31 March 2011

Paying Dues

The battle to get you to pay sales tax on out-of-state purchases continues, with increasing success.

One obvious question: Why would you ever want to pay more tax? Everyone has limited personal funds to spend on books and things. If you can save sales tax, why not?

Off the top of my head, some good reasons:

One, sales tax pays for schools, roads, libraries, other important things you use or need. Two, if you don’t pay that tax you are hurting people who live and work in your own home area. And the people who depend on them.

The bigger the purchase the grander the temptation. Here in Mendocino County you save 8.25% on your purchase of pantaloons, wrist watch or books. It is good to save money, but that does not make it ethical, moral, or right.

Very small increases in sales – or losses – spell success or failure for local stores. Have you counted up recently the empty store fronts in your part of town?

Sandy Torkildson of A Room of One’s Own bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin, figured out that if a substantial number of her regular customers would agree to buy five more books in the coming year, she would have the wherewithal to sign a long and more expensive lease. They did pledge, and she did renew successfully.

Even such a small effort – just buy a few more things locally – can make a huge financial difference to any store, especially a low-margin, independent bookstore. Shop locally, help your favorite stores survive.

It’s like when someone offers to repaint your house or build a garage. They can do it more cheaply if they don’t pay good wages and employment taxes. If they do the right thing you will pay more. To me, it’s worth it for everyone’s well-being and peace of mind. If you don’t appreciate honest outfits, paint your own house, Mr Selfish.

Two states this month passed “sales tax fairness” legislation. When signed into law, Arkansas and South Dakota will require out-of-state retailers with “online affiliates acting as sales agents” to collect and send in sales tax on orders made by state residents.

The laws in these and other states vary, but in general they’re calling Amazon and other’s bluff.

Some California politicians and opinion makers have long advocated for reform. One LA Times columnist wrote, “Regardless of whether you favor raising taxes ... at least we should all agree that taxes already owed should be collected.”

California Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner said “We’ve got the wholesale support of big retailers and small mom-and-pops. California businesses are finally fed up.”

The NY Times editorialized: “It never made sense to exempt online retailers from collecting sales tax... it's ridiculous.” According to the newspaper, Illinois is losing an estimated minimum of $150 million a year in uncollected taxes and California more than $300 million a year.

Online giant Amazon.com is actively fighting the sales tax recovery movement. Amazon already has disassociated itself from its associates and closed warehouses in Colorado, North Carolina, and Rhode Island because those states sought to recover lost sales tax. Now that Texas has demanded that Amazon.com pay $269 million in uncollected sales tax, Amazon has threatened to leave that state.

According to the money advice site The Motley Fool, Amazon “had gross revenue of more than $12 billion in the past year, which could translate to several hundred million dollars in sales tax revenue” just from Amazon alone, not counting the myriad other companies that avoid collecting sales tax, such as EBay.

Texas loses an estimated $600 million a year from online sales, according to their comptroller's office: “We regret losing any business in the state of Texas, but our position hasn't changed: If you have a physical business presence in the state of Texas, you owe sales tax.”



NOTES:

The “five more books” pledge

Inc.com (formerly Inc Magazine) has helpful hints for online retailers who DO want to collect sales tax:

Transcript of an excellent podcast from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (“Amazon is especially aggressive about not collecting sales tax. In fact, it only collects sales tax in five states. But, Amazon or its subsidiaries have a ‘physical presence’ in 17 states.”)

Booksellers testify on the subject

The Boston Globe on sales tax

24 March 2011

Billy Collins Goes on Tour

I admit I don’t read much poetry. I certainly don’t read poetry books all the way through without skipping a lot. I absolutely don’t read poetry books late into the next morning, going without sleep to enjoy the next poem, and the next.

I have never done this before – but Billy Collins, that sly poet from New York, got me and grabbed me and wouldn’t let go until I’d finished each page, then the Acknowledgments, the About This Type page, the jacket copy, and the front matter, then a couple of poems over again...

The book is “Horoscopes for the Dead” and it begins with a poem titled Grave. Most of this collection concerns the dead and the living, what we’ve lost, what we are inevitably going to lose, and how the poet and therefore you may feel about all this.

“What do you think of my new glasses
I asked as I stood under a shade tree
before the joined grave of my parents.

“And what followed was a long silence
that descended on the rows of the dead
and on the fields and the woods beyond.”

The opening verses of Grave sound whimsical perhaps, and grim. No doubt someone who reads more poetry than I would find echoes of Whitman in the phrase “rows of the dead” and Frost in “the fields and the woods beyond.”

Collins in this poem plays another of his snob-deflating tricks. First, there’s a kind of overly high-minded passage...

“One of the one hundred kinds of silence
according to the Chinese belief,
each one distinct from the others,”

Followed a few verses later by a healthy deflation... “I was the one ... who had just made up the business of the 100 Chinese silences.”

Despite the ever-present playfulness, the light-hearted humor, paradoxically some of these poems are deeply moving. The poet presses first one ear and then the other into the grass hoping to hear his mother and father’s voices... “What do you think of my new glasses?” Finally the poet and the reader approach the real silence:

“the Silence of the Lotus,
cousin to the Silence of the Temple Bell
only deeper and softer, like petals, at its farthest edges.”

Of course, the surest way to destroy a good poem must be to break it apart and try to retell it. The poet has already told his story more plainly and more, well, poetically, than anyone else can ever do.

Throughout this collection I half-smiled at many turns of phrase and unexpected zigs between one line and another. His poems can be surprisingly sophisticated and homely and plain pretty much at the same time. Billy Collins engages his reader in dialog without ever asking for more than a willingness to listen. Even a casual reader is drawn right in to Collins’ stories.

His unwillingness to overawe is most clear in the poem Gold. The rising Florida sun reflects – like gold – off a nearby lake. The poet’s east-facing room is filled with “golden light that might travel at dawn on the summer solstice the length of a passageway in a megalithic tomb.”

Several effusive stanzas later Collins writes “but the last thing I want to do is risk losing your confidence by appearing to lay it on too thick.”

You have to smile at that. You have to. Collins is a master. You say that to yourself while reading.

I was describing this book to a friend the next day. I mentioned a poem about his dog, titled Two Creatures, with a chilling insight at the end. She asked me to quote something. All I could remember was that Collins describes himself in one poem as “keeping an eye on things, whether they existed or not” and in another as “secretary of the interior.”

Much of this work was published previously in magazines and anthologies. Taken in this lovely little gray book, all were fresh again, and tasty and fun. The poem Grave has appeared in “Best American Poetry 2010" and “Best Spiritual Writing 2011.”

People who read poetry have known Billy Collins for years. If you haven’t met this poet, well, why not?



NOTES:

“Horoscopes for the Dead” by Billy Collins. Random House hard cover $24. ISBN 978-1-4000-6492-2.

About Billy Collins and his book tour...

Poemhunter has the text of many of Billy Collins’ poems and I don’t know how they deal with copyrights, but take a look...

17 March 2011

Guide Dog Loses Eyes, Gets His Own Guide Dog

On the GoogleNet you can find endless cute animal videos... who’s stealing the doggie treats? Not Denver the dog – despite his guilty look – it’s Freddy the cat.

A Japanese village destroyed by tsunami – sad part of a larger story. Shivering, abandoned pet dog in the same village – gut wrenching.

“Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals” is the subtitle of psychologist Hal Herzog’s timely book. It’s titled “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat” as in love dogs, hate rats, eat pigs. Herzog’s book is stuffed with anecdotes, revealing experiments, news reports, encounters and observations. Assembling massive evidence and utilizing his own published research, he begins to approach the raw, bleeding heart of our relationship with animals.

Herzog’s musings came home for me this week when I read an essay by Marc Bittman of the NY Times. Under the headline “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others” Bittman writes, “It's time to take a look at the line between ‘pet’ and ‘animal.’ When the ASPCA sends an agent to the home of a Brooklyn family to arrest one of its members for allegedly killing a hamster, something is wrong... That ‘something’ is this: we protect ‘companion animals’ like hamsters while largely ignoring what amounts to the torture of chickens and cows and pigs. In short, if I keep a pig as a pet, I can't kick it. If I keep a pig I intend to sell for food, I can pretty much torture it.”

Bittman is pondering the questions discussed at length in Herzog’s book.

We breed rats to feed to pet snakes, but we would not feel good offering a kitten killed humanely in the local animal shelter to a pet snake. It makes little difference to the snake. Why does it make such a big difference to us?

Herzog notes cats “are recreational killers” and estimates “a billion small animals a year fall victim” to their hunting instincts. The solution? Keep the cat inside. Most owners find this cruel and will not do it.

At the same time, “With about 94 million cats in America,” he writes, “the numbers add up. If each cat consumes just two ounces of meat daily, en masse, they consume nearly 12 million pounds of flesh – the equivalent of 3 million chickens – every single day.” We feed songbirds and eat chickens. We feed chickens to cats who eat some of the song birds we attract. Go figure.

This is just the beginning of the ethical and moral questions involved in our relationships with non-human living things. Can you be a vegetarian who eats fish? Can you be a vegan who wears leather shoes? Can a vegan in good conscience eat grain knowing that many small creatures are swept up and destroyed when fields are harvested?

Mark Bittman in his essay notes “We’re finally seeing some laws that take the first steps toward generally ameliorating cruelty to farm animals, and it’s safe to say that most of today’s small farmers and even some larger ones raise animals humanely. These few, at least, are treated with as much respect as the law believes we should treat a hamster. For the majority of non-pets, though, it’s tough luck.”

Many have wrestled with these thoughts and questions, and few of us have it all figured out, if that is even possible. In “Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat” Herzog highlights our hypocrisy, inconsistency and virtual blindness on these issues.

The people he most admires have somehow come to terms with their own “carnivorous yahoo,” the tendency of humankind to exploit other species.

“I have met lots of animal people who... work for animals in different ways and on different scales. Most of them do small things that help animals and make them feel good about themselves. Some of them cut back on their meat consumption or adopt a shelter dog. Others donate money to PETA or the World Wildlife Fund or pull over to the side of the road and carry a box turtle in the middle of the highway to safety.”

John Le Carre, the English writer said in a 2008 novel quoted by Herzog, “The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.”



NOTES:

“Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat” by Hal Herzog. HarperCollins hc $25.99. ISBN 9780061730863.

The author’s homepage

Mark Bittman's essay

My favorite comment among the many that followed Bittman’s piece: “Like it or not, humans are the animals at the top of the food chain and we get to decide what's for eating and what's for petting. That said, unprincipled cruelty to any living creature sucks.

Still, I look forward to Mr. Bittman's next hand-wringer about which plants are for eating, which plants are for landscaping, and which plants are just too nice to eat.”

11 March 2011

Click Save

There are many books on writing, all filled with writing about books, which sounds tiresome, and often is. Only some of this writing is in books. The rest is in desk drawers or filed in the cloud, as we call the place where words are when they aren’t actually in your computer but appear to be.

This afternoon I was reclining in a comfortable chair, first mistake, polishing off a deep book by Umberto Eco and struggling with the urge to take a nap. When I awoke two hours later I realized “I’ve got nothing” as in “I have no idea what to write and it’s pretty much time to come up with something.”

Idly I turned to “Lessons from Late Night” by Tina Fey, an amusing article in the current New Yorker. In the first two sentences she’s funny, and that’s why they pay her the big bucks. Why would I care that Fey worked for glamorous Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels for nine years while I sat on a chair in the unheated back office of a rural bookstore?

“In 1997, I realized one of my childhood dreams. (Not the one where I’m bring chased by Count Chocula.)” I told you she’s funny.

The urge hit me to write something cute, funny, and paid by the word. I jumped up, scared the cat, and spun into a nearby computer chair. Tina fires the starter pistol. I react.

This is the point where I wish I could write with pencil and paper. Pencils do not have to be turned on and warmed up. They don’t have to ask themselves if everything is connected, monitor, keyboard, hard drive. They don’t ask for a password, and they don’t buzz like frogs in winter.

Pencils don’t ask you to rename last week’s file and figure out the date three days from now. Pencils smear, but that’s a small inconvenience.

When you’re finished how do you email your smudgy pages to hundreds of people’s spam folders? It can’t be done with pencil alone, I’ve discovered.

All week long I worry about what I’m going to write on Thursday night. Worry throbs like a low-grade toothache. When the family vehicle dies half-way out of the drugstore parking lot, worry throbs. Especially then.

Unlike Mozart and his famously facile creative process, what I want to say has not already taken shape when I sit down to write. Unlike Mozart I hardly know what key I’m in, let alone what page I’m on. Instead, I channel my inner Miles Davis and make it up as I go along. Blow smoke until the bass player subtly signals G minor, and away we go.

“Confessions of a Young Novelist” is the latest book by the 77 year-old young novelist Umberto Eco (his ironic joke, not mine). It’s deep and entertaining, being pretty much the transcript of his Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature delivered at Harvard University, a place I once applied.

As a philosopher and semiotician, Eco spent a career parsing the meaning of meanings of words. Asked to contribute a detective story to an upcoming anthology, Eco “hunted through my desk drawers and retrieved a scribbling from the previous year – a piece of paper on which I had written down some names of monks.

“It meant that in the most secret part of my soul the idea for a novel had already been growing, but I was unaware of it. At that point, I had realized it would be nice to poison a monk while he was reading a mysterious book, and that was all. Now I started to write ‘The Name of the Rose.’”

Eco has a lot to say about The Empirical Author and the Model Reader. His confessions are absorbing, and much easier to absorb, I would think, in book form than in a lecture hall.

My confession is simpler than Eco’s: Remember to push Save every couple of minutes or you’re in trouble.


NOTES:

Umberto Eco – Born in Italy in 1932 and named after the inventor of a plug-in hybrid vehicle that Mussolini ordered destroyed? The author’s homepage in English

03 March 2011

Living in the Far Future with Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku is smarter than me and probably smarter than you, unless you really ARE a rocket scientist. Kaku is a quantum physicist who “grapples ... every day (with) the equations that govern the subatomic particles out of which the universe is created,” he says.

I have no idea how to grapple with subatomic particles. Despite this, I can understand most of what Kaku writes and says. You have to be really smart to be smart enough to make yourself clearly understood. It’s a gift, and Michio Kaku has it.

In his latest book “Physics of the Future” Kaku postulates “how science will shape human destiny and our daily lives by the year 2100" a time when we’ll all be dead. Our children and most of our grandchildren, all gone – unless...

Unless all the medical advances outlined here come true. In the future “DNA chips scattered throughout our environment” will constantly “monitor us for cancer cells years before a tumor forms.” We’ll have hand-held tricorders like in Star Trek. We’ll do MRIs on the spot. Doctors will order new organs grown directly from our own cells. Our descendants will have access to all this and a lot more. Maybe even at a price they can afford.

We will live longer and appear younger. Sixty will be the new twenty-five. It could happen.

“The Physics of the Future” is full of exciting, startling predictions, extrapolated from prototypes and research. Kaku insists his predictions, like those of Jules Verne, are based on best available science, and interviews with hundreds of cutting-edge scientists around the world.

In 1863 Jules Verne wrote “Paris in the Twentieth Century.” In that novel and in “From the Earth to the Moon” Verne predicted glass skyscrapers, air conditioning, TV, elevators, high-speed trains, gasoline powered automobiles, fax machines, even something resembling the Internet. He predicted the first moon mission, the size of the space capsule, location of the launch site in Florida, the number of astronauts on the mission, the length of time the voyage would last, weightlessness the astronauts would experience, and the final splashdown in the ocean.

Verne had gunpowder for rocket fuel, but even geniuses don’t get everything right.

Kaku offers chapters on the future of the computer, artificial intelligence, medicine, nanotechnology, energy, space travel, wealth, and humans themselves. He understands that science is morally neutral, and can be used for bad as well as good. He could give more thought to the risk of uneven distribution of all this progress. It could lead to future conflicts if we don’t do things right.

In the year 2100 I speak to my electronic wall and say “Molly (we call our wall Molly), I want to plan a European vacation. A real one. Not one of those holographic walk-throughs you are so good at. Please (we say please, even though Molly is a robot) check on flights, hotels, sites or events that may interest us. You know our tastes.

“In a few minutes, Molly has prepared a detailed itinerary.” Later, in the Roman Forum, a reconstruction of Imperial Rome is “resurrected in (my) contact lenses.” Language translation? Projected in your eye.

Kaku may have it wrong about wrapping wires around your skull in order to telepathically control your home, but gee whiz, how would I know?

You will enjoy this book. I did, a lot. See you in the future.



NOTES:

Michio Kaku’s homepage

His blog...

This link will take you to Mr Kaku’s Facebook fan page, where his personal appearances also are listed...