The Week In Books: The Mario Brothers Read A Book, Google Loses Key Spy Author Support, Renes Descartes Letter Discovered & Ready To Be Judged By Mind

This will have to be a quick edition of the week in books, as the DA is a blue collar sod who is on snow duty.

The Mario Brothers want to sell you books.

Or something like that. Just one more big name joins the e-reader market with more questions than answers remaining. Suddenly, my idea for marketing a special e-reader key chain for your different e-readers (and their publisher exclusive contracts) seems like a practical business idea.

In the meantime I'm wondering if Mario, let alone Toadstool, has ever read Dostoevsky.


Google is slowly losing ground in their quest to control every damned thing.

I wonder if they'll shut down Blogger users who harp on this. One way to find out...


The article describes the list of authors opting out of the Google settlement (for copyright violations) as ranging from Thomas Pynchon to Jeffrey Archer.

Is that some sort of gamut? I am beginning to understand less and less of the way we are categorizing authors. The important thing though is that some people, ranging from literary spy thriller writers to popular spy thriller authors (okay, I'll stop) are resisting this most obvious of displays of power.

Does It Exist If Still Unfound?

Something that I'm sure the good people at Hesperus are asking right now (please, come back to the sates).

Haverford college is just another local school who is sure to figure in the evening news. Scratch that. Lower Marion, my old high school football rival (played in the 100th contest, mind you) will be the only one on the TV. This letter by Descartes though... Far more interesting than a story about IT guys spying on young girls over the internet.

Is it just me, or is the national news paying equal measure to a story about a high school IT department as they did about the CIA spying on US citizens?

Time Celebrates A Ruinous And Grand Tradition

Life's list of drunken, drug addled genius. Nuff said.

In any case, it's back to fight the snowpacalypse.

Front List / Back List: The 35th Anniversary Edition of Middleton A. Harris' The Black Book and Wonder By Hugo Claus

A somewhat odd pairing today, especially considering Belgium's role in the slave trade way back when. I have full confidence in your ability to compartmentalize these two books, both are what could be considered "Front List" titles. The title I ended up designating to the Front List, The Black Book is the newer release and so it gets the nod.

Meanwhile Hugo Claus' brilliant novel Wonder, would actually be a little long in the tooth for the front list claim, being that it was published in the halfway through 2009.

Still, the new anniversary edition of Middleton A. Harris (compiled and edited by Toni Morrison) landmark "scrapbook" coincides with a current affair (Black History Month) and so it almost could have fit a little better into that "Back List" designation.

I promise not to do this to you again. That business put aside, let's get to it.

From The Front List


The Black Book - 35th Anniversary Edition. Edited by Middleton A. Harris with the assistance of Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, Ernest Smith, and Toni Morrison. Foreword by Toni Morrison. Random House. U.S. History / African American History. Hardcover. ISBN: 9781400068487. $35.


On my way back from Ashtabula this last Sunday I stopped at one of those many micro-purgatories that inhabit the exit ramps of the American highway. This one was around Harrisburg and boasted an Old Country Buffet, which I did not eat at.

In the bathroom however there was a selection of typical graffiti. A penis complete with hairy ball-sack. A phone number offering oral sex. A four-letter word alternatively rendered via scratching instead of a felt marker. And then a pair of more disturbing messages.

"Obama is a dumb niggly."

"Kill Obama."

Two vile sentiments that are increasingly run-of-the-mill for bathroom graffiti for roadside service centers. Are they increasing because Obama is doing a bad job? I find that hard to believe as job losses have decreased under Obama and only the comically uninformed would blame Obama for the record levels of foreign held debt he inherited from George W. Bush. Plus the assassination of the President of the United States is a heinous subject to joke about, even if that joke is limited to the rest stop bathroom or Fox News.

So while political affiliations may underlie this call for murder, it is without a doubt more of an issue of race than political philosophy. So while the election of Barack Obama may have signaled the beginning of a new era of race acceptance in the US, it also served as a cannon shot on the Mississippi, bringing the reality to the surface.

Racism is alive and well. And sadly that's no real shocker.

One of the things I've heard Toni Morrison say about the idea behind Random House's decision to publish her assemblage of the provocative collection of scraps, photographs, news clippings and post cards that comprises The Black Book was a need to create a publication that would reach a larger African-American audience. The Black Book of Middleton A. Harris' unbelievable collection of ephemera sidestepped academic dryness or political heavy handedness. It was history fragmented, primary, and in this sense unbelievably and powerfully accessible.

The book is disturbing to behold. Pictures of lynchings, burnings and hangings are interred in The Black Book's pages and they are gruesome to behold. One unnerving two page spread is from the August 18th, 1911 edition Coatesville Record of Coatesville, PA. The front page article is concerned with the lynching and burning of a "colored man" accused of killing a cop. The two pages are disturbing enough but as I live near enough to Coatesville I can add an additional story. Less than a hundred years later, just last year, two white men were arrested for a series of racially motivated house fires that had nearly everyone in Coatesville living in fear for several months.

Many of the tragic stories on display in this singular of history books have that doubly haunting effect of finding modern day brethren amongst our headlines. The Black Book is not a work of misery alone. There are many bright stories in there as well.

The anti-aircraft gun, the mechanization of shoe production, street sweeper, lanterns, typewriters and all kinds of amazing invention patents also grace the pages. There are the visionary musicians, inventing nearly every facet of what we now call popular culture. The heroics of the negro leagues and titanic struggles of men like boxer Jack Johnson.

It's all here. On one page there is a triumph and the next a horrible occurrence. Flip to the middle and you'll find a profile of men like Frederick Douglas. Flip a few more pages and you'll arrive at humiliating advertisements using nappy headed pickininnies and comical black musicians tripping on their own feet to get at a box of corn meal.

Without a doubt, regardless of your ethnic composition, the story of the black American is the most frustrating one we have in the US. So full of triumphs. So riddled with despair.

Included in the new edition is a letter that Toni Morrison received after the original publication of the book in 1972. It is from a man in prison, which was a form of letter Morrison apparently has received her whole life. Instead of the usual requests for money or freedom this man asked for two copies of the book.

In Morrison's foreword she quotes him:

Dear Mrs. Morrison, someone sent me a copy of "The Black Book." And if at all possible, I would like to have two more. I need one copy to give to a friend, another to throw against the wall over and over and over. The one I already own I want to hold in my arms against my heart.

That is it. That describes this very important book about American history.



From The Back List


Wonder by Hugo Claus. Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim. Fiction. Archipelago Books. Trade Paperback. 338 pp. ISBN: 9780980033014. $15.


Yes, it was published somewhat long ago, back in May of 2009, but since it has been shortlisted for Three Percent's "Best Translated Book Award of 2010" and because I just finished reading it (the real reason) it lands itself here on the DA's humble Back List selection.

This was the first and certainly (I hope) not to be the last time I have read anything by Claus. Hugo Maurice Julien Claus, according to nearly every accounting, is considered the greatest of Flemish authors, not to mention the greatest writer in the Dutch language's history.

Claus was a prolific writer, composing over a thousand pages of poetry, twenty novels and sixty plays let alone essays, translations and librettos. Of these works it is Wonder and The Sorrow Of Belgium that are considered among his best.

Wonder is a somewhat challenging book that forces the reader to enter through a series of chapters engaged in a stream of consciousness mode reminiscent of Joyce's Ulysses. From these first few chapters a sort of rhythm emerges and more conventional modes of writing come somewhat as relief. Even in the somewhat obscure opening pages, Wonder maintains its most defining trait, which is a sense of humor that would have Kafka giddy with laughter.

Wonder is essentially a novel about fascism and its psychological impact on the human being. This is also to say that it is a novel concerning a damaged sort of humanity and all the psychosis this entails. Claus' melancholic satire takes aim at both the culture of fascism in Belgium during World War II and its visible descendants twenty years after the war. Claus brilliantly conjures what is best described as the modern day (Claus' 1960s) atavism of NAZI ethos. The brilliant part is what makes this book a joy to read and cumbersome to describe.

Claus' hapless but intelligent protagonist is Victor de Rijckel, a schoolteacher. Victor is clearly mentally unstable and, lucky for us, also the supposed author of the book we are reading. He is not however an unreliable source. Despite the revelation that Rijckel is penning his book from the confines of a madhouse, the reader should still believe his story. There is something intrinsic in de Rijckel's Belgium. Whether in the eternal collaboration of big business (in his case Haakebeen's Lumber and Furniture Center) with the powers that be (NAZI or foreign occupying) or the echoes of a fascistic sense of inherited destiny espoused by Victor's Principal, Claus' world relates to ours with disturbing ease.

The story itself sums up easily, if somewhat absurdly. Victor, a teacher who has been divorced by a student whom he married, meets a remarkable beauty at the town's annual costumed ball, which is named The White Rabbit Ball. He follows her and her male suitors to the sea, where, following an antisemitic outburst, she drives off leaving the suitors to ponder her existence. In short order, and with the assistance of his very own Sancho Panza manifested in an impish boy from the school he teaches at, de Rijckel learns the whereabouts and seeks out this mysterious woman.

I wondered about the ball's name to some degree, as the theme of madness and an increasingly lurid adventure full of fearful tyrants and bizarre benefactors aligns well with that other rabbit hole induced fantasy, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.

The boy has knowledge of this beauty's whereabouts and leads Victor to a village in the countryside. Naturally the villagers find it suspicious that this grown man is traveling with a boy so clearly unrelated to him. This of course leads to some of the more off-color humor in the book, which usually centers around the sexual escapades of Victor, who is no lover of boys but instead prefers very young girls.

His quest for the woman (girl) takes him to a castle in the countryside where he, again hapless, gets tangled up with a cadre of surviving Flemish NAZIs and in order to maintain his proximity to the object of his quest poses as an expert on their lost, yet believed to be alive, leader. It is in these passages that the heart of fascism is plumbed, in particular the religious strain that inhabited Flanders during the war years. It is less pro-German than it is a call to righteous battle issues from the pulpit against communism. In that "righteousness" much evil could/would be done.

What amazes me the most about this book is the author's ability to connect the dots. At the source of the bygone World War's evils, manifest in the castle's congregation, the threads of influence on other characters like the principal, the villagers, the two young lovers in Victor's life and the Flemish culture itself emerge. It is an amazing study of the influence of history on modernity. In another sense it opens up the reader to the reality that Victor, who fought in World War II, is mentally ill because of the war.

There is almost too much to discuss in this book. Stylistically Claus is meticulous, selecting by hand his verbiage for each chapter. In the chapter describing the Lumber Yard he plies the reader with acronyms and the supposedly common sense language of deals done right. When writing of the mysterious leader of the castle's cadre, Claus' language takes on the tone of mythic tradition and national pride. When discussing the two young women of the novel his tone changes entirely. In his ex-wife there is the new fascism of her obsessive love of western popular culture mixed with the old definition of masculine and feminine archetypes from the war years. In the mistress of the castle, there is the dichotomy of a woman seeking to be an exemplary love of the lost fascist leader, a sort of Venus in furs done up with a swastika beret, and young girl whose whole identity has been defined by the men she has been forced to worship.

The book's most comically sad moment comes when she spontaneously fellates Victor in the front seat of her purple sports car, both of them taken aback and left unfulfilled.

The title, Wonder, captures the cruel humor of this masterpiece. Why? of course, is what follows in wonder's wake. Or maybe it's the other way around.

People Behind The Books

Middleton A. Harris
Toni Morrison
Hugo Claus
Michael Henry Heim
Archipelago Books

The Week In Books: Going To Ashtabula Edition

Oh yes. Ashtabula, Ohio. You may recognize it as one of the towns Jack Kerouac mentions only by name, once, in his classic novel On The Road.

Or you may know it as a tragically depressed harbor town on Lake Erie, complete with decayed downtown and a lone bookstore. In any case I am off to Ashtabula in order to celebrate my grandfather's 90th birthday.

My grandfather was a lifelong carpenter and ran a respected home building company in Ohio first and later in Florida. When I was a youngster I used to pick up nails on some of the work sites (supposedly this was a job, though I still have my doubts).

My favorite story about him is one from World War II. He was in the artillery during the invasion of the Philippines and as a carpenter the notion of destroying buildings came to bear heavily on him.

After the battles had ended and some down time was at hand, he and a friend took time to build a house on the island they were stationed. It is a very noble and somewhat vain story, but I have always found a splendid attempt at harmony in it.

So anyone wanting to wish Carlos Vernon Capp (shortened form Capitana) a happy birthday can do so by raising an extra dry, slightly dirty, vodka martini and gobble a handful of peanuts. Because that's what Carlos will be doing.

Public service announcement complete, let's talk books.

Greenlight Bookstore = Super Colider?

Per Beatrice.com. The Brooklyn based bookstore is launching a new event series that is, in this humble blogger's imagining, a really cool thing.

In short they are pairing writer/bloggers (kind of like a liger only smaller, less dangerous) for intelligent discussions before an audience.

Now what I would like to see is a mere blogger take the stage with a writer and get get to facilitate a discussion. Basically have the blogger as a guest moderator. Maybe that's what they're doing here. Not 100% certain, but in either case it still seems clever to me.

Might have to take the train up to see exactly what's happening and report more later.

Ron Hogan & The Tao

One Beatrice story followed by another, sort of. Former GalleyCat editor Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com fame and who is now employed (or is it deployed) by Houghton Mifflin & Company as their director of digital marketing is auspiciously engaged in an independent book experiment.

His previously released edition of a paraphrased edition of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching online, for free, is the foundation of this experiment. Via ChannelVBooks, Hogan is releasing a print edition of the previously free Getting Right With Tao: A Contemporary Spin On The Tao Te Ching.

The experiment seeks to discover whether a previously free online text can be successfully sold in a print format. Whether or not it proves anything will be seen.

I really don't normally go in for these sort of "modernized" projects but anyone proselytizing for the Tao is fine with me. Wait... Something seems wrong here.

Speaking Of Mixed-Motives

From MobyLives there is this cruel story about a pernicious (I will make the value judgment) bookstore chain in the UK called Oxfam.

Here, let Oxfam explain who and what they are:

"Oxfam is the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe, selling around 11 million books every year. Most of the 700+ Oxfam shops around the UK sell books, and more than 130 shops are specialist bookshops or book and music shops."

Sounds like a success story, right? Behind every fortune...

Books are donated direct to shops by the public, or through more than 700 Oxfam book and music banks in convenient locations around the country.

Somewhat akin to BetterWorldBooks here in the U.S., Oxfam has little to no operational costs because the books are...free.

There used to be a remainder store across the street from my old store Wolfgang Books. We all used to love fielding the question about why our books were so much more expensive than their "Everything $2.99" price-point.

Explaining remainders isn't easy and so instead we would just say that our books were new or collectible.

The reality is that it is very difficult to operate in competition against a retailer that has little to no overhead and gets its inventory for free. Check out why some independent bookstores are more than a little upset about the Oxfam spreading through the UK like Kudzu in South Florida.

More Whale Please! Philip Hoare's The Whale, that is.

I really can't say enough about this book. It is truly rare to find a mixture of science and literary investigation written so stunningly.

Here's a linke to Philip Hoare's website, in particular to a documentary done by the author with the BBC.

Enjoy.

Everyone have a great weekend.

Front List / Back List: Loomings, Or Philip Hoare's The Whale & Something Else About Books

In the second installment of Frontlist/Backlist there will be no direct relationship between the two books being discussed. The first is a new release that is worth your while and the second is a book over a decade old and yet pertinent a current event.

In the latter case I am talking about the book as technological phenomena. First though, to an absolutely amazing new book, housed nonetheless in a very old technology.


From The Front List


The Whale: In Search Of The Giants Of The Sea by Philip Hoare. Ecco - Harper Collins. Nonfiction/Biology. Hardcover. 453 pp. ISBN: 9780061976216. $27.99.

I pit its speech against infinite silence-
And a notion of eternity floats to mind,
And the dead seasons, and the season
Beating here and now, and the sound of it. So,
In this immensity my thoughts all drown;
And it's easeful to be wrecked in seas like these.

-from The Infinitive by Giacomo Leopardi. Translation by Eamon Grennan.

Note to booksellers. Shelve above title in any of the following ways: Historical travel writing. American history. Marine biology. Or just wrap a rubber band around it and Moby Dick and sell as a package deal.

You think that I'm kidding but the reality is that Philip Hoare has written a magic book. It is of that inspiring breed of book that is as much a call to adventure as it is a compendium of impressive research. His subject is manifold but boils down to two essential investigations.

On the one hand there is the whale, at once the leviathan of primordial nightmare and the gentle beast whose very being an empire was built upon. On the other hand there is that most powerful, and ponderous, work of American fiction. By name: Moby Dick.

Both are large and impressive subjects and to deal with one you will have to deal with the other. The difference, and certainly the genius, in Hoare's biography of the whale is that it filters the book through the beast and not vice versa. In this manner of approach Hoare has created a sort of ideal literary criticism of Herman Melville's masterpiece. Through an amalgamation of fable, lore, biased affection and historical reality The Whale is exactly what Saint-Beuve would have wanted in a book about a book. That is to say it approaches the author(s) of Moby Dick, both Melville and the whale in autobiographical terms.

Hoare's approach is, to put it mildly, comprehensive. Let's start with the illustrations, which can be described only as diverse and profuse. Then there is what the text accomplishes beside the illustrations. Beyond the mystery of the whale's vertiginous biology (I had no idea that sperm whale's can kill with sound, for instance) there is also the bloody history of whaling, an industry which fueled American ascendancy as an economic powerhouse. The Whale is replete with an exhaustive etymology of nearly every word derived from whales or whaling. Hoare is smart to soften the melancholy philosophy of the deep and the jargon of whaling times with his own experience with whales and, well, the books about them.

Perhaps he took that lesson from the headache some of the passages of Melville's masterpiece are known to create. They are infamous ones, that resemble more so a dictionary than the great American novel.

Stylistically speaking, Hoare's book is immense. He writes with a grand air, which borders on the high romantic. I haven't read any of Hoare's other works and I would like to now. I wonder if he always writes this way. I suppose one must error towards the immense when addressing whales. Not unlike John Bonham's drum solo in, uh, "Moby Dick".

It is not hyperbole to say that the reader of The Whale, which won Great Britain's most prestigious nonfiction prize, will find themselves wondering if Hoare has left anything out. The combination of a mysterious subject and a tireless researcher on a labor of love is nearly unmanning. Twice I had fitful dreams of whales and boats while I read this book. This too is no exaggeration.

Some of that may be personal. I grew up in southern Florida, with the ocean less than a mile away from my home and a canal in my back yard. Whether through the contemplative hobby of fishing or the vain occupation of catching, I have always loved the uncertainty of the liquid realm. One day while fishing with a net for bait fish a ten-foot alligator rose from the black water of the canal. Uncertain is perhaps too weak a word for the mixture of emotions a nine-year-old boy feels when confronted with storybook dragon.

Water obscures. Whether in the form of the leaf tannin in swamps or the light scattering sublimity of the ocean deep, water is at its most potent when its contents are inscrutable. We are visual beings and nothing is more terrifying, or exciting, as the power of the sea to hide even its most impressive beings. Water is essential to the myth of the whale, and Hoare is powerfully aware of this.

When I close my eyes, I see those massive animals swimming in and out of my vision, into the blue-black below; the same creatures that came to obsess Melville's ambiguous narrator, 'and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale'. On my own uncertain journey, I sought to discover why I too felt haunted by the whale, by the forlorn expression on the beluga's face, by the orca's impotent fin, by the insistent images in my head. Like Ishmael, I was drawn back to the sea; wary of what lay below, yet forever intrigued by it, too.

-from The Whale

The deep blue is made fearful by the implication of the leviathan, not the other way around. Hoare admirably captures something of Moby Dick's brooding atmosphere and does so, perhaps not by coincidence, by somehow capturing a staggering amount of the whale and somehow fitting it into a book.

Like I said before. It's somewhat of a magic trick.

From The Back List


The Future Of The Book edited by Jeffrey Nunberg. Afterword by Umberto Eco. University Of California. Linguistics/Technology and Society. Trade Paperback. 306 pp. ISBN: 9780520204515. $34.95.


Let us meditate book people.

He did not despise the new, but used it wholeheartedly; he did not reject the old social institutions, but found new ways to adapt them, and when thwarted one way, found another, odder but still functional, way to use them; and he did not tarry to prophesy a new age of learning and wisdom. Most of all, he did things. The larger scheme within which he did them was not widely imitated, nor was it imitable. Even to say this is to reveal waht is so often wrong about our expectations of ourselves and our cultural heroes: we dream of strong leaders, men on white horses, people who change history. Those are the fools and the demons of our past. The most effective change is that wielded by those who do not expect to create or manipulate a closed system, but those who do recognize that change takes place in an open system, in one where it is the accumulation of shrewd and collaborative actions of the many that generates the unexpected harmony.

-from Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus by James J. O'Donnell.

O'Donnell is writing of Cassiodorus, a failed visionary whose chief trait of excellence was that, as O'Donnell put it, "he solved nothing." If you cannot find social, political or directly book related wisdom in the above quote then, well, you just aren't paying attention.

The Future Of The Book was published in 1996 and in this sense it has purchased an air of authority about it. Much of the historically applied questioning of the book's title has eerily come to fruition. As the first printed books met resistance from the monasteries on economic grounds (and a few salient academic arguments) so too has the electronic age of the book met with resistance from the publishing community.

While the monks decried the new technology, the mechanisms were being put to use in back allies, by business people and merchants who saw the fiscal potential of the new way of making books.

This notion of the business man scuttling the book from its rightful caretakers is a cruel one. Crueler still to think about as Jeff Bezos and the e-book players (good band name?)seek to "create or manipulate a closed system," but essentially his role is the same.

Difference is he might yet succeed.

That is the most startling aspect of this series of essays: we seem to handle changes in media format the same way every time. The rise of blogging mirrors the rise of the pamphleteers, both preceding more official use of the format. It is strange to think about but the pamphlet preceded what we think of as the book, in its "authorial" format we take for granted.

With pamphlets it was a scandalized aristocracy that sought to rid the world the world of them. It was this aristocracy that passed laws concerning published materials. Laws that exist today. If someone hands you a pamphlet on the streets and it doesn't say who it was paid for, well, you could, well, not sure who you turn them in to but it is supposed to be illegal.

In turn it is a corporate buttressed meritocracy today that slanders the lowly blogger and a publishing industry (a vast generalization, I know) that is loathe to approach the question of format, just like the monks of yore detested the scandalous mutability of the printing press.

I am not taking a stance here. Merely recommending a book that might shed light on the situation. We've been through it before, you see.

After this reading (the third in some essay's cases) this book again I am left with one very uneasy question left unanswered. Or perhaps unconvinced of an answer might be more accurate. The question is: Are the times different?

Or is the business-minded iron grip on emerging technology the same thing as a Council Of Toledo? In this case the vitality of the apex corporation replacing the health of ecclesiastical texts.

The Week In Books: Why Does Everyone Hate The Small Bookstore?

Sublime like a tiger's stripes. And as endangered? Micawber's is a gem of American bookselling.


Where does this leave the bookstores?

Tongue in cheek title, no doubt, but buckle up nonetheless. Some shit is about to go down.

There is only one conclusion I have arrived at after the dust of the first battle of the e-book wars has come to a close. It is a simple one. Like all modern wars the reason it came about is control. Control of pricing, auspiciously, and control of format in reality.

Just like all the bright faced lefties when Bush II invaded Iraq, screaming about blood for oil, many of the commentaries about this publishing conflict fall short of addressing an important aspect of this discussion. Essentially the format has been accepted and now the big players are jockeying for control. So I ask you, nostalgia shelved neatly at the dusty back next to poetry, what the hell is happening to bookstores in all this?

After reading the observations of the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post I found one consistent theme, the latter of which contains the best summation by Steve Pearlstein:

With a higher price for both the tablet and the books, you wouldn't expect this new model to pose much of a challenge to Amazon's dominance in digital books. But then over the weekend, Macmillan told Amazon that if it didn't agree to the same terms it had hammered out with Apple, Amazon would no longer have access to new books from the publishing house until several months after they were released through bookstores and Apple. Amazon's initial response was to prevent users from buying Macmillan books on its Web site. By late Sunday, however, Amazon had raised the white flag and announced that it would go along with the new arrangement. Other publishers are now expected to follow Macmillan's lead.

Never mind the lack of a comfortable reading screen or anything resembling the e-ink technology. Apple is gaining ground with a thin computer, essentially half the creature that a netbook is, simply through packaging and loyalty to the Apple brand.

Wait... I seem to remember an adage about this sort of thing.

Sad joke aside, what is consistently nagging at me is the total lack of a long view commentary on what will happen to bookstores. You know, those places you wander into, have long arguments with the proprietor and find books you've never seen advertised on Amazon or faced out in a Barnes & Noble.

The technological reality is solidifying. I will not argue about that. In fact, I am excited about it. As e-books become the norm the big question I hear being asked is how will small publishers get their important works to market with success. A small publisher will not be able to pay for the front page of Amazon.com or buy into a Barnes & Noble TOPPS (you think those endcaps are picked by booksellers?) style program. Then again, I guess they never have. Good old word-of-mouth and advertising in magazines, blogs and whatever the future newspapers look like has been good enough to this point. Let alone the fact that the press is often free on blogs and webzines.

So bookstores... Pragmatically I can foresee a sort of hybrid bookstore/blog that serves the role of literary muckraker (ahem), selling e-books online. Let me revise that. I can imagine that scenario. Problem is though, that this is about control and not the object itself. Not blood for oil but blood for strategic command. As things stand now, if a small bookseller wants to join the e-book world they will have to settle for pitiful affiliate links that are dubious income streams at best.

This is because the major players in all this are retailers and not wholesalers. The small bookstore (you know the place you met your great love or found out OMG! that he/she also loves Samuel Pepys) is largely reliant on wholesalers to consolidate inventory monitoring and billing. Lord knows they help with monitoring billing.

This leads me to the second aspect of this depressing war. Not only are small independents unable to engage in any e-book commerce they are also unrepresented in all the talk about pricing. As someone who ran a book business for six years, three of which were bricks & mortar, I can tell you that the retail book business is geared for nearly everyone except the small bookstore. There simply is no other area of retail that expects the retailer to purchase products at a 40-50% discount. A healthy 2.5x markup is considered retail norm. In books the store is expected to purchase a $24.99 book at $14.99 and bring home $9.99. That's a lot of cash flow to manage for a short profit. Quantity then...right.

And you wonder why Barnes & Noble carries board games and hard sells coffee.

So... Amazon wants to control the pricing of books in Walmart fashion to forever bar smaller (or even larger) retailers from the equation. Apple wants to keep business as usual, because they simply don't have to fear other retailers, as they control the device itself. Barnes & Noble is slangin' Nookie with smug awareness that they have always had both the leverage of price setting and consumer interface all at once. And now with a new technological platform the old B&N seems to be in not too shabby a spot for the impending battle royale.

The publishers have a right to be worried about this situation. They lament caving for returns and remaindering in the past and truly it was damaging to the book business when it happened. The remaindering system is bad for both small booksellers and publishers.

So this time some publishers have drawn a line in the sand and that's noble, or smart. How so the little guy? When bigtop stores and internet monsters can buy tons of books at deep discounts and return those they don't sell, it is the small bookstore, making ten bucks on a hardcover they had to outlay fifteen for that is getting the proverbial shaft.

It's like a small bookstore is a consignment shop. Oh, and the returns system is harder on them too. Much of the time the wholesaler or publisher asks them to eat 10% of what they return.

And what is left to the small booksore? To ask communities to get behind them? To hope people are willing to buy something at a higher cost that they can have for cheaper online?

Let me tell you, he says sadly, one of the biggest kicks I have ever received to the nuts happened every day I received the mail of the neighbors who lived above Wolfgang Books. Once a week without fail, sometimes twice, there would be a book shipped from Amazon.

I don't blame them for buying it from Amazon. A bookstore does not have a right to consumers. That's one of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners make. They believe that since they are doing the right thing (organic food, good books, or free trade coffee) that consumers should buy from them. There is nothing more untrue.

I blame the system that seems to get harder and harder for small bookstores to survive. And it seems that the system, despite recent developments, is business as usual.

From The Back List: Supplemental Snowpacalypse Edition

The Gold Rush Stories by Bret Harte (including "The Outcasts of Poker Flat", "The Luck of Roaring Camp", "Tennessee Partner" and others). Heydey Books. Trade Paperback. ISBN: 9780930588885. $13.95.

And pulseless and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

-from "The Outcasts Of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte

Finally... Leisure. As some of you know I work in the gardening/plant industry these days and with the insane amount of snow we were just pummeled with I had to spend the last 24 hours working to remove the lovely white hell. Greenhouses, you see, are not exactly ideal load bearing structures.

Now, with snow removed and plants all cared for, I am able to join my reading brethren here in the North East and enjoy a day spent...reading.

Fate though would have me digging yet. After spending a night with my rugged snow removal cohorts I had a particular story in mind. One worthy of all the dick jokes and hard work. "The Outcasts Of Poker Flat" by Bret Harte is the best snow story, in my mind and the best of Harte's prolific career.

My life being in boxes, I knew the copy of The Luck Of Roaring Camp and Other Stories (containing the above story) was obscured by paper, cloth and cardboard. While shoveling out the gutters of our big foliage greenhouse I decided that I would just read it online. The book is in the public domain and would be easy to find online.

Sentimentality got the better of me. Sure, I could download it to a kindle (if I had one) or just read it on my laptop. But then I would be denying myself the pleasure of reading my 1894 edition (not a first, but an early impression), handsomely bound and easy to hold (the duodecimo is the best size for short story collections - I will hear no arguments) and bound by the good people of Houghton Mifflin over a century ago. They will have to make a scratch and sniff Kindle if they ever plan on engaging the olfactory pleasures of reading an old book.

Bret Harte is a somewhat neglected writer, mainly due to a public feud he had with Mark Twain, the latter of which made sure to win even after the former had died. Because of Twain he has largely been characterized as a little too lacy for his old west subject matter. Perhaps the finest review of his work, in fact the work I am about to read, was made by the great one, Jorge Luis Borges, in a foreword he was writing to a Spanish language edition of a collection of Harte's works.

Borges spends three-quarters of his foreword explaining how insufferably stuffy Harte could be. He also hints at a fundamental shift in western or "tough guy" fiction brought on by the advent of the hard boiled writers of the twenties, thirties and forties. The somewhat contrived and oh too earnest (a shame there is such a thing) writing of Harte was buried under the avalanche of cool. His characters lacked in firepower, or so Borges hints.

In a classic twist of plot, Borges cleverly brings the reader to the realization that the characters of Harte's story are down-and-out types. A luckless gambler and an unwelcome whore provide the swarthy counter to an innocent young couple, all stranded in a blizzard as they flee Poker Flat for one reason or another.

The cold is a tough enemy and even the world-weary gambler, the ever collected Mr. John Oakhurst, has all he can handle to try and keep himself and the people in his company alive. Oakhurst is one of my favorite antiheroes in all of literature. He is a very real character. Flawed, disreputable, and yet also a man of action and fundamental humanity. Oakhurst has seen the bad deal down, but he has also done the right thing, not because he ought to but because it was right.

The growing power of the winter storm knows not about such things though. As in many of the stories in this collection, there is a grim limit to man's capabilities when confronted with nature's elemental power.

This is the story made to be read amidst dire weather. The odd combination of stultified life and dynamic strength mirror a blizzard well. Beyond the chilly setting , it is a story of redemption and violence. Harte was a writer that could truly show us the moral heights and base lows of humanity. He also could spin one hell of a yarn. Sure, it's a little sentimental and naive at times. No denying that. The language is contrived, just like Twain used to say. But when John Oakhurst staked the deuce of clubs to that fateful tree with his bowie knife, no one was calling him a sissy.

Front List/Back List: Communism Is For The Dogs

Well here it is. The first Front List/Back List is upon us. Since the new format may take some getting used to, I have decided to make the first post one of direct relationship between the two books.

Remember, the Front List/Back List postings are going to consist of one new release and one older "back list" title. The back list title will be relevant to either some current event, trend or in the case of today's post, the new release being reviewed.

So let's get to it.

From The Front List


Two Underdogs And A Cat: Three Reflections On Communism by Slavenka Drakulic. Seagull Books. 2009. Hardcover. Fiction. $17. ISBN: 9781906497286. Part 4 in the "What Was Communism" series edited by Tariq Ali.

"A dog on a leash is in possession of something very precious nowadays - a Master."

In his Six Memos For The Next Millenium Italo Calvino enumerated six concepts, which he believed were elemental to the understanding of literature. One of them, which he termed "Lightness", is best exemplified in fables and folk tales. Lightness, or so Calvino stated, was the ability of a story to deal with weighty matters in a removed manner. Rather than sliding deep into the muck of the issue at hand, "light" writing deftly jumps away from the problem and looks at it from afar. Often with something closely resembling mirth. If not outright knee slapping laughter.

Slavenka Drakulic's most recent attempt to wrestle into digestible terms the world altering behemoth that was Soviet Communism is written with lightness in mind. The author of several novels and one particularly striking memoir concerned with communism (How We Survived Communism And Even Laughed) has certainly enough practice at this discussion to bring along the requisite deftness. That is perhaps the most striking aspect to this tiny book: that it combines decades of knowledge and soul-searching into a collection of mirthful fables.

In three brief fables, each told by a different animal, the realities of and the life after communism are revealed. Drakulic is taking the long view in these stories, both forward and backward. None of these animals, even the feline companion of the "General" who declared martial law in Poland on December 13th, 1981, take a definitive side on what communism was. None of them believe themselves capable of pronouncing, one way or another, a verdict. The one constant among the three intelligent creatures (a mouse, a dog and a cat) is that they lament the growing unawareness of what life was like in communistic times.

Shockingly, Drakulic's small interlocutors outline a torpor both in the post soviet countries as well as abroad. Having never been to eastern Europe or Russia, I personally held the apparently misinformed belief that communism was still very much "felt" by those still living in its wake. In a way, this is an essential difference with Drakulic's book and the series it is a part of. Drakulic is interested in communism as it was through the venue of what it is.

Delivered with, of course, a light touch.

In the first story a mouse, a sort of de facto curator and tour guide at the Museum Of Communism discusses many of the relics on display with a relative who is visiting, who just happens to be a German rat.

In the second story the oldest dog in Bucharest remembers the hardships described by his mother when Nicolae Ceauşescu almost inexplicably made it illegal to own dogs, forcing the onetime companion animals into the streets. Ceausecu never ordered there extermination, believing that the animals would starve and he could avoid the bad press. Instead modern Bucharest has a problem with a dangerous wild dog population.

Wojciech Jaruzelski is never named in the final story, but the hard to describe career of the last communist leader in Poland is center stage as his (though she would not like this designation) cat writes to the war crimes trial officials in hope of expedience. One way or another, guilty or innocent, she wants the trial to come to a close. People do not know how to feel about it otherwise, or so she observes with icy reserve. Closure is something supremely important for those who might yet see themselves as victims. And apparently cats.

For every dog a leash and each cat a clean break.

One part history lesson mixed with one part fable, Drakulic has provided readers a very useful book. As a "War On Terror" escalates and a "big push" has commenced in Afghanistan it is precisely a book like Two Underdogs And A Cat that may provide readers with a sense of balance when looking toward the long view. Forward or backward.

From The Back List


Heart Of A Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. Grove Press. Trade Paperback. $14. Originally written in 1925, it remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987.

"A collar is just like a briefcase, the dog quipped mentally and, wagging his behind, proceeded with a lordly air to the second floor."

Bulgakov's second greatest satire (after The Master and Margarita) is perhaps as close to the word "sublime" as slapstick can come. The tale is a reworking of the Frankenstein story to fit hilariously grim (like the smile on a skull) into the framework of early communist Russia.

Beginning and ending with Sharikov (the mongrel in the starring role) narrating his often less than favorable situation it is yet the middle that most readers will delight over.

Philip Philippovich is Moscow's and perhaps all the world's greatest medical genius. His talented ministrations to the upper crust of the Party's officials has granted him somewhat of a special lifestyle in the midst of 1920's poverty. Despite a disreputably noble heritage, the good doctor lives in great abundance, eating elaborate meals and dwelling in an apartment far larger than what would typically be allotted him.

It isn't his daily practice that we're interested in though. No, indeed the doctor is a revolutionary (in the nonpolitical sense) figure in experimental medicine. His latest quest is regeneration of human tissue using animals. Kudos to Bulgakov for foreseeing such medical innovation. Hopefully that's all he foresaw...

Enter Sharikov. The mangy but lovable mutt is taken in and cared for by the doctor and his assistants. The stray dog is amazed at his seemingly good fortune. Sure, he is no longer free, but the square meals and warm apartment are well worth the trade. This is one of the constants between the above book by Drakulic and Bulgakov's. Namely that there is something not altogether bad about being "managed" by someone else. Even if the master is a cruel one.

Thus it is only natural for poor Sharikov to feel suddenly betrayed when the doctor's assistant presses a chloroform rag against his nose.

Enter the monster. By grafting a human's pituitary gland and testicles to poor Sharikov in hopes of regenerating human tissues Philip Philoppovich arrives at a alarming discovery. The transformation of a dog into a man. A stunted, strangely canine looking man.

Worse still is the quality of the organs used to grow this new thing. Apparently, in Mel Brooksian irony, the doctor's assitant procured the organs of a violent lecher given to excessive drinking. They wanted spare parts. They got another drunken thief who spouts Engels and lies in an alternating but consistent pattern. Not to mention the fact this new being has an irrational hatred of cats.

The bureaucracy of communistic Russia demands that every man have his papers and so eventually, much to the chagrin of Philip Philippovich, Sharikov is given his all important papers. In time Sharikov has a job. His chosen profession? That of removing all the cats from Moscow. With swelling, if false, proletariat pride the dog moves about the communistic system playing for sympathy from the strong and viciously lording over the weak.

A darker look at human nature you may be hard to find. Lucky for us, Bulgakov decided to deliver his condemnation of the politics and social hypocrisy of his day in a humorous manner. There are many points in Heart Of A Dog that will have you laughing out loud. There are, alas, more scenes that will have you grimacing than laughing.

The parallel myth of Frankenstein's monster provides the ultimate backdrop for a satire of communism. The good doctor's creation is only realized as monstrous before his own monstrosity, let alone the sinuous leviathan roiling across eastern Europe.

A somewhat surprise ending provides important relief and, well, closure. In this case again important to cats.

A sculpture of the character Behemoth from Bulgakov's masterpiece, The Master And Margarita. On a wall in Kiev.


The Writers

About Slavenka Drakulic.
About Mikhail Bulgakov.

The Week In Books: Dr. Steve Haycox, Amazon's Iron Fist, Salinger Creepy

Look, monopolies over published media are no big deal.

Pretty fiery first installment here. No pun intended.


Amazon & The Economic War Of 2010

The river is eating its own. Over the last week there has been much discussion of what is going to happen in the aftermath of Amazon's declaration of economic warfare against Macmillan.

In an unbelievably aggressive move last Friday, Amazon pulled all Macmillan titles from its listings. This of course is a crippling attack on Macmillan.

Since then Amazon has "restored" the publisher's listings but without the necessary "buy buttons" to actually purchase titles. Stay classy, Bezos.

The argument is auspiciously over what a $9.99 price-point set by Amazon for electronic books does for publisher prestige. The reality is the disagreement between Amazon and now two publishers (Hachette has taken up arms with Macmillan) is about control. Amazon wants it. The publishers are unwilling to relinquish it.

What is astounding to me is that there has never been a clearer case for antitrust investigation. When a retailer holds enough distribution and sales power to threaten manufacturing (in this case a publisher) entity with oblivion you have a unfair marketplace.

But then again Obama had a pretty cozy (Obama released exclusive publications through Amazon in 2008) relationship with Amazon during his campaign so... Yeah.

The best place to go to read up on this insane battle is over at the MobyLives blog at Meville House. Check out the advertisement that Macmillan put in the NYT last week. Awesome stuff.

The best piece taking the technological long view of this skirmish can be read over at arstechnica.com. The e-book market is going to turn into the wild west and the e-book consumers will be pulling their hair out in droves before this is over.

I foresee a handy key chain for all your different publisher exclusive e-book readers. When the corporate gluttony is suppressed, we may yet find a useful technological innovation in all this.

Pretty amazing. Amazon dot com. Modern day Cronos.

J.D. Salinger

I was still on my hiatus when two major luminaries of 20th century literature passed last week. As regulars know, I'm not one to throw my thimbleful into subjects as vast as the late Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger. I will however tip my hat to a couple of summations worth your while.

And one that I found particularly foolish.

First off is the New York Times gossipy, almost dissenting look into the life of the mysterious and apparently very creepy Salinger. Most of the articles materials are derived from Salinger's daughter and her 2000 memoir, Dream Catcher.

Here's the link to the New York Times meta-obituary.

For a more substantive and less of a tabloid scandal air look to Robert McCrum's piece in the Guardian.

Only one issue with McCrum's article. Philip Roth and Gore Vidal are the "last of the Mohicans" in American letters?

Oh my... It seems my fears are confirmed. No one is aware that Toni Morrison is still alive.

Howard Zinn

Over the last week I've enjoyed reading the dissenting views of the late historian's chief work, A People History Of The United States. I know the positives. I really wanted to hear what negatives people could come up with.

Zinn's career is interesting and his chief work is one of the most important books recently published. He was a bit of a one trick pony, in my humble estimation, and as such the sea of his latter publications became narrowed on current affairs and politics. With this his personal political motivations as a historian and writer became evident.

This is typically a transgression worthy of the scarlet letter "S" for historians. As in slanted or skewed.

A People's History has yet weathered the storm admirably. Mainly due to the fact that it is a groundbreaking and comprehensive work that has been tended to and updated by Zinn like a monk in his garden. So while the threat of his political tittle-tattle should have endangered his legacy, we find instead a singular work that is current, up-to-date and important.

Most of the criticism that has been leveled its way has been centered on the updates Zinn has made to bring the book up to current times. Still, the research for the more historical claims is rarely questions.

But like I said, I enjoyed the last week's slew of arguments against Zinn. The best of which is Steve Haycox's amateurish discussion of both Salinger and Zinn in the Anchorage Daily News.

It sums up the dissenting view nicely. It goes like this: Lead with a tepid summation. Call left leaning people foolish and uncritical. Then offer unsubstantiated generalizations about what kind of person enjoys the said work. All this is then confused as critical acumen.

Haycox offers up gems like: "Most professional historians dismiss "A People's History" for its one-dimensionality and its presentism."

Really, Steve? Most pros, huh? Any names? Besides you, of course. I know. Citing a source is such tedious work.

Here though, is the real gem of Haycox's confused meandering.

If they're so flawed, why then are these books so popular? The answer lies in the careless habits of readers. Neither book requires much work. With Holden Caulfield, one need not think, only indulge the first salient feeling that floats up from the page. With Zinn's impression of history, one need not think much, only so far as a naÏve condemnation of all power.

These are not very useful prescriptions for serious learning. While they do alert readers to the need for criticism, they provide few lessons and too few tools for moving it forward.

I see what happened here. Steve equates these two books with what people on the left like to read about. He's talking about what people take from these books. He's talking about people on the left. WTF.

Fans. That's really what you're writing about here, Steve. You are concerned about what a faceless and indeterminate population might take from two books that you obviously are either unfamiliar with or have not read in years.

I really can't say this enough. Read, damn it! Read the books you review and write of them in themselves. Please, don't lump two of the 20th century's most celebrated works into a category because of critical observations equivalent to reasons for or against an American Idol contestant based on regional loyalty.

It's nonsense. The guy has a Ph.D. I wonder if he remembers how he got it.