Italy Takes Over the World

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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...

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

“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...

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...

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!

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.

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

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...

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!

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

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)