amy, who was sitting unobtrusively off to the side with several of her Strangers With Candy costars, but she wussed out.

Afterwards, we went to a bar for beers, and recounted the evening to Katie, who said that, after the talk, folks were snapping up copies of Random Family (and Dress Your Family) left and right.

David Caruso

Update: Andie just got home and presented me with this baseball card-sized color photo of David Caruso that he autographed on the reverse. He was shopping at Andie’s Barnes & Noble store tonight and had given the card to one of her co-workers who David assumed was a fan. Apparently not, because Andie ended up with the card, which she gave to me for good luck on my job interview in the morning.

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