Last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was printed two years ago, there will be no more. After 244 years, Britannica Inc. is calling it quits in the print encyclopedia business. They sold a couple thousand copies of the 2010 edition to libraries, but that was pretty much it -- nobody else was willing to pay the price for information they can look up online as easily.
I am conflicted. I must admit that I rarely look up things in books nowadays. On the other hand I spent many a lazy summer evening picking up a random encyclopedia at a friend's house and opening it at random to some page about some topic I knew nothing about, and trying to figure out what they were talking about. In a way this gave me an education that the crappy schools of the desegregation-era South, which were all about trying to keep white boys out of the same schools as them uppity nigras and nothing about providing an education, could not have hoped to give.
And now that's gone, forever. There will be no more children on lazy summer evenings picking up an encyclopedia and turning it to a random page. I suppose it was inevitable anyhow, given the plethora of entertainment options that today's children have -- in my childhood there was one television, showing a black-and-white picture, in a large wooden piece of furniture in the living room, and if the grownups were watching a show that was not appropriate for children we were sent elsewhere to entertain ourselves. And we did, because we had no choice. And in homes full of books, naturally we picked up books. Today... that'll never happen again. Books are becoming obsolete. When I needed a new reference book on Microsoft Powershell, for example, I bought an e-book from O'Reilly, not a paper book. I have limited space on my bookshelves, and I save that for reference books I *can't* get as e-books... which is increasingly few nowadays.
Have you ever had to quit watching a movie or reading a book because it was too good?
With me it's tragedies that, if the characters have grabbed me, I just can't keep going on after I realize that this can't end well. Steven King's Pet Sematary is one such book. After the guy's kid gets hit by a car and he starts dreaming about digging up the kid's body and taking it to the pet sematary, I just had to quit reading. I couldn't go on. I didn't want to see what was going to happen to these characters that I'd grown to love, because I knew it wasn't going to be anything good.
Latest instance of that is the movie The Professional. A young Natalie Portman's damaged character of an abused and orphaned girl who acts out sexually and violently in a way I've seen in real life from abused children raised under similar circumstances, and Jean Reno's equally damaged Leon the hit man, are played brilliantly by their respective actors. But Matilda has the poor impulse control of youth and the wild emotional swings of an abused youngster, and there's no way this can end well. In the end someone dies, and I know it's going to be one of these two complex and conflicted characters because there's no other way it can end, and I just don't want to watch any further because I'm just a softy and those two actors have sold me on their characters. Too bad Natalie Portman's recent roles have basically been as eye candy, because this movie shows that she totally has the skill to own a movie. Or at least she did as a thirteen year old kid.
So what about you? Any such instances of "too good to finish"? Or am I just a big ole' plush softy penguin?
Via the General, it's Banned Book Week. So what's your favorite banned book? Mine is To Kill A Mockingbird, it has one of the more unique heroines in literature and tackles some of the toughest themes of our time.
UPDATE: Got an upset email from World Nut Daily. They're upset that many of the banned books on the ALA list feature gay people (the prototypical one being of course "Heather Has Two Mommies") and whine that the ALA shouldn't have put them on that banned books list. Because, y'know, if it's a book about gay people, it's not *really* banned if it's banned. Alrighty, then!
Just ploughing through 3800 pages or so of A Game of Thrones. I adored George R.R. Martin's 70's work like "A Song for Lya" and "Seven Times Never Kill Man", but he got really cynical during the Reagan years. REALLY cynical. As in, hard to read unless you wanted to become really, really depressed, as typified by his "Tuf Voyaging" series. He started on this gigantic potboiler (4 volumes so far, a 5th on the way later this year) in the year Bill Clinton was elected, and it's incredibly dark and cynical too with plenty of dead bodies (he kills off one of his friggin' HEROS within the first few hundred pages!), but also brings a bit of the humanity from his 70's work into the fray. It's a nice mix, just friggin' HUGE.
Boldtext Pew Bible: King James Version (Hardcover)
This book has an incredible amount of sex and violence, including incest, entire cities being destroyed, plagues of frogs and locusts, and even the death of 99.9% of the world's population in a giant flood. Irwin Allen would have had a field day making a television movie of this book, there's just so much entertainment here, much better than Twilight.
But the downside is the incredibly one-dimensional characters (with the exception of that "Jesus" dude, who is this really groovy stoner hippy type who, like, preaches peace and giving up material possessions in pursuit of the spiritual and stuff like that when he's not, like, toking out big time, but also has downer times when he wonders why he bothers), and an utterly disjointed plot where characters pop up, do a few things, then disappear for the rest of the book. Dude. This book really needed an editor, not only for the major, major plotholes (*TWO* different stories about how the Earth was created? Dude!) but for the atrocious spelling, grammar, and rampant run-on sentences. For example, at the beginning of the Book of Matthew there's this one sentence that literally runs on for multiple pages of "begat" after "begat" after "begat"! Which is okay if your name is James Joyce, but this "God" guy who wrote this book isn't anywhere near the talent that James Joyce is. Dude. Get a real copy editor for your next book, 'kay?!
I have to get this book. He just names it Life, and he has lived one helluva life, that much is for sure. Love him or hate him, Keith Richards is a legend, and not just in his own mind. I am especially interested in reading the description of the recording techniques that they used for some of the most famous guitar tracks on the Stones' albums...
Mark Twain's autobiography is being published, 100 years after his death, in accordance with his will. In it, he criticized fake Christians who didn't know the meaning of the word, rich moral-less financiers who corrupt the morals of the nation, and wars of foreign aggression where the U.S. invades random countries and slaughters the natives. In short -- Rupert Murdoch, the "Christian" Religious Right, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This book has an incredible amount of sex and violence, including incest, entire cities being destroyed, plagues of frogs and locusts, and even the death of 99.9% of the world's population in a giant flood. Irwin Allen would have had a field day making a television movie of this book, there's just so much entertainment here, much better than Twilight. But the downside is the incredibly one-dimensional characters (with the exception of that "Jesus" dude, who is this really groovy stoner hippy type who, like, preaches peace and giving up material possessions in pursuit of the spiritual and stuff like that when he's not, like, toking out big time, but also has downer times when he wonders why he bothers), and an utterly disjointed plot where characters pop up, do a few things, then disappear for the rest of the book. Dude. This book really needed an editor, not only for the major, major plotholes (*TWO* different stories about how the Earth was created? Dude!) but for the atrocious spelling, grammar, and rampant run-on sentences. For example, at the beginning of the Book of Matthew there's this one sentence that literally runs on for multiple pages of "begat" after "begat" after "begat"! Which is okay if your name is James Joyce, but this "God" guy who wrote this book isn't anywhere near the talent that James Joyce was. Dude. Get a real copy editor for your next book, 'kay?!
The classical thriller authors of the past loved to put people into an isolated position, then do terrifying things to them as they were entirely cut off from the world. Cutting the telephone lines was almost the first thing done, the victim hears someone trying to break into the house, picks up the phone, and ... no dial tone!
But recently I read about a home invasion where the burglars cut the telephone wires going into the house, burst in with guns, demanded all the money... and the kids ran off and locked themselves into a bathroom and called 911 on their cell phone.
Can you think of some other boilerplate plot points of the classics in mystery and thriller fiction that have been rendered obsolete by technological progress?
Time: Somewhere in January 2010. Scene: Editorial offices of a New York book publisher. A young lady wearing a modest dress has entered the door and is standing there in the lobby looking around uncertainly. An older woman walks into the lobby.
E: Ms. Lee?
L (looking uncertain): Yes?
E: I'm Emmy Edwards, your editor. We love your book! We think it has a lot of potential! Only a few minor changes, and it can be a New York Times best seller, we think!
L: That's... good. I guess?
E: Come, come! Let's go to my office, okay?
Cut to: Editor's office. The office consists of an L-shaped desk along a cubicle wall covered with printouts of manuscripts, with an obsolete CRT monitor showing another manuscript. The sound of other people talking or typing on computers wafts over the cubicle walls.
E: Okay, Ms. Lee. Can I call you Harper? You can call me Emmy.
L(looks uncertain): I guess that's fine... Emmy.
E: So first thing, I love your book, love it love it love it! Except we need to have at least two sex scenes in the book, one with the villain, and one with the hero.
L: But... Scout is only six years old!
E: You'll have to fix that, won't you? Make her 18.
L: But then the scene where Scout faces down the lynch mob doesn't work, it's all about the lynch mob running up against her young innocence...
E: So make her a very young-looking 18, okay? Make her gripe that she looks like a 12 year old or something. But she has to have sex, or we'll never be able to auction the book off for a movie!
L: Oh... okay... uhm...
E: The good guy, I guess, would be the neighbor's kid, the one she hangs out with all the time. Except she doesn't know she loves him until the end of the book, when she bones him big-time. Make him 18 too.
L: But... Dill is gay!
E: Whatever. Make him bisexual or something.
L: I guess it's not that important...
E: Also, you need to change the setting. It should be something exotic, like New York City or New Orleans or something like that, not some sleepy town in Alabama. Our market research shows that our books are read mostly by bored housewives in dull suburban tract houses who want a taste of something more... exotic.
L: I guess... maybe New Orleans? I guess there's neighborhoods in New Orleans that could work. But no, the courthouse scene still doesn't work, because Scout won't be able to call out the members of the lynch mob by name then.
E: If it doesn't work, just replace it with a sex scene or something. Okay, next thing, we need some vampires.
L: Vampires?
E: Yes, vampires! Guaranteed to double the sales of the book. Vampires are sexy! The bad guys, the Ewells, make them vampires. And make that Tom Robinson a werewolf who gets wrongly accused of rape after that girl vampire tries to suck his blood and has to spit it out because vampires can't drink werewolf blood. It's all about discrimination against werewolves, that's always a big hit with our focus groups.
L: Werewolves. Vampires. What does that have to do with real life?
E: Look, kid, do you want a best seller or not? We do these edits, and I guarantee you a first pressing of 120,000 books! That's how hot I think this book is. These aren't big changes, just little things. Look, you want to be rich or not?
L: Well... except the book is about prejudice and discrimination in the South. How can I make it about vampires and werewolves?
E: Make the vampires be the bigots and the werewolves the ones discriminated against. And hey, that next door neighbor, Boo? Make him a zombie.
L: A... zombie.
E: Hey, your explanation for why he never comes out of the house sucks! I'm doing you a favor, okay?
L(looking stunned and dazed): A... zombie...
E: Now, your vampires need a special twist to make them interesting compared to all the other vampire novels on the market. Vampires with sun allergies are old school. Maybe make them sparkle in the sun? Wait, no, that other series of vampire novels already did that. Maybe they glow. Yeah, glow, like light bulbs! That explains why they mostly only come out at night.
L: Vampires... glowing... no. No no no no no no no. No glowing vampires. I have a nice little period piece novel set in the South that talks about prejudice and innocence, not a trashy vampire novel!
E: Oh you idealistic kids. Look. Here's the reality. Vampires are hot. There's no market for innocent little period piece novels, it would never sell. And by the way, you have to move it to the present, it'd be too expensive to shoot the movie as a period piece. Won't sell. Never.
L: Well I guess that's how it has to be then. You won't publish it the way it is?
E(stony stare): No. It has to have vampires.
L: Sorry to waste your time then, I'll be going.
Cut away: Harper Lee in a small New York City flat, sitting at her dining room table staring at a fistful of rejection slips who've rejected her novel for various reasons -- "too episodic", "we don't publish period pieces", "too rural", "too much a downer", "no sex." She sighs, wipes them off the table, puts her head down on table and silently sobs. A minute later she sits back up straight and picks up the manuscript for her book, and stares at the title for a second. Then she carries it to the telephone in the kitchen, and picks up the phone.
L: Hello, Manhattan Temps? Hi, Cheryl. This is Harper. Time to go back to work for you guys again, yeah, I wrote the novel, but nobody wants it and my money's run out now. Yeah, sucks. Oh well. So, how's it going with Doug? Great! Maybe we can all do lunch ...
Voice fades away as camera moves in on a trashcan below the telephone. In the trashcan is a manuscript. The title page says, "To Kill A Mockingbird".
McMillan wants to force e-book prices to be the same as paper book prices. The only problem is, that's a business model which makes no (zero) economic sense. The only price that makes sense from the consumer’s point of view is the marginal price compared to the currently-available paper copy: I can get 25% of the cover price back when I resell a paper book to a used book store, thus from my perspective, since ebooks do not allow reselling my copy to a used book store, they must have a marginal price that is 25% less than the currently available paper copy, or I simply will not buy the eBook because it does not make financial sense. Yes, there are the issues of book storage and such, but I resell most of the books I buy, I don’t keep them, for exactly that reason — most books are being bought as simple mindless entertainment, not something all serious and stuff. I do like having the *option* of keeping a book — but I don’t keep most of them. Sorry, writers. I know you love your prose and hope we have placed it upon the mantelpiece above the fireplace to bow to your genius every time we enter the living room, but the majority of us are buying them for simple entertainment, not because we are Serious Collectors Of Your Great Literature.
Now, from the publishing end of things, McMillan whines they can't make money on ebooks if they price them at their economic utility price. But I am utterly disinterested in hearing publishers whine about how their business model can’t survive contact with actual real-life capitalism. I am not on this planet to be a charity for publishers who can’t figure out how to operate in a capitalist environment. The market is what the market is. You can’t sell people an eBook for the same $7.95 as the paperback when the consumer’s marginal price for a paperback copy of the book is $5.96 (after they resell the paperback to the used book store). It simply doesn’t work, and can’t work in a capitalist economy because it makes no financial sense from the consumer’s point of view. That’s capitalism. Thus the low uptake of ebooks outside of maybe a couple of million early adopters who flunked high school consumer math and, of course, readers of Baen Books, who have had access to reasonably priced DRM-free ebooks for years.
So does that mean that I agree with Amazon’s actions? Well, not really. The prices they want to impose make no sense either. If the hardback is the only version of the book currently out and is currently $19.95, that implies the ebook should be $14.95 if you wish to actually sell large numbers of ebooks. But Amazon is trying to force that to $9.99. From a standpoint of maximizing income that’s ridiculous. And don’t assume it’s to make a profit selling Kindles — I’ve been involved in the computer manufacturing business for over ten years now, and my estimate is that Amazon is basically at break-even (no profit at all) on the Kindle. Clearly they’re trying for the brute force method of “grab market dominance, and *then* worry about profit” that they used when starting out in order to drive most of the competing book e-tailers out of business. Also clearly, this is not in the best interests of authors attempting to maximize their own income.
I was listening to some new stuff on my iPod on the way to and from work today, and there was a song that made me stop and replay it a number of times. It was a very mysterious song that went around in circles back to a few key lines that repeated in various places and making more sense each time, almost a dirge, but slowly I picked out those critical lines, remembered some personal background on that artist, and figured out what it was maybe about. But thinking about it, I was like, wow, that's a really cool way to put a song together.
I've previously noted my biggest failing as a songwriter -- I'm basically a storyteller, not a poet, so I want to tell a story. But a good poem -- and a good song -- are as much about what they *don't* say as what they *do* say. The goal is to leave some ambiguity, some mystery, so that the listener can create their own story. It is as much about engagement with the listener as it is about saying something specific. So anyhow, "The Promised Land" wasn't a good vehicle for trying out that technique because it has a specific story to say, so instead I sat down and did a first rough cut of a new song called "18" tonight. No mp3 yet because parts of the lyrics are still "mumble mumble mumble" because I couldn't think of anything to fit there while I was just blurting out lyrics into the microphone (but I have no shortage of ideas of what to put there so that'll get resolved) plus the chord sequence and melody are going to change because I used one of my basic all-purpose sequences to avoid having the music get in the way of creating the lyrics while I was trying to put that together, but it'll go through the same process as usual -- I'll write down lyrics, try them out again singing them into the microphone, some of them won't "feel" right and I'll change them, wash, rinse, repeat.
As for someone who asks, "where do you get your ideas?", ideas are not something I'm ever particularly short of. In this particular case, it is a song about something that I read in the newspaper combined with something that happened to someone I know. The subject matter of the song I kept hitting the "repeat" button on knocked it loose, though it's an entirely different subject matter. The problem is too many ideas, rather than a shortage of them, and the only reason I don't get back to work and finish that desert novel is because of a time shortage, it's a lot quicker to write a song than a novel.
Four letters, simple, seeming. But deep in its intricacies. There is a deep, throbbing pain, making the world turn red and forehead wrinkled as it soaks into your bones and drains everything but itself from the world, crowding out friends, family, music, sometimes even life itself. There is a short, sharp, deep pain, shocking and surprising, followed or preceded by a fall and broken pieces of human body pushed past their endurance. There is a pain upon moving, sharp and crisp and sexual with a grin or perhaps a grimace as the pain is relished as proof that one still lives, still loves, still endures. There is a pain of dreams dead, or dreams deferred, of things said or things unsaid, things done or things undone. There is the pain of living your life and realizing, suddenly, that all you have been, all you have done, is futile, hopeless, useless, adding nothing to this world, and that you are too old and too set in your ways to change.
Four letters. Pain. In the taxonomy of pain there are many pains, both physical and otherwise, temporary or enduring. There is only one truth about pain, and that is: there shall be pain. Perhaps not harsh, perhaps only wistful, but no life comes to its close in complete joy. Always there are the sorrows, the regrets, the could-have-beens and should-have-beens, the scars and the bruises and the scabs that are picked, and then comes the end with the needles and the cold. In the end all learn the truths of the taxonomy of pain.
I need to do something about this situation. The last of the last batch of white bookcases that I brought home from Ikea last year are now full. I might be able to clear out enough room for another one, but really. Let's face it, half these books, I'm never going to read again, so I need to go ahead and get rid of them. Maybe donate them to the Friends of the Library for their book sales...
What starts up this riff is the fact that I just came back from Barnes & Noble with $75 worth of new books, including C.J. Cherryh's new novel Regenesis (which was originally called "Cyteen II" until it was decided that would make things too confusing). I finished re-reading Cyteen (a Hugo Award winner) a couple of months ago, I re-read it every couple of years because it asks some interesting questions about what it means to be human, but one of the things that has always irritated me about Cyteen is that it just... stops. Stops in mid-air, without wrapping up some pretty damned critical plot points (like, who killed Ari 1? And why did Denys suddenly go fuggin' crazy and try to kill Ari 2?). It was pretty clear that Carolyn was setting up for a sequel. It just took twenty years before she bothered getting around to it. ARGH!
So I guess I'll be busy for the next day or two reading Regenisis. With my luck, it probably sucks and doesn't answer any of the questions that went unanswered in Cyteen. Sigh.
Finally got back to work on it. Marlena just went at it with her mom (she always goes and mooches the washer and dryer at her mom's house rather than use the washateria, ostensibly to save money, in reality it's more complicated than that the way things can be between daughter and mother sometimes), Sheriff Ray talked to Jerry Rawlings (who, remember, had a red pickup truck smash through his gate) and got the description of the pickup truck and the guy driving it, and talked to Bendigo Bob out at the old ghost town and found that the guy, who ole' Bob describes as "looked a bit like Charlie Manson, sorta runty guy with long hair and crazy eyes" (and Bob should know because Charlie used to stop by his place from time to time back in the day) got sent Jerry's way because the guy told Bob that he was looking for a place a woman might be staying and Bob decided that maybe Jerry might teach him a lesson about respecting the privacy of folks out in the desert. Then the Sheriff mentioned the woman and child who had been at the Hobbit mine and asked if he'd seen them, and Bob allowed as how he might have, and gave the Sheriff a bit of a description although he's in his 70's and his eyesight isn't so good so he isn't even quite sure whether the kid is a girl or a boy. Not much help, but a little. So anyhow, the Sheriff has now gone and checked out a number of prime camping spots to see if the guy in the red pickup truck is still lurking around the valley, and come up empty, so he's heading back to the office. BTW, shift change has of course happened at dispatch, and there's a dispatch that the Sheriff should have gotten, but the new dispatcher hasn't bothered reading the log book to find out she's supposed to tell the Sheriff about it. But the Sheriff will of course get it once he gets back to the office and picks a copy of it off his desk.
Meanwhile, our mystery woman, back at her cabin, has put on a backpack, pulled out a camouflage net, and had a flashback. A short one luckily. So now she's discovered the old mining trail that the *other* mystery woman, the one at the mine, used to get across the ridge separating her cabin from the next canyon over, and she's gone over that mining trail and set herself up camouflaged on the other side. I'll be interested to see what happens with that one... but I think we're about to find out who our second mystery woman (the one with the kid) is, and what she's doing out there.
And yeah, I know how the story ends. And it's not a happy ending, both a good guy and a bad guy get killed. And there's a mystery still unsolved at the end that drives the Sheriff and Marlena both halfway crazy that they can't solve it, and hopefully the reader too, but that's how life works sometimes. So eventually they just have to accept it, and move on as best they can.
As for whether I write another novel that solves that unsolved mystery, or even divulge the answer to the unsolved mystery... nope :-). Not that I'm exactly sure of the answer anyhow. It's complicated. There's wheels within wheels and every time the Sheriff and Marlena think they've arrived at the answer, it turns out they're wrong, or maybe not wrong, they just can't tell what is true and what is not by the time they get to the end because there's all these things they think they know but they contradict each other. Hmm...
I went hiking today, sort of. I spent four hours hiking the dikes at the SF Bay wildlife refuge, trying out my new camera and GPS. Oh yeah, the GPS. Delorme PN-40 GPS, which allows downloading color (or black-and-white) aerial photos plus 1:24000 scale USGS topo maps and layering them on the display. It's like having Google Earth in your palm. Works damned brilliant. This is basically their PN-20 grown up, with better speed and more reliable hardware and software. Their PN-20 was brilliant but the technology didn't exist back then to do it right. The PN-40 solves that problem and worked brilliantly for hiking those dikes, which don't show up on any maps but show up just fine on the color aerial photography.
Hmm.... oh yeah, the photographs... I took lots of photos of aquatic waterfowl. But this photo of a groundhog (?) is one of the most interesting I took because of the clarity of the photo and the interesting colors. Shows what the new camera is capable of doing...
Nice.
After that, I ordered a pizza, and re-read Carol O'Connell's novel Crime School. Just as brilliant the second time around. I'm a sucker for O'Connell's New York Gothic and her sociopathic detective with the blond hair and bright green eyes, and can admire O'Connell's techniques too when I'm not cribbing them, e.g. the way she never tells all of the story and always leaves something hanging to drive you mad and make you want to buy the next novel in the series. Real life is like that, full of mysteries you never know the answers to. The Mallory novels are not "real life" by any means -- maybe Kathy really could fly (the swingset video and the exploding video seem to point that way, as unlikely as it seems to all the characters in the story) -- but O'Connell pulls it off anyhow. And now you know who I crib from for trying to make my own unlikely heroines work, heh.
