Words on Books... and a few other things from time to time

Dream Walking Through Bookstores

2012-02-09T19:13:00.000-08:00

If there is one thing I know well, it is bookstores. I used to own one, and over the years I’ve probably visited another couple hundred, in many countries, not all English-speaking.

A few weeks ago I had the chance to stop in to three independent stores in just a few days... all owned by the same people, Paul Jaffee and Barney Brown, co-founders of Copperfield’s, in Sonoma County, California. You can find two Copperfield’s in Sebastopol where they began, and two in Petaluma. They’re also in Montgomery Village Santa Rosa, plus the downtowns of Napa, Healdsburg and Calistoga; altogether, eight iterations of the same store, each one different, including two that specialize in used and rare books.

I shopped and browsed for the same things in three Copperfield’s, and the experiences could hardly have been more different. The Calistoga store felt winter sleepy and somewhat empty, like the surrounding town. The Healdsburg store by contrast was crowded, compact and well stocked. The one in Napa had the deepest selection and put me into a fine book-induced dream state.

There’s always an interested mind behind any truly interesting bookstore. How can this be, you ask? After all, all new books bookstores draw on the same universe of currently published books. That’s where the interested mind comes in – both the customer’s and the book buyer’s. If you purchase science books and cook books, say, the store will stock more of these. If the manager happens to be obsessed with chess and travel, you’ll find more of those as well.

Local management at Copperfield’s clearly influences each store’s style and content. I found many of the same authors in each store, but there were differences. One store stocked one Lee Child thriller; another store carried more than a dozen of his titles, some in multiples.

Contrast this with online stores that endeavor to have everything you could ever want in one virtual space. That very comprehensiveness can be discouraging. When you have everything, you want nothing.

The pseudo-friendly algorithm will attempt to tailor the shopping experience to what you’ve liked in the past, but only a human, with all the subtlety of cultural interaction between not-quite strangers, can put in your hands exactly the book you wanted before you knew you wanted it. Here’s a toast to people over data-mining mathematics.

Another way I know a good bookstore is by the physical effect it has on me. Often people in bookstores fall into some kind of trance-like state as they wander around.

This cannot happen to people who work there. The best ones are constantly aware of books out of place or leaning over each other; listening for customers with questions (My all-time favorite remains: “Where is your non-fiction section?”); aware of music too faint or too loud; of the need for a break or a crack at lunch.

Having left day-to-day bookselling behind, now I too fall into that browsing trance. It’s not that I start bumping into things. It’s more like entering a smooth, stand-up dream, where each book, fiction or not, kicks off a new story. Minutes after walking in I’ve already visited wartime France, seen loggers clutching axes. I’ve checked out a few favorite authors, and thumb-flipped through the most beautiful islands of Greece.

Walkable bookstores charm, seduce, excite, challenge and educate the open-minded dreamer, especially so for some lucky children.

Which brings us to World Book Night, April 23. Hundreds of people will be giving away thousands of free books around the world that night, and I just learned that I will be one of them.

“Don’t gloat,” the welcome letter cautions, “if a friend or colleague didn’t get this email.” Perhaps they picked one of thirty titles that already had been taken to zero by other enthusiastic potential book-givers. Or they entered their email address incorrectly.

As it turns out, several people in the Mendocino area have been picked to give away books in April. Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino plans to have a meeting for these people so we can compare notes and share fears about walking up to complete strangers, asking something such as “Have you read THIS book?” and then handing it to them.

Like The Millionaire of vintage TV, we aim to make people happy readers, with no negative consequences. If only the rest of life could be that easy.

NOTES

Copperfield’s home page...

World Book Night USA

World Book Night UK and Eire

Now Into Folding Paper Airplanes, Thank You Professor Weinstein

2012-02-02T18:38:00.000-08:00

There are so many things one might do with one’s short time here on the surface of planet Earth. One might save the world, or a small piece of it, or just for fun, one might fold paper airplanes.

If one wanted to fold paper airplanes, one might benefit from expert assistance. Maybe a PhD expert. Yes, that’s it – a professor of molecular genetics at Ohio State University who also is an experienced pilot and longtime origami enthusiast. Origami – you know – the art of folding squares of paper into magical things such as cranes or flowers, stars, dragons, boxes, roses, hearts, even Yoda.

The professor has arrived. He is here to help you fold paper that flies, soars, dips and looks good doing it.

The successful California publisher in Fort Bragg, Cypress House, later this year will present On Folded Wings, Paper Airplanes for All Ages, written by molecular geneticist Dr. Michael Weinstein, with aircraft illustrations by Mike Dietz.

You can do this. You can create the Diamondhead Staggerwing.

“An antique aircraft, the Beech Staggerwing is one of the most elegant ever built,” professor Weinstein writes, before entering nerdland: “This canard* is similar, in that the canard wing is lower and forward of the main wing.”

Can this book actually be For All Ages? I doubt my new granddaughter can do canard wings or inside reverse folds yet.

Before I read this book and learned about canard wings, measuring the speed of the River Seine, Smart Dart stun planes, Mandelbrot sets, Bird-base fighters and more, I already knew how to make one paper airplane. Someone showed me on a slow day in algebra class. I’ve flown my paper jet into teachers’ hair-do’s. One of my best efforts once came to rest stuck between the teacher’s sock and the Achilles notch in his sneaker.

Most often, however, my personal jet launched with a quick baseball toss, then lurched to the floor with a pitiful dent in its binder paper nose.

With the professor’s book I would have learned something about aerodynamics. I could have benefited from centuries of research on why things fly or don’t. I could have built a tail-dragger, a Gremlin, a Triangulon, or an Enormously Abstract Heron. I could have hit my teachers more often.

On Folded Wings shows you how to fly pieces of paper. But that’s not all. It’s a short introduction to the science of flight, written light-heartedly but seriously, too. Clear schematic drawings in full color take you step by step into the sky, or at least the ceiling.

You will learn pitch, roll, yaw and basic folds. Master these folds, build your airplane. All but one plan calls for a single piece of paper (the Twin Star, being a twin, takes two pieces of paper). You will learn about air speed, and why piston powered planes need overhauls. You will find out what makes an airplane go fast (“The answer is actually a bit more complex than you might think.”)

This book is a gem, highly recommended as an educational tool and as plain fun and games.

Right now I’m trying a radical new design – folding the entire book into the world’s heaviest paper airplane.

NOTES

On Folded Wings, Paper Airplanes for All Ages by Michael Weinstein. Cypress House paperback $16.95. ISBN 9781879384798. Publication date April, 2012.

Cypress House on the web

Yes, there is an Online Paper Airplane Museum!

And you can find them on Facebook as well...

And another one on Maui!

*Canard: (1) duck (2) a false report; rumour or hoax (3) an aircraft in which the tailplane is mounted in front of the wing. Tailplane: Also called (esp US): horizontal stabilizer a small horizontal wing at the tail of an aircraft to provide longitudinal stability. (From the World English Dictionary)

My Application

2012-02-01T15:38:00.000-08:00

This is what I wrote on my application to give away books on World Book Night...

Where do you intend to give away your books? (please give as much detail as possible)
I don't shop often at Safeway, preferring the local organic foods market and the locally owned bigger store. I see all my friends in these two locations, but few people I know in Safeway. Therefore, it will be a nervy challenge for me personally, and a great opportunity to approach relative strangers with such a magical gift.

To whom do you intend to give your books?
I'll be looking for people I never saw in my bookstore, people perhaps not dressed expensively. If I have copies of Because of Winn Dixie I'll look for children approx 8 - 13. Bel Canto is a fairly high level book but full of excitement and tension -- can be read purely on the adventure level so it won't be "literate" and offputting, but it is quite deep when one ponders what happens and the implications. Also has quite an emotional punch to it. People who read this book remember it.

Why do you want to give this book away? (less than 100 words)
As an independent bookseller for 26 years in Mendocino CA I recommended books endlessly; but never had the opportunity to give away a pile of them. What a pleasure and a treat to do this!

Note: it's "fewer than 100 words" not "less than..." but I didn't write that on the application. I want those books!

World Book Night

2012-01-26T19:29:00.000-08:00

UPDATE 2 February 2012: World Book Night (WBN) has extended the sign-up deadline to midnight on Monday, February 6, for book givers and for stores and libraries that would like to serve as book pick-up locations for the April 23 celebration of reading. The goal is to recruit 50,000 book givers and hundreds of bookstores and libraries to be book pick-up locations across the country.

The non-profit people at World Book Night want to hand you 20 free copies of a current paperback book for you to give away on Monday, April 23.

You have to apply to do this, they have to pick you, and you have to apply right now – before midnight on February 1. If selected, you will choose your book from a list of 30 provided by participating publishers. Then give away the title you chose. World Book Night.

You’re encouraged to give books to strangers, not to family and friends. Find “light” or “non” readers” and hand each a book until your 20 have disappeared. They’re looking for 50,000 readers to give away a million books. You can be one of these inspirational people.

What’s the catch? Well, you have to do this right away, as the deadline is almost here, and WBN has to chose among thousands of applications to pick the most worthy. You tell them which three books you’d give away, and why. If your application is approved one of the titles you picked will be boxed and waiting for you at a nearby independent bookstore or community library.

In the meantime you can start to think about how to spot a light reader. How you tell a light from a heavy reader. I myself have been all of those things in the past, non, light and heavy, sometimes at the same time.

When I was in my 20s I hardly read a book or looked at TV. I was busy changing the world and chasing women, not in that order. Reading furthered neither, or so I thought at the time.

I was the classic “light” to “non” reader. Read a Vonnegut here and a Catch-22 there. Pondered deeply How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Complete Idiot by John Muir (probably not his real name). Got oil stains on it. Read the Berkeley Barb and The Oracle. Not much else.

When I finally stumbled into bookselling I had a lot of catching up to do.

Suddenly I was surrounded by people who read books. All the time, night and day. They talked about them. They had opinions, favorites and failures. This was a new thing for me. I was educated by customers, by the opinionated people who worked the bookstore floor, by out-of-town sales people, catalogs, and book chatter I picked up everywhere.

During the initial decade I had little time for reading. I had to open up in the morning and close down at night, add up receipts and walk them to the bank, pay bills, negotiate with landlords, fight fire and flood, make smart decisions about everything, not least of which included figuring out which titles to stock. Little time for reading anything but publisher catalogs.

In 2006 the bookselling monkey, fat and sassy, jumped off my back. Now I am the obsessed, catching-up-with-classics, free-form reader I always wanted to be.

People in their 20s and early 30s typically don’t read much. It’s not because of electronics, it’s because first-person, hands-on life does not encourage the contemplative life. This opinion may be totally wrong of course, as it is based solely on my own experience.

So.. If you successfully sign up for World Book Night you will then be presented with a list of 30 titles. Pick the book you want to give away.

I looked at the list of free books. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ll admit it – I don’t read a lot of fiction, and of the books on the freebies list I think I may have read two. Two of 30, or about six per cent. I am definitely a “light” reader in relation to these admirable books. Maybe someone will spot me on the evening of April 23 wandering the streets somewhere, and have mercy on my lightly literate soul.

Maybe she’ll hand me a copy of Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Sorry – that’s the one title I think I have read. Show me The Book Thief, The Lovely Bones, The Poisonwood Bible, Q is for Quarry, orThe Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I haven’t read those yet.

Not Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – I have a copy but haven’t read it yet. Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo? I THINK maybe I read that. Let me take a look at the first page...

NOTES

Here’s where to register to be a book giver.

More information about World Book Night USA

And the British site, where World Book Night was invented

Venice "La Citta' Magica"

2012-01-19T19:48:00.000-08:00

Read the text below and do the exercise: “Venice the magical city, the city of water, dominatrix of the seas, the city of a thousand faces, the mysterious city.”

Odd that my Italian teacher, born in Vicenza, near Venice, now living in Istanbul – odd that she would send me this exercise in the Italian language just now, when I’m reading the magical book Venice: Pure City by acclaimed British writer Peter Ackroyd.

To open this beautifully constructed book is to fall into the poetry of Venice:

"They voyaged into the remote and secluded waters.They came in flat-bottomed boats, moving over the shallows. They were exiles, far from their own cities or farms, fleeing from the marauding tribes of the North and the East."

For those who love Venice, only this kind of poetry can do it justice. He continues:

"This was a solitary place, its silence broken only by the calls of the seabirds and the crash of the billows of the sea... at night it was the setting of a vast darkness, except in those places where the moon illumined the restless waters... Yet in the daylight of the exiles’ approach the silver sea stretched out into a line of mist, and the cloudy sky seemed to reflect the silvery motions of the water. They were drawn into a womb of light..."

These paragraphs open a short history of Venice, as if any recounting could conjure Venice’s magic, an admittedly unique and indescribable phenomenon. The centuries-old power of Venice is long departed, leaving ruins, mists and reflections for modern eyes to ponder.

Ackroyd describes the building of Venice as “an act of communal perseverance against nature.” Piles of oak, larch and elm were driven into the ground beneath strata of clay and sand, sixteen feet down. Cross-beams were laid on, then cement and broken stone, a decking of wooden planks, and more cement. “From these foundations Venice rose, resting upon a petrified forest” that is “almost imperishable” – if kept perpetually below the waters’ surface.

The buildings of Venice rose in brick,faced with marble facades – gorgeous Baroque and Gothic faces somewhat unrelated to the buildings behind them. This may remind an American reader of frontier towns. Jury-built wooden buildings on main streets boasted larger-than-life facades, as if the poor structures were swathed in elegant costumes with the backs cut out.

The Venetians have always been famously insecure. They live on shifting mounds of mud, at the mercy of ocean tides and the falling water table, dependent on trade to exist. Until the last century, drinking water in Venice was collected in neighborhood cisterns, compromised by sea water leaking in on the same conduits and pipes. Sometimes ships were sent to nearby rivers to collect fresh water.

The Venetians were relatively safe, but never wholly secure. I wonder if 19th Century settlers in California coastal logging towns sensed a similar insecurity.

The great redwoods were everywhere, but each mill town, and there were dozens, worked to cut them down ever more efficiently. Exposed hillsides silted up rivers and the fishing industry largely disappeared. When the big trees were gone the loggers departed. Mendocino survives now as a largely empty wooden town on its ocean-battered bluff, the remaining members of a working class serving tourists rather than industry.

Mendocino’s Historical Review Board insists their singular vision of the past be built out today. Similarly in Venice, Acroyd writes, “The contemporary restoration of many buildings... is a case history of seeming rather than being. In their devotion to appearances the restorers have created an unreal city, bearing little relation to its past or its present.”

Awash in tourists, both Venice and Mendocino ask the visitor to pretend things are as they always were. Even at its height Venice was insecure, isolated, inward looking, melancholy. Now it is our turn to tour – in museum dioramas – towns that once forged steel, built locomotives and cut down forests.

It amounts to a creation of fakes, Ackroyd believes. He quotes a German visitor from the early 20th century who remarked that Venice represented “the tragedy of a surface that has been left by its foundation.”

Still, the falseness “does not render Venice superficial,” Ackroyd writes. “Quite the contrary. The attention to surface, without depth, provokes a sense of mystery and of unknowability.”

NOTES

“The Futurist movement of Italy... in its manifesto... declared that it was time ‘to fill the stinking little canals with the rubble of the tottering infected old palaces. Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots’; the entire city was a ‘great sewer of traditionalism.’”

Venice: Pure City by Peter Ackroyd. Anchor Books paperback $21. ISBN 9780307473790.

The New York Times has a page collecting its articles on the author...

Decent article and a classic photo of the author...

2012-01-12T23:18:00.001-08:00

Spending time with new granddaughter this week. Everyone is into hugs and tickles. The women in this house have oxytocin running through their little blue veins.

Oxytocin is sometimes called “the cuddle hormone.” This drug is reputed to make women especially affectionate with babies.

This explains a lot, at least to me.

In the United Kingdom, McDonalds has temporarily begun providing books instead of toys with Happy Meals. On February 7 Happy Meals revert to the usual plastic toy delivery system along with the burgers, fries and chicken nuggets.

The books chosen – nine million of them are expected to be given away – are from the Mudpuddle Farm series, written by award-winning author Michael Morpurgo.

Morpurgo is the author of War Horse, a sentimental young adult novel set during World War I, later adapted for the stage and now a major movie by Steven Spielberg.

Each book comes with a finger puppet – a toy. McDonalds simply cannot give up on the toy idea.

Britain’s National Literary Trust is backing the promotion. They say no more than one British child in three owns even a single book. They want to change this.

In the New York Times, author David Bornstein reports on a nonprofit organization named First Book, which he says “is spearheading a new market mechanism that is delivering millions of new, high quality books to low-income children through thousands of nonprofit organizations and... schools.”

One commenter on the article noted, “The quality and diversity of books available from First Book is wonderful. Generally, with a budget of 2 dollars per book, the books that children have access to are poorly written, poorly illustrated, poorly bound, etc. With First Book, a budget of 2 dollars per book gives you hardcover books, award-winners, bilingual books, and more!”

In 2008, First Book launched its marketplace “with the goal of making books systematically available at deeply reduced prices - typically 50 to 90 percent off - to any organization certified tax-exempt and serving children in need,” Bornstein reported.

This scheme has important implications for everyone. If the experience of owning books is key to children’s motivation and learning, First Book is a wonderful thing. Publishers have an additional, dependable place to sell their books, even at deep discounts, encouraging them to keep on producing quality books.

First Book began as a book “bank” – a means to distribute publisher overstocks to reading programs. 85 million books have been given away in this manner, but in recent times smaller print runs and increased need have shown the shortcomings of this system. First Book added the marketplace to their offerings.

First Book has many allies in the effort to get books into the hands of children. At Mendocino Coast Hospital newborns receive Goodnight Moon in English or Spanish, purchased at discount from local bookstores and donated by the teachers’ organization Delta Kappa Gamma.

In Wisconsin and Minnesota the volunteer group Neighborhood Little Free Libraries builds simple "take a book, leave a book" wooden structures in front yards, by a sidewalk, coffee shop or park. They hold 20-30 books that kids and adults can give and take.

In southern California the organization Access Books collects and donates books to local libraries under the slogan “Give a child a book, she’ll be happy. Give a child a library, she’ll be literate.” Book Ends in Los Angeles has donated over 2 million books to classrooms and youth organizations.

There are many more such organizations, and some are listed in the Notes section of my wordsonbooks blog.

In Mendocino county citizens last fall voted a sales tax increase to permanently fund public libraries. As someone said, we need another Andrew Carnegie to fund a wave of new library construction so we can have as many libraries as Starbucks.

Wouldn’t that be interesting!

NOTES

McDonalds in the Huffington Post

David Bornstein in The New York Times on children owning or not owning books

Neighborhood Little Free Libraries

Access Books “With Literary and Access for All”

The Book Thing, where every book in the store is free but your daily take-away is limited to 150,000 books.

The name of our organization is "Look. It's My Book!" That says it all. When people ask where the money comes from, we reply with the simple truth: "people like you and me." The need is enormous, and for the children, the time is now. For fifteen dollars a year, someone can buy a school child 6 books -a small act of kindness that may make a big difference to that child.

The Libri Foundation donates children's books to rural libraries.

Another way to donate, and for free, is through sites like Click to Give. Advertisers pay for your daily click, and people get books.

Behind the Book, a NYC-based literacy organization, donates new books to students as part of a classroom reading promotion program, where we bring in the author of the book to lead several workshops and where the students work with the author to create their own original written work

How to Write a Thriller

2012-01-04T19:25:00.000-08:00

I was standing around in the mysteries section of my favorite local independent bookstore Christmas week – specifically that lost week between Christmas and New Years – looking for another Lee Child novel to read. Child writes thrillers, not mysteries, but that’s where I found him.

Brought Worth Dying For to the counter. A woman spotted the flashy red cover and exclaimed, “Wow – Lee Child – he’s a great read!” as if I wanted her opinion. It is good to meet a fellow fan.

You don’t get that on a Kindle. Gray sweater, gold chain on her neck, about 50. Real person, standing on a real carpet, in sight of the ocean. Nothing electronic about her.

Why do so many readers find these sometimes gory, always suspenseful Jack Reacher novels so gripping? Why do I read these books so fast? I try to stop at midnight but rarely can.

Lee Child’s ongoing character Jack Reacher is ex-military – definitely a John Wayne type. He’s a drifter without fixed address. Trouble finds him. He’s a never-lose street fighter, accurate with any weapon that comes to hand. And in all these novels Reacher vanquishes whatever he sets out to vanquish. John Wayne all the way. Also a Mission Impossible Tom Cruise type, except Reacher is way taller and would crush Tom Cruise.

Lee Child uses all the tricks known to successful thriller writers and he does it well. Even the most plain descriptive passages advance the action:

“The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building, six and a half million square feet, thirty thousand people, more than seventeen miles of corridors, but it was built with just three street doors, each of them opening into a guarded pedestrian lobby.”

Soon Reacher is striding through radial three across B wing to A wing, pursued by a bunch of – probably -- cops.

And you keep on reading because chapters end like this:

“I thought: should I be worried? I was under arrest. In a town where I’d never been before. Apparently for murder. But I knew two things. First, they couldn’t prove something had happened if it hadn’t happened. And second, I hadn’t killed anybody.

“Not in their town, and not for a long time, anyway.”

And the books begin well. Take this, from Killing Floor:

“I was arrested in Eno’s diner. At twelve o’clock. I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.”

From Gone Tomorrow:

“Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of telltale signs. Mostly because they’re nervous. By definition they’re all first timers.”

You read that, you hang on for the ride, in this case a fateful subway ride.

In a 2006 essay, writer Linda Adams said for a thriller to work you need High Stakes. Planning. Pacing. A Goal. Credibility.

No Unnecessary Details: "In one of Clive Cussler's books, he interrupts a scene where a helicopter is about to crash to explain why the helicopter has to crash on a particular side. This stops the fast pace of the action scene, and it isn't needed for the reader to understand what's going on."

You have to have the Ticking Time Bomb. Dot the I's and Cross the T's. Be thorough.

Readers whip through Lee Child’s 500-page books faster than insomniacs eat ice cream, faster than a .338 mm bullet leaves the barrel. Almost faster than that.

Chapters are short and punchy. Reading Worth Dying For by page 100 I had finished Chapter 15. Six point six pages per chapter. Can’t get more entertaining than that.

NOTES

Linda Adams’ essay ...

Lee Child’s home on the web ...

The first five Reacher novels are Killing Floor; Die Trying; Tripwire; Running Blind; Echo Burning.

The most recent five: Nothing to Lose; Gone Tomorrow; 61 Hours; Worth Dying For; The Affair.

All published in paperback by Dell; Delacorte Press in hard cover.

The Pursuit of Italy

2011-12-29T17:49:00.000-08:00

British historian David Gilmour’s latest book, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of A Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples is simply the best one-volume history of Italy, as well as a deeply entertaining argument against the idea of nationhood on that storied peninsula.

Books like this one usually are found on the back pages of university press catalogs, languishing in their stolid scholarship, published for experts, read only by experts. The fact that The Pursuit of Italy is published in Britain by Penguin and here by Farrar, Straus & Giroux speaks for its engaging readability and usefulness, and of course its potential saleability.

Italy is one of the top three most-visited European countries, for all the well-known reasons. Those who wonder why Italy is so contradictory, so multi-layered and difficult to understand, will love this book for the way it un-parses a convoluted story.

Beginning with the ancient Romans and continuing through last year, Sir David walks his readers through Italian history: debunking, demystifying, yet always in awe of the local magic.

Gilmour argues that Italy was founded on deception, patriotic myths and military aggression, and never truly unified – not deep down, not permanently.

When the Kingdom of Italy was formally proclaimed in March, 1860, suddenly everyone, north and south, became subjects of Piedmont, a small region in the north between Milan and Venice. Same monarch, Victor Emmanuel II, same capital (Turin), and the same Piedmont constitution for everyone. New name, however.

In his famous Italian novel The Leopard author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa notes the various plebiscites establishing Piedmont’s rule in Sicily were often impossibly unanimous Yes votes due to corruption and double dealing by the new authorities. Any nation begun on such obvious and dispiriting lies will never have much enthusiasm for the trappings of democracy. The southerners felt at the outset they were a conquered people, not equals in the new state.

Gilmour views the “real Italy” as “the one trampled on by the Risorgimento” (the nationalist uprising that created the country in the 1860s). He calls that movement a “drastic and insensitive imposition,” one that “tried to make its inhabitants less Italian and more like other peoples, to turn them into conquerors and colonialists.”

“United Italy never became the nation its founders had hoped for,” he writes. “A single region – either Tuscany or the Veneto – would rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art and the civilization of its past. But the parts have not added up to a coherent or identifiable whole... it is a disappointment... ‘a country that has never been as good as the sum of all her people.’”

The Pursuit of Italy is grounded in fact and an underlying love for the people who “have created much of the world’s greatest art, architecture and music, and have produced one of its finest cuisines, some of its most beautiful landscapes and many of its most stylish manufactures.”

Gilmour has been interviewed in Italy, and discussed in journals and newspapers. However, no Italian publisher to date has produced Gilmour’s book in Italian.

Modern Italians fear what some far right parties in Italy are pushing – racism, secession, hatred of immigrants. It seems to me the fear of falling back into fascism informs negative comments on Gilmour’s book.

Most Italians have not read this book, but they don’t like it much, anyway.

NOTES

Special thanks to sales representative Gigi Reinheimer for thinking of me when she comped this book last fall.

The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour. Farrar, Straus and Giroux hard cover $32.50. ISBN 9780374283162. E Book $16.99 available for instant download from your local independent bookstore. SKU: rDQbi3sYBVIC.

The quote ‘a country that has never been as good as the sum of all her people’ comes from Luigi Barzini, author of The Italians, a book I read many years ago. It is one of the liveliest dissections of the Italian spirit ever written.

New York Times Book Review on The Pursuit of Italy...

The following links are in Italian; Google can translate the text for you.

Italians on David Gilmour ... Italian interview with the author... Corriere della Sera...
Saturno: inserto culturale de Il Fatto Quotidiano...

Another Holiday, Whatever You Call It Mr Cranky Pants

2011-12-22T16:47:00.000-08:00

It is my task this morning to blend with the red and green: the red plaid socks and the green cookies.

Six years ago, on December 25, I wrote:

A friend of mine pointed out the nicest thing about the Christmas frenzy is that people are thinking about other people, and what gifts to give them.

The pushing and the shoving, the wrapping rush followed by the post office rush followed by the rush to get something for someone who sent you something but you didn't have something ready to give that someone...

We're doing all of this for our fellow humans, and, perhaps, to celebrate a birth.

I’ve written many things over the years, this time of year, but this is my favorite, from eleven years ago. Eleven years ago!

This is the season of wonder. Young children feel it immediately. Adults must be reminded.

Sunset in Mendocino was scorchingly magnificent. The sky lit up interior walls as if the ocean was on fire.

In the bookstore we sounded the Sunset Alert, used only when exceptional winter displays are in danger of being missed. A few moments later thirty people were standing in clusters on the sidewalk, faces turned west, watching the sky bleed in technicolor. Coruscating blues and purples and oranges reflected off their sunglasses.

We gave the sunset our total attention. It was surprisingly quiet.

Scientists think spectacular sunsets are a function of increased air pollution, not angels. Whatever. When the universe calls out for attention that spectacularly, we watch.

The ancient Pacific Ocean ends a few feet from where I work all day. It washes up on the Mendocino cliffs. We hear, see and smell it, but no longer take notice of it unless we're surfing, fishing, or trying out a new pair of binoculars.

Sometimes I reflect that I live on a track not much wider than the one zoo animals lay down in their endless circuit between sleep and food. I drive home, to work, and back again, with little change year 'round.

On my five minute commute I pass a pond filled seasonally with wild geese, a blue heron, egrets, ducks, the occasional chicken, and a grazing cow or two. At Russian Gulch I crane to the right for a quick glimpse of the ocean.

As I turn in to Mendocino I have a moment to see if the tide is low, the ocean rough, the sky foggy or clear. On Main Street I smell the iodine from freshly stranded kelp if there's been a storm, and most days something delicious roasting over at the Moose Café.

For months at a time I have neglected to walk along the nearby headlands or climb down to one of the sandy beaches. I resolve to walk the headlands barefoot, more than once. I pledge to make time to chat with anyone, any time. I will watch the sun set.

I know a long-time saleswoman -- one of many -- whose job is driving to appointments all over northern California flogging books, greeting cards and calendars to retail stores. Each December she bakes small breads for every one of her buyers. This year her breads came in cranberry, pumpkin and lemon flavors.

Joselyn walks into my study, sleepy from a nap, chewing on some roasted peanuts. "If we're not careful, we'll eat all the bad things," she says, handing me some nuts. Then she laughs.

That’s what I wrote back then. This is what I’m writing now: The holidays can get old, if you let them. Mr Cranky Pants gets tired of the music, the colors, the insistent begging of monotheistic bell ringers.

But at the same time Mr Cranky Pants is happy to be alive, to be sharing, to be able to remember good times and look forward to more. What else can one ask, in fact?

Happy Holidays to You and Yours, No Matter Why, When and How You May or May Not Celebrate Whatever it Is You Do or Don’t Celebrate.

It’s Not All Bad News. No it’s Not. Yes it Is. No it’s Not!

2011-12-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

My gift to you this season – good news from the wobbly world of books.

“McGraw-Hill Education Cuts 550 Jobs” No, that’s not the good news.

Amazon Unveils $6 Million Annual ‘Fund’ To Entice Authors and Publishers into its Prime Lending Library.” No, that’s not good news either. The $6 million fund “designed to woo publishers and authors to participate in the Kindle store,” requires them to give Amazon “at least” a 90-day exclusive access in the Kindle store.

Those who receive gifts of the Amazon Kindle and other E-Readers may not yet realize that in some cases, e-books are more expensive than their printed equivalents, the Wall Street Journal recently concluded. That won’t be good news for them.

Oh, and this one: Amazon is paying you up to $15 to shop in local stores, but use your smart portable device to buy what you like online. Paying you to do this. Not good, and pretty damn offensive to retailers who pay rents and local taxes while helping customers find things. That’s definitely awful.

One reader asked, “What has Amazon done for your community? Do they pay taxes? Sales tax? Give you donations? Support your kid's school raffles/teams/theater productions? Bring interesting authors for you to meet? Create a cultural and social center for you to meet like-minded folks? Let you use the bathroom in an emergency? Employ your kid in school internship programs? Bookstores and other independent businesses do all the above and more. We are your neighbors, your friends, your teachers, your babysitters -- is Amazon? Support your family. Support your neighbors, your town and community. Unless all you want in the future is a glowing screen for a friend, that is.”

Roxanne Coady, a bookseller in Connecticut, made the modest proposal that Amazon pay brick and mortar booksellers a finder’s fee for purchases made online by customers who live near actual bookstores.

In a related development, the US Justice Department as well as the European Union are looking into how e-book prices are set. There are anti-trust implications, and lawsuits, and it’s a tussle among Apple, and publishers, and Amazon, over money. One reader commented, “ePublishers and traditional publishers are fighting over who gets the biggest slice of the pie. How authors make a living, what people read and the social importance of literature are secondary matters.” And that’s not good.

Another person added, “Independent(s) (bookstores) are the life raft, but some publishers don't believe that. Yet, when outlets -- or ‘showrooms’ as bookstores are called -- go, and readers can't find what they want, so will sales. The sales pie will shrink to become more like a muffin or moon pie.” That wouldn’t be good.

It’s not all bad news. Yes it is. No it isn’t. The American Booksellers Association, which works on behalf of independent bookstores nationwide, reported its members had sales increases in November, while book sales as a whole – read sales in chain stores and discount outlets – were significantly down. That is good news.

In recent months we’ve seen a number of small bookstores open, and only a few close down. And that certainly is good news.

Among the new store announcements: La Casa Azul will open next Spring in East Harlem, New York. The Maple Street Bookshop in New Orleans is opening two more branches there. Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion fame will open his new bookstore, Common Good Books, in April at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota. The I Love Books Bookstore has opened in Kingsport, Tennessee, and owner T. Glen Moody shared a wonderful observation with a local reporter:

“This is the bookstore of the 50s and 60s, but it is also the bookstore of the future. The time of the big box bookstore has come and gone. The new model is the small, local bookstore where customer service is key.”

To that thought I can only say – wow. It is a mixed bag out there. The world of books and publishing is not only wobbly, it’s in turmoil, world-wide. Do your part. Read more books. Even buy a few, if you can afford it.

When a Bookstore Was Just a Bookstore, and a Phone Was Just a Phone

2011-12-08T14:30:00.000-08:00

The eight Hawaiian islands rise magnificently from a warm blue sea 2,390 miles and five hours from the coast of California. They are beautiful, peaceful, isolated, struggling with problems both environmental and human, but also beautiful, peaceful, and isolated.

On this visit we packed at least 25 pounds of books, causing – by their weight alone – the islands to further slip under the pounding Pacific. We observed that many readers have converted to Kindles and E-Readers of various kinds, thus reducing the cost of checking overweight suitcases.

In action the Kindle from Amazon looked dull and gray, like my hair; the IPad bright and shiny, like my hair used to look. One user told me gray E-Ink is easier to read than a full-color screen, but I wouldn’t know, not having read from either for hours on end.

Too many island visitors look to Amazon as their first choice in books and electronic reading. This is a sad mistake, for a number of reasons, but in Hawaii it’s sort of understandable.

We visited Talk Story Bookstore, “The Western-Most Bookstore in the United States!” on Hanapepe Road in Hanapepe, Kauai (“Welcome to Hanapepe – Hawaii’s Biggest Little Town”). It’s run by Ed and Cynthia Justus. Ed was away, serving on the County Council. Cynthia was there. Periodically she called out to customers lost in the stacks: “Hello There! Aloha! We have lots of sections here, just ask if you need anything!” and we wandered about, looking for mindless spy novels to add to our collection of mindless spy novels.

At Talk Story authors are divided by sex: Female writers to the left, by the windows, male writers to the right. On their website Cynthia explains, “The reason why is every day someone comes in and asks, ‘Do you have a book by....’ and they go, ‘I don’t remember the author’s name, but he,’ or ‘I don’t remember the name of the author, but she,’ and now we’ve got 50 per cent, and we’re able to sell them a book.”

I had to wonder what they did with names like Georges Sand, or Dusty Rhodes, or Robin, Whitney, Storm, Piper, Montana, Kai, Avery – male? female? How would you know?

Talk Story is not only the westernmost bookstore on Kauai, it’s the only-est one, too. Over the years other small bookstores, new and used, have dropped away. This year the last remaining store, Borders Books & Music, disappeared into bankruptcy after 16 years on the island. This left a large empty building at the Kukui Grove Center in Lihue, and unemployed about 40 booksellers.

Talk Story bought up some Borders shelving, making their crowded store even more crammed. It was poetically perfect recycling, and we applaud them for their initiative and their obvious success. Talk Story is a community gathering spot and a venue for musical events that take place on the sidewalk just outside.

It was island superstores such as Borders and Barnes & Noble that drove out the smaller independents. When the giants decide to close, it’s not easy for smaller stores to come back.

We walked around in the warm, moist air, fantasizing about starting a new books bookstore on Kauai. We would fill it full of the latest and bestest and hire only the smartest booksellers.

And when people walked around our store taking smartphone photos of books they planned to buy later online, we’d sigh, and murmur Aloha! and dream of the days when a bookstore was just a bookstore, and a phone was just a phone.

NOTES:

Talk Story Bookstore

YES On Tax Fairness

2011-11-10T22:50:00.000-08:00

Something I voted for actually won.

I can hardly believe it. This never happens.

Except this time we managed to beat the Howard Jarvis-inspired, Prop 13-inspired, difficult two-thirds rule on tax increases – by a whopping nine percent over the required two-thirds affirmative.

Local taxpayers consulted both their wallets and their consciences and voted a one-eighth of a cent sales tax increase into law by an approximate ratio of 11 to 3, countywide. Hooray and congratulations!

Soon, Mendocino county will open libraries five days a week instead of three; can afford to reinstate after-school programs for children; can once again purchase significant numbers of new books; will “not only survive but thrive,” as one librarian said.

On a closely related subject, you may have heard about the shady tax break some Internet companies offer California customers by failing to collect state sales tax on their purchases.

Californians who don’t pay sales tax are supposed to pay an equal use tax instead. Few do.

State law requires purchasers to pay tax on tangible property “used, consumed or stored” here. According to the law, “Consumers in California owe use tax on purchases from out-of-state retailers when the out-of-state retailer is not registered to collect California tax, or for some other reason does not collect California tax.”

Booksellers have been in the vanguard of a nationwide effort to change this situation – to level the buying field and increase fairness, not to mention needed revenue for the state. They ask why a book purchased in a California bookstore costs an additional 7.25% in state tax plus local tax, when the same book purchased from Amazon, for example, is in effect completely tax free?

Many forces are coming together in an effort to fix this, not only in California but in other states losing out on millions in dollars that the law says is owed but is rarely collected.

The big news recently was the announcement that a bipartisan – if you can believe it – bipartisan group of US Senators introduced the so-called Marketplace Fairness Act, which would grant states the authority to compel online retailers to collect sales taxes.

The proposed legislation would ensure that online retailers collect taxes, while dealing with concerns raised by smaller online vendors who fear they would be unfairly impacted. The proposed law would exempt online sellers whose annual sales are less than $500,000.

The National Retail Federation came out in favor of this version of the proposed law. Their CEO said, “In a 21st Century retail industry, we ought to have a 21st Century system to ensure uniform collection of sales tax.... Congress has gotten the message and is ready to act. As the industry that employs one out of every four Americans, we are determined to help make this goal become reality.”

And here’s the amazing thing – Amazon supports this bill, even after spending millions of dollars and much lobbying time to defeat previous proposals. Not long ago Amazon temporarily cut loose all their California vendors as a protest against attempts to make the giant e-tailer collect sales tax in the state.

An Amazon spokesman said, “Amazon strongly supports enactment of the (bill) and will work with Congress, retailers, and the states to get this bipartisan legislation passed.”

This reversal from Amazon puzzles me. Why would the world’s largest online retailer willingly give up a tax advantage? Apparently, the justification is in the provision exempting vendors who individually sell less than half a million dollars of goods a year. Amazon likely could continue to avoid collecting sales tax on consumer purchases from these small fry who sell on Amazon’s pages – which sales make up a significant part of Amazon’s overall business.

Whatever the motives, this bill reflects a national change of mood. People have shown themselves willing to pay taxes to support services. National politicians have heard that message.

Many communities this past Tuesday voted in various tax increases. Who knows, maybe we can return to the days when there was music and art in the schools, libraries were open seven days, roads were repaired...

No, don’t wake me up.

I like this dream. I think we have a winner.

NOTES:

Publishers Weekly reports on recent developments... as does Shelf Awareness.

California tax FAQ brought to you by the Board of Equalization...

FURTHER THOUGHTS: However final vote goes, some retailers will be helped by this, some not. There is serious lobbying by trade organizations and corporations large and small on both sides of this bill. Comments on the InterGoogle are all over the place – from thinking it’s an unalloyed good thing, as I do, to believing it’s an attempt to kill the largest online retailers or at least to curtail their success.

One commenter points out that Amazon could neutralize the effect of sales tax simply by choosing to additionally discount purchases in each state by the exact amount of local sales tax, so that a discounted sold at $50 item with no sales tax would be equal to the same discounted item sold at, say, $47.50 plus local sales tax, or $50. We shall see...

Good News about Bookselling, Really, I Mean It, No Kidding!

2011-11-03T23:09:00.000-07:00

Want to hear some bad news? Some ankle-wobbling throat-tightening bad thing? Neither do I. Here’s some good news, culled from recent editions of various trade journals in the publishing and bookselling sectors.

From Shelf Awareness, a daily trade online newsletter:

October 7: “A mobile pop-up bookshop shaped like a cat is the result of a second collaboration between arts collective NAM and Numabooks, a group of artists whose medium is the book. The latest incarnation, Numabookcat, will be on display at (their) gallery in Tokyo... For 4200 yen you have a little conversation with the host, who, based on those talks, will select 12 books for you. You will then get one book in the mail for an entire year.”

October 12: Two new bookstores reported opening. Owner Lara Hamilton of The Book Larder on Facebook in Seattle says she wants her cookbooks store “to be a place where people can gather and linger, where if we're not too busy, someone might offer you a cup of tea or something we've been cooking from a book.”

And the former Border’s location in San Francisco’s Stonestown Mall has become an independent bookstore named ODE Books. New owner Martin Carmody saved a ton of money on signage – ODE is three adjacent letters leftover from the old Borders sign. Sort of like the Toyota pickup we saw around Mendocino re-branded TOY.

October 13: Seven former employees of a now-closed Borders Express bookstore in Capitola are in the process of putting together a brand new store named Inklings at the same location in the mall. One of them told Shelf Awareness, “We really want to make a place for the people that come here regularly and just keep doing what we love doing.... They saw how we ran this store, how passionate we were about what we were doing and how much we wanted to keep doing it. They weren't really buying the store. They were buying us.”

In Kansas, Shawnee Books & Toys opened recently at a former Borders. New owner Michelle Ranney had “stayed through the chain's liquidation process, seeing firsthand the effects of a bookstore's closure in a community. Those were the ones that would make you cry: the teenagers that would come in that had been coming to the store for like 10 years and be like, ‘this is my home.’” She added, “I want people to still feel that way. I want kids to grow up here.”

October 17: Nancy Duniho, owner of the The Corner-Stone Bookshop in Plattsburgh NY plans to keep her store open “for the foreseeable future” after discussing the possibility of selling with 15 potential buyers this fall. “I had great encouragement from my clientele all summer long to stay open. They said they didn't want Plattsburgh to be without a bookstore,” Duniho said.

October 21: The Avid Bookshop, Athens, GA celebrates its grand opening tonight with a party featuring music, a poetry reading, and the ‘ringing in’ of the permanent art installation in the children's section. Tomorrow afternoon the store will have a celebration for children that includes story times, visits by storybook characters and more.

Bookselling This Week profiled Broadway Books in Portland, OR, noting that earlier this year, when Borders was closing, some of the bookshop's customers expressed concern for the indie. “People kept asking, ‘Are you going to be alright?’” said Roberta Dyer, co-owner of Broadway Books. “So we felt an honest response was needed.”

They produced a State of the Union address which, in addition to explaining the recent changes in the book industry and what they meant for the store, listed 10 things that the store was doing to remain competitive, and 10 things that customers could do, in turn, to keep Broadway Books alive.

“Oh, we put it everywhere,” said Dyer. “We really wanted to make sure we got the word out. The response was terrific. We wanted to be as transparent as possible. We worked really hard on it and carefully considered every word, so we were really gratified when the response was so strong.”

The response led to what Dyer said has been the shop's “best year ever” and customers are now “more understanding of how our business works... (It’s about) being informed enough to make a decision about where you're shopping or how you're shopping. It empowers people. We're sensing that our customers are smarter about that kind of thing than they used to be.”

I could go on with all this not bad, actually very good, news. I read about things like this almost every day. But we’re out of time and space. On my blog I’ll have links to all this and more. Go booksellers!

NOTES:

Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino CA recently held a community meeting along the lines of Broadway Books and other stores. Their manifesto...

Thanks to the good people at Shelf Awareness for keeping us up on all the news.

KillingFloorDieTryingTripwireRunningBlindEchoBurningWithoutFail

2011-10-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

The frost is on the pumpkin. Dr Bronner’s 18-in-1 Pure Lavender Castile Soap Made with Organic Oils congeals white each morning, a sure sign that winter is approaching. The temperature edges below 40 degrees and the Myers Lemon has new purple buds. It’s fall, the nights are long, and it’s a good time to read scary books.

I don’t mean vampire scary or ghost in the woods scary. I mean Lee Child scary, books like Killing Floor and Die Trying, books where bullets fly and often hit things, loyalties are tested, and the hero always wins. Books like that. Books by a British TV writer turned New York thriller author.

When the sun shines there are things to do. When the sun goes down, around here it’s readin’ time.

Lee Child has a formula and he repeats it from book to book. There is a predictability to the mayhem, just as predictable as the Pachelbel Canon at a Mendocino wedding.

Hero Jack Reacher echoes John Wayne, down to his repeatedly stale, old-fashioned relationships with women. You know he’s going to survive. After all, he has to appear in another dozen books. But you still worry maybe this time his captivity, torture, mistreatment, misdirection, bullet wounds, chain whipping and so on will be his last. No, it won’t. He will survive.

You’d think these books would pall, that you’d stop midway and ask yourself: Don’t I have better things to do? Why am I wasting my time with these gory things? But you don’t stop, because Lee Child is a master of this kind of writing. You think ahead and try to guess what’s coming next. You spend serious moments pondering who is loyal and who bent.

These books are long – the first three in the series run more than 500 pages each – and I read each one in a burst of enthusiasm. I pretty much used every spare moment to find out how Jack Reacher would get out of the next situation, how he would dispense frontier justice, how he would say sayonora to the inevitable love interest.

At one point in Die Trying, which is the second Jack Reacher novel in a line that stretches to 17 so far, at one point I put the book down in despair. Oh not again – these bad guys are militia-nuts super-patriotically holed up in Montana with a roomfull of old dynamite and a warehouse full of guns and missiles? I care about this?

I sighed – I don’t care if they wear shiny black boots, I don’t care about their back story – I don’t want to spend time with these characters – I sighed, then dove back into the book and didn’t put it down until 2 in the morning. Die Trying and Killing Floor and Tripwire – they are that absorbing, that well done.

Lee Child readers don’t much care that the plots are hackneyed and the characters stiff. We enjoy the sudden squeeze of fickle fate, the surprise, the joy of puzzles that slowly resolve.

In anything approaching real life I would recoil from visions of heads exploding, ingenious tortures, quasi-military confrontations, all of that. In a Lee Child adventure the violence is there to entertain– the artificiality is what allows a weak-kneed pacifist such as me to stumble forward through the gore. The final confrontation feels like the final innings of a good World Series game – one team wins and the other loses – burned to death in an exploding warehouse stuffed with dollar bills, say.

Jack Reacher hitch-hikes away from his latest adventure. He’s not seeking trouble, but trouble seeks him, book after book after book. Lee Child grabs you where it hurts and you’ll stay grabbled for at least a couple of days of intense reading.

And that’s a good thing, when the nights are long and the days are cold.

NOTES:

You don’t have to read these Jack Reacher novels in order, but it’s more fun that way. The first three:

Killing Floor by Lee Child. Penguin paperback $9.99. ISBN 9780515141429.

Die Trying by Lee Child. Penguin paperback $9.99. ISBN 9780515142242.

Tripwire by Lee Child. Penguin paperback $9.99. ISBN 9780515143072.

Lee Child has an extensive website. These three pages will tell you more than you need to know:
FAQ... The Books... About the Author...

Paul Revere's Pony Ponys Up

2011-10-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

I want to thank everyone for pitching in during the pitching to help raise money for this community radio station. Thank you!

If you are hearing this on Sunday, between Celtic and This American, good morning, and the pledge drive is now in its final day. If you are hearing the repeat broadcast on Wednesday, good afternoon, and the pledge drive is a fond memory.

If you are reading this online you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. And that’s OK.

I stayed home this week nursing a small stone that decided to descend from kidney to outside world. While screaming in pain (I exaggerate, but not much) I managed to finish an entire novel. I’m all better now, thank you.

Listen my children and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere...

The Fort by Bernard Cornwell celebrates the Penobscot Expedition – a now-obscure battle that took place in 1779 during the American Revolutionary War. Told with the freedom of a novelist but closely following the facts, Cornwell’s The Fort is a refreshingly clear vision of events that over the years have been both simplified and patriotically glorified.

And I on the opposite shore will be

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm...

In a note on Heroic Myths Cornwell writes, “The Penobscot Expedition is a forgotten campaign of the American Revolution, and many people probably wish it would remain forgotten. For the Americans it was a disaster, though in the end it made no difference to the war’s outcome or to their eventual triumph, while for the British it was a victory that did nothing to avert their humiliating loss of the Thirteen Colonies.”

Basically, the Americans screwed up. Paul Revere was there, for example, and he did not do well.

... And yet, through the gloom and the light,

The fate of a nation was riding that night;

As an artillery officer in the Massachusetts Militia, Revere was “utterly ineffective...(as well as) consistently uncooperative, awkward and belligerent toward his comrades.”

It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who years later made Revere famous with the poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

“And Americans have been hearing of the midnight ride ever since,” Cornwell notes, “mostly oblivious that the poem plays merry-hell with the true facts and ascribes to Revere the heroics of other men...”

In fact, of the several riders that famous night Paul Revere was the only rider who did not complete his mission.

Cornwell continues, “Before the poem was published Revere was remembered as a regional folk-hero, one among many who had been active in the patriot cause, but in 1861 he entered legend” due, in part, to Longfellow’s wish to rouse Northern patriotism at the start of the American Civil War.

For those who read The Fort, Revere’s reputation will never be the same. Some of his contemporaries “believed Revere’s behavior (at the battle) was disgraceful. Revere’s present reputation would have puzzled and, in many cases, disgusted his contemporaries.”

There are other, more important actors in this story, but throughout their adventure Paul Revere is the prime prima donna – at crucial moments in the battle he returns to his anchored ship for hot meals. Ordered to move cannons he delays or denies or questions the order. His gunners are inaccurate due in part to Revere’s inexperience and insouciance. Revere was a patriot, an excellent silversmith and successful businessman, but no soldier.

We’ll talk again next week. In the meantime, thanks for supporting this wonderful station.

NOTES:

The Fort by Bernard Cornwell. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 0062010875.

To “pony up” -- informal. to pay (money), as in settling an account: Next week you'll have to pony up the balance of the loan. Origin: 1650–60; earlier powney < obsolete French poulenet, diminutive of poulain colt < Medieval Latin pullanus (Latin pull(us) foal + -anus -an); see -et
— Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2011.

Good friend Adam Springwater sends this link about another midnight rider, perhaps more heroic...

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). Written April 19, 1860; first published in 1863 as part of Tales of a Wayside Inn:

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,-
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,-
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,-
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,-
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,-
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Time to Feed the Meter

2011-10-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about an unusual bookseller. His name is Charles Mysak, no relation, and he sells books in New York City from his parking spot on the corner of Columbus Avenue and 68th Street.

He snagged his spot more than a decade ago and he hasn't budged since. Mysak stores his inventory in a green ‘94 Honda Civic and he manages to feed the meter $36 a day – in quarters.

Which brings me to the current fund raising drive here on KZYX. Feed the meter. Hold on to your spot. Show your staying power, your dedication. Drop some quarters into the radio slot on a regular basis. Help keep us on the air.

Mysak was quoted in a radio interview: "I've been here for 11 years," he said. "Barnes & Noble is now closed. I'm the last resource for books (in the neighborhood). I'm here from 7 to 7 every day."

Just like this radio station. We are here every day and every night, pumping fresh, pollution-free information into your personal space whenever you want to listen. To be on the air we have to feed that meter every day, too. You can help with that.

So far during this fall pledge drive we've been pleading, joking, and otherwise encouraging you to make a move on your wallet and give us a call at (707) 895-2233 or pledge online at KZYX,ORG.

At this point maybe it's time to step back and consider why we go through this exercise two or more times a year. KZYX runs on a model first successfully used by the listener-supported Pacifica Foundation in the years following World War II. It worked then, and it works now.

Many people are astonished to discover a radio broadcast operation owned, administered and paid for by the listeners themselves. That is what Pacifica pioneered, and that's what we do here. It's truly democracy in action, and that always has been our goal -- to free radio from the almighty advertising dollar, depending instead on the free will donations of people like you, listeners who find freedom of the airwaves important in their lives and important for their community.

KZYX has a different history from Pacifica - we're much younger, for one thing. KZYX took shape 20-plus years ago when community radio enthusiast Sean Donovan arrived here to beat the Mendocino bushes for the earliest supporters of Mendocino Public Radio.

On the KZYX web site you find this: "We are a hybrid of sorts... we are not just community radio (radio that encourages volunteer programmers and focuses almost singularly on locally relevant news and information) nor are we just public radio (professionally produced commercial-free radio). Instead we are a combination of the two: we feature some of the finest Public Radio programs available and we have over 100 local volunteer programmers."

That unusual combination sets this station apart from most others; certainly apart from Jefferson Public Radio to the north, which steers away from controversy, offers no local news and minimal local programming.

We have managed to create something here that is precious, and like many precious things, something fragile, too. We don't depend on grants, although national funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helps. We pay the bills the same way you pay yours - by digging deep, asking for help when we really need it, and economizing everywhere. Feeding the meter before it expires.

The physical plant is difficult - components break down or need upgrading – and professionals from larger stations are sometimes amazed when they see how well we make do with aging equipment and a distinct lack of sleek offices to impress – who?

The hard working staff and volunteers make it work. We succeed because of you – a person who does care about community radio in general, and this station in particular.

Finally, let me repeat a story I’ve told before. I have a friend whose car radio car broke and she couldn’t afford to replace it.

She told me she is giving KZYX a generous donation even though she can’t hear us much. I don't know how to characterize that kind of generosity, but I sure know how to appreciate it.

Now is a very good time for you to add something to what you've already given. If you haven't joined and pledged yet, this is your moment. Let us hear from you. Feed the meter!

Different books, different publishers, same jackets

2011-10-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

I was struck by the similarities of these covers. The Fort was published in paperback in 2011 by HarperCollins; Imperium in 2006 By Arrow Books (a division of the Random House Group Limited, Great Britain).

Each book has the same ALL CAPS descriptor at the top, author name in red, same contrasty silhouette illustration style; although Cornwell's title appears gold (he sells more copies, so he gets the gold) both titles appear ALL CAPS, with a summary phrase at the bottom.

US book this year; UK book five years ago. Someone is stealing someone else's cover art. Or the same artist is stealing from herself. Or there is a formula for best selling historical fiction paperbacks and these two books follow that lead. Whatever the explanation, it's a bit disconcerting.

I'd love to hear from anyone who might explain this more believably...

In the Deadly Game of Power, One Man Will Risk It All

2011-10-06T20:02:00.000-07:00

You can look at the novel Imperium two ways – the way the publisher sees it, “In the deadly game of power, one man will risk it all” – or the way it feels when you read the book – Marcus Tullius Cicero of Rome was a good guy who had an interesting career.

In the Senate of republican Rome Cicero got off some punchy lines. He destroyed his opponents in court with nothing more than documents and shrewd speeches. Very little in the way of knives and blood in this particular deadly game of power.

This is a good historical novel, crammed with real incidents and actual intrigues, informed by a careful study of Cicero’s own words and deeds. Some readers will not find this particularly exciting. For gripping courtroom drama you might better turn to writers such as John Grisham.

Author Robert Harris specializes in novels set in ancient Rome – we enjoyed Pompeii a few years ago, following an aqueduct engineer as he puzzled out why water is not flowing along the enormous Aqua Augusta. Something’s wrong on the slopes of Mt Vesuvius – it smells like sulfur – and in the deadly game of power, one man will risk it all.

A substantial part of this story takes place in ancient Sicily, and no doubt that’s why I discovered a discarded copy of Imperium in a hotel in Taormina last week, just in time to help kill ten slow hours flying home. Under other circumstances – such as being able to stand up, walk around, stretch – I may not have mustered the patience to read this book.

We seem to be flying over some frozen section of northern Canada and already I’m on page 321 and I can’t feel my feet any more. Deep vein thrombosis is setting in...

Imperium can also be read as a bruising critique of our own times, from the perils of democracy to the response to terrorists. The story is told as a memoir written by Cicero’s amanuensis – a slave named M. Tullius Tiro, who actually existed, and who was indispensable to Cicero’s success. Always at his side, able to record the great man’s utterances on small wax tablets using a shorthand he invented, Tiro recalls “at first this was exciting, then astonishing, then arduous, and finally extremely dangerous... I witnessed his private meetings and carried his secret messages. I took down his speeches, his letters and his literary works, even his poetry – such an outpouring of words...”

Imperium appears to be as true to what we know of Roman history as any novel could be. The people are real, the events are real, the decisions are final – no, wait, that’s Judge Judy – and the author has to invent very little.

Cicero, while personally ambitious, was consistently honest and dedicated to democratic principles, against great odds. That kind of person was enormously rare in Rome, as he would be today in Washington DC. Considering the powers arrayed against him – the wealth of Crassus, the cunning of Pompey, the ridicule of the aristocrats, the conspiracies of Julius Caesar – Cicero emerges as a people’s hero, someone to admire and emulate.

Because Cicero was an orator, not a soldier, Harris has a problem here – not enough blood and guts for some readers. With grace and cunning based on unceasing hard work, Cicero managed to counter the misdeeds of corrupt officials and in court convict even the most powerfully connected criminals.

Harris is brave to tell the kind of story that could easily cost him his popular audience. The fact that his novels have been consistent international best sellers speaks well for modern readers.

NOTES:

Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris. Pocket Books paperback $15.
ISBN 0743498666.

The sequel to Imperium is Conspirata: A Novel of Ancient Rome by Robert Harris.
Pocket Books paperback $16. ISBN 0743266110 EAN: 9780743266116

Pompeii by Robert Harris. Random House Trade paperback $15. ISBN 0812974611.

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not traitor, he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their garments, and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared." - Cicero, 42 B.C.

The Art of Fielding

2011-09-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

WORDS ON BOOKS and A FEW OTHER THINGS FROM TIME TO TIME
by Tony Miksak for KZYX&Z-FM, 90.7 Philo CA
Airs September 4, 2011 at 10:55 am & Wednesday, Sept 7 at 1 pm
Title: The Art of Fielding

(MUSIC UP) This is Tony Miksak with a few Words on Books...

In 509 magnificently crafted pages, first-time author Chad Harbach this month will introduce himself, his characters, and a wonderful new novel to the world.

I don’t really have to review this book, and I don’t have to describe it to you. All I need to say is when it appears in hardcover this month, go get yourself a copy and be prepared to stay up late reading and enjoying.

The novel is titled The Art of Fielding. It will be available at your local bookstore, your non-local bookstore, in large print, in regular print, as an audio book, and no doubt pretty soon an e-book, too.

However, we have more time, and that allows me to share some of the things that make this book so intriguing. Start with the phrase The Art of Fielding. That is the title of the novel and it also is the title of a fictional baseball instruction book titled The Art of Fielding – got it? – revered by several of the ball players in the novel. The way they hug it to their chests, read it on the team bus, recite passages by heart, it’s like another character in itself. This doubly-fictional manual was supposedly written by the greatest shortstop ever, a made-up player named Aparicio Rodriguez. Confused yet?

Aparicio’s fielding manual reads like a Zen meditation:

Paragraph 26. The shortstop is a source of stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond.

The name Aparicio Rodriguez transparently was no doubt created by Harbach from the first and last names of two very real major league baseball players: Shortstop Luis Aparicio, who was an All Star 13 times, and is in the Hall of Fame; and third baseman Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod, Yankee’s 3rd baseman, who has hit more than 500 home runs, been an All Star 12 times, and admits he used steroids for three years due to "an enormous amount of pressure" to perform.

The pressure to perform is one of the main themes of the novel, and by bringing A-Rod obliquely into the novel, Harbach references the real-life stress of performing.

From the novel: “Baseball was an art but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer – you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability.”

And again: “But baseball was different... You stood and waited and tried to still your mind. When your moment came, you had to be ready, because if you f****d up, everyone would know whose fault it was. What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see? ... You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard. And trying hard, as everyone told him, was wrong, all wrong.”

The Art of Fielding is about ball players, but also college presidents and their daughters, misplaced French chefs, and the craft of writing itself. Take this passage, for example:

“Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them – you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore. It felt better to talk with a ball in your hand, it felt better to let the ball do the talking. But the world, the non-baseball world, the world of love and sex and jobs and friends was made of words.”

Your job now, no pressure, is to go out there on the field in your own uniform. Ignore the cheers, ignore the boos, don’t let the opposing fans get to you. Walk out and find yourself a copy of The Art of Fielding. Pay for it. Bring it home. Focus. Enjoy. Stay up late. You will not be sorry.

NOTES:

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Little, Brown & Co. hardcover $25.99. ISBN 0316126691.

Chad Harback is all over the place online. His magazine and blog writing and his publisher’s website and an interesting Bloomberg article about his finding a publisher and the $650,000 lottery for the right to publish it.

The real Luis Aparicio ...

And the also very real Alex Rodriguez...

another quote from the made-up Art of Fielding manual:

59. To field a groundball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.

Tonight's classical music play list

2011-08-30T18:07:00.000-07:00

PLAY LIST
KZYX fm 90.7 ... streaming at www.kzyx.org

August 30, 2011 “Ensemble” (8-10 pm) Tony Miksak, sitting in for Marcia Lotter

8:00 pm station ID, underwriting. Music of Mozart, Haydn, Shostakovich, Smetana, Martinu and Dvorak

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio 5:37

Performed by the Capella Istropolitana, conducted by Barry Wordsworth.

Franz Josef Haydn Symphony No. 100 in G major “The Military” 26:49

Performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Sir Georg Solti
1 Adagio - Allegro 2 Allegretto 3 Menuetto e Trio: Moderato 4 Finale: Presto

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) Concerto for piano, trumpet & strings No.1 C min Op 35 22:12

Performed by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Chailly. Soloists Ronald Brautigan, piano; Peter Masseurs, trumpet
1 Allegretto 2 Lento 3 Moderato 4 Allegro con brio
Shostakovich wrote his First Piano Concerto in 1933 when the composer was 27 years old, for himself to play. High spirited. Many changes of mood, parodies of popular music. Truly a piano concerto, but the trumpet speaks througought and has a lot to do, esp. at the end of the final fourth movement.

9 pm station ID, underwriting

Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) Piano Trio in G minor Opus 15 29:14

Performed by the Golub Kaplan Carr Trio. David Golub, piano; Mark Kaplan, violin; Colin Carr, cello
This recording won the AFIM Indie award for best classical ensemble in 1995 in honor of its recording of Smetana and Tchaikowsky piano trios.
Smetana composed only four mature chamber works, yet each had a deep personal significance. The Piano Trio in G minor of 1855 was composed after the death of his daughter Bedriška. You definitely hear the influence of Robert Schumann; maybe some direct quotes, in fact, with hints of Liszt, and the overall tone is elegiac.

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) Concerto for Oboe & Small Orchestra (1955) 15:44

Performed by the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, Paul Freeman, conductor. We hear Alex Klein on oboe, Daniela Kosinova, piano.

Antonin Dvorak (Waldesruhe) Silent Woods; Notturno in B Op. 40 5:41 + 6:50 = 12:31

Damn you, Charles C. Mann and your big books with numbers on the cover

2011-08-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

I was reading 1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, for about six years, when you popped up again with 1493, Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.

The new books I really want to read are getting in the way of finishing the other not-quite-so-new books I also really want to read.

While waiting for 1491 to turn into 1493 I read 1945, The War That Never Ended (Gregor Dallas) I also read parts of Moscow, 1812, Napoleon’s Fatal March (Adam Zamoyski) and 1688 A Global History (John E. Wills, Jr.) I have to cover another 323 years of reading before I’m up to date. I also am dipping into a novel by Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, which turns out to be highly entertaining futurist fiction, so although it’s about a single year, with some flashbacks, it’s not clear exactly which future year she is talking about.

I can report that a lot of things changed after 1493. According to the author, that year marked the beginning of absolutely immense changes in the history of mankind, and the fate of all the other species.

It began with the now vanished town of La Isabela, personally established by Christopher Columbus, on what now is the island of Hispaniola, Dominican Republic side. “It was the initial attempt by Europeans to make a permanent base in the Americas” not counting the Vikings in Newfoundland five centuries before. It failed, as many other settlements, but even this small effort brought changes:

“(Columbus) and his crew did not voyage alone. They were accompanied by a menagerie of insects, plants, mammals, and microorganisms. Beginning with La Isabela,” Mann writes, “European expeditions brought cattle, sheep, and horses, along with crops like sugarcane (originally from New Guinea), wheat (from the Middle East), bananas (from Africa), and coffee (also from Africa). Equally important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitchhiked along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description – all of them poured from the hulls of (Columbus’) vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.”

From here, the author goes deep into the weeds of history, carefully delineating the changes – how New World silver changed everything, bankrupting Spain and bringing down a dynasty in China; the tobacco saga and the reinvention of slavery; the fatal progress of malaria; the growth of international trade and our subsequent dependence on it, and much much more.

This is a book in which you will rediscover some things you already knew, and many you never imagined. It’s rich in imagery, research, and plain good story telling.

I found myself bogged a bit in some of the detail – but there’s always another page, another story, another fascinating connection I had never seen before.

Mann and other historians call the process The Columbian Exchange. Most importantly, he insists, “there is a growing recognition that Columbus’ voyage did not mark the discovery of a New World, but its creation.”

When the Old World landed in the New, the effect of newly introduced plants, animals and diseases was to quickly wipe out the natives, plant, animal and human, and replace one ecological system with another – to make the New World in effect something of a replica of the Old. It was this accidental but overwhelming transformation that allowed Europe and Europeans to dominate the next several centuries.

We arrived ill-equipped and soon starving; in no more than 50 years after Columbus we were beginning to rule the New World and its inhabitants. We accidently invented what now is called Globalization, too. It is an amazing story, and in 1493, Charles Mann tells it exceedingly well.

NOTES:

1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Vintage paperback $14.95. ISBN 1400032059.

1493, Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann. Knopf hard cover $30.50. ISBN 9780307265722.

Wikipedia on La Isabela

1945, The War That Never Ended by Gregor Dallas. Yale University Press paperback $28.00 ISBN 9780300119886.

Moscow, 1812, Napoleon’s Fatal March by Adam Zamoyski. Harper Perennial paperback $16.99 ISBN 006108686X.

1688 A Global History by John E. Wills, Jr. W. W. Norton paperback $16.95. ISBN 0393322785.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood. Anchor Books paperback $15.00 ISBN 0307455475. Set in the same future as the author’s earlier novel Oryx and Crake. YouTube author interview on the subject of Book Three of this trilogy

Vote YES on Libraries

2011-08-04T22:27:00.000-07:00

Vote Yes on Libraries! is the battle cry of freedom going around Mendocino County. All it will take to make our public libraries forever financially independent will be a 67% yes vote on the library initiative, Measure A next November.

Which vote will include a teeny tiny little increase in the county sales tax.

I forlornly hope this thing does pass with two-thirds of the voters plus one affirming it. 67 per cent in favor of an increase in sales tax? Forlorn hope.

According to supporters, the tax increase will amount to 1/8 of a cent on the dollar, or 13 cents for every hundred dollars spent on taxable items. It might cost the average household, if there are any of those left around here, maybe $2 a month. The result would be an estimated windfall for county libraries of $1.3 million each year. The money could be spent only on supporting libraries, nothing else – providing longer hours, more staff, better book replacement, more outreach, more programs for children.

About that term “forlorn hope” ... I came across it in Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels. British soldiers fighting Napoleon, ordered or volunteered first into the breech to face fully loaded cannon and muskets, were termed the Forlorn Hope. Few survived, but they fought with honor. Honor was not a small thing in those days.

Our more recent ancestors built magnificent libraries – their descendants so far have not managed to keep them open.

Today I walked up to the Fort Bragg Public Library. It was closed, of course. I could see walls of books, computers, comfortable reading chairs and tables. I pictured knowledgeable librarians ready to point out good reads and collect overdue fines.

A sign taped to the locked door disclosed this library now is staffed by two 36-hour employees, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, for a total of 23 open hours a week. These tragically short hours are damaging to our community, a drag on the future and a blow against the general well-being.

Presently there are virtually no services for children in local libraries. In Fort Bragg the summer reading group for children is ending and nothing will take its place. Supporters of the library initiative report that state funding for Mendocino County libraries has dropped more than 80%. Three years ago local libraries were open 40 hours per week.

Due to lack of funding you no longer can enter a Mendocino County library to obtain a book from out of county. You just cannot do it. Until recently if the book was on a library shelf in, say, Modesto, upon request it would shortly appear in Fort Bragg and be held for you at no charge.

If you’d like to find out more or support the Yes on A campaign, you can phone a volunteer, or look into their web site. The coast contact phone number is (707) 937-5925; inland call 485-5827. The Yes on A web site is voteyesonlibraries.org

Are libraries still relevant? Is visiting the library on your to-do list if you have a smart phone in your pocket and an iPad in your backpack?

Let me list the ways...

Some children have a parent who will read to them, talk them through the pages of a picture book, associate reading with happy times together. Some do not. Those children especially need the nurture and support a librarian can provide. And the responsibility of returning a book on time.

Not everyone has access to digital media, and not everyone is able to use it successfully. Help is available at the library.

Not all reading materials are digitized and available through Google. And not all books and documents are free, but these materials can be found for free in a library. No serious researcher can afford to skip library research. Where else can one read actual newspapers, magazines and books, listen to books on tape and see videos. Find sheet music to play. For free.

You can read alone, you can browse alone, but it’s fun sometimes to share with others. It is inspiring to hear about a new author and it’s inspiring simply to watch others enjoy reading.

Peace. Quiet. The ineffable smell of actual books. The library as refuge. Vote yes, and keep libraries open!

NOTES:

Origin of “forlorn hope”

Vote “Yes” on Libraries

Radio Play List

2011-07-14T20:06:00.000-07:00

... sharing my notes for the next classical show on KZYX where you can listen live at 10 am to noon on July 15, 2011...

PLAY LIST

July 15, 2011 “Wondrous World of Music” sitting in for Gordon Black

10:00 station ID, underwriting. Music of JS Bach, Beethoven, Dvorak, Francais, and Cimarosa.

Johann Sebastian Bach Concerto for Violin no 1 in A minor, BWV 1041 15:00 approx
In three movements: Allegro moderato, Andante, Allegro assai. This Concerto written between 1717-1723.
Performed by Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999)
The legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin was the eldest child of Russian-born Hebrew scholars who met in Palestine, emigrated to New York City, and moved to San Francisco soon after their son's birth. As it turns out, Menuhin grew up just a few blocks from where my mother lived, in a Jewish neighborhood where Yiddish was the common language amongst the many immigrants. A true prodigy, after only three years of violin study, Yehudi made a legendary debut at age seven with the San Francisco Symphony. His Carnegie Hall debut came three years later, in the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which garnered great praise and began his long, internationally acclaimed career.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Trio in G Major for Three Flutes 4:26
First movement: Allegro
Performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal, Christian Larde and Alain Marion, flutes

Ludwig van Beethoven String Trio in E flat, Opus 3 38:14
Performed by the Grumiaux Trio – Arthur Grumiaux on violin, Georges Janzer, viola; Eva Czako, cello.
This is Beethoven virtually channeling Mozart – this six movement trio was published four years after Mozart’s wonderful Divertimento and in the same key – some scholars believe this trio was actually written in the same year – 1792 – Mozart’s trio was published, and no doubt Beethoven heard Mozart’s trio performed in Vienna, and may have been able to study the score as well.

Antonin Dvorak Serenade for Strings in E major, Opus 22. In five movements 27:27
Performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz, conductor
Composed in no more than 12 days, 1875. “The most extrovert and ebullient of all Dvorak’s early works” ... In a very happy period, just after he won the Austro-Hungarian State Prize (Brahms was one of the judges), a year into his marriage, and just before the birth of his second child. During a space of five months he produced a string quintet, four duets, a piano trio and a piano quartet, a major symphony, sketches for a new five-act opera, and this work, the Serenade for Strings.

Jean Francais (1912-1997) L’Horloge de Flore for Oboe & Orchestra 15:50
Performed by Lajos Lencses on oboe with the Radio Sonfonie Orchestra of Stuttgart.
... in 7 short movements, no breaks between them, each lasting less than 3 minutes. Inspiration for this piece came from a poem by Stephane Mallarme which in turn referred to a “flower clock” or “horloge de flore” invented by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus in the 18th century – a garden plan that would create a clock that corresponded to the day and night opening time of different flowers. Each movement here corresponds to a particular flower – Galant de jour, Cupidone bleue, Cierge a grandes fleurs, Nycthanthe du Malabar, Belle du nuit, Geranium triste, and Silene nociflore.

Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) Concerto in G Major for Two Flutes 9:51
Movement 1 - Allegro
Performed by Robert Dohn and Helmut Steinkraus, flutes, with the Wurtemberg Chamber Orchestra.

At the Speed of FedEx

2011-07-14T16:04:00.000-07:00

It’s a tiresome truism – the virtual world makes the other world, the so-called “real” world real small, really fast. In the virtually real world I talk to my Italian teacher in real time on my real computer, even though she lives in Istanbul within sight of the Bosporus, and I live near the sea at the western edge of California.

Electrons have carried us closer. Out in the world of tangible things, things with weight, that must be moved around by hand, conveyor belt, airplane, truck, and feet – in the world of wine, flowers and dirty sinks – things here also are changing quickly.

This afternoon the FedEx driver showed up in our driveway with a small package. Inside was a book I ordered online from Italy two days ago. Two days ago! It was shipped from Via Verde 8 in the small town of Settala, near Milan, Italy on July 12. It walked down my driveway at 1 pm on the afternoon of July 14. These things can happen, even in the Real World.

I would have ordered this book from my local independently owned bookstore if they dealt in books in the Italian language, published in Italy, but they don’t. I hope the Gods of Shopping Local forgive my electronic order, but don’t the Gods want us to be happy? In my personally made-up religion they do.

By the way, the book looks fascinating, and when and if it’s translated into English I will recommend it to you. It’s titled Canale Mussolini or “The Mussolini Canal” and it’s a novel by Antonio Pennacchi. He recounts the story of the fictional Peruzzi family, from the end of the Great War to the Second World War, their struggles to survive in those crazy years.

The book so far reads like a fable told around a mythic fire, and indeed there are references back to the ancient Greeks (the main character is named Pericles). What makes this novel important to Italians is the way the story snakes through the convoluted track of recent Italian history. With the compelling honesty of a great novelist, Pennacchi demonstrates how local families get caught up in the ‘isms’ of their day. He explores the very idea of fascism and questions the meaning of collaboration. Who, if anyone, can behave honorably in such strange and harrowing circumstances?

Canale Mussolini won the Strega Prize in 2010, awarded annually since 1947 to the best novel of the year in Italy, judged by a jury of 400 literati including former winners of the competition. Pennacchi came to writing late in life, after a workingman’s career and as a political organizer. Each of his prior novels won at least one major literary prize after a great number of early rejections.

About this novel, he writes, “Beautiful or ugly as it may be, this is the book that I was born to write. Since childhood I have always known I would have to capture this tale – the stories in fact are not the invention of the author, but seized out of the air – to tell the tale before it vanished. Nothing else. Only this book.”

By the way, I purchased the novel from ibs.it, who call themselves The Internet Bookshop, the best source I’ve found for books in Italian other than visiting the Italian Bookstore in London, or traveling to Italy itself.

The 2007 film My Brother is an Only Child is based on Pennacchi’s novel Il Fasciocomunista. (The Fascist-Communist).

Returning to books written in English, it turns out that a book I mentioned dipping into last week is a novel you might want to read at the beach, say, while you’re reclining in the shade on a self-made puddle of sun screen, slippery cold drink to hand. The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel is a fine read, worth your time. The story unfolds in Brooklyn, in downtown Manhattan and on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples.

On the first page Alexandra Broden, investigator for the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service Division, is listening to a ten-second intercepted phone call:

“The recording began with a click: the sound of a woman picking up her telephone, which had been tapped the day before the call came in. A man’s voice: It’s done. There is a sound on the tape here – the woman’s sharp intake of breath – but all she says in reply is Thank you. We’ll speak again soon. He disconnects and she hangs up three seconds later.”

Typical thriller, right? Maybe, maybe not. Alexandra Broden pretty much disappears from The Singer’s Gun until the final chapter. In the pages between there is some funny stuff – a twice-canceled engagement superimposed on a strangely disconnected romantic relationship, some travel adventures, and some danger, and some erotically strange doings in a Manhattan office building, and, well, pop open another one and get reading.

You will be entertained and beyond that, you may learn a few things you didn’t know about human nature under stress.

NOTES:

Canale Mussolini by Antonio Pennacchi. Mondadori (publisher website) paperback 14 Euro. ISBN 9788866210085.

Antonio Pennacchi has a Facebook page and a personal home page... both in Italian, easy to translate using Google Translate or similar services.

The Italian “Internet Bookshop”

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426. The author’s home page.

A day at the beach below Elk, California

2011-07-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

Michael, Christine, Joselyn, Zipper and myself had breakfast at Queenie's Roadside Cafe, then walked down to the beach on a gorgeous July day...

Summer and a Book (& optional jug of wine, loaf of bread, thou)

2011-07-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

Let the record show we were seven days into the month and my Sierra Club Wilderness Wall Calendar was still open to the North Cascades of June, not the Banff fireweed of July.

Already this summer is lazy, hazy and not overly crazy. I have my loaf of bread, I have my jug of wine. Let me take thou into my particular reading adventure.

A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler kept me enthralled as spring moved into summer. Author Jason Roberts rediscovered a traveler famous in his day and forgotten ever since.

The extraordinary fact of this tale is that after British naval officer James Holman lost his sight while serving shipboard off the coast of America in the early 1800s he went on to travel the world, alone, and blind. He did this at a time the blind were considered invalids, unintelligent, and incapable of living independently.

And he wrote well about his travels, publishing a number of books. Among many other accomplishments Holman became an authority on the fauna of the Indian Ocean, cited by Charles Darwin.

In the same vein of extraordinary travel stories, I came across in my favorite used bookstore in Eureka, California, an anthology compiled by John Julius Norwich. A Taste for Travel first published in 1985, is the best kind of anthology – highly personal and selective. Norwich groups his writers into somewhat arbitrary chapters such as Bad Moments, Hardships, First Impressions, Advice to Travelers, couched at all times within Norwich’s witty and perceptive comments. It’s a great summer read.

A different kind of travel book kept me up two nights in a row way past the time sensible people have entered the deep sleep zone of Rapid Eye Movement.

Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series, starring up-through-the-ranks hero Richard Sharpe, runs, so far, to something like 21 exciting volumes. I’ve read many Sharpes over the years, and since in the bookstore I couldn’t recall exactly which ones, I arbitrarily purchased Penguin paperback volumes 9 through 11, which propel the British officer through adventures in Spain fighting Napoleon’s expeditionary forces, all the way to the battle of Waterloo and beyond.

Remind me, please, never to start a Sharpe novel at midnight, OK?

This week I began a novel highly recommended by bookseller friends in Mendocino: The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. I was absolutely delighted by the first ten pages. We have a cellist involved in a very funny on-again-off-again engagement, a respite for her husband on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, plus strange and amusing business doings in Manhattan. There is an undertone of danger, and so far it’s not clear if I’m reading a fairly light-hearted novel or an espionage thriller. Either way, The Singer’s Gun is another great summer read.

On a more personal note, I’ve just received a copy of Volume One of a projected several-volume autobiography by Herbert Blau, titled As If. Along with director Jules Irving, Professor Blau was the founder of the Actor’s Workshop, which flourished in San Francisco from 1952 to 1964.

My father, Joe Miksak, was one of the Workshop’s featured actors, and the plays he was in and the neighborhood where Blau and my family lived are an important part of my childhood memories.

I remember being frightened to the edge of hysteria one night watching the production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Was that really my own father stumbling about on the in-the-round stage, gripping bloody eyes, screaming out in agony?

Blau describes the scene this way: “For even in the horror of it, that sight to awaken pity... there was what couldn’t be seen, strikingly there, emblooded, at the myth’s climactic blindness, as the awesome figure of Oedipus – played by Joseph Miksak, tall, stately himself – loomed over the spectators, with an awful knowledge inscribed.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been sitting in the first row, but it’s too late to change that now.

NOTES:

A Sense of the World – How a Blind Man Became History’s Greatest Traveler by Jason Roberts. Harper Perennial paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780007161263.

A Taste for Travel, An Anthology, by John Julius Norwich. Out of print. Purchased at Eureka Books, 426 Second Street, Old Town Eureka, CA.

Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series on his own website

The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel. Unbridled Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 9781609530426.

As If, An Autobiography Volume One by Herbert Blau. University of Michigan Press hard cover $60 (get it from the library why don’t you). ISBN 9780472117789.

“As if, as if, it is all ifs; we are at / much unease.”
Marianne Moore “Elephants”

The San Francisco Actor’s Workshop

Some of Joe Miksak’s credits are listed in the Internet Movie Database

Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915 – 2011)

2011-06-16T19:05:00.000-07:00

We lost an old man this month at age 96. They say whenever someone dies an entire universe – thoughts, feelings, experience – also dies. This could not be more true in the case of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

His books are inspiring, thrilling memoirs that inspire others to similar feats of travel and insight.

When Patrick Leigh Fermor was 19 he decided, having nothing better to do, to walk alone from London, along the Rhine, down the Danube, to Constantinople, now Istanbul. This was in 1933, ten months after Hitler's accession to power, through a Europe soon to disappear.

Years later Leigh Fermor pulled out his battered old notebooks and wrote two books about the trip, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The first was written in 1977, the sequel eleven years after that. Both have become true classics.

A high-spirited 19 year-old sets out across Europe, but it’s his 63 year-old future self who tells the story. Youth transformed by maturity, experience enlightened by scholarship, impulse tempered by reflection. In these books there is more than one kind of time, more than one state of mind. Fermor blends his selves with grace and intelligence.

From A Time of Gifts "Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees...Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation... But, in the tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came?"

Fermor on the Baroque: "Concave and convex uncoil and pursue each other across the pilasters in ferny arabesques, liquid notions ripple, waterfalls running silver and blue drop to lintels and hang frozen there in curtains of artificial icicles. Ideas go feathering up in mock fountains and float away through the colonnades in processions of cumulus and cirrus..."

Walking lonely stretches in the dead of winter Fermor amused himself by reciting aloud the Latin poets or Shakespeare. At one point a peasant woman walked out of nearby woods with arm loads of kindling. Hearing the strange words she dropped everything and flew back into the forest.

Fermor concludes A Time of Gifts standing on a bridge between Slovakia and Hungary: "Close behind me, girls in bright clothes were hastening excitedly across the bridge, all of them carrying bunches of water-lilies, narcissi, daffodils and violets... I found it impossible to tear myself away from my station and plunge into Hungary. I feel the same disability now; a momentary reluctance to lay hands on this particular fragment of the future; not out of fear, but because, within arm's reach and still intact, this future seemed, and still seems, so full of promised marvels."

Fermor served as an irregular in the British Army in Greece during the Second World War. Living as a shepherd in the mountains of Nazi-occupied Crete, his small group captured the German general in charge of the island and conveyed him to British forces in Egypt. For this exploit and for his later writings Fermor was medaled and later knighted.

Over the years Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote a number of books, some set in Greece, all in his uniquely elegant style. This month, obituaries published all over the world praised both his courage and his creativity.

NOTES:

Newly reprinted this year, the story of that Cretan adventure:

Ill Met by Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, with an Afterword by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Paul Dry Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 1589880668. Stanley Moss was the other British officer on this raid.

A summary of the thrilling story of the General's kidnaping told in the New Yorker in 2006: but to read the entire article you will have to register with Highbeam Business...

Fermor’s walk from London to Hungary:

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $16.95. ISBN 1590171659.

Hungary to Constantinople:

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Jan Morris. New York Review Books paperback $15.95. ISBN 1590171667.

Words of Mercury is an out-of-print anthology of Leigh Fermor's writings. Many copies are available, mostly in Canada and the UK. Try Addall You can read a review here.

Fermor on the pleasures and rigors of monastic life: "In the seclusion of a cell – an existence whose quietness is only varied by the silent meals, the solemnity of ritual, and long solitary walks in the woods – the troubled waters of the mind grow still and clear, and much that is hidden away and all that clouds it floats to the surface and can be skimmed away; and after a time one reaches a state of peace that is unthought of in the ordinary world."

Quoted from:

A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor, Introduction by Karen Armstrong. New York Review of Books paperback $12.95. ISBN 1590172442

Obituaries:

Christopher Hitchens in Slate

The Guardian

The Independent

Casino Grande

2011-05-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

I was describing The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, an odd book that demonstrates within Italy’s dark heart hides an even darker place, then takes it back in a postscript.

I can almost understand the contradiction. Almost.

Everywhere you walk in Rome are monuments to Victor Emmanuel and Garibaldi, heroes of the late 19th century when Italy belatedly and with untold difficulty merged its walled cities and foreign-owned principalities into a modern nation state able to collect taxes and participate in wars.

The merging process didn’t quite take. Italy still has more dialects than France has cheese, more cynics than patriots, and a rising political party ready to split their section of northeast Italy from the rest of the scuffed-up boot.

In March, Italy celebrated 150 years of nationhood. That didn’t take, either. The official merger was ignored and much more attention given to the matrimonial merger of a royal couple in Britain.

Italians live in a country much younger than the United States. They are more concerned with dodging small trucks in smaller alleys than voting in elections. Their best energies are given to discerning the freshest possible groceries and trying not to step on the neighbor’s dog’s droppings.

Italians casually display what is called menefreghismo – an I don’t care attitude to everything outside immediate family and friends. One highly impolite saying runs Non me ne frega niente! – “I don’t give a (blank) about any of it.”

It’s a useful attitude when it comes to living with blatant corruption in Italy’s only national sport, soccer; when lying politicians own the newspapers and television channels that report on them, when the accused endure decades-long trials whose decisions eventually are overturned, a place where convicted criminals often hold seats in parliament.

Italians admit they live in a casino – a brothel, a miserable confusion, a mess -- but they can smell the olive trees through the garbage.

Naive visitors come for the glories, not the ghosts, and there is nothing wrong with that. Pilgrims to Rome were amazed not only at the bones of the saints and the magnificence of St. Peters, but stunned by the falling-apartness of it all. They still are.

Americans complain how expensive everything is, how this storekeeper lied or that church was closed. We make our personal pilgrimages to Rome in search of Raphael, only to experience invisible hands in the backpack on a hot and crowded bus to the Vatican.

As I listened to the neverending complaints I thought about the joys of sunset at Hadrian’s tomb, Raphael’s erotic paintings in the Villa Farnesina. A freshly squeezed spremuta, the famous pizza bianca in Campo dei Fiori, sliced off cleanly with one terrific swipe of an enormous knife. Etruscan marvels in a spotlessly clean museum located inside a gorgeous palazzo located in turn inside a gorgeous park.

The trattoria down the street where you knock to enter. Nuns flying down the sidewalk. The marvelous marble of Chiesa Nuova which lost the right to be called “new” several centuries ago.

The first strawberries of spring. Homemade ravioli in a homemade sauce served by the person who cooked it. The shouting, the laughing, the unruly joy of it all.

Italy is an unstirred soup, a kettle of contradictions, a tantalizing work of art obscured by a long, dark passageway. A language so ethereal they invented an inflexible grammar to make it real.

All this... and I don’t begin to understand how it all fits together. Does anyone?

Italy: The Bad, the Worse, the Really, Really Bad Stuff and the OK Parts

2011-05-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

By the first 100 pages of The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones, Italy is looking more than a little dark.

In the first 100 pages Jones has detailed political scandals, failures of the criminal law, pervasive corruption in Italy’s one national obsession, soccer.

It goes from bad, to worse, to the really, really bad stuff, and finishes later with the OK parts – sort of like a terrible, overpriced meal that comes with a really good dessert.

Jones talks about how Italian television is a mind-killing wasteland, how cynicism and alienation are the enduring posture of most Italians’ relationship with government and bureaucracy. All this, plus self-destructive terrorism, an ongoing, simmering sort of civil war that dates to the end of World War II. I could go on, and Tobias Jones does, in sometimes sleep-inducing detail.

After an effective and fact-supported dissection of the Italian attitude toward women and feminism – “there are basically no female role models in Italy other than those confined to the role of television confectionary...” Jones reports the following conversation:

“How on earth can you put up with all this nonsense?” he asks one of his female students, noted for her firm, feminist opinions.

“That,” she said smiling, “is exactly what we ask of British food: how can you possibly swallow that rubbish?”

“Fine. But the difference is that we don’t spend a third of our waking lives watching TV, consuming what’s been put on our plate by the country’s most powerful politician (Silvio Berlusconi).

“Fine. But I would rather have crap television than crap food,” she laughed.

What Jones describes is essentially true and verifiable – the scandal, the lying, the evasion, the cynicism, the deadly inability of anyone in Italy to find the truth because it is so overladen with lies. And I haven’t even mentioned the really dark parts where he talks about the failed “Clean Hands” political cleansing, Italians’ troubled relationship with God and religion, the baleful influence of organized crime, and so on until you almost can’t stand it anymore.

Jones published The Dark Heart of Italy in 2003, and it became a best-seller in Italy, proving that even Italians enjoy hating Italy.

And still, as most of us desperately want to believe, there really is another, much more lovely aspect to all of this gloom, another way of experiencing the boot.

In a revised postscript Jones gets around to admitting that “... I occasionally blush with embarrassment... (When I first wrote this book, five years ago) I was... fuming disbelief and fury at what I thought was happening in a country I presumed to call my home... (In this revised edition) I decided not to erase or soften my (words) because what made me angry then still makes me growl deeply today.”

“It’s only, perhaps, when you’ve been away that you realize the true value of the place,” he writes. “I was astonished at the intimacy and warmth of it. Whilst various sordid scandals make the news, the charm of street-level humanity goes unreported.”

More on this to follow...

NOTES

The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones. North Point Press paperback $15. ISBN 0865477248.

This appears to be the original 2005 edition, without the revised postscript which changes the conclusions of the book a bit. The edition I read was purchased in Rome in a Faber/Penguin edition: ISBN 9780571235926.

More information is available at the Faber web site.

Tobias Jones has left journalism for the fraught joys of community. He no longer writes a column for the for the London Guardian, but you can still read them here (“A Life Less Ordinary”).

Rome -- The fruits they are a-changin’ ...

2011-05-21T10:03:00.001-07:00

May 21, 2011

The fruit and vegetables are changing... artichokes (carciofi) are done, except in restaurants catering to tourists. We are in the middle of peas (piselli), and now it’s strawberries and nectarines (fragole e nettarine).

I have yet to taste a single sour, flat, cruddy piece of fruit. Tomatoes, even purchased pre-packaged at the local supermercato, have that just-off-the-vine taste. Strawberries – at least the ones I bought yesterday – taste like they were picked off the vine as I ate them – hard to describe how delicious. Same for the nectarines... I lean over the sink and just devour them.

I took another walk in Trastevere today, this time with three goals – the Villa Farnesina and up the Gianicolo hill behind it to visit San Pietro in Montorio. On the way down the hill I managed to find an excellent Japanese restaurant on the big street Viale di Trastevere... and again, the four pre-sliced slices of orange were as sweet and delicious as you are imagining... and it’s not in season for citrus.

The Villa Farnesina was built by the richest man in Europe, the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi. He decorated this ravishing place with the assistance of Raphael and his helpers, architect Baldassare Peruzzi, and others. The paintings reflect the (now much reduced) gardens and orchards outside that originally led down to the Tiber (Tevere). Some are made to look like tapestries, with ruffled edges and faux tie-downs. It’s all erotic, colorful, cheerful, and the most fabulous love-nest you’d ever want to own. The large loggia rooms were intended to be open to the outside (now glassed in top to bottom)... peel me a grape and call me honey, honey.

The Gianicolo hill was the scene of months of deadly fighting between French troops defending the Pope’s rule of Rome, and volunteers from all over Italy who streamed there in defense of the newly-created and short-lived Republic (the wrenching of Rome from the Pope’s control took place a few years later). In this case the French won, with the loss of many lives. Garibaldi was there with a large contingent, and when the struggle was over, escaped to fight again.

The fallen Italians later became folkloric heroes. One of them died of gangrene at 21 from a battle wound. His words – poem, song, not sure – became the Italian national anthem. In the park at the top there is a 1941 fascist mausoleum in Mussolini’s favorite travertine marble with the saying O ROMA O MORTE enscribed above (this was one of Garibaldi’s mottos – another was “God and the People” and another was Obbedisco! ("I obey!") and another was... well there were several.

Along the path – actually a busy street – near the top of the hill – a spot with merry-go-round, big equestrian statue of, right Garibaldi, and a grand vista of the city – along the path is a row of busts of heroes – most looking like they could be working in any bar or wearing a business suit instead of military insignia and hats. The busts are very accessible both to passersby and to pigeons, yet have not been defaced or graffitti-ed. I don’t know if this is from respect or indifference. Either way, it’s unusual.

Another phenomenon... the asphalt below the vista lookout makes a perfect chalk board for lovers... I saw signs – big – many feet across – saying in effect that this marks the day that Alonso and Maria fell in love — and so forth.

I was pouring sweat. Not only was today hot, it had an undercurrent of humidity. At the very last moment, returning home, a few drops fell.

If you recall, I visited the church of San Francesco di Ripa earlier in order to see the voluptuous statue there, but only saw the feet and midsection. This time was even more – what, frustrating? Funny? – the church was closed for another hour, and I wasn’t waiting around. I made a return visit to Santa Maria in Trastevere – no wedding, but it appeared that a number of pre-teens were being rehearsed for an upcoming ceremony – not a bar mitzvah ... probably first communion.

I witnessed two weddings in progress... and afterwards on the way down the hill watched pigeons getting stomach pains eating rice off the paving stones.

A concert, a kiss and a half-eaten sandwich...

2011-05-17T13:12:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I have just purchased a single ticket for what sounds like a great concert, 28 May at the same place as before -- the Parco della Musica. I know the way there and back (basically, taxi), I know the place and how it works and the time is nice and early -- 6 pm, so I'll be home before it's too late.

Here's the program -- all eastern Europe:

Orchestra e Coro dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Constantinos Carydis direttore, lexander Toradze pianoforte

Borodin
- Danze Polovesiane
Šostakovic
- Concerto per pianoforte n. 2
Cajkovskij
- Sinfonia n. 6 "Patetica"

That's of course Borodin, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky. A powerful show. And if this link works, the red dot represents my seat...

I actually had wanted to go to a concert that is sold out -- the Israeli/Palestinian Orchestra for Peace, conducted by Daniel Berenboim... too bad. But this one will do.

This afternoon I managed to miss my school mates and an aperitivi party. As a warmup and wifi check-in I stopped for a glass of excellent red wine with peanuts and chips at Cafe Barnum at about 6:30, thinking to catch up with the gang in the Campo de’Fiore ... the wine and checking mail was fun, but although the cafes in the Campo were all packed, I never did find "my" group...

However, next best thing, I did finally find a friendly Lavandaria -- where they take your pants and your shirt and return them in 24 hours washed, dried and hung on hangars... what luxury!

I'll find out tomorrow where everyone was, but I don't think I missed much...

After turning my pants in to the red-headed lady behind the counter I decided to extend the evening by walking to Hadrian's Tomb (Castel Sant’Angelo) at sunset... glorious gigantic famous round thing on the Tiber... with a pedestrian bridge leading to it, lined with statues... of course I took pictures.

If you return into Rome along the bridge and on to the street in the same direction, Tomb at your back, the street leads you back into my neighborhood. I had not realized just how close these things are. From Hadrian's tomb it's a straight shot to the front of St. Peters... They basically are connected, and you can see one clearly from the other. Rome gets smaller every moment.

Wrote Jane Corey (we met in Firenze last Saturday) to ask how she's doing... Great, it turns out. In Paris visiting/staying with friends from Berkeley, eating salmon; tomorrow everyone's going to Giverny. Jane noted that in my case time must be going faster and faster... and it's true. So much I still want to do here -- walks in Trastevere, the Etruscan Museum not far from Villa Borghese, the Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, Naples, and so forth... eating in every last tasty-looking hole-in-the-wall trattoria...

I'm keeping up with the work at school. It's getting easier, as we seem to be in a kind of review/holding pattern, repeating stuff we've studied earlier. A lot of this detail – the trapassato remoto? -- will be useless in conversation, but it's good to know more than one uses, I guess.

I'm hearing, reading and speaking Italian every day, all day long, and sometimes even the most humble human interaction can be surprising. There was a couple in a doorway embracing and kissing. She had a half-eaten sandwich in one hand, holding on to it with the same hand she was using to run her fingers through his hair. I know, it sounds creepy, but it wasn't, exactly. As I passed I called out "baciare e mangiare!" ("kissing and eating") and the guy looked at me and laughed.

Moments like that are why I'm in school. Not. Wait a minute... really? I guess so! Tell me what else Italian is good for. You can do opera in German, if you have to.

quick link to Rome photos... so far

2011-05-16T11:22:00.000-07:00

Just click here and take a look... let me know your thoughts? One friend thinks I cleaned up Rome too much. The next photos will be for him: graffiti, broken pipes, dog droppings... can hardly wait.

the 18 hour trip north REVISED

2011-05-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

May 13/14, 2011... the voyage north

Friday the 13th... after school I marched to Piazza Argentina and waited until 2 sharp for the Agenzi Viaggi (travel agent) to open and sell me train tickets to Firenze, and on Saturday Firenze to Orvieto to Rome, which they did. They also made a reservation for me at Hotel degli Orafi, which has become my/our favorite splurge in Firenze. It’s 4 four stars but feels like 10. Located literally at the foot of Ponte Vecchio... The Medici corridoio traverses the front of the building.

The corridorio was constructed by the Medici bankers back when the ufizzi (offices) actually WERE their offices, so they could walk back and forth unobserved and unmolested between the Pitti Palace on the other side of the river, and their uffizi, now The Ufizzi, the world famous art gallery. Once in a long while the corridoio can be entered and walked, but I’m informed the art inside is second rate... but just to be there and peer out the windows at the commoners below... would be something to do, I think.

Of course, having booked one day in advance, and wanting only a single bed/single room, I had room 204 with a view of the ventilator shaft. But still, it was the Orafi: all-marble bathroom, the best in shampoos and towels, just a very elegant, understated feeling. Actual, readable, books discretely placed on bookshelves...

I washed and walked 15 minutes to the piazza in front of the incredible Santa Croce (Dante is there, on a pedestal, but at the moment he’s under 360 degree wraps while some parts of him apparently are restored). Jane Corey walked into the square, looking like the highly lovely and confident solo traveler she is (“This wrinkled thing is the best dress I have... and the wrinkles are supposed to be there...”). We sat at an outdoor table at Ristorante Finisterrae on the square, squinting at the setting sun, catching up. Drank prosecco and ate bruschetta and a couple of the oranges and grapefruits that have been available for free in a pile ever since I first spotted this place in 2007.

Off to the incredibly fun and eccentric Teatro del Sale, not far from Santa Croce, on Via dei Macci.

I could write pages on this place, but to cover the main points – it’s run by and was invented by the chef Giuditta Pichi, who has one of the best restaurants in Firenze, on the same street: Cibreo. The Teatro feels like his living room, with enough space to invite a hundred people in for dinner and a show. You don’t just walk in, however. You have to be a member, and read the rules, which are all about honoring and respecting, and when you’ve joined (or they’ve found you in their computer from a previous visit) you then pay the 35E for dinner and the show, and you’re in.

They found me in the computer – this was a lot more fun and a lot more hectic than it might sound – and translated what they found as Anton Maksitov (close, I guess), written in silver ink on my burgundy-colored club card, good from last July 2010, to this July, 2011. I guess I better return soon.

Let’s run off a few things so you’ll get the feeling... Long line outside to get to the club window, where newbies receive a sheet of rules to read – handed out with all seriousness, no smiling – and then a return to the window with the filled out form and 5E. Then another long line entering the Teatro where at the front they take your evening’s payment.

In the first room, all wood, Giuditta is standing around, looking silvery and grandfatherly; there are rolled up T shirts for sale, plus: Teatro Aprons with double rows of buttons down the front; foodstuffs such as sauces, spices; the newsletter (5E to buy, free on the Internet, all proceeds to an Italian volunteer group bringing water to villages in Africa)... then the entry into the club. Small tables, folding chairs, a few couches, some theater-style seats... a roaring large kitchen to the right with something roasting that looks like (and turned out to be) lamb, pork and chicken turning on spits; a bakery in action... a table of help yourself hors d’oeuvres that this time included two sauces made of probably chick peas and something else, stewed beet greens with red chunks of beets, potatoes, lentils, rice, etc.

During the two hours of dinner new dishes came steaming out of the kitchen, each announced in an indecipherably shouted spiel from a cook leaning out the kitchen window into the room of diners. Sometimes you crowd at the kitchen window to get a plate of deep fried vegetables, or one delicious veal meatball in a sauce, or freshly baked bread sticks, and so forth... or half a large sardine deliciously cooked in fragrant oil, moist and bony. I got so full so fast I had to pass on several courses. At the end, a table full of whipped cream and crunchy biscuits and a flour-free chocolate torte and coffee...

Our table turned out to have, left to right, two women from Boston who were on a 10-day visit to Italy they won in a fund-raising auction (“I paid too much, but once I started bidding I wasn’t going to lose... We have to come back some time and pay regular prices...”) a mother and daughter from Holland, a couple from San Francisco who truly relished and analyzed each course – very good eaters; Jane, and myself. There was as much table wine and as much water, carbonated and not, as you wanted all night.

On the table, this sign:

CARI SOCI

SIATE CORTESI,

PENSATE VOI STESSI

ALLA VOSTRA

SPARECCHIATURA

.... Grazie

... which translates, very roughly, to please return dirty dishes to the kitchen...

OK... we’re stuffed, we’ve all met each other and wondered about the place... now two of the hosts stand in front and announce the evening’s entertainment as the tables are cleared and removed, the chairs lined up theater style, facing the elevated stage which holds one red velvet chair and two microphones. We are urged not to stand and walk during the 50 minute concert because “the floor squeaks, and we are recording tonight.” The flamenco guitarist was Juan Lorenzo. He played fast and well, but had an annoying habit of presenting never ending cascades of notes and rhythm – well played and sometimes exciting, but all variations and no theme, if you know what I mean. His nylon strings, not entirely in tune at the beginning, kept sliding south but he never stopped to tune except for a passing twist on the low E... I don’t imagine the audience cared, but it bothered me. His CD was for sale in the lobby – recorded earlier, of course.

After the Teatro disgorged us Jane and I took advantage of the cool night air to walk down to the Arno, talking all the way, and since we were so close, to my hotel and the rooftop bar (open to midnight; view of Duomo in one direction, river in the other) for a thrilling nightcap of a big bottle of water and some delicious free sweet pastry pieces... I sent Jane off into the night with abundant hugs – are we going to have stories to tell – and got to bed about 1 am, after checking out the 600 channels on the TV (TV – what an idea – hadn’t seen one since leaving California).

Saturday morning I enjoyed the lavish breakfast in the lavish breakfast room, then checked out and walked slowly back to the Teatro area to find my “family” before they left at 11 a.m. for a visit to Fabio’s mother, who lives in the center of Chiusi (formerly the Etruscan capital, all those many eons ago). On the front door of Borgho Allegri 38 Fabio had left a handwritten note and map... he has a new workshop (laboratorio) two blocks away (due, quattro passi) where he works with an older Maestro making, repairing and refinishing furniture. Both were wearing gloves and smelling of fresh varnish. We shook hands by touching elbows.

It was fantastically fun to see Fabio again, ask about his wife and daughter (now as tall as him, plays clarinet in the school band which at this moment is visiting the band in Spain that had visited them here in Firenze). Before I figured out which hole in the wall was Fabio’s shop I noticed tiny, energetic Miu scampering in the street nearby. I knew then I was close. Miu, you haven’t changed a bit, and your humiliating doggy name still sounds like “meow” in English.

Fabio said in a dozen different ways that I was always welcome to look him up, that we are “family” in reality, that he would like to keep in touch and perhaps cook for Joselyn and I, and so forth. All real, all heartfelt, all just the best thing to experience on a sunny, fresh, Firenze morning.

I walked across town, paying respects to the Duomo along the way (newly auto-free streets make the neighborhood much more pleasant) and made my pilgrimage to the herbs and lotions store affiliated with the Sisters of Santa Maria Novella, officially Officina Profumo Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella SRL. Hadn’t been there for three years, but I knew exactly which lovely room to enter, what to ask for (thanks to Joselyn for emailing me the words on the label) and I think I was served by the very same grand lady who was behind the counter several years ago. She knew exactly what I wanted – rose and geranium lotion for dry skin – with milk – all white– bianco – and went and got it. I then asked her for a second one, explaining I probably couldn’t get back for another three years, at least, and it had to last. Also picked up some sweet almond oil for the J (olio di mandorle dolci)... no more carry-on for me, however.

I stuffed it all in my backpack, and killed some time reading the Herald Tribune and sipping a caffe latte on the S. Maria Novella square; then caught the train to Orvieto.

Homecoming... I hadn’t been there since the 1960s and the amazing horizontally striped Cathedral hasn’t changed a bit. Walking slowly through town I stopped for a two-flavor gelato (casatta and ciocolatto) at La Musa, Gelateria artigianale, and soon realized photos were out of the question as long as chocolate ice cream was flowing over hands and fingers. At the amazing edifice itself spent 3E to get inside, for a long, leisurely look at the excellent mosaics and frescoes inside. Joined an Italian tour group with priests and nuns, following along as the guide described the major fresco panels – I didn’t need a guide to tell me those ecstatic humans being pulled out of the ground by Gabriel’s trumpets were different from the other humans over there, beaten down en masse by devils, and angels with lousy assignments... Usually this kind of hyperventilating garishly illustrated Bible stories well, both offends and bores me, but in this time and place I was captivated by the energy and skill of the work. Over the altar is a smallish piece by Fra Angelico, all the rest finished 50 years later by another hired painter, this time from Siena.

On the short train trip back to Stazione Termini in Rome, the woman facing me in our compartment carried on unending conversations on two mobile phones. She was called and made calls constantly, no respite. Seem,ed to be enjoying herself, too. Very entertaining for her, and for me, watching.

I am pleased with myself at such an eventful 18 hours, finally writing this at about 11 pm Saturday evening. I wish all days could be this interesting and fun and friends-filled. Maybe they can. We can make it so, as Captain Picard might say.

A concert and a luthier...

2011-05-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

May 10, 2011... The concert last night at Parco della Musica was excellent. I found the room muffled the music a bit, but I had an exemplary seat – 14 rows back and squarely facing cellist Gautier Capucon... he was a bit over-theatrical – reaching out with his bow arm as if gathering a swirl of notes to him before starting to play. He kept lifting his off (left) foot from the floor. He endeared himself to me when he turned his head toward the first cellist behind him when the music called for their duet. Capucon played the Schumann Concerto; the orchestra (Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia) played a Schumann Overture, Scherzo and Finale, and after intermission the Brahms #1.

There were several unusual things about this concert. For one, the entire orchestra was off-stage until the appointed time for the concert to begin. I checked my ticket – was I in the correct hall at the right time? Then at precisely 7:30 they walked in and took their places... For another, they sat so that from my seat the first violins were stage left, the seconds stage right, with the violas behind them, and the cellos facing the audience from their seats directly in front of Conductor Semyon Bychkov. The basses (three for the Schumann, six for the Brahms) were located at the rear, left; brass to the rear right, and in between horns and winds. Dead center in the rear was the single percussionist who made up in volume and energy what several assistants might otherwise have added.

May 11, 2011... There is a coda to this... on my way home from school this afternoon I took another street on pretty much of a whim, thinking to find again the old man in the old shop who had sold me two perfect pens (and in this school, with answers to exercises necessarily written into tiny spaces, good pens are crucial). I have not found him yet (was he only a dream? No, I have two good pens and a pad of paper – where else could I have purchased them here?) but stumbled almost immediately into what clear was a violin shop.

It turned out to be the atelier of Claude Lebet (“Maestro Liutaio” or master luthier) who was out at the moment, but one of his several assistants undertook to answer my question – did they know the old man in the old shop? No, but since you play violoncello, would you care to try this one?

What a gift from heaven. I put down my school bag, picked up the cello and – it was really excellent – very loud and clear, from the lowest to the highest notes. Turns out it’s an exact copy of the original (insert maker here – I forget) cello now owned by last night’s performer, Gautier Capucon.

It wasn’t as good as his, being a month old, not centuries, but it played like a dream. If it turns out, I should have photos of another assistant playing it for me (so I could stand back and listen) and me playing, too.

The maestro arrived, I was introduced, and he went to work and ignored me. His work these days apparently is not wield knife and chisel, but to stare into the desktop computer of yet another assistant, and discuss web things. You can find him here...

Meanwhile, I was trying to remember the maker of my cello (Carletti natale 1941) and failing. I did discover that this shop will rent me a cello – a good cello but not like the one I tried – for 100E for a full month, case, bow included. A very very good deal, but one I probably won’t take him up on because I probably only have one or more playing sessions here in Rome, and I wouldn’t be playing it here in this apartment – no aural privacy, no music.

The maestro has published an authoritative and highly illustrated book on the instrument makers of Rome. As I left, the assistant offered me a gift – a peg holder made of leather with a tiny metal cup to catch the sharp point of the cello stick.

I was very impressed with the entire experience. It was a great pleasure to play, regardless of instrument. By the way, the one I tried would sell for approximately 22,000E.

visit to the Rome luthier Claude Lebet

2011-05-11T07:30:00.000-07:00

Rome .. End of my first week here...

2011-05-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

May 6, 2011... This first weekend was fun and full of events. Dinner with school friends Kathy (from Windsor CA), David, and his wife Tricia from Melbourne. We went to Avenue 60 in via del Gesu (short walk for P. Venezia) and enjoyed good food, esp. the wine (Kathy had me take photo of the label for her boyfriend. The report: we chose well). The place is clean, modern and well located, but only one other couple was eating there when we were – on Friday night! Never can tell why one place hits and another misses. Avenue 60 gets top reviews on TripAdvisor – in fact, that’s where I found it. Can anyone explain?

May 7, 2011... Saturday morning I bought flowers in Campo dei Fiori and journeyed (out by bus; back by Metro) to EUR (pronounced ay-ur) to join Ana Fitzpatrick to play cello/piano duets. Teleman, Vivaldi, Elgar (a bassoon sonata, very romantic) and Schumann...

Ana’s home is very comfortable, filled with art she has made (ceramics) or purchased, and two pianos, because she usually plays four-hands. Her friend and my future acquaintance Claudio was in Sienna visiting his elderly mother, which he does two weekends a month, bless him. All the time I spent with Ana was in Italian... I did OK but was a bit hard on myself that I didn’t have more words and phrases at hand... Ana has taught Spanish (she is from Argentina originally) and got in the habit of not only correcting me but interrupting me with the correction. I got used to it. She made us both a big salad (she became a vegetarian after her children did) and then did me a huge favor: Located an upcoming Schumann cello concerto/Brahms Symphony #1 and when I returned home I bought a ticket for next Tuesday night at the Parco di Musica (and now to find it and get there in time).

I got off the Metro at Colosseo, took a bus to Piazza Venezia (home of the huge monument that looks like a typewriter).. explored high above using Michelangelo’s famous steps. Walked home, slept well – very tired.

Sunday May 8 woke up early and treated myself to an early walk from here through Trastevere. Truly enjoyed the morning quiet. Found two possible places to stay with Joselyn next time we are here, both quite close (but impossibly more fancy): Hotel Residenza Farnese (four stars) just off Piazza Farnese; and in Trastevere: B&B Arco del Lauro. Both look possible... well located but on quiet side streets.

Took lots of photos, and when I arrived at Ponte Cestio Fabricio (the only bridge that spans an island in the Tiber) took out my Touch and followed the Rick Steves audio walking tour. I enjoyed his friendly voice, but soon realized it would have been easier to follow directly in the book RS Rome 2011 which I have here. Chiesa Santa Cecilia was beautiful – it was set up with white roses everywhere for a wedding or first communion. The well-lit statue of St. Cecilia was beautiful... this whole church was beautiful – a light and lovely hand – as if the ever-present nuns there were the architects, not the usual great (= egotistic) male builders. While I slowly looked around, a gaggle of nuns held a small service (sans priest) on the side – reading the bible, intoning prayers, and singing. One nun stood with one hand on keyboard and one hand on book. Beautiful. As I left, bells in the tower above the church exploded together. In the courtyard it felt as loud as the loudest ambulances and police.

At the farthest point of the walk – by this time I had finished the RS tour – I entered the interesting church San Franceso a Ripa. Rick does not include it on his walk, probably because the church is not much compared to many others here and contains only one thing that stands out – but it’s so amazing – the sculpture by Bernini, of Beata Ludovica Albertoni (1671-4) who is, according to another guide, “in a state of religious ecstacy bordering scandalously on the sexual.”

Sunday services were in full service. It would have been too much to wander up the left aisle to the last chapel to view Beata. I could only bring myself to wander in sight of priest and congregation one chapel away from the goal. In that adjacent chapel was a little door opening on to the Bernini room. I could barely peer at Beata’s feet and drapery – but however hard I leaned over the heavy oak bench that barred the passageway I never could see her famous expression... will have to return on another day, I guess. But it was fun anyway.

On the way home I waited to eat until reaching the nearby wifi café which turned out to be closed. So I tried the nearby ristorante (forgot the name; provide later) which turned out to be excellent, with an Israeli/international chef. Traditional Italian – not exclusively Roman – food made very well. House-made bread with small dishes of dried tomatoes and chopped olives to spread on it; fresh green salad with a ball of bufalo mozarella sitting on top (also walnuts and lemon) ahh.. .and finally house-made (what else?) ravioli in a light red sauce, filled with various seafoods – shellfish and actual fish. Very fresh. Two caffe lungos to finish, and now, 5 pm and four hours later, I can still feel them whirling in my rapidly beating heart.

I’ve been studying intensely especially today – finishing what I should have learned in Level 4; preparing in advance for what’s coming in Level 5 (enrolling in a new class, higher level; wasn’t happy with the teacher in L4). I’m far from ready, but more ready than I might be otherwise.

How does it happen that in every class there always are one or more students who outshine everyone else? They get every line of every exercise correct... I study, too. What am I missing? Sufficient brain cells, probably.

lots happening in Rome

2011-05-06T07:29:00.000-07:00

... and I guess I'm a tiny part of it. Please watch this space for actual "blog" comment in the next few days. I've been emailing and writing, going to school, struggling to get my apartment livable, trying to find better ways to get online, enjoying the filth and the flowers, the gorgeous, sunny fresh air and the cool nights... If one does not get toes smashed by a Mercedes, one could actually enjoy this place. I'm living down an alley -- Vicolo Bolo, which is just off Via dei Pellegrini, which is parallel to Corso Vittorio, which is next to... and close to my school. Many of the famous places here in Rome are no farther, in fact much closer, than my mailbox at home. In a mile or so I'm at dozens of churches, famous squares and fountains and all that. Rome. Too much to take in during one lifetime, but an easy place to spend a lifetime trying.

The best book I've read about Rome (actually, brought it along, even in its old hardback version) is "A Thousand Bells at Noon" by Franco Romagnoli... it's really a love letter to the city by a boy born there, a man who left, and an older man who returned. Remarkable. Now available in a $14.99 paperback version.

He died in 2008... wish I could have met him. See this NY Times obit

Italy Takes Over the World

2011-04-20T21:51:00.000-07:00

Let’s take a look at the data: By most measures, Italy will rule the world one day. You say China. I say Italy is sneaking up on the outside track.

Italy has already captured the travel market. Guidebooks to Italy greatly outnumber guides to China. More Americans visit small towns in Tuscany than villages in Shanxi. More people can name Italy’s President than China’s General Secretary or Premier. It’s not even close.

In China, everyone’s heading to the cities, looking for work and adventure. In Italy most people stay put, waiting for you to pile out of the next tourist van. Some have neighbors who once visited the nearest big city. That’s more than enough excitement.

According to the nation’s biggest book distributor, current books on China outnumber those on Italy. However, add the word “travel” and the figures reverse – travel books on Italy more than double those on China. There is one current travel book on Italy for every 4,754 Italians, but only one for every 75,616 Chinese. You could look it up on the InterGoogle. I did.

That’s how Italy takes over the world – one travel guide at a time.

Writers such as Rick Steves, the Frommers, contributors to Lonely Planet, Let’s Go, Fodors, Insight, DK, Rough, Michelin, Brand, Blue – all continue to produce guides to the place. The one I take along is the latest Rick Steves, the most user-friendly and consistently updated. He’ll get you into places by the back door, find you a nice place to stay, and hold your hand while you wander famous museums listening to Steves on your Mp3 player.

Rick Steves is highly selective and does not try to cover everything. When Steves omits a place fewer Americans visit (and the reverse is true – Americans appear anyplace Steves recommends – he single-handedly made fashionable the small towns along the Cinque Terre coast of Liguria).

If you want comprehensive information look to Michelin or the Blue Guides. Lonely Planet is fairly inclusive and often provides extra detail. Lonely Planet favors the low-end of budget accommodations. Frommers and Fodors guides are budget-worthy but include more expensive places, too.

The best full-color maps and other visuals can be found in the DK Eyewitness Guides or National Geographic Traveler Guides. These are better for study than to lug around. Rough Guides are interesting for their distinctly British point of view.

One standout among these guides is the new series Insight Select Guides to places such as San Francisco, Istanbul, London, Hong Kong. My copy of Rome Select would look modishly fashionable casually resting on a café table across from, say, the Trevi Fountain. It has a beautiful fabric cover, a bookmark ribbon, and reads as if it was written person to person. If you’re in the mood for romance, ancient history, local flavor, modern art or a coffee break, Rome Select has you covered.

Some years ago Susan Cahill edited The Smiles of Rome, A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers and the collection is basically timeless. Entries include articles and excerpts from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James to Federico Fellini and Muriel Spark. If you did take this book with you, you’d find yourself searching in St. Paul’s footsteps along the Ostian Way, or wondering at a statue of Moses in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli where Sigmund Freud once pondered “the complex soul of the artist.”

Most things in Italy are in the habit of changing slowly. That’s why film maker, cookbook author and restaurateur G. Franco Romagnoli’s book A Thousand Bells at Noon, A Roman’s Guide to the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City resonates a decade after it was first published.

“Like a lung timed by traffic lights,” Romagnoli writes of Piazza Barberini, “the square inhales and exhales cars and buses from the seven streets that empty into it.”

Another series that has been around for some years and ages well is The Travelers’ Tales Guides. 30 Days in Italy, True Stories of Escape to the Good Life includes this closing rhyme:

Paris has la Tour Eiffel

Babylon had its tower as well

But neither has the power to seize ya

Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

NOTES:

Rome Select, various authors. Insight Select Guides hard cover $15. ISBN 9789812822710.

The Smiles of Rome: A Literary Companion for Readers and Travelers by Susan Cahill. Ballantine Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 034543420X.

A Thousand Bells at Noon: A Roman Reveals the Secrets and Pleasures of His Native City by G. Franco Romagnoli. Harper paperback $14.99. ISBN 0060519207.

Italy, the Romagnoli Way: A Culinary Journey by G. Franco and Gwen Romagnoli. Lyons Press hard cover $24.95. ISBN 1599212447.

30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. Travelers' Tales Guides paperback $14.95. ISBN 1932361421.

A few more:

The Colosseum by Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard (Wonders of the World). Harvard University Press paperback $14.95. ISBN 0674060318.

Rome from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregor. Belknap Press paperback $22. ISBN 0674022637.
One reviewer wrote: “I can't really have a favorite book on Rome, can I? No, but...well, this comes close. In three hundred pages of clean, muscular prose, McGregor has done the almost impossible task of pulling the glories of this city together in a neat, readable, incredibly well informed study...”

McGregor also has written “From the Ground Up” books on Paris, Venice and Washington DC.

Administrative map of modern China...

Italy: 12,620 books and 60 million people = one book for every 4,754 citizens.
China: 17,192 books and 1.3 billion people = one book for every 75,616 citizens.

Glasses of Exotic Nutty Stuff

2011-04-14T20:12:00.000-07:00

Lovely now; surprisingly youthful. Delicate grapefruit aromas. Flinty, buttery, vanilla toastiness, nice weight on the palate. Floral, sweet citrus and pear, sweet cream, roasted nuts and vanilla flavors. Soft floral and butterscotch notes.

If this was a woman I’d fall slobbering at her feet. If this was a potluck I’d think I’d stumbled into a BMW convention. But if this was a glass of wine, well, I’d ignore the foo-foo, drink whatever they served and ask for another.

With all due respect to the excellent winemakers at Hafner Vineyard, isn’t all this wine perfume a bit much? Is there anything else created by people as over described as modern bottles of wine?

You could make a meal out of what some can find in Chardonnay.

First course: Grapefruit baked with butter and vanilla. Then pears in sweet cream, roasted nuts, butterscotch pudding to finish. Not nutritious, but pretty tasty, I’d bet.

“Winespeak can only take you so far,” note Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater in their book Is This Bottle Corked? The Secret Life of Wine. “After that it is up to you...”

The authors quote a range of wine descriptions, from leather, pencil shavings, rubber, stone and compost, to licorice, chocolate and coffee. Since few can “really discern more than a small handful of scents and tastes” you might be better off to “just pour yourself a glass, drink it, and decide whether or not you like it,” they say.

If a reviewer writes a particular wine reminds her of “cat’s pee on a gooseberry bush” you might pass. Another wine evokes “a rugby club changing room.”

The authors of Is This Bottle Corked? have put together a number of brief essays on some of the main topics that might intrigue imbibers. The authors may sound at first a bit flip, but contained in their lightweight approach is a great deal of significantly useful information. “Flavor,” they explain, “is actually made up of two components: its ‘nose’ and its taste...certainly, part of the fun of drinking wine is catching the differences between what a wine smells like and what it tastes like.”

In another wine book prize-winning wine writer and British TV/radio expert Oz Clarke says Let Me Tell You About Wine, a Beginner’s Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Wine. His book is richly illustrated with photos, graphs and charts. Clarke invites the reluctant sipper into a comfortable relationship with the glass, and the book could not be more friendly to beginners.

Right at the start Clarke breaks down wine tastes and smells into 18 basic groups, each of which he then matches with the best wines in the world. Group 6 as one example is “Earthy” -- savoury reds which “are the classic food wines of Europe, the kind where fruit flavours often take a back seat to compatibility with food and the ability to cleanse the palate and stimulate the appetite.”

In this group he recommends Bordeaux and Chianti from Europe, Cabernets and Merlots from places closer to home.

“Your chances of walking into a wine shop and coming out with a wine that’s enjoyable to drink, whatever the price level, are better now than ever before,” Clarke writes. “The last quarter of the 20th century saw a revolution in wine, in terms of both style and quality.”

That’s fine with me. So set up another glass of that gooseberryish perfumy tropical fruit, crisp, refreshing, tangy, bone dry, peach pineapple and honey, black pepper, mellow, intriguing, herby, sweet-sour, blushing, succulent, subtle, sharp, toasty, exotic, nutty stuff... right now!

NOTES:

Is This Bottle Corked? by Kathleen Burk and Michael Bywater. Harmony Books $19.99. ISBN 9780307462916.

Oz Clarke’s Let Me Tell You About Wine by Oz Clarke. Sterling Publishing $19.95. ISBN 9781402771231

Oz Clarke on the web...

What's Wrong with the Vongolari?

2011-04-07T18:49:00.000-07:00

The Italians. Besides being the name of Luigi Barzini’s excellent book of some years ago, to say the word “Italians” is also to say whew, who will ever understand them? Everyone has theories, but even Italians don’t understand the Italians.

Some things are easy to see: Italians are tribal. They owe loyalty first to family, last to nation. Their accidental country today is only slightly more unified than Libya and slightly more successful than Tunisia (with both of which countries Italy is historically tied). It’s easy to see the huge gap between south and north, commonplace to complain about cynical politicians and do-nothing bureaucrats. You can see all that and not begin to unravel what makes Italy, Italy.

I’ve decided to go to Rome next month to clear up the confusion. I’ll inspect any number of heavenly meals, talk Italian with a few patient natives, and let you know what the heck’s going on over there.

To prepare myself I’ve been poring over guides to Rome and reading the Italian detective novels of Andrea Camilleri, a native of Sicily now living in Rome, and Donna Leon, an American who lived in Venice for thirty years.

Both authors wrestle with modern Italy on every page, trying to explain and understand how Italians came to live in such a gorgeous and messed-up place.

In “August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri, Inspector Salvo Montalbano discovers that his suspect “happens to be the mayor’s brother-in-law” in the fictitious town of Vigata, Sicily, and gets almost all the city’s building contracts.

“And they let him do that?” the Inspector asks, as if he didn’t already know the answer. “Yes they do, because he pays his dues in equal part to both the Cuffaros and Sinagras...” the two dominant Mafia families in the area.

“So the final cost of every contract ends up being double the figure established at the outset... poor Spitaleri can’t do it any differently, otherwise he’d be operating at a loss.”

So much for the Mafia. In case a reader of these mysteries set in Sicily might imagine noble Venice relatively free of corruption, Donna Leon early in her book “A Sea of Troubles” is quick to point to another state of things.

Leon’s mystery is set on the island of Pellestrina, on the Venetian lagoon, home to a number of close-knit fishing families.

“I don’t know enough about the way things work out here,” a policeman from Venice reports, “but that’s the feeling I get: there’s too many of them and too few fish left...”

In one scene Commissario Guido Brunetti interviews a lagoon pilot whose job brings him in contact with these fishermen.

“The vongolari (clam fishermen)... “they’re hyenas. Or vultures. They suck up everything with their damned vacuum cleaner scoops, rip up the breeding beds, destroy whole colonies... The bastards dig them up right in front of Porto Marghera, and God knows what’s been pumped or dumped into the water there. I’ve seen the bastards, anchored there at night, with no lights, scooping them up, not fifty meters from the sign saying that the waters are contaminated and fishing’s forbidden.”

“But isn’t there some control, doesn’t someone check them?” Brunetti asks. “(The pilot) smiled at such innocence... there are all sorts of inspectors, Dottore, (he) answered... but that doesn’t mean anything gets inspected, or, if it does, that whatever they find gets reported.”

“Why not?” Brunetti asks, as any reasonable reader of this mystery might. “Instead of speaking... he contented himself with rubbing his thumb across the end joint of his first three fingers.”

Both Donna Leon and Andrea Camilleri love the land and the people. At the same time they clearly are unsettled over things they’ve learned. The way things work in Italy makes its residents crazy, angry, or much more common, indifferent.

There is no other country in the world where things are so messed up and at the same time so beautiful. The ever-clever Italian way of life is an affront to things most Americans believe. Life in Italy is a riddle not likely to be solved no matter how many excellent books are published, no matter how many times one travels there.

NOTES:

“A Sea of Troubles” by Donna Leon. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143116202.

“August Heat” by Andrea Camilleri. Penguin paperback $14. ISBN 9780143114055.

Publisher web sites for Donna Leon include Grove Atlantic Press and Random House UK

Andrea Camilleri on the web can be found here and here and even here with an explanation of how the town of Vigata came to be invented.

Paying Dues

2011-03-31T22:30:00.000-07:00

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

Billy Collins Goes on Tour

2011-03-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

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...

Guide Dog Loses Eyes, Gets His Own Guide Dog

2011-03-17T20:14:00.000-07:00

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.”

Click Save

2011-03-11T17:46:00.001-08:00

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

Living in the Far Future with Michio Kaku

2011-03-03T18:43:00.000-08:00

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...

Where to Shop When You Can ‘t Shop at 200 Borders Stores Any More – or – Under-Super-Size Me, Please!

2011-02-24T19:26:00.000-08:00

A while back I indulged in a quasi-gloat about the impending, now finalized, bankruptcy of Borders Books & Music, and the closing of 200 of their once super superstores.

Across the country, independent booksellers are racing to pick up the slack, to take the place of the superstore down the street that had threatened to send their bricks and their mortar into retail oblivion.

Relax, independent bookstores. You don’t have to do a thing. People who used to wander aimlessly into Borders, hypnotized by the smell of brewing coffee, will now wander into your stores.

At your typical Borders there are miles of aisles with no one in them. Books stacked any which way, not a worker in sight. No one to greet you, ask if you need assistance. No one to point the way to poetry.

It may surprise your Borders shopper that there is such an animal as a local, independently owned bookstore. When she stumbles in – well – freaky might describe it.

She is likely to be greeted by a smiling employee, often the owner herself, who offers assistance while remaining discreetly out of the way when she doesn’t want suggestions.

Eye contact is common in independent bookstores, which may also be disturbing to chain-store shoppers accustomed to roaming super-sized barns in uninterrupted fugue state. By the way, Dissociative or Psychogenic Fugue is a real disorder that causes temporary amnesia. It may have happened to you at Costco, for all I know.

You will not be fuguing in your independent bookstore. However, you may be tired from your long journey getting there, as Borders (and Barnes & Noble) have forced many local stores to close in recent years.

If you no longer know of an indie bookstore near you, direct your Googlelectric device to Indie Bound (unfortunate name) dot org. Insert zip code, and Indie Bound will return location and directions to reachable stores.

I did this just now for my own location, 95420, even though I know darn well where my local bookstores are located. Indie Bound returned the locations of 19 bookstores within 100 miles, ranging from Levin & Co. in Healdsburg and Treehorn in Santa Rosa, to the independents of Mendocino County: Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino, Cheshire Books in Fort Bragg, the Book Juggler in Willits, Laughing Dog Books in Boonville, Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah and Four-Eyed Frog Books in Gualala.

Vroman’s in Los Angeles and Politics & Prose in Washington DC are among those exchanging virtually worthless Borders Rewards Cards for their own instore customer cards.

Roxanne Coady of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut, asked her customers what she might do now that Borders is closing. She was astounded at the more than 200 responses she received.

Some people suggested things R.J. Julia, and most other independents, already do – shipping direct to customers, offering electronic books on portable flash drives, and so forth. Others asked for price discounting, always a troublesome issue for low-margin independents.

Ms Coady told a reporter at Bookselling This Week although she wants to make all of her customers happy, deep discounting isn't her business. "I've always felt we've got to stick to what we're good at, and it might mean that we're not everything to everybody. The question is, are there enough customers who want what we're good at?"

Other independents such as Copperfields stores and Bookshop Santa Cruz do discount a selection of new books. They and others plan to continue the discount policy and publicize it.

At Vroman’s in LA, more than 80 people already have turned in their Borders cards. They have discovered the joys of shopping locally where suggestions are available and everyone knows your name, but only if you want them to know it.

NOTES:

“Fugue state” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: A fugue state, formally Dissociative Fugue (previously called Psychogenic Fugue) (DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders 300.13[1]), is a rare psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality and other identifying characteristics of individuality. The state is usually short-lived (hours to days), but can last months or longer. Dissociative fugue usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. After recovery from fugue, previous memories usually return intact, but there is complete amnesia for the fugue episode. Additionally, an episode is not characterized as a fugue if it can be related to the ingestion of psychotropic substances, to physical trauma, to a general medical condition, or to psychiatric conditions such as delirium, dementia, bipolar disorder or depression. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode, and upon recovery there may be amnesia for the original stressor (Dissociative Amnesia).

The Indie Bound (unfortunate name) independent bookstore finder...

Bookselling This Week on independent responses to Borders...

Bogie

2011-02-17T22:43:00.000-08:00

Thanks to author Stefan Kanfer for his new 255-page meditation “Tough Without A Gun, The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart.” This is non-fiction at its most interesting. I stayed up to 4 am today finishing the darn thing.

Kanfer, film critic and researcher, has written books on Groucho Marx and Lucille Ball, Marlon Brando and Yiddish theater. In his new work Kanfer has a triple subject: Humphrey Bogart the consummate actor, Humphrey Bogart the flawed and fascinating person, and Bogie the film legend who takes over when he’s on screen, still stands for a no-nonsense kind of American manhood, and refuses to fade away, long after others have been forgotten.

There already have been any number of good and useful books on Bogart, as Kanfer is the first to point out (and to borrow from). Bogart has “popped up in retro mysteries and pulp crime novels” and books by scholars, historians, fans and total strangers, all of whom were “unable to let go of (him).”

Why another book, and why now, more than 50 years since Bogie last appeared on screen? In the years since his death in 1957 “both the definition and the image of the male role had drastically changed... by the rules of history, Humphrey Bogart should have become obsolete, a faded image totally obscured by new faces and fresh interpretations of the male role.

“Instead, he became more prominent, looming larger as we moved away from his epoch,” Kanfer writes. “What he offered was more than a recreation of movies past, where men were men and women were unemployed. His masculinity was not swagger, but its opposite – a quiet, bitter recognition of reality...”

The final chapters deal with Bogart’s afterlife – his lasting effect on our culture. Kanfer could not have offered a compelling summation without the extensive biography that precedes it.

Kanfer pinpoints April 19, 1957, as the real beginning of the modern Bogart myth. The Brattle Theater in Cambridge MA ran a revival of the fifteen-year-old film Casablanca. Harvard students dropped in during exams week, and returned night after night, “wearing trench coats and dangling cigarettes from their lower lips, singing ‘La Marseillaise,’ shouting lines of dialog on cue.”

Soon other art houses were running Bogart retrospectives. Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, Dix Steele, Fred C. Dobbs and Billy Dannreuther lived again in films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Petrified Forest, High Sierra, The Big Sleep, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The African Queen and many more.

At Bogart’s funeral, actor, friend and director John Huston said “Himself, he never took too seriously – his work most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with amused cynicism. Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect.”

Truman Capote, screen writer on Beat the Devil, wrote a famous tribute to Bogart after the star’s death, and many others joined in. French existential writer Albert Camus sported a Bogart-style trench coat and created characters that could be considered Humphrey Bogart clones (and clones of Hemingway characters, too). Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless starred Jean-Paul Belmondo playing a car thief “whose gestures mimic the Bogart style” from cigarette to facial tics.

Restaurants and bars took on names and furnishings lifted from Humphrey Bogart movies. Woody Allen used the Bogart myth in his “wistful comedy” Play It Again, Sam. There were Broadway plays and off-Broadway plays, London revues, pop songs, even a Bogart Collection from Thomasville Furniture featuring the Trench Coast Chair and the (Barefoot) Contessa Banquette.

Bogart was cool before “cool” was invented, someone once said. Kanfer agrees: “Chances are he would have been pleased to be the essence of cool.”

“In an unguarded moment,” Kanfer says, “(Bogart) gave a terse and accurate self-appraisal: ‘I’m a professional. I’ve done pretty well, don’t you think? I’ve survived in a pretty rough business.’”

He was true to himself. He knew his lines, paid his debts, showed up on time and did good work. All of that, enduring fame, and long-lasting influence. It’s not a small thing, what Humphrey Bogart accomplished.

NOTES:

“Tough Without A Gun” by Stefan Kanfer. Knopf hard cover $26.95 with many illustrations. ISBN 9780307271006.

Knopf’s pages on Stefan Kanfer

Chicago Sun Times book review of “Tough Without A Gun”

LA Times review

Thoughts from my pea brain...

2011-02-10T19:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes ideas come floating in from all sorts of places, bump up against each other and sometimes it all makes sense, and sometimes it’s just another set of oddities in this odd but rapidly changing world we inhabit.

In my pea brain “The Imperfectionists,” an excellent novel, is bumping up against The Espresso Book Machine mentioned here last week, and both are bumping around with an article in the Economist on 3-Dimensional printers.

“The Imperfectionists,” is a highly entertaining debut novel by Tom Rachman. Written as a group of connected short stories, it concerns a fictional English-language daily newspaper published in Rome by a motley group of correspondents – very much based on The International Herald Tribune still published daily in Paris. Rachman in fact served as an editor there.

“The Imperfectionists” brought back for me memories of my own brief career in journalism and public relations. I knew people very much like Rachman’s characters. He has it down: the strange moods and stranger relationships in a big city newsroom.

Last week I poked fun at the new Espresso Book Machine now churning out books-on-demand at the Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse in La Cañada.

This week I found out what an Espresso Book Machine actually is. An opinion piece in the trade magazine Publishers Weekly claims instant reprints of long-forgotten titles are making a number of people quite happy.

Jeffrey Mayersohn, proprietor of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA, says his Espresso Book Machine, nicknamed Paige M. Gutenborg, or “Paige” for short, helps readers “connect with the literature of the past... (and) enables what we believe to be an important part of the future of publishing and bookselling.”

He calls Paige “a literary time machine.” One local poet found and printed a biography of his ancestor. Another customer, a telegraphy enthusiast, printed a copy of “Anglo-American Telegraphic Code to Cheapen Telegraphy & to Furnish a Complete Cypher For Use in General Correspondence Including Business, Social, Political & Other Subjects of Correspondence” first published in 1891.

Harvard Book Store prints about 1,500 books every month on Paige. Self-published works by contemporary authors make up about 75% of the books printed.

Readers in the store choose to reprint physical books even though every one also is available for free as digital downloads through Google, Mayersohn points out.

“For many readers and for writers the allure of paper remains. Watching the joy on their faces leads one inevitably to the conclusion that we still cherish the experience of the printed word, preserved for eternity in the pages of a book.”

Then a report in the Economist speculates on the implications of “additive manufacturing” – 3-dimensional printers that create objects “by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam... one layer at a time.”

Calling it “Print Me a Stradivarius” may be an instrument too far. But the idea is not at all far-fetched and its implications are huge – for the price of what a laser printer once cost, inventors already can create prototypes of any idea — sell the object, then modify it based on feedback from users. You can run off a thousand gadgets from a machine in your home. No need to book a factory in China or commit to a traditional manufacturing process.

The implications of homemade manufacturing are profound. As the process gets even better and cheaper, anyone with a blueprint can create the object it represents.

So we have print newspapers thriving alongside Internet-only publications. Bookstores not only selling books but printing them on request. Inventors producing desktop toothbrushes and junkyards able to manufacture spare parts for any car.

The possibilities are fantastic. The world is changing. Sparks are flying.

NOTES:

Espresso Book Machine brochure

The Economist on 3-D printing

Jeffrey Mayersohn’s opinion piece “Hit ‘Print’”

Here is the location of every Espresso Book Machine in the United States of America (it may be out of date by the time you read this)

New Orleans Public Library; University of Michigan Shapiro Library Building; Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, VT; The BYU Bookstore, Harvard Book Store; The University of Arizona Bookstores; University of Missouri Bookstore, University of Utah; Village Books, Bellingham, WA; Boxcar & Caboose Bookshop and Café, Saint Johnsbury, VT; Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA; Schuler Books and Music, Inc. Grand Rapids, MI; University Book Store, Inc. - University of Washington; Grace Mellman Community Library, Temecula, CA; North Dakota State University Bookstore, Fargo, ND; University of Pittsburgh Hillman Library; North Carolina State Bookstores Raleigh, NC; The University Co-Op, Austin, TX; Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse La Cañada Flintridge, CA; McNally Jackson Bookstore, New York City, NY.

The Espresso Book Machine

2011-02-03T18:07:00.000-08:00

“Good news: Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse, La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., is opening on Monday in its new, larger location in ‘a modern custom literary emporium’ that has replaced ‘a drab former gas station,’ according to La Cañada Online.” – from the newsletter Shelf Awareness.

Come on down and visit us here in our new literary emporium! We have everything you could want in an independent bookstore and much more – gas pumps, espresso pumps, books any way you like them, a full range of shopping experiences. We’ve just installed a meat and produce area and in the next few weeks we’ll also have a 40 amp dedicated charging station. Charge up all your electronic devices plus a Toyota Leaf or Chevy Volt.

Or as we like to say, charge in, charge up and charge your groceries at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse!

The Shelf Awareness article continues: “The store is increasing its inventory and is offering a dedicated readings and special-events area independent from the din of the store's coffee and pastry counter. It will also have an Espresso Book Machine.”

While you’re here take in one of our author readings. We now feature performing authors around the clock, seven days a week. There’s one of our writers in the produce section, watering the broccoli and restocking lemons. Check our website for the full author appearance schedule.

Walk through our store and on the main stage you might discover a local author reading from a work in progress. Nearby on one of our satellite stages a famous author dances tango or practices the piano. On party weekends more adventurous and in-shape writers have been spotted on the stripper’s pole presenting quite a “literary show.” Must show valid ID and be 21 to enter that part of the store, however.

As Shelf Awareness notes it’s often noisy at The Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse. So many people having so much fun! Clusters of young people are chatting online with Facebook friends. Others order shoes from Zappos.com or shout voice commands into Bluetooth earpieces. Some customers browse the old-fashioned physical book displays, then make use of our high speed wireless connection to order books or ebooks from Amazon. They return to us for the coffee and the conversation and to order even more books from Amazon. It’s like an 18th century coffee house in here!

Enjoy our “explosive” Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse atmosphere. When you mix Italian espresso fumes with the odd gasoline leak, something as simple as one malfunctioning IPad can set off the whole thing. Hello, Flintridge Volunteer Fire Department. You know our address!

About our new Espresso Book Machine. Order your book cappuccino style, with foam on top, or plain espresso: no jacket, no color, black ink on black paper. Here’s how it works: Plug an appropriate electronic device into our EBM, insert major credit card, download reading material. Be careful to choose e-book, not double mocha.

Shelf Awareness continues: “...the new building, costing at least $1 million, took much longer than anticipated to construct. New utility lines had to be installed. Soil contaminated by the gas station needed to be replaced. And the store had to install an elevator to allow disabled customers to enter the store from its below-ground parking area.”

Some of that construction continues. We provide shovels and bags to hold contaminated dirt. You fill bags and drag them out to your car. We provide an easy-to-follow IPhone app that shows the closest EPA-approved dirt depository and where to find emergency espresso. For every three bags you drop off we’ll provide one free cup of coffee. Save your dump receipts.

From Shelf Awareness: “The Wanniers also had to contend with a runaway truck that plowed into and wrecked their store nearly two years ago.”

You will soon discover we don’t encourage sitting on the street side of our store. Much of the shattered glass is gone now, but you’ll still see truck tire tracks on the faces of owners Peter and Lenora Wannier. They’ve pretty much recovered from their injuries but Peter now restocks the Espresso Book Machine with a severe limp.

Wondering what else could go wrong at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse? Well, two weeks ago it was discovered that under the old gas station was a previously undiscovered spur of the San Andreas fault, so it won’t be long before the entire bookstore falls into a crevasse.

Hey, watch out for that guy with the tray of hot coffees. He’s not paying attention and he’s going to trip over your chair leg and spill a lapful of scalding double lattes on your I Heart Books t-shirt. Get up now, while you can.

NOTES:

The Shelf Awareness article

Shelf Awareness home page

Flintridge Bookstore ...my apologies for poking fun... I do wish them all the best of success...

Music for the Radio...

2011-01-06T22:54:00.000-08:00

January 7, 2011 “Wondrous World of Music” sitting in for Gordon Black on KZYX -FM, Philo CA

10 am station ID, underwriting. Music of Albeniz, Kodaly, Jean Francaix, Chausson and Tchaikovsky

10:04 Isaac Albeniz (1860-1909) “Asturias” + “Tango” 9:02
Performed by John Williams, guitar

Albeniz loved the music of Andalusia. Was a child prodigy on piano; first appeared at the age of four. These pieces are arranged for guitar from various virtuoso piano pieces. Note that the Tango here was writen before it became the dance we know from South America. When Albeniz wrote this Tango it was a form of Spanish Flamenco, quite different from the later Brazilian Tango dance.

10:13 Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967) “Dances of Galanta” 15:09
Performed by the Philharmonia Hungarica, Antal Dorati, conductor

When Kodaly lived in the village of Galanta (part of Hungary then, now the Czech Republic) there was a long-established gypsy band in the village, so well known years earlier a book of their dances had been published in Vienna. Kodaly used the Gypsy songs as his starting point, and also made use of their typical rhythms called in Hungarian “verbunkos” ("ver-bun'-kosh"), a military style tune played in march tempo.

10:30 Jean Francais (1912-1997) “Quintet for Clarinet + S Quartet” 24:31
Performed by The Serenade String Trio & Friends, with Bernhard Rothlisberger, clarinet

Written in 1977. Francais used winds many times in his compositions.

10:54 Lute Music by Silvius Leopold Weiss (1686-1750) to top of hour
Prelude in D Major 1:47
Capriccio in D Major 2:38
Fantasia in C Major 3:50
Performed by Lutz Kirchhof, lute

Silvius Weiss died in the same year as JS Bach. Born and raised in Germany, he spent six years in Rome where he heard the music of Corelli, Alessandro and Dominico Scarlatti, and in general absorbed the Italian musical esthetic. He began performing and composing at age 20 and soon became known as the greatest lutenist of his day. He was the most prolific composer for that instrument who ever lived. He wrote more than 600 suites, sonatas, concerti and other pieces in the late baroque style.

11:00 station ID, underwriting

11:04 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) 49:41
Symphony #5 in E minor, opus 64 NOTE CHANGE CD for Movts 3/4
Performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan

Tchaikovsky wrote his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1888. Dramatic, many changes of tempo.

11:54 Isaac Albeniz “Cordoba” 6:00
Performed by John Williams, guitar

Gloating, just a little...

2011-01-06T17:44:00.000-08:00

The Borders Group bookstore chain is showing every sign of going down. Forgive me, but I’m going to do a little gloat ... there, that was fun.

I don’t want 19,000 international booksellers to lose their jobs, I don’t want publishers and authors to go unpaid. It’s not good for anyone if miles of bookshelves disappear.

But hey, many of us involved in grassroots bookselling and publishing long ago noted the era of Super Stores could not possibly go on forever. It’s been suspected for a while that Borders was the weakest of the beasts.

As the New York Times put it plainly, “Borders, which has suffered from losses in revenue for years... reported dismal third-quarter earnings in December.”

There is a long-standing American trend toward massive consolidation. See: Standard Oil and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company for classic examples; Starbucks for a more recent one.

One day in 1971 Tom and Louis Borders opened a small bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and began to expand.

The consolidation went like this: Kmart Corporation purchased Waldenbooks, a bookstore chain. Waldenbooks purchased Brentano's, another chain of bookstores. In 1992 Kmart acquired all the Borders stores and expansion really took off, often at the not accidental expense of smaller, non-chain bookstores. Borders (or Barnes & Noble) is opening a big new store across the street or down the block, and you’ll just have to pack up and leave, buddy.

This process made a lot of money for a few people, and hurt many other people in the process. Years ago, traveling to Kauai, Hawaii, we discovered the small bookstore we liked was gone. To this day there are no independent bookstores on Kauai and most other Hawaiian islands. At one end of Kauai you can shop for new books at Borders; at the other end, Barnes & Noble. With minor nods to local authors, the stock of both is essentially identical.

1-7-2011 CORRECTION -- Thanks to a reader who just returned from Kauai and noted there is an excellent independent bookstore in the island -- Talk Story in Hanapepe and I am so chagrined I missed it! And so happy it's there.

Borders and Barnes & Noble can be viewed as dinosaurs raining blows on each other. Down here where people actually live and shop – in the ever-evolving land of independent bookstores, if you will – we hardly hear those dinosaur battles.

Barnes & Noble sells a B&N-branded E book reader, the Nook Color. Borders doesn’t have one of their own. This has hurt Borders, although they are pushing hard to sell The Franklin AnyBook Pro Reader, Sony Daily Edition and Touch Edition and Pocket Edition, the Kobo, the Cruz, the Libre.

Independent bookstores don’t have store-branded E readers, and yet most are doing well selling electronic editions through the newly developed Google Books webstore.

The business press so far has concluded that Borders is headed for restructuring now and bankruptcy later. They’ve tried to renegotiate payment deals with major publishers, but the publishers don’t like the offer.

Borders may be down and Barnes & Noble up, and who cares? You, good listeners and readers, shop locally. You believe the 3/50 Project – people working together to shop locally and spread the word about it -- is a fine thing, and you’re right.

Good for all of us intelligent mammals. We are evolving, yet we will cling to paper-based books as long as we can. We will read electronically too, why not? But mainly paper. May all the little people live long and prosper.

NOTES:

Borders’ own history lesson

The Wikipedia version

“The 3/50 Project supports independent, locally owned businesses by inspiring consumer loyalty to the storefronts that directly fund their communities. Think of three businesses you'd miss if they went away. Stop in. Say hello. Pick up a little something that makes you smile. That's what keeps them around, after all. Pick 3. Spend 50. Save your local economy.”

Random Thoughts for a New Decade AND The Monster of Florence!

2010-12-30T15:55:00.000-08:00

Random thoughts for a new decade...

In the next year no ten year-old will have spent a second in the 20th Century. The United States has been at war your entire life if you are 17 years old.

The Stanford women’s basketball coach is quoted this week: “This was a real important game for our team. I’m really proud of how everyone prepared. Everyone really knew what we needed them to do.”

She could have added “And they really came out and really did it.”

Let’s say you are one of those people thoroughly tired of constant power outages. Let’s say you go out and purchase a home generator. I was one of those people. Once we had our generator installed we stopped having occasion to use it. It always seems to work that way.

Same goes for umbrellas, firewood, and flashlight batteries. You’ll only need these if you don’t have them. This is really how the world really works. Really!

In the past year various speakers modified the word “unique” and this must stop in 2011. Unique is one of a kind. You can be Number One. You can’t be Very Number One.

Take literally. If the box is literally full of writhing snakes you mean one of two things: The box is full of snakes, in which case you don’t have to add the word literally; or you mean it was AS IF the box was full of writhing snakes, in which case you do not mean literally full of snakes. Got it? The mind boggles at this point in time.

Once again we remind you that “at this point in time” is irritatingly overstated. “At this time” is enough. This reminder brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

Now, those newscasters who use the adverb “now” to emphasize how “live” they are must cease this in the New Year. Now I’ll hold my breath until now goes away. Really.

On NPR this morning I heard a reporter say that defeated Senate candidate Christine O’Donnel “was refuting FBI claims” she misused campaign funds. No she didn’t. To refute is to prove something false or erroneous. She didn’t refute the claims; she denied them.

While you are wondering at that, wonder at this: The Feds are being urged to allow increased shooting of sea lions from land or boat near Bonneville Dam in Washington. I say save the salmon: eat the rich (with a nod to P.J. O’Rourke’s book of the same name). That will also save fish.

Turning to literature, I have a book to recommend for fans of serial killer literature, tales set in Italy, and mysteries without resolution. “The Monster of Florence, A True Story” was written by two journalists, one Italian and one American, who themselves eventually came under suspicion for involvement in a series of gruesome murders.

Douglas Preston (the American) and Mario Spezi (the Italian) call their book a “true story” I’d imagine because it is impossible to know where the story is true, and where it’s fiction. The authors detail decades of investigative reporting. They uncover self-serving bureaucratic nonsense. They assess questionable evidence derived from mishandled police investigations. Both writers are fairly sure who is the Monster of Florence, but can’t finally prove anything. The police are not interested in their conclusions, and in fact have accused Spezi of being the murderer himself, and Preston of interfering in the ongoing investigation, such as it is.

Spezi spent months in prison. Preston has been effectively banned from returning to Italy by threat of arrest. He explains in an interview, “having seen the arbitrary exercise of judicial power in Italy firsthand, I’m not inclined to take the risk of going back.”

That’s Italy for you: a really, really, interesting place to fail to solve a bloody bunch of unsolved murders.

NOTES:

Slate discusses “literally”

There’s literally a blog on literally, not recently updated but fun.

“The Monster of Florence, A True Story” by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi. Grand Central Publishing paperback $14.95. ISBN 9780446581271.

Interview with Douglas Preston.

Preston's home pages...Author website.

2010-12-23T19:28:00.000-08:00

Bill Bryson has written a lot of books. He is funny and informative, in recent years more informative than funny, and that’s OK.

Seven years ago he seemed to cap off a lifetime of non-fiction works with “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” basically science from your airplane window; at least that’s where the thought first came to him. What ARE those white things we call clouds?

He had covered a lot already – England, the English tongue, the Continent, America in general and the Appalachian Trail in particular, Australia, autobiography, you name it. Then he did it again – another huge and not short history of some aspects of, well, private life. Bryson’s latest book, “At Home.”

Home, for the Brysons, is a Victorian-era “former Church of England rectory in a village of tranquil anonymity in Norfolk, in the easternmost part of England.”

We read our way through The Hall, The Kitchen, The Scullery and Larder, The Fuse Box (entire chapter on Fuse Box), Drawing Room, Dining Room, down to Cellar, out to Garden, into Plum Room, up The Stairs to Bedroom, Bathroom, Dressing Room, Nursery and finally, the Attic, where the book both begins and ends.

“I had occasion to go up into the attic to look for the source of a slow but mysterious drip,” Bryson writes. “When I did finally flop into the dusty gloom and clambered to my feet, I was surprised to find a secret door, not visible from anywhere outside the house, in an external wall.”

Bryson tries to understand the attic door and everything else in the house. “Houses aren't refuges from history,” he says. “They are where history ends up.”

“‘Have you ever noticed,’ Brian (a local archaeologist) said as we stepped into the church-yard (next door) how country churches nearly always seem to be sinking into the ground? Well, it isn’t because the church is sinking... It’s because the churchyard has risen. How many people do you suppose are buried here?’”

The answer, arrived at after a bit of calculation and estimation, was twenty thousand burials in that one churchyard. No wonder the church appeared to be “in a slight depression, like a weight placed on a cushion.”

You will learn about the Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, immediately known to all as the Crystal Palace in London. Bryson describes the civil servant who conceived of it, and the deaf Duke who impulsively hired his gardener to design and build it. Add in glass making and glass taxes. We’re still in Chapter One.

Bryson’s own manse is “a more modest edifice... designed by one Edward Tull of Aylsham, an architect fascinatingly devoid of conventional talent (as we shall see) for a young clergyman of good breeding named Thomas John Gordon Marsham.”

With this book and a couple glasses of wine you can bore nearby loved ones with amusing stories: Origins of the mousetrap; dangers of nineteenth century paints; invention of cast-iron bathtubs: Hey Joselyn! What? Did you know that “porcelain enamel is in fact neither porcelain nor enamel, but (in essence) a type of glass”? The wool spinning problem. Child labor. Reverend Marsham’s relationship with his housekeeper, Miss Worm. I could go on; Bryson does.

After 450 densely packed pages Bryson returns to the attic (“It turned out to be a slipped tile that was allowing rain through.”). From a table-top sized secret landing outside he reflects, “One of the things not visible from our rooftop is how much energy and other inputs we require now to provide us with the ease and convenience that we have all come to expect in our lives. It’s a lot – a shocking amount. Of the total energy produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in just the last twenty years. Disproportionately, it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction.”

He ends “At Home” with this thought: “The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.”

NOTES:

Here’s how they figured out the number of burials: “A country parish like this has an average of 250 people in it, which translates into roughly a thousand adult deaths per century, plus a few thousand more poor souls that didn’t make it to maturity. Multiply that by the number of centuries that the church has been there and you can see that what you have here is not eighty or a hundred burials, but probably something more on the order of, say, twenty thousand... That’s a lot of mass, needless to say. It’s why the ground has risen three feet.”

“At Home, A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson. Doubleday hard cover $28.95. ISBN 9780767919388.

Wikipedia on Bryson

Bryson on Bryson and another Bryson on Bryson

Bryson quotes...

Random House maintains a home page for Bill Bryson.

Probably the most authentic home page for the author.

The Human Library.... and Afghanistan

2010-12-16T18:02:00.000-08:00

Visit the library, rent a human... what a concept! It’s not often I come across an idea that actually appears to be new... yet, as usual, this idea is not new at all. The first recorded instance of a so-called Human Library took place about ten years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The idea is we all have stories to share. What better place to meet and spin tales than your local library or bookstore?

In Copenhagen, the idea was to “break down prejudice by bringing people of different backgrounds together for (person-to-person) conversation.” Other venues in other places have copied this concept and expanded it.

Most recently I read about a Human Library in the online news aggregator Slate, which reported that “libraries in Toronto are trying to shake things up a bit. They've stocked their shelves with something new: people.”

In Toronto, librarian Anne Marie Aikens said her event this past November drew more than 200 people who “rented” for a half-hour each a police officer, a comedian, a sex-worker-turned-club-owner, a model and survivor of cancer, homelessness and poverty, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and a 19 year-old man with cerebral palsy.

Aikens told a local reporter, “With the Human Library it’s a one-on-one experience and that kind of storytelling... does harken back to centuries and centuries ago when a story was the only way to learn. It's an old technology.”

She added, “A good portion of users heard about it from social media. In the least personal, most mediated way, they found a way to have a very personal experience.”

Funny she should say that, because as soon as I heard about the Human Library I went over to Facebook and searched for Human Libraries. I found them in Norfolk, England; Wroclaw, Poland; Terni, Italy; Tucson, Arizona; and Lismore, Australia.

Let’s try this in Mendocino! Put a name tag and bar code on my chest, and remember to return me to the loan desk when you’re finished conversing.

* * * * *

On another subject altogether: This is the week our government talks publicly about plans for the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Which brings to mind a book I just finished, “The Afghan Campaign” by historian and novelist Steven Pressfield.

It turns out that the Macedonian general Alexander, “The Great” to history, spent three years trying to pacify the same stony soil we currently are fighting over. He didn’t succeed, either, and in the end left “fully a fifth of his army... to keep the country from reverting to insurgency,” according to an historical note at the beginning of the novel.

Alexander extricated himself by making an alliance with a powerful warlord and taking as wife the warlord’s daughter. Alexander’s forts stretched over the land, but despite victories, Alexander never permanently subdued the region. He was forced to fight a tribal, guerrilla war against insurgents who would not join in traditional battles. The brutal and mysterious terrain, as always, favored local inhabitants.

“The Afghan Campaign” tells this story through the adventures of several of Alexander’s soldiers, and in the process we learn about the people of what is now Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. The tale is chillingly similar to what the US is trying to do now, and what Britain, the Soviet Union, and others failed to do.

If you’d like a ground level view of how tribal life and warfare really works, look no farther than “The Afghan Campaign.” It’s set more than 2,300 years ago, but it’s fresh as a wound, and no more comfortable.

NOTES:

The Toronto news story...

For more details about the Human Library http://humanlibrary.org/

The Slate magazine...

“The Afghan Campaign” by Steven Pressfield. Broadway Books paperback $14.95. ISBN 0767922387.

Meet the author and his blogs...

Another note on EBooks...

2010-12-16T16:19:00.000-08:00

From an article in Bookselling This Week ...

Some bookstores are hosting digital petting zoos to introduce e-book options. Gallery Bookshop & Bookwinkle’s Children’s Books in Mendocino, California, combined a petting zoo with a holiday party. “We had a computer set up and were showing customers how to buy e-books from our website,” said owner Christie Olson Day. “We also had preloaded books on an iPad, iPod Touch, Sony Reader, and laptop.”

Olson Day’s aim was to demonstrate to customers not only how to buy e-books, but also how e-books can serve the needs specific to their neighborhood. “We’re out in the boonies and don’t have reliable wireless. So we highlighted that you can read Google eBooks offline. That’s really important to people here.”

Olson Day said that customers “like the idea that we’re in the e-book game and they’re rooting for us, but not many are falling in love with reading digitally.” More evidence, she said, “that print and e-books have a long future coexisting together.”

However, she believes that during the flood of publicity surrounding the launch of Google eBooks one important message was lost or confused. “Customers have heard the fact that Google eBooks are good for the indies, but they’ve missed the fact that the need to buy them from us,” Olson Day said. “You’ve got to figure that for every one person who bothered to ask how this is good for us, there are still one hundred out there who don’t get it. So we’re publicizing that if they want to support their independent bookstore they need to buy their e-books from our site.”

Democracy comes to Ebooks -- at last!

2010-12-09T23:28:00.000-08:00

Big changes for independent booksellers this week as Google turned on their Ebooks service and made it available to all booksellers, in all formats except Amazon’s proprietary Kindle book reader.

The implications of this are truly huge – in one swoop the face of bookselling changed forever. And mostly for the good, as far as I can see.

What this means to you is that if you’ve ever wanted to read an entire book on any electronic device at all – your laptop, smartphone, Nook, Sony E Reader, IPad, name it, you now have access to more than 400,000 books for purchase from more than 4,000 publisher, plus another two million titles – yes, two million – in the public domain, these last at no cost to you whatsoever.

Of course, ink on paper is not going away. Don’t fret. It’s just one more way to read.

If you’d like to take a look for yourself, google “google books” or more specifically direct your browser here and look around. On the first page you will see a variety of full-color book jackets and links to all the rest. Readers can access electronic books directly from Google, or use the talents and suggestions of a favorite bookstore and order the same books from them.

All of these Google Ebooks are available from any device connected to the Internet. Browse, choose, pay if required, download, and begin reading. Since your book resides in the “cloud,” not on any particular computer, you can break off and continue reading on the same or any other available computer or phone.

For example, you might download to your computer a copy of “The Best Spiritual Writing 2010" edited by Pico Iyer and Philip Zalesky. Maybe at home you have time to read the introduction and the first essay. Later in the day, at lunchtime, you resume reading for a half hour – to do that you log in on whatever computer is in front of you. Later that evening you want to read again, this time on your wife’s new IPad. Log in and that book and any others you’ve download will be waiting for you. Google remembers what page you were reading. Preferences for type size and line spacing are preserved. As time goes on you begin to appreciate Google’s free and unlimited storage space.

You can read offline on most devices, except your home computer. Google’s working on that, too.

From what I have heard and seen, independent booksellers are excited to offer Ebooks to readers who previously had to search elsewhere for them.

Many readers, of course, are cautious. One wrote, “I'm not a huge fan of Ebooks. Few reasons, one of them is I just don't read enough, I couldn't justify the cost of buying a dedicated device. Also, I'm one of those people who still buys CDs, because I like to have the physical copy on my shelf.”

Another reader said, “Ebooks that can't be given away to a grandchild 50 years from now are not a deal. That is my largest issue with them. I shouldn't have to ‘hack’ an e-book format to use it ‘like a book’ in 5 or 50 years.”

Another said, “If it's a book I figure I'll only read once, I typically go for a hard copy that I can then give to someone else.”

On the Lifehacker site someone named CV posted: “Physical books are conversation starters. E-book readers? Not so much. I will strike up conversations with total strangers if I see them holding a book that's intriguing. It's similar at home (mine or someone else's). You can look at someone's bookcase and figure out a lot about a person...

“I have one shelf full of travel guidebooks to places I have been. Sure, the electronic versions are great while you're out on the street (looking at a smartphone or iPod doesn't tip anyone that you're a tourist), however, there's a satisfaction of occasionally glancing at that shelf which triggers memories of those trips. Those are things you can't replace with electronic books.”

CV concluded with this thought: “I would love to have electronic copies of all of my cookbooks. That would come in handy for searching.”

Of course, right now there are some gotchas, glitches, and shortcomings. But it’s a start, and kudos to Google for helping democratize the emerging universe of electronic books.

NOTES:

All this is very new, and there are shortcomings. For example, what should a reader do when the price of an Ebook on the Google site differs from the price on a favorite bookseller’s site? Or worse, when an Ebook featured on Google is nowhere to be found inside a bookseller site? This last happened to me just now, and it’s frustrating. But I trust these kinds of things will be fixed soon.

If you’d like Google’s help figuring all this out...

Here are links to some of the early crop of articles on Google’s new service:

Mashable... Bloomberg... Christian Science Monitor...

Fast Company... Literary Agent Andy Ross... Bookselling This Week...

YouTube videos:
(Independent Bookstore McClean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Minnesota) and Ink, Pulp & Caffeine...

Lifehacker...

New York Times: “The Google e-bookstore is an outgrowth of the Google books project, an effort that began in 2004 to scan all 130 million books in the world, by Google's estimate. Scott Dougall, Google's director for product management, said the company had scanned about 15 million books so far.”

Home Again

2010-12-02T17:26:00.000-08:00

Vacation is when I have time to read, especially when vacation takes place on the slow-moving isles of Aloha. Tony, you say, you are retired and all, so what are you talking about, “vacation”?

Since the late 14th century English has used the word “vacation” to mean “freedom or release from some activity or occupation.” This kind of freedom is difficult to maintain, I’ve found. Leave the back door unlocked and Life walks in with jobs of work that no one gets paid to do. Get the groceries, clean the garage, fill the driveway potholes – “do the do” as Joselyn says.

I prefer to visualize the underlying Latin word “vacare” which translates to “be empty, free, or at leisure.” That I can do. As long as I don’t join another non-profit Board.

When in the state of “vacare” I have uninterrupted time to read big books for big pleasure. On this “vacare-ation” I spent quality time with several such, all worthy of your precious time.

I started with “Night Soldiers” by Alan Furst, then moved on to Steven Pressfield’s “The Afghan Campaign,” and finished with the new Bill Bryson brick, “At Home: A Short History of Private Life.”

“Night Soldiers” was a great place to begin. It took me away from the sighing waves and basking green sea turtles to a more difficult world, a world about to suffer World War. When I arrived at the final pages I sighed with an audible “wow” of pleasure, relief, excitement, satisfaction; wishing, of course, that the book could have gone on much longer than 456 pages.

Furst calls “Night Soldiers” “a panoramic spy novel” probably because it covers many pre-war years and a vast swath of territory, from Siberia to Brooklyn. The first sentence:

“In Bulgaria, in 1934, on a muddy street in the river town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia.”

The ensuing story takes Khristo from his village on the Danube to Moscow, where he is trained by the Soviets to be a spy and a soldier. He fights in revolutionary Spain, is captured in France, finds perilous freedom in Paris, and finally arrives in America. We share consciousness with Khristo as he gradually figures out his place in the world.

Early in the book a Soviet recruiter befriends Khristo: “He was quiet for a time. Somewhere out on the river, in the distance, was the sound of a foghorn. When he spoke again, his voice was sad and quiet. ‘...Do not waste your time with grief. It is a great flaw in our character, our Slavic nature, to do that. We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain... Here, in this town, it will go on. You will not survive it. They murdered your brother; they must now presume you to be their mortal enemy, very troubling to keep an eye on...”

“Night Soldiers”, first published in 1988, may be the best of the uniformly excellent Alan Furst novels. It’s not as singularly focused as some of his others. This book goes to more places, with more characters and more adventures, than most of his other books. There is time here to consider the old Ottoman empire and postwar America, too.

If Alan Furst sounds interesting, you could well start with “Night Soldiers.” It’s the first of Furst’s spy/intrigue/historical novels, setting up the qualities of time, tone and place for the dozen or so that have so far followed. Happily for readers, some of the characters introduced here reappear in later books.

As for Bill Bryson and Steven Pressfield... well, I’m back from vacation, or vacare, and I’ll get around to these guys in future essays.

NOTES:

The Online Etymology Dictionary

Alan Furst’s “near history” novels:

Night Soldiers (1988) Random House paperback $15. ISBN 9780375760006.
Dark Star (1991)
The Polish Officer (1995)
The World at Night (1996)
Red Gold (1999)
Kingdom of Shadows (2000)
Blood of Victory (2003)
Dark Voyage (2004)
The Foreign Correspondent (2006)
The Spies of Warsaw (2008)
Spies of the Balkans (2010)

Sailing on the Sea of Books

2010-11-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

When I was a bookseller, buying new books for an independent bookstore, I could imagine the world of publishing – all of it, from the largest corporate media sites to the smallest presses – as an impossibly vast ocean I had to somehow navigate. It was my job not only to discover the most interesting ships sailing those waters, but on behalf of potential readers it was my work to filter out the trash and plastic bits to end up with a bucket or two of new books – books worth the hard-earned money of potential readers.

There are way too many new books published for any one person ever to read, or to hear about in the first place. The reader must cultivate exquisite taste or waste precious dollars on the wrong books.

No part of this filtering process is easy. It’s not easy for writers, who must ponder their readers as well as their own navels. It is not easy for publishers, who stake fortunes on the net sales of a short list of new titles. It is not easy for book reviewers, who must decide what to review. It is not easy for booksellers who cannot waste a single square foot on books no one will purchase. And it certainly is not easy for you, readers of all ages, who are the ultimate judges of what gets read and what discarded.

Then there is the question of what happens to books once they’ve had their run on best-seller lists, their initial spurt of publicity and promotion. Do they continue to sell out of the small print at the back of publisher catalogs, or do they fall to bottom feeders on the floor of this ocean of books, where for 99 cents you might take a chance on a book published ten years ago and long forgotten?

I’m thinking about all this because publisher Globe Pequot is reenergizing one of those somewhat forgotten books and republishing it this month as a movie tie-in.

The film is titled “The Way Back.” It comes out in January with director Peter Weir, based on a book of similar name, the 1956 memoir titled “The Long Walk” by Slavomir Rawicz.

“The Long Walk” was first published in England in 1956. It’s a thrilling story of escape which may or may not actually be true. With the help of a ghost writer Rawicz recounted a grueling 6500 kilometer trek from the wartime gulags of Soviet Siberia across Asia to rescue in India in 1941.

“The Long Walk” in its day sold a half-million copies worldwide, in more than twenty languages. When I came across it some years ago I reviewed it here, and still recall the powerful ending. Six starving escapees, after an unbelievably difficult eleven months hiding and walking, stumble into accidental rescue by a wartime Gurkha patrol high on the Indian side of the Himalayas.

The odds against any book ever reaching your lap or your Kindle or your Ipad, Nook, computer screen, CD player, bookstore or library are enormous.

The ones that get through most often tie-in with movies, with big cultural turning points such as elections or wars. The ones that get through are more likely to be written by established authors, or new celebrities. These potentially successful books may concern hot button issues, or controversial theories. They may purport to change your life if you simply do this. Or do that.

Maybe it has always been this way. When books were written for monks and aristocrats few regular people had any chance to see such rare objects, let alone consult one. Now that books exist in every possible form at every price point, do the best rise to the surface? How does a book find you? How do you discover the one odd book you will love? How do you do that two times in a row?

There will never be one simple answer to these questions, fast as times are changing. All useful questions to ponder, I think.

NOTES:

“The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom” by Slavomir Rawicz. Lyons Press/Globe Pequot paperback $14.95. ISBN 1599219751. Also available in hard cover, electronic and audio versions. This edition will soon have a movie tie-in cover.

In 2004 a group of adventurers retraced “The Long Walk,” documenting changes to environment and society in the past 60 years, and bringing along medical supplies for remote communities. Some of their story is on their web site.

Wikipedia collects a lot of information about “The Long Walk” and its author(s)...

YouTube trailer for the film “The Way Back”

RopeofSilicon has more information and the international trailer.

My book review from April, 1998.

What We Say When We Have Nothing Much to Say

2010-10-28T16:24:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I’m due at Mendocino High School to (quote) “talk about the process you go through to develop your pieces.”

You caught me at a good time, I’ll say, because it’s a good day to write. It’s raining outside, the Giants’ game hasn’t started, and the computer’s working again.

Blank screen, nothing particular to say. It’s a universal problem for writers. In my case, I have to be interesting for five minutes and about 600 words.

When I’m truly at a loss, I look at the online news, where the GoogleNet tirelessly searches on my behalf for the word “books,” wherever it may be found.

I get news of library BOOK sales in small towns. In Zurich, “Swedish-Swiss engineering giant ABB on Thursday posted a 25 percent drop in third quarter net profit although order BOOKS grew strongly.” The Omaha Fire Department BOOKS are inadequate. GM is moving to clean up the BOOKS before its highly anticipated public stock offering.

It’s depressing how many journalists or headline writers use the term “one for the BOOKS” when describing a Music Hall of Fame induction, dissension in the world of social networking, or the hundreds of people who showed up for one entry level librarian’s assistant job opening in Tacoma, Washington. That, too, was “one for the BOOKS.”

At this stage, kids, I peek at the bottom margin. Hey, we’re 80% of the way to the bottom of the page. Things are looking up, and that’s certainly one for the BOOKS.

When I’m in this nothing-to-write-about mood, something small will get me started. When the mood strikes I can rant for two full pages and often do. Note to aspiring writers: Rants write faster than almost anything else. Book reviews take time. Research takes lots of time. Coming up with one new thought? You don’t want to know how long that takes.

The odd thing is, people respond. I’m startled when something that didn’t take long to write elicits praise. All I did was open the door and watch what straggled through. You enjoyed standing there with me? Fantastic.

Looking over past scripts, I can spot the ones that began with nothing. They started with a news item, or a couple of news items. Something someone said touched me off. I passed on some stuff someone else had the wit to write first (always with attribution, of course).

Once in a while writer’s despair drives me to delve into personal history. It’s interesting to describe what life was like before some of you were born, before Ronald Reagan, before Bush One for that matter. Back when movies were shown in palaces, tomb-like fastnesses where your sneakers stuck to yesterday’s candy. Back when radios were furniture. When it was a big thing to have mom take you by the hand and walk you to the local library. One’s own story is inexhaustible, and sometimes it interests others, too.

There. I’ve filled two pages with today’s version of nothing much to say.

Then there was the story in the current Publishers Weekly about two guys who have developed “A New Model for Fiction” through their start-up publishing company Electric Literature.

“For hundreds of years,” one of them writes, “the best way to transmit complex information was to cut down a tree, pulp it, stain symbols onto the flattened pulp, bind it together, and distribute it. Industries grew to support that process...

“Text, on the other hand, only becomes more useful with technology. After all, digital text is easily searchable, linkable, and shareable... Memoir can include home movies, photo albums, and perfect copies of diaries and letters.”

I feel a rant coming on. Except we’ve already got five minutes in the can, and, well, there’s always next week.

NOTES:

Wow – 727 words an hour? Sorry I went over the speed limit, occifer.

Electric Literature was launched in 2009 by Scott Lindenbaum and Andy Hunter.

All Pledge Drive All the Time

2010-10-21T23:19:00.000-07:00

When this edition of Words on Books first hits the airwaves, on Sunday morning, sandwiched between Oak & Thorn and This American Life, you will have experienced nine days of our Fall Pledge Drive.

We’ve been barking at you, pleading, joking, and otherwise encouraging you to make a move on your wallet and give us a call. At this point maybe it’s time to step back and consider why we go through this exercise two or more times a year.

KZYX runs on a model first successfully used by the listener-supported Pacifica Foundation in the years following World War II. It worked then, and it works now.

Pacifica’s goals have always been “to encourage and provide outlets for the creative skills and energies of the community,” “to contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors” and “to promote the full distribution of public information.”

It’s startling to many listeners to discover a radio station that is owned, administered and paid for by the listeners themselves. That is what Pacifica does, and that’s what we do here. It’s true democracy in action, and that always has been our goal – to free at least one radio frequency from the almighty advertising dollar by depending instead on the free will donations of people who find freedom of the airwaves important in their lives, and important for their community.

KZYX has a different history from Pacifica – we’re much younger, for one thing. This station began to take shape more than 20 years ago when community radio enthusiast Sean Donovan arrived here to beat the Mendocino bushes for the earliest supporters of Mendocino Public Radio.

Pacifica began in 1946 when Lewis Hill, a conscientious objector, and his like-minded friends founded that educational, non-profit organization. Three years later they went live and Berkeley station KPFA hit the air. That single station, not without many difficulties, grew and the idea spread. Right now, there are about 100 stations affiliated with Pacifica, and many more that broadcast Pacifica-based productions including such great ones as Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now.

Excellent as Pacifica is, we do things differently here. On our web site you can find this: “We are a hybrid of sorts... we are not just community radio (radio that encourages volunteer programmers and focuses almost singularly on locally relevant news and information) nor are we just public radio (professionally produced commercial free radio). Instead we are a combination of the two: we feature some of the finest Public Radio programs available and we have over 100 local volunteer programmers.”

That unusual combination – Pacifica style and National Public Radio style – sets this station apart from most others; certainly apart from Jefferson Public Radio to the north, which steers away from controversy, offers no local news and minimal local programming. To top that off, they repeat many shows rather than use available hours for additional programming.

In light of commercial radio, and unsatisfactory Public Radio, we have managed to create something here that is precious, and like many precious things, something fragile, too. We don’t depend on grants, although government money helps. We pay the bills the same way you pay yours – by digging deep, asking for help when we really need it, and economizing everywhere.

The physical plant is a joke – in the sense that pros from larger stations can’t help but chuckle when they contemplate how we work with aging equipment, tangled wires and a distinct lack of sleek offices to impress — who?

Yet you know we make it work. We succeed because you give a damn about radio in general, and this station in particular.

Finally, let me tell you a true story. I have a friend who doesn’t listen to us much any more because the radio in her car broke several months ago and she can’t afford to replace it.

She told me this week she is giving KZYX a donation to help us carry on. I don’t know how to characterize that kind of generosity, but I sure know how to appreciate it.

As the Fall Pledge Drive comes to a conclusion, and afterward, it’s a very good time for you to add something to what you’ve already given. If you haven’t joined and pledged yet, this is your moment. Let us hear from you.

NOTES:
The Pacifica mission statement.

troth [trawth, trohth] -noun 1. faithfulness, fidelity, or loyalty: by my troth. 2. truth or verity: in troth. 3. one's word or promise, esp. in engaging oneself to marry.

Plugging Friends

2010-10-15T00:50:00.000-07:00

Today we are NOT going to discuss Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s new book of essays “The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist,” based on the author’s 2009 Charles Eliot Norton lectures. We are not going to discuss this book because this reviewer, like the proverbial book worm, is in the middle of it, chewing through close-packed ideas, a few pages at a time; contemplating, not for the first time, what it means to read novels and to write them.

“The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist” will interest serious writers, and anyone who reads full-length fiction. Pamuk derives his title from a famous essay by the 18th century philosopher Friedrich Schiller, where the terms “naive” and “sentimental” were used to describe opposing points of perception.

But today we are NOT going to discuss the work of Orhan Pamuk. We are instead going to plug our friends – not shoot them, pleasurable as that might be, but plug them as in give these writers some well-deserved mentions.

First there is the inestimable British writer John Biggins, who with “The Surgeon’s Apprentice” has shifted his attention from historical novels set during the First World War to “The twenty-fifth day of December in the year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and ten: the Feast of our Blessed Saviour’s Nativity.” “The Surgeon’s Apprentice” is available in electronic form from the author, and printed on-demand, if you demand it. I’ve read the first few chapters, and “The Surgeon’s Apprentice is first rate: as amusing and intriguing as his previous novels starring Otto Prohaska, lieutenant in the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Submarine Service (yes, this once actually existed).

Then there is “El Sereno” by local poet and author Jay Frankston. This is a full length, well-researched novel set in Spain. With “an authentic background of strife, epidemic, civil war and dictatorship” “El Sereno” tells the story of those dedicated and somehow mysterious men “who walked the streets at night in the old sections of all the major cities of Spain.”

Then there is “In the Last Days of the Empire: Watching the Sixties Go By on Greenwich Village Time, A Bartender’s Tale” by Sam P. Edwards. For anyone seeking a vision that absolutely reeks authenticity, especially if you lived through the 1960s in the United States, this book brings alive the era through poetic visions and stories. It reads like this: “to invitation-only volleyball games on campus/with academic poets/punctuating their aspirations with deft spiking of ambiguity/while ‘On the Road’ put ambition in perspective/ at least of the ordinary kind, teaching me to savor the experience of back alleys without pretence...” The book also is available as an audio production with jazz music from the era and selected famous voices from those times.

Then there is Boonville writer Bruce Patterson, author of “Walking Tractor & Other Country Tales” a memoir of farming and logging in the Anderson Valley. This month he returns with the sequel, “Turned Round in my Boots, a Memoir.” Both books are published by California’s highly esteemed Heyday Books.

Then there is the new young adult novel “Steinbeck’s Ghost” by Lewis Buzbee. I met Lewis some years ago when he would arrive in Mendocino to flog the latest titles from Chronicle Books. Lewis was writing on the side and published his first novel, “Fliegelman’s Desire,” while still a sales representative. A few years later he wrote “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” which featured a precious few pages set in Mendocino’s Gallery Bookshop.

Buzbee’s most recent novel is “Steinbeck’s Ghost,” written for young adults. “What will Travis do,” the cover asks, “when characters from books start appearing in his real life?”

I don’t know what Travis will do, but I have the opposite dilemma – not characters from books, but books from a great number of characters. The mailbox is bulging and it’s all a bit overwhelming, but also I am grateful to all these heroic wretches tapping out new sentences on old computers. I admire all of you, and hope I’ve helped find you a few new readers for your remarkable books.

NOTES:

“The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist” by Orhan Pamuk. Harvard University Press hard cover $22.95. ISBN 9780674050761.

“The Surgeon’s Apprentice” by John Biggins published by John Biggins Fiction. Paperback $23.99 ISBN 9780956542328. Ordering information on John’s website.

“El Sereno” by Jay Frankston. Whole Loaf Publications paperback $19.99. ISBN 9781450050715.

“In the Last Days of the Empire: Watching the Sixties Go By on Greenwich Village Time, A Bartender’s Tale” by Sam P. Edwards. Eureka Productions paperback $14.94 ISBN 9780557485680. Also available as a download through Lulu.

“Turned Round in my Boots, a Memoir” by Bruce Patterson. Heyday Books paperback $18.95. ISBN 9781597141444. More information on “Walking Tractor” and “Turned Round in my Boots.”

“The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” by Lewis Buzbee. Graywolf Press paperback (out of print but available online) ISBN 9781555975104.

“Steinbeck’s Ghost” by Lewis Buzbee. Square Fish (Macmillan) paperback $7.99. ISBN 9780312602116. “It’s been two months since Travis’s family moved from their shabby old house to a development so new that it seems totally unreal. There’s one place, though, where Travis can still connect with his old life: the Salinas Library...”

Joe Louis

2010-10-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

That’s quite a book, I said to my wife Joselyn as I finished “Joe Louis” by Randy Roberts. Not a great book, I corrected myself, but a great story.

Joe Louis reigned, and that is the right word, as heavyweight boxing champion of the world from 1937 to 1949. Roberts writes, “He had come up from desperate poverty, made millions of dollars, walked down the avenues of America like a god, and heard his name praised from New York to California. Joe Louis, the champion of the world. He had been the most written about and talked about athlete in America, maybe anyone in America. There could be no encore, not even a second act, to his life in the ring.”

Yet Joe Louis lived another thirty-two years, dying in 1981 of a heart attack the morning after watching Larry Holmes outpoint Trevor Berbick at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

Saying little, protected from scrutiny both by the press and his own handlers, Louis became a symbol like no other for people of color. One black editorialist said early in Louis’ career, “What he is doing as a fighter will do more to show up the fallacy of ‘inherent inferiority’ of Negroes than could be done by all the anthropologists in the nation – so far as the ears and eyes of the white masses are concerned. One flash of his mighty brown arm is a better argument than a book... He will be felt where no sermon ever would be heard.”

White sportswriters in the 1930's painted Louis in the grossest racial stereotypes. The black press saw him as a symbol of the fight against oppression, and as an oppressed man himself, despite the success and the money.

The story of great black fighter Jack Johnson still resounded when Joe Louis began his run of victories. Jack Johnson kayoed all comers, “great white hopes” included. He flaunted his white girlfriends and wealth. “In victory, Johnson had probed the live nerve of American racism,” Roberts says. A unanimous white establishment then disbarred, discredited and discouraged Johnson and his supporters.

When it came to Joe Louis, from the start his handlers carefully crafted a largely silent, heroic figure, the very image of a bold fighter who said little and never* lost, a piece of clay Americans could shape into whatever statue they needed.

Louis’s career was chronicled exhaustively in the press, and Rogers relies mostly on press reports to create his story. Perhaps the author was unable or unwilling to interview people who knew the champion. The result is a book crammed with incident but set oddly at a distance from Joe Louis himself, the largely unknown person behind the persona.

Even as told from ringside rather than inside, Roberts has a magnificent story to tell, one deserving to be pondered and contemplated. Why was Joe Louis so important to so many people? How did he survive the virtually unanimous racism and become at last a hero to all Americans?

Roberts suggests the answer: “More than any man, any force, of the generation, Louis confirmed full black equality – even, some asserted superiority. In the ring he did not ask for respect or equality; with his fists he demanded and received it... Louis exerted a powerful appeal, symbolically expressing African Americans’ struggle for equality and deep-seated yearning for a settlement of past injustices...”

Jackie Robinson, setting out to be the first black player in white professional baseball, said “I’ll try to do as good a job as Joe Louis has done...”

Joe Louis defended his title more than 25 times, 22 by knockout. “No heavyweight (had) defended his title more often. Louis had defended it seven times more than the previous eight champions combined.”

At the funeral, held in a ring at the Sports Pavilion of Caesars Palace, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said, “We are honoring a giant who saved us in a troubled time... With Joe Louis we had made it from the guttermost to the uttermost; from the slave ship to the championship. Usually the champion rides on the shoulders of the nation and its people, but in this case, the nation rode on the shoulders of the hero, Joe.”

NOTES:

“The reverend Jesse Louis Jackson (named Jessie for Jessie Owens and Louis for Joe Louis) continued: God sent Joe from the black race to represent the human race. He was the answer to the sincere prayers of the disinherited and dispossessed. Joe made everybody somebody... Joe, we love your name... We all feel bigger today because Joe came this way. He was in the slum, but the slum was not in him. Ghetto boy to man, Alabama sharecropper to champion. Let’s give Joe a big hand clap. This is a celebration. Let’s hear it for the champ. Let’s hear it for the champ! Joe, we love your name. Let’s give the champ a big hand.”

From the book: “In a fitting irony,Joe Louis’ carefully manicured, noncontroversial image became the centerpiece for the loudest cry for racial justice and set the tone for the later civil rights movement.”

“Joe Louis” by Randy Roberts. Yale University Press hard cover $30. ISBN 9780300122220. Published October, 2010.

Google “images for Joe Louis” to see Google’s very large collection of images of Joe Louis; or try this address.

Wikipedia’s Joe Louis entry.

* During his heyday, Louis lost to German Max Schmeling by knockout (1936) in the 12th round; in the return match Louis KO’d Schmeling (to the great chagrin of Nazi Germany) in 2:04 of the first round (1938). Overall, Joe Louis lost three professional fights: Schmeling (1936); Ezzard Charles (1950) and Rocky Marciano (1951). Louis “retired” and relinquished his title in 1949. The Charles fight was for the title he had given up; the Marciano fight was the last of nine non-title fights of which Louis won all but the last. His final record: 65 Wins (51 knockouts, 13 decisions, 1 disqualification); 3 Losses (2 knockouts, 1 decision).

Italy's Last Stand

2010-09-30T17:22:00.000-07:00

A friendly sales person gave me a pre-publication copy of “Palmento, A Sicilian Wine Odyssey” by Robert Camuto, knowing I roll over for anything Italian.

Taking careful note of new vocabulary, following the author’s travels on a map of Sicily, I joined the journey. Caution: If you’ve read one too many Words on Books on Italy, stop here.

OK. Now that we are alone:

“Palmento” is not only an account of wineries visited and wines tasted. It’s also a tale of people, the widely various individuals the author encountered on that storied island.

At table with a winemaking family Camuto says, “I noticed that Rosa Aura was studying me. There was discussion in Italian about me – who was I and where was I from? After all, I lived in France, claimed to be American, and had a Sicilian name? I explained, in Italian, that I was born on Sicily’s westernmost island.

“‘Pantelleria?’ Bruno said.

“No. Manhattan.”

The wine story Camuto tells begins in ancient centuries with Greek and Phoenician settlers. It moves forward through Roman times, years under Arab rule (they grew grapes, too), feudal times, and modern Italy. In recent centuries young Sicilians often left their island for better lives elsewhere. Vines withered, farms decayed, and few locals prospered. It has only been in the past 25 years or so that abandoned ‘palmenti’ or old-fashioned hand-press wineries, have been restored by people ambitious to make something new and wonderful from the high volcanic soils of Mt. Etna and the grape growing weather found almost everywhere in Sicily.

Camuto’s adventures take him through places such as Palermo and Corleone where he encounters stories of the Mafia and those courageous souls who resist the Mafia.

Camuto meets Sicilians whose ancestors worked the land; others he meets arrived more recently. He encounters biodynamic and natural growers, others who insist on solely native grapes and yeasts. A number of winemakers import refrigeration, stainless steel tanks and additives in search of an internationally palatable result. No matter the philosophy, some wines are great, some not so much, as it is in all wine regions. The scene is evolving quickly.

Not all these Sicilian winemakers are male. In the chapter Due Donne, or Two Women, and in fact throughout the book Camuto meets interesting, independent women. Some have degrees or mainland experience in winemaking. One works the vines and creates the wines; another directs an enterprise. Each succeeds despite prejudice and resistance. Each in her own way is amazing.

“I didn’t do it for the money. I’m not making money,” (one) says. “I did it because I loved the land... it was the land speaking.”

Arianna Occhipinti, 26, who farms a contrada called Fossa del Lupo (Wolf’s Ditch) does not struggle with the media, the market, or faraway customers, Camuto notes. “Her difficulties have been with farmers in her neighborhood.”

One of her workers “said to (her) in a Sicilian dialect, ‘Listen, my son went north to work and he is a man. And you who are female, what do you want to do, stay here and work in the countryside of Sicily? Go north and you will have some hope!’”

Arianna stayed, with her family. She grows solid grapes and good wines, and her Sicily is changing once again.

So much for the wine. Then, there’s the food... Oops, no more time. Read this book! “Palmento, A Sicilian Wine Odyssey” by Robert Camuto.

NOTES:

“Palmento, A Sicilian Wine Odyssey” by Robert V. Camuto. University of Nebraska Press hard cover $24.95. ISBN 9780803228139. Published September, 2010.

The highly tasty and “official” book trailer for “Palmento” is on YouTube: Camuto reads from his book at a book signing.

Camuto writes, "Yet it seemed to be only a matteer of time before -- like much of the rest of Italy -- it would lose something. I thought of the bridge that would connect Sicily to the Italian boot and the continent and an endless supply of fashion outlets, fast food, and doubt.

"Sicily, I thought, is Italy's last stand. In Sicily's heart, I thought, she must know this."

The conversation continues...

2010-09-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

Last week we started a conversation with Christie Olson Day, owner of Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino. We continue that chat now.

I asked Christie “How's your level of confidence, and what are your expectations, generally speaking, going forward, for the independent bookselling industry?”

She replied, “Regarding the future of independent bookselling, I think the only sensible answer is, ‘I don't know.’ Anyone who says anything else is just pretending. I don't mind taking some guesses, though, and of course I'm professionally obligated to place my bets and take my chances.

“I'm betting that there will be thriving indie bookstores 20 years from now. How many? I'm not sure. But I'm doing my best to make sure Mendocino ends up with one of them. Indies have prevailed against big-box bookstores in the print-book business. (I know, it might be a little premature to declare a definitive victory, but I'm pretty confident on this.) I think we might just be able to pull off the same David-versus-Goliath miracle in e-book land if we can stay in the fight long enough.

“The American Booksellers Association is, right now, working out an agreement that will make a huge selection of e-books available through your local bookseller. The challenge will be to raise awareness of the fact that you don't have to go to a giant corporation to get your e-books. We haven't done a good job of this so far. Most of our customers have no idea that e-books have been available on our website for two years now, and the selection is going to get exponentially better this winter.

“I'm encouraged by the fact that people keep opening bookstores, and local governments actively recruit them. I'm encouraged when I see people realizing that locally owned businesses are the backbone of our communities. I'm encouraged by movements like the 3/50 Project (Pick 3 stores. Spend $50. Save your local economy.) I'm encouraged by the fact that there are still absolutely awesome indie record stores out there, even in the age of iPods.

“I get discouraged by readers' expectations that e-books should cost almost nothing. I wish people understood that most of the cost of a book comes from production of the content, not the object. I think the biggest danger to the culture of reading, right now, comes from the pricing pressure exerted by amazon on publishers. There's never been good money in writing, publishing or bookselling; folks did it because it was good work, and with luck and hard work you could scrape by, financially. If the price of a book is $10, it doesn't matter whether it's printed or digital; professional publishing will be dead in the water. And if you've ever read an unedited manuscript, you know that's a great, great loss.

“About the only thing that makes me really angry in the business is the predatory, dishonest, destructive tactics used by our big-business competitors, particularly Wal-Mart and Amazon. They're villains, pure and
simple. They're bad for our communities and our culture, and before the changes wrought by the Reagan administration they would both have been broken up under our anti-trust laws.

I asked, “Is it still easy to find people who want to work in a bookstore, despite the well-known drawbacks such as modest compensation? Is it true everyone must have a PhD to be considered?

Christie said, “It's encouraging that so many fantastic people do still want to work in bookstores. No, you don't need a PhD ... you don't even have to know a whole lot about books before you start. You do, however, have to WANT to know a whole lot. And you have to love, really love, people. We have some of the most talented, creative, committed people you can possibly imagine. They care SO MUCH about this work.

“Best part of the job? I never, ever, wonder if what I'm doing is worthwhile. Thanks for asking!”

NOTES:

Christie recommends “Barry Lynn's excellent book, ‘Cornered: the New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction,’ about consolidation in retail and the government's re-interpretation of antitrust laws under Reagan.”

“Cornered” by Barry Lynn. John Wiley & Sons hard cover $26.95. ISBN 0470186380. Paperback $16.95, to be published by Wiley on January 18, 2011 ISBN 0470928565.

Here’s a bit I had to leave out of the script above for lack of time:

“Recently we had a really remarkable experience with a local student who worked for us over the summer. Celeste Fox-Kump was our first-ever Youth Summer Intern, working in the store between her 7th and 8th grade years. She went through an introductory program, learning a bit about many different aspects of the business. She was so capable, enthusiastic, hard-working, smart, and YOUNG, her presence brought a burst of energy to the whole operation.

“With any luck my own kids will qualify for the same program when they get
to middle school. The only thing I can say about balancing work and family life is that families need a homemaker. Obviously I don't think that the mother always needs to fill that role, but it IS important and necessary work. So any family in which both parents work demanding full-time jobs is going to face a challenge. You have to either hire a homemaker or share that third job between you, which can lead to some spectacular disagreements. (Not in our house, of course. I'm speaking in generalities.) In our case, it's nice that the kids can share in both our jobs. Collin has his dad as a teacher this year, and both kids spend plenty of time at the bookshop.”

Taking a Bookseller's Temperature, Part One

2010-09-16T16:47:00.000-07:00

It’s time to get out the old thermometer – the oral thermometer, please – and take the temperature of at least one local bookstore. This week I talked with my friend Christie Olson Day, who became the owner of Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino when she bought it from me, four years ago.

Gallery Bookshop has a long and proud history. From about 1962 and for many years after it was run by Betty Goodman, a former children’s librarian with a love of literature. She named the store “Gallery” Bookshop because it was half a gallery, half an art supplies store, and half a high quality bookstore with emphasis on art books of interest to students and teachers at the Mendocino Art Center.

When I came along in 1980 Betty was ill and ready to sell the store to someone interested in preserving it. I managed not to fail in the first few years as I learned the business. Later, we grew and prospered. We opened Bookwinkle’s, a children’s bookstore, later expanding to the corner of Main and Kasten streets and incorporating everything into one big bookstore.

By 2006 I had enjoyed my own long run – after 26 years the store was doing fine, but I needed time to do new things for the rest of my life. Almost magically, Christie Olson Day, who had worked in the store for nine years, through the birth of two children, sent me an uncannily perceptive email.

“Tony, if you ever think of selling the bookstore, can we talk?”

That was in March, 2006. By September that year we had signed papers and Christie was the new owner. She’s doing great things with Gallery Bookshop. It’s full of energy and great books.

I thought it might be time we talked together for publication. The rest of this Words on Books is Christie’s responses to my questions. It continues next week..

First question for Christie: “How are you doing as the owner? How's your work, all aspects. Joy? Sorrow? Boredom? Challenge? Intensity? Learning things?”

And she answered: “Boredom? Boredom? Hahahahhahahhahah. Never. I always said that going to work in the bookstore was one of those rare dreams that actually lived up to -- exceeded, in fact -- all my expectations. As in: ‘Working in a bookstore seems like it would be great.’ And then ... IT WAS. The work was so compelling that I wanted to buy the store. And lo! Just as interesting. Much, much more difficult, of course, and it's just getting
harder.

I asked, “How's your level of confidence, and what are your expectations, generally speaking, going forward, for the independent bookselling industry?”

Christie said, “It's getting harder for just about every local business, and particularly retail, and particularly retail bookselling. Where to start? The recession has been incredibly challenging for Mendocino businesses. We just have to keep doing more, and doing it better, to keep our customers.

“I mean, Shakespeare on the Mac(Callum) House lawn? I love it, it's fabulous, but inns don't have to do these things in boom years. For us and other bookstores, it means more & better events, more outreach, new public relations projects, building a more extensive online business, and anything else we can think of to keep our communities engaged. Customer service has also become a high-wire act.

“For bookstores (and other businesses with intense big-business competition like pharmacies, florists, hardware stores) there's an awareness that one tiny mistake is all it takes to lose a customer to that big box store or giant online operation.

We’ll stop here for lack of time. Next week Christie talks about the future of independent bookselling, family life, e-books, readers’ expectations, and a lot more.

NOTES:

Visit the bookstore...

They have written a short history of the store.

Ban, Burn or Read?

2010-09-09T23:30:00.000-07:00

Two observations today interrupted my already wandering trains of thought. (Can trains wander, I wonder?)

A school boy walked down a local sidewalk holding a book in front of him. It was a school text, and he was totally absorbed in reading it.

Later an oversized, overweight guy wearing a Blackwater t-shirt climbed into his Hummer and drove off in a cloud of burnt premium.

I really liked the first image: Young boy reads book. I really hated the second one: Guy in military-style vehicle displays logo of corrupt mercenary organization.

I jumped to moral conclusions without a conscious thought, and you might have done the same. Most of us mortals live in a world pre-colored for us by experience and assumptions.

These depressing thoughts bring me to the issues of book banning and book burning, both of which were clearly in evidence this week. Preacher Jones in Gainesville, Florida, called off his planned incineration of copies of the Quran.

And as of this writing, Defense Department officials were in negotiations to purchase and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” written by Anthony Shaffer, former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and former lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. The D of D wants to ban the book, basically burn it, because, according to an internal memo, publication “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security.”

Too bad about that, military guys. “Operation Dark Heart” already has been distributed to reviewers and finished copies have been purchased by reporters and others. The book will become famous now that it’s been targeted.

Just the very thought of government suppression inevitably will make any available copies hideously expensive on EBay and similar sites. People will seek out this book who otherwise would have ignored it.

Most attempts at destruction of the printed word end up like that. Preacher Jones said he planned to burn a holy book, and even that was enough to create worldwide anguish and anger.

In light of this it is hard to credit a photograph on the news at the moment. It’s a picture of Preacher Jones shaking hands with imam Muhammad Musri, who is president of the Islamic Society of Central Florida in Orlando. Clearly reconciliation, even forgiveness, can be achieved at the very moment of confrontation. If these two embraced and forgave, anyone can.

According to history books we Westerners crusaded all over the early Muslims, then fought them to a standstill at the gates of Vienna while inventing the croissant-shaped pastry which, when served with butter and jam, is one of the best results of a war ever.

Later we invented America and pledged ourselves to freedom of speech and religion. A US mosque is constitutional in any location, even New York city.

It’s easier to read books than burn them, and a lot healthier for everyone.

NOTES:

“Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan and The Path to Victory” by Anthony Shaffer. Thomas Dunne Books hard cover $25.99. ISBN 978-0312612177.

Scott Shane of the NY Times: Military Seeks to Buy 10,000 Copies of Book of Secrets
published September 9, 2010.

Scalding Hot Coffee and Comfortable Cups of Tea

2010-09-03T10:40:00.001-07:00

Reader Jane Martinez from Brooklyn writes, “I would like to point out how enjoyable are the Brunetti mysteries by Donna Leon. I picked up on them because I will be going to Venice and the Veneto for the month of September. I always like to read some fiction set in the area in which I will be traveling... (Leon) (develops) her main characters, many of whom return in subsequent tales, but I am fascinated by the Brunetti family itself.

“I cannot decide whether or not I like to have a series,” she continues. “On one hand it is entertaining to get to know the characters and wait eagerly for more of their adventures (for example, the “Outlander” series by Diana Gabaldon). On the other hand I get too involved in reading all the books that I have missed and do little but read until I am caught up.”

“I do little but read until I am caught up.” Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

Jane, I know the feeling. I once spent an entire summer on the family couch reading every Freddy the Pig story I could find in the West Portal branch library in San Francisco. I have been thanking the late Walter R. Brooks ever since for showing me how much fun total immersion can be.

Then there are the novels of Patrick O’Brien. I came to these seafaring tales long after other friends had praised them for years. Once started I could not stop, and the high quality of these books never falters. O’Brien never hits a wrong note. The series begins with “Master & Commander,” which introduces the enduring characters Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, and ends with number twenty, “Blue at the Mizzen,” and that might have been it, but in fact there was a wee bit more: When O’Brien died ten years ago, three chapters which would have begun the 21st novel were found neatly arranged on his desk. The manuscript plus a sketch for a deadly duel was posthumously published as “The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey.”

When an author is capable, the characters rich and interesting, there is every reason to continue enjoying everything that author cares to produce. There may be disappointments along the way; no running back scores a touchdown every time; but when authors get on a winning streak we follow in awe, eternal fans.

Over here I have a knee-high stack of novels by the British/American author Bernard Cornwell. That stack recalls a heck of a lot of entertaining reading. Cornwell tends to group his books into small series set in, say, medieval Europe, or the Napoleonic Wars. Several novels – yes, another series – take place during the American Civil War, others concern King Arthur. Very few of Cornwell’s books are one-offs – he tried a modern setting with “Scoundrel,” bringing in the IRA, CIA, British intelligence, gunrunning, and a bit of marine surveying. It is so easy to turn his pages.

When I want to get lost, to dive in to some books and stay underwater for a while, I want a reliable series – Wilbur Smith comes to mind; so does Isaac Asimov, Robert B. Parker, John Mortimer, Conan Doyle, and so many more. I take these authors with me on airplanes, trade them with other fanatics, read them repeatedly. They keep me up at night and wait for me when I have ten minutes to spare.

This week I enjoyed a truly excellent novel, “Fame,” by German author Daniel Kehlman. His nine connected short stories add up to a beguiling novel, funny and poignant. Kehlman has one other novel to his name, “Measuring the World,” which has won prizes and been translated into more than forty languages.

Readers like (and the literary world requires) scalding hot coffee from challengers like Kehlman, but readers also have an appetite for comfortable cups of tea from writers who entertain with a recurring cast of characters. It’s a reality show, a soap opera, a set of sequels; it may be the same book written twenty different ways; we make it our own, and we love it.

NOTES:

Too many books and authors mentioned here to identify them all with prices, publisher and ISBN. Everything mentioned above is in print and readily available. Go get hooked!

I apologize for not mentioning YOUR favorite authors and series. Leave a comment and let us all know...

Kwei Quartey and John Le Carre

2010-08-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

OMG as we like to write on the Intergoogle. Omigawd, it has been hot around here for what – two days? Now we have the cooling fog, the ocean breezes, and we laugh at the people melting in their huts in the real California, located just a few miles inland from here.

This week I was immersed in a murder mystery set in Ghana. “An absolute gem,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “Move over Alexander McCall Smith,” shouts Kirkus Reviews.

“Wife of the Gods” is new in paperback by first-time author Kwei Quartey. I do not know this author personally, but somehow he managed to send me an autographed copy inscribed “To Anthony Miksak, Wishing all that’s good.” How could I not read his book?

And I enjoyed it very much. The publisher promotes it for “fans of ‘The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency’ but then every new International Cozy is compared to McCall Smith’s novels set in Botswana, starring Precious Ramotswe. Precious by now has starred in a dozen books, solving many crimes and misdemeanors and improving the quality of life in her country.

Kwei Quartey has created an intriguing lead character, Detective Inspector Darko Dawson of the Criminal Investigations Department.

A beautiful young woman has been murdered in the local forest between the towns of Ketanu and Bedome. There are suspects, too many of them. We have rumors and indications, leads and wrong leads, witchcraft and faith healing, traditional practices, family secrets. Secrets that come back to slap you in the face if your name is Darko Dawson.

“Wife of the Gods” is one English translation of the age-old practice of Trokosi, and this practice is central to the story. Young girls are given by their families as wives to a local fetish healer. Once in his compound they never leave. According to the author, “The Ghanian government and NGOs... decry the practice... Traditionalists are in favor of the tradition and deny that slavery is involved.”

Also last week I ripped through another espionage thriller by the pseudonymous John Le Carre, titled “A Most Wanted Man.” It’s interesting to compare these two adventures, one a debut, the other maybe the 22nd in a revered pantheon of successful novels.

John Le Carre, David Cornwell on his British tax returns, explores his well-known urban territory – government sponsored spy craft, international espionage, faltering bureaucrats, do-good charities, a conflicted private banker, several individuals each with at least a spark of heroism. In “A Most Wanted Man” everything revolves around one mysterious Muslim boy, a refugee named Issa.

Issa has Chechen roots; he has been tortured in Russia. He can hardly speak, yet somehow he has sufficient moxie and enough cash to bribe his way to Hamburg, Germany, in search of his father’s inheritance. When he gains it, he gives it away. Various government agencies hunt and hound him. Issa is a potential threat because his situation is so amorphous. Is he connected to terrorists, or simply a boy in search of his patrimony? No one, friend or enemy, succeeds in fully understanding him, and in a Le Carre novel that is a most dangerous situation.

The astonishing, surprising, ending reminded me of the slamming denouement of Le Carre’s novel “Absolute Friends.” Le Carre admires the power of anti-terrorism forces and abhors the assumptions that underlie their actions.

The lands in which these two authors place their novels – forest paths or city streets – could not be more diverse. Yet the underlying landscape is very much the same. Few characters see things clearly and fewer still have the power to set things right. Everyone is flawed. No situation is free of secrets and doubts.

It is likely we will have many more mysteries from Kwei Quartey. His next, due in 2011, is titled “Children of the Street.” African culture and its contradictions will provide endless adventures.

Kwei Quartey was raised in Ghana. He trained as a doctor and settled in California. His biography notes that “when he was eight years old, Kwei began to write short novels that he bound by hand with colorfully illustrated cardboard covers.”

I doubt David Cornwell ever did that, but how would I know?

NOTES:

“Wife of the Gods” by Kwei Quartey. Random House paperback $15. ISBN 9780812979367.

“A Most Wanted Man” by John Le Carre. Pocket Books paperback $9.99. ISBN 9781416596097.

John Le Carre has a website.

Alexander McCall Smith has one too. And African music.

Kwei Quartey can be found here along with scarey music.

Pondering E-Ink

2010-08-19T19:23:00.000-07:00

Scenes from a brief vacation...

A young woman is deep into her Kindle, peering into its gray e-Ink screen while perched on a deck overlooking some of the most spectacular mountains in Canada’s Banff National Park. We’re chatting with a family nearby. “I still prefer ‘real’ books,” the main reader in the family declares. Her husband calls over to the Kindle person to ask if she likes her toy. “I love it, really love it!” she says.

I stand there holding a digital camera. A few years ago I would have had film in it. Stuck between book and book machine. Which side am I on? Do there have to be sides? Can’t we all get along?

I admit it would be easy to carry Canada guidebooks in electronic form. Pro: Much less weight. Con: No color photos. Same with novels we brought along to read in between staring at beautiful lakes and receding glaciers.

I love electronic things, but I also like to touch the pages I’m reading, bend the spine, use an old receipt for a bookmark, write my name in it, give it away. I like those things about paper books a lot, but I remember how I once turned to my Random House Unabridged Dictionary every day, and now it’s simply a piece of dusty furniture on a lovely rotating wooden stand, cluttering my office.

On the way home to Mendocino we stopped for a visit at Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco. This cozy store is owned by Neal Sofman, an acquaintance from bookselling days.

When I first entered the biz, Neal Sofman was a big deal. With his partners he had a hand in bookstores in Cupertino, Larkspur, and San Francisco.

Four years ago Neal was forced by local conditions and partners wanting out to give up his last bookstore, A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books on Opera Plaza in San Francisco. He came out of the sale with enough money to open another bookstore in the city, this time in a great part of town and minus the messy partnerships.

He told a reporter at the time “I love the new neighborhood -- people keep sticking their heads in the door asking, 'When are you opening?' It's a mixture of old and young people, families, little children, teenagers. There are a number of restaurants right on our block. We have 300 square feet in the back of the store that we'll use for book clubs, workshops, and community activities.”

Neal’s dream is alive. On our brief visit we were gratified by everything we saw – the location, the selection, the intelligent woman working the counter, the many browsers, including a family with children.

Following the maxim “never leave a bookstore without a book” I picked up the last copy of “Helmet for My Pillow, From Parris Island to the Pacific,” a war memoir by Robert Leckie, first published in 1957. Leckie enlisted into the Marines shortly after Pearl Harbor, and fought in the Pacific through a number of horrific and eventually famous battles. He lived to become a prolific writer on US military history.

Leckie’s book was one of the main sources for the recent TV miniseries “The Pacific.”

As we walked down the street to our car we passed an empty storefront, windows whitewashed, a big FOR LEASE sign in the window. It had been a Waldenbooks outlet. Remember Waldenbooks?

Waldenbooks was an early bookstore chain, later absorbed by Borders. Along with Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com these behemoths at one time intended to take over the book business and drive out the independents.

Such things did happen, to a degree. Times got tough for many bookstores, and many disappeared. But now we are on the downslope of that decades-long wave. Many small bookstores survive and prosper. Barnes & Noble is for sale, their sales dinged by the rapid advance of electronic books and e-readers.

Who knows? Maybe the chain stores can’t stand stiff competition. Below-the -radar outfits like Bookshop West Portal thrive in neighborhoods everywhere. That story definitely is not over yet.

NOTES:

Bookshop West Portal, Your Neighborhood Bookstore

From their current bookmark:

“Books are keys to
   wisdom’s treasure;
Books are gates to
   lands of pleasure;
Books are paths
   that upward lead;
Books are friends.
   Come, let us read.

   Emilie Poulsson

Books, Books, Books...

2010-07-31T11:50:00.000-07:00

I’ve picked up and put down a surprising number of books this summer.

Some I read all the way through and enjoyed, but so far they haven’t made it into this show. Others trailed off at various places... the book was disappointing, not what I wanted at the moment. Or simply not engaging enough to compete with all the other books clamoring for attention.

I had high hopes for the latest Alan Furst novel, “Spies of the Balkans.” Furst has supplied many hours of intensely enjoyable reading in his previous works, all set in Europe in the years before World War II.

“Spies of the Balkans” resembles these, but it’s as if Furst took this one off, as the great composer Beethoven was known to do. Someone once pointed out that Beethoven’s even-numbered symphonies tend to be less fraught and majestic than the odd-numbered ones.

In this latest Furst, set in Salonika, Greece in 1940, Costa Zannis, policeman in charge of “special” cases too delicate for ordinary police treatment, gets involved with a woman helping Jews escape from Berlin. This leads to fear and suspense, good vs. evil, and the usual assembly of flawed characters.

It adds up to... well, an interesting book. But I’ve come to expect more from Alan Furst – novels crafted so intriguingly well they equal the best of the genre, from John LeCarre to Graham Greene.

“The Cello Suites, J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, & the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece” will interest a broad range of music lovers. Eric Siblin has done original research on the history of these Suites for Solo Cello, and discovered a world known previously mostly to scholars. If this book is for you, you’ll know it the moment you spot the beautiful cello embossed on a black jacket.

I tried, I really tried, to get through “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” a novel set in coastal Japan, 1799, as seen through the adventurous eyes of a Dutch trader. It’s well written, dense. Fans of highly literate historical novels will spend many happy hours diving into this nearly 500-page book, even if I didn’t.

“Seaside Dream Home Besieged” is the combative personal story of how a new home on a bluff near the town of Elk in Mendocino county came finally to be constructed. Author Ted Berlincourt and his wife Margie fought six years through county and state agencies and stiff local opposition for the right to build. It’s a necessarily one-sided view of a struggle that years later still has people not talking to each other. Those who opposed the construction have yet to write their side of the story as convincingly. In the meantime, “Seaside Dream Home Besieged” is compelling documentation of convoluted coastal politics.

That leaves a tasty pile of books I can’t wait to dive into. Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections” will publish his novel “Freedom” in September. Then there’s another large one, “The Passage” by Justin Cronin, which appears to be just the kind of thriller I’m looking for this summer.

“A Truth Universally Acknowledged, 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen,” edited by Susannah Carson, is the perfect accompaniment to “Pride & Prejudice” which I’m currently reading at the rate of one short email a week, provided by Daily Lit dot com.

Right now I am reading “The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge” by Patricia Duncker. Others awaiting their turn include “In the Shadow of the Cypress” by Thomas Steinbeck,“A Life Worth Breathing, A Yoga Master’s Handbook of Strength, Grace, and Healing” by Max Strom, and “The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing” by Tarquin Hall.

Not to mention some used books I picked up recently: Michael Chabon’s “The Final Solution,” “HarperCollins College Outline: Music Theory” and “Wagstaffe the Wind-up Boy” given to me in person by English writer and friend, Jan Needle.

Need I say more? It’s time to read a book!

NOTES:

“Spies of the Balkans” by Alan Furst. Random House hard cover $26. ISBN 9781400066032.

“The Cello Suites” by Eric Siblin. Atlantic Monthly Press hard cover $24. ISBN 9780802119292.

“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” by David Mitchell. Random House hard cover $26. ISBN 9781400065455.

“Seaside Dream Home Besieged” by T. G. Berlincourt. Trafford Publishing paperback $19.99.
ISBN 9781426904783.

“Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus & Giroux hard cover $28. ISBN 9780374158460. Publication date September, 2010.

“The Passage” by Justin Cronin. Ballantine Books hard cover $27. ISBN 9782345504968.

“A Truth Universally Acknowledged, 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen” edited by Susannah Carson. Random House hard cover $25. ISBN 9781400068050.

Daily Lit “Minutes a day of great reading in your inbox-100% free!”

“In the Shadow of the Cypress, A Novel” by Thomas Steinbeck. Simon & Schuster hard cover $25. ISBN 9781439168257.

“The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge” by Patricia Duncker. Bloomsbury USA paperback $15. ISBN 9781608192038.

“A Life Worth Breathing, A Yoga Master’s Handbook of Strength, Grace, and Healing” by Max Strom. Skyhorse Publishing hard cover $24.95. ISBN 9781602399808.

“The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing” by Tarquin Hall. Simon & Schuster hard cover $24. ISBN 9781416583691.

“Wagstaff the Wind-up Boy” by Jan Needle, illustrated by Roy Bently. Back to Front paperback $12.99. ISBN 9781904529415.

One of the best sources to search used book titles and purchase them is ADDall (“Book Search and Price Comparison – Be smart: don't buy any book without comparing the price.” You also can also use them to search for new books.

The used books mentioned above were purchased at Eureka Books in Old Town, Eureka, California. “...one of the last classic antiquarian bookstores on the West Coast, offering books and ephemera in all fields and price ranges.”

Laughing at Fate

2010-07-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

Spend just a few precious moments with the daily newspaper and suddenly it becomes clear. We’re doomed.

Page One starts out OK: It’s opening day at the fair. But then we have Growing fears US may face deflation, Study sees mass migration to the US. No wonder people skip the morning paper in favor of Facebook.

British Petroleum has exiled their CEO to Siberia. McCartney plays the White House. The Austrian Governor of Cally-Fornia issues a budget warning. San Diego bans offshore boozing on personal flotation devices. No more Floatopias.

This morning I received an emotional letter from Lafayette Books in the East Bay. Owner Dave Simpson wrote, “Dear Friends, It's Monday and I'm in the bookstore, it being the last Monday we'll exist in the traditional ‘brick-and-mortar’ sense. We're very excited about our new life on BIG BLUE, but for many of us – staff, friends, family, and customers alike – it's a time of extraordinary poignancy.”

Rent was raised, sales fell past break-even and Simpson was forced to shrink his excellent store to fit inside a renovated bookmobile. A sadly familiar story in recent years, except for the bookmobile.

Simpson writes “Since 1963, the Lafayette Book Store has been a center of literary activity and a community center where people come to browse books, ask for recommendations, meet their neighbors, and cultivate relationships with our charming, intelligent staff... with the closing of the brick-and-mortar I worry that the talisman will be lost and the community that's gathered around the bookstore will dissolve.”

Simpson adds, “Together we can prevent this from happening! ... the VERY best way to keep this sense of community is to join us on Facebook. We have a Lafayette Book Store page and also The Bay Area Bookmobile page.”

Really? When your local bookstore goes down, you save the situation by friending it on FaceBook?

“We'll be active there with our schedule of appearances, announcements of author signings and events, and as always, our book recommendations (and you can offer your own!). Come join the conversation!”

Dave, I feel for you and for the community you’ve served so well. I’m happy I can still find you online and in your new bus. That’s all good, but tell me how is Facebook any kind of substitute for what we’re losing here?

Pretty much every US bookstore is already on Facebook, whether they are “real” or just an address. Those real life readers, the brick and mortar ones who supported you with their time, dollars, and love. Now... well, maybe they’ll friend you on Facebook.

I have trouble imagining that as any kind of good news.

In June the small town of Willits in Mendocino County lost its favorite bookstore, Leaves of Grass. Their web site forlornly announces they’re open Monday through Saturday 10-6, Sundays 12 - 5. But the phone is disconnected, the books are gone, and owner Rani Saijo has moved on.

Back in May she wrote, “Changing times have made it impossible for us to keep going. Thank you to all our friends & supporters for these wonderful years!”

However, we do have a birth to celebrate. This summer KZYX’s own Loretta and WDan Houck opened a bookstore in Boonville, named Laughing Dog Books. “Come! Sit! Read!” Congratulations!

I’m sick of bookstore obituaries. Let’s cut it out, people. Support your local independent bookstore today, and tomorrow, and again next month, too. I still prefer to find my bad news in the daily newspaper, where most of it isn’t so personally painful.

NOTES:

Lafayette Book Store, 3569 Mt Diablo Blvd Ste E (next to Postino Restaurant)
925-284-1233 mail@lafayettebookstore.com

Laughing Dog Books

LDB on Facebook

Summer Camp in a Bookstore

2010-07-22T22:53:00.000-07:00

Listen up, Bradley. Stand at attention and hold on to that book. Chin up, shoulders back. That’s right. Good morning children, and welcome to your Summertime Books Boot Camp.

At least, that’s how I used to imagine camp, scarey and authoritarian, until I looked more closely. Across the country bookstores are running friendly summer camps for children. I’d go in a California second if I were eight years old.

Some camps are free half-day gatherings in a store with games, reading and snacks. Other camps are paid reservation only, elaborate productions staffed by expert booksellers and authors.

The bookstore camp phenomenon exemplified by one store in Brooklyn was written up recently in the New York Times. A couple of days ago Bookselling This Week, a newsletter for independent booksellers, filled in with reports from other stores.

Diane Capriola co-owns The Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Georgia. Her store “has been holding summer camps since the store opened five years ago.” This year they have NINE camps. I am impressed.

Reading through the descriptions I’m thinking how great these camps sound. Their offerings range in cost from $210 to $325 for a week and promise to be rich in experiences and fun. Right now, all nine camps are filled, some with waiting lists.

Consider the Boo-yah for Boys! Camp: “Do you thirst for adventure and mystery? Do you love rockets and secret codes, hunting for treasure and figuring out how things work? In short, are you a boy who wants a whole week of TOTAL AWESOMENESS? Boo-yah for Boys! Camp is full of activities, learning, and adventure designed to entertain, engage, and elevate young boys. Join us, and become one of the few, the proud, the Boys of Summer!”

Other camps include Campology Camp, Camp Kane, Creative Writing Camp, American Girl Camp, Chess Camp, Camp Half-Blood, Goody for Girls! Camp, and The Name of This Camp is Secret.

In Campology Camp you’ll create an “ology” book of your own based on things you learned. In Creative Writing Camp kids learn techniques and meet authors; in other camps you might learn to sew, solve bank robberies, visit the vet, put on a talent show, do magic, decipher codes, solve clues to a mystery in competition with another bookstore’s summer camp, learn about girls in history, immerse yourself in Egyptian myths, capture the flag, race a chariot, and more.

There are many other bookstore summer camps in locations across the country, ranging from Brownstone Books in Brooklyn to Bookpeople in Austin, Texas, Towne Center Books in Pleasanton, California, to Eagle Harbor Book Company Bainbridge Island, Washington.

At Camp Eagle Harbor you’ll find free weekly day camps in the store. Expect a professional children’s theater workshop, a soccer program with workout in the store parking lot; a book group with free stuff, sneak previews, and a discussion; a spelling bee, a bead making workshop, a class in making sock puppets, and more.

Bookstores do need to reach out to new readers and find creative ways to relate to the surrounding community. The summer bookstore camp is one of the best ways bookstores accomplish all that.

If the idea clicks with you, check with your local bookstore or library for similar events. Here in Mendocino a local independent bookstore offers three summer events: Story Time with Allegra Fisher, Creative Writing Workshop for Middle and High School students, and a Summer Reading Club for Tweens and Teens.

Judy Wheeler and Bob Ditter at Towne Center Books in Pleasanton offer a Mystery Writing Camp for children. “Discover clues, crack codes, develop your own mystery stories and have a heap of fun! All kids aged 8-12 who love to read, write and solve mysteries are welcome!”

You don’t even need a bookstore to sponsor a camp... get together with other families you know and organize your own. There’s lots of summer left!

NOTES:

The Little Shop of Stories...

Bookselling This Week...

Another Bookselling This Week article on summer camps,

Camp Eagle Harbor...

Towne Center Books...

"What is this?" "It's a bookstore." "Oh, I don't read."

2010-07-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

I’ve been out of the bookselling biz for some time now. That old familiar monkey on my back bothers someone else with his bad breath, scratchy claws and constant demands for attention.

This week it all came back – the adventure, the heartbreak, the humor of working in an independent bookstore. It seems that bookseller Cynthia Christensen of Book Stop in Hood River, Oregon, recently came down with pneumonia and laryngitis, and her husband stepped in for a couple of weeks in her place. He kept notes:

“Do you have this used?” (Customer holds up a book just released in paperback that day.) “It was just released today.” “But you're a used bookstore.” “Sorry, they haven't figured out how to print them used.”

“Do you have a restroom? My son needs to poop.”

“I'm just browsing.”

“I'm just killing time.”

“Can my kids stay here while I'm eating next door?”

“There's a hair on this sofa.”

“Can I make you a deal on this book?”

“Have you seen my wife?”

“Do you have maps?” (Looks at map, copies directions, incorrectly folds map, leaves it on the sofa.)

“Where am I?”

“Is this a library?”

“Was Abraham Lincoln really a vampire hunter?”

“How come this town has three bookstores?”

“I can get it cheaper on Amazon.”

“Can you describe the lay of the land around here?”

“Will my car get towed if I leave it in front of your store all day?”

“I'm looking for a book that has the word 'free' in the title.”

“Mom, I have to poop!”

“Do you have a chicken section? Goats?”

“Have you seen my children?”

“Mom, can I have this Clifford book?” “No, Clifford gets on my nerves.”

“Are all these books donated to you, so I can just take one?”

“Have you read all these books? When do you watch TV?”

“If I bring in some books, can you tell me what they're worth so I can sell them on eBay?”

“I never knew there was a library here.” “There is, but it's on the next street over.” “What is this?” “It's a bookstore.” “Oh, I don't read.”

“Dad, look a bookstore! Let's take a look.” “Why? It's just books.” “Come on, it will just take a minute.” “No, reading is stupid.”

“Are you hiring?” “No.” “I like books.” “So do I.” “I promise not to get in the way. I could just read or something.”

Another person: “Are you hiring?” “No.” “Good! Can I use your company's name?” “Why?” “I have to tell the Unemployment Department I can't find a job.”

That’s a sample of what Charlie Christensen recorded sitting in for two weeks at his wife’s bookstore in Oregon. Other booksellers tweeted in on the same subject. Some of their contributions:

From Robert Sindelar’s first year as a bookseller in 1990: “Do you have ‘Get Rich Overnight’” “No, but I can get it for you.” “Sorry, I can't wait.”

“Can you recommend a book? Something dark & creepy.” “How about Crime & Punishment?” “Nah. I don't really like Austen.”

“So people actually come in here and buy books?”

“Who wrote Jane Austen?”

Lanora Hurley, Next Chapter Bookshop: “Had a customer demand to know where the 'body shop' was & dragged staff person outside to point at sign that reads 'bookshop'.”

“I never like any of your books but you always play good in-store music.”

“Can you tell me who the author of Shakespeare is?”

“How many books are there in the trilogy?”

“Do you have the ‘Autobiography of Ben Franklin’? I'm not sure who wrote it.”

“Do you have Shakespeare in English?”

“Do you have those mystery novels by Angela Lansbury?” Replied ‘Yes’ and showed him the books by ‘Jessica Fletcher.’ He was happy.”

“Where do you keep fiction that's true?”

In Mendocino more than once we were asked “Where’s your non-fiction section?” Think about it.

NOTES:

The Hood River report in Shelf Awareness.

Some original “bookstore” tweets...

Plays Well With Others

2010-07-08T17:27:00.000-07:00

What did we learn at summer camp? We learned to play well with others, whether it was a Mozart string quartet or a bassoon quintet composed by Alexander Spitzmuller-Harmersbach, who lived from 1894 - 1962, or so it said in the Humboldt Chamber Music Workshop Program.

We learned that whoever designed the student dormitories, back when Humboldt State University was only a College, whoever that was must have used plans for state prisons when constructing these identical concrete cells decorated with tattered “Turn Out Lights When Not in Use” stickers dating back to the oil crisis of the 1970's.

Under a particularly difficult to move piece of furniture we discovered Rebecca’s driver’s license. How did Rebecca get a drink or drive a car without her license? How did she sign up for a library card?

Sometimes we REALLY fail to get along well with others. Take, for example, World War II. That extreme failure to cooperate is reflected in the novel I’m starting now, “Spies of the Balkans” by the excellent novelist Alan Furst.

We also fail to understand the needs of others when we allow shrinking budgets to destroy public libraries. These quiet sanctuaries are exactly the community places we need most – comfortable, central locations where information and people interact at no charge, with no commercials, where the tools of learning are mentored by experts, where people who need these things most benefit from using them.

Libraries usually are the first services to suffer cutbacks, yet what other publicly funded endeavor gives back so much for so little? Contrast spending on libraries with any part of our immense war budget. Try it on a bumper sticker:

"It Will Be a Great Day When Libraries Have All the Money They Need, & the Military Has to Hold a Bake Sale to Buy a Bomber."

Marilyn Johnson writes in the Los Angeles Times that librarians “represent the best civic value out there, an army of resourceful workers that can help us compete in the world.” Not to mention help children dream.

She says, “Those in cities that haven’t preserved their libraries, those less fortunate and baffled by technology, and our children will be the first to suffer. But sooner or later, we’ll all feel the loss as one of the most effective levelers of privilege and avenues of reinvention – one of the great engines of democracy – begins to disappear.”

I have long wondered how 19th century steel baron Andrew Carnegie came upon his campaign to fund free public libraries throughout the country, and pondered why Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Warren Buffet and other well-intentioned plutocrats do not loudly support public libraries. They must have people to tell them the news: the US gap between rich and poor is larger now than it’s been for eighty years.

Maybe they believe books are old-fashioned or dying. They would be wrong. They may not fully understand how modern libraries are successfully interfacing with the bright new electronic world.

Or maybe they do realize all this, but libraries are out of fashion for rich people. There is not a lot of Ted Conference glory involved in supporting the institution. That’s plain short-sighted, as most of us realize.

So the next time your local library is in the bulls eye for layoffs, cuts in hours and services, or outright closing, give out a shout in opposition. Make it politically painful to cut a library budget.

Many more citizens protest the closing of an animal shelter than bother about the loss of a bookmobile. Which facility is more important to our fellow humans? I ask you.

(MUSIC) You too, can receive WOB scripts in your email and review episodes you may have missed. To be on the list, please send a note to amiksak@gmail.com. I'm blogging at www.wordsonbooks.blogspot.com and I enjoy reading your comments there.

NOTES:

One place to purchase a version of the sticker quoted above on paper, or t-shirt, mug, baby apron, hooded sweatshirt, water bottle.

NEWS ARTICLE from the Ann Arbor Journal:

Michigan Peaceworks hosted its second satirical "Bake Sale for Bombs" Saturday evening at the intersection of State Street and North University in downtown Ann Arbor with the aim of promoting peace. Members of the group, however, were deterred from selling goods by both city and university police midway through the event.

Peaceworks, founded in 2002 in Ann Arbor, was initially created as a non-profit project devoted to preventing the Iraq War. With supporters from across Washtenaw County, the organization dedicates itself to raising awareness on the causes and effects of militarism, and other social justice issues.

For more of this story, click here.

On the gap between rich and poor...

IMPORTANT SELF-PROTECTING CAVEAT: I do understand that the people wise enough to support animal shelters are exactly the same people who understand the importance of libraries.