World Book Night

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"

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...

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

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

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

 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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.