[via Neatorama with h/t to Execupundit..]
©Wendy Galietta-The Washington Post
More in a Washington Post slide show…
Out here in the ‘burbs of NYC, we saw some flurries and a lot of panic. By Friday night, the shelves of the supermarket were picked clean, the Long Island Rail Road threatened to close the entire system down, gas stations were nearly pumped dry, and people lashed themselves to the living room furniture. Saturday morning, the roads were deserted as the populace hunkered down behind the walls and waited for the crushing advance of the century’s first big storm. Snowmaggedon they called it.
A slight dusting began around 10 AM…then…nothing more.
A general disappointment ensued…at least it got politics off the airwaves for a while…
“What shall I do with all my books?” was the question; and the answer, “Read them,” sobered the questioner.
But if you cannot read them, at any rate handle them, and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye.
Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are.
If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
- Winston Churchill, quoted in The Man Who Loved Books Too Much
©Al Fenn, 1955
Kindle that. At least until the batteries run out…heh…
If Filmmakers Directed The Super Bowl…the first and last are my faves…
[h/t to Michael Wade and Execupundit...one of my daily reads...]
…that looks like this:
“Mostly colour coded in red and wood, all of the furniture is home made and the chair is a cobra bucket seat salvaged from an old mini clubman…
Starting from the left is my Yamaha piano that doesn’t get enough use. Next is the Yaesu and Uniden receivers for listening to amateur radio. The table was made up using the base of an old office table with a new mdf top covered in black leather to reduce reflections from the monitors…
On the table is my iMac and Formac monitor with a pair of Roland monitor speakers, a shuttle pro controller and a Frontier Alphatrack controller.
Next to the computer table is my bookshelf and tv setup. The TV is a 32 inch samsung LCD and a pair of home made speakers each side which I built because the audio quality on the tv speakers was rubbish. Below the TV is the Yamaha AV amplifier, a Dreambox satellite receiver, a Sony Bluray player, Xbox 360, Sony PS3, my custom designed xbox is bottom centre and a media pc on the bottom right. Together it will play almost any form of video or music media…
More lusciousness here at The Shipbuilder’s Office…
Other than a link to an obit, I haven’t offered anything on Salinger and his passing. He was, if you read last week’s essays and opinons, a most important author. What I remember is spending an entire summer looking for, finding, and reading anything he wrote that I could get my hands on. And not because I was influenced by Catcher In The Rye – I didn’t enjoy the book when I first picked it up and it was only a bit of chance and circumstances that I ever came back to Salinger again.
My first job out of college was as a proofreader for a law book publisher. If you think proofreading is a mind numbing business, try law. Although some comical things could happen such as when the typesetter, not having the Japanese idiograms for a trademark book, substituted Yiddish characters while he ordered the type. Unfortunately, the type was never placed in the text and nobody caught it as the book went thru page proofs, repro, and mechanical stages . The final book was printed, bound, and shipped most likely wishing the legal experts a happy Shavuos.
One of my trenchmates was a former English major named Dennis who processed manuscript for release to the compositors (typesetters). I handled the next stages which were galley and page proofs. We sat next to each other in separate small offices, working quietly, until one or the other needed a break.
One afternoon, especially worn, I dragged myself into Dennis’ office and slumped down in his chair for a bit of philosophy and conversation. I was having a particularly hard time getting up the energy for another set of proofs and complained that I could find no good reason why I should spend as much time as I did since traffic was always pushing me for more and faster.
“Do it for that old lady,” Dennis said, “do it for the old lady in Kansas.”
What?”
“Ever hear of JD Salinger?” he asked.
Told him I read a brief bit of Catcher but really hadn’t read anything else by the author.
“Well,” he said, putting down his pen, straightening his tie, and leaning back in his chair, “Salinger wrote about the Glass family. They were featured on this radio program called It’s A Wise Child.”
Go on, I said.
“Anyway, one day Franny is complaining to her brother Buddy that the older brother Seymour got on her case about shining her shoes before she went on the program. Franny thought it was a stupid request since they were on a radio show and that no one was going to see their shoes anyway.
“Seymour explained to her that somewhere out in the mid-west, in some dust-bowl, sat a dirt poor lonely old woman, in her rocking chair on the porch of her broken down house. Every day she looked forward to listening to that show and hearing the Glass family speak to her and it was the one true pleasure she had left in her life.
“So what?, said Franny.
So, Seymour said, if there is any one good reason you need to shine your shoes, do it for that old lady who sits alone all day waiting for us to come on the radio.”
As if there’s any other reason you need…
[Note - if you're interested in the story, pick up and read Franny & Zooey... - J.]
“…the activity I”m most likely to be engaged in is staring. If staring ever becomes an Olympic event I’ll be bringing home the gold.
While other people go to work, I stare out the window. I stare at the dog. I stare at blank pieces of paper and paragraphs and single sentences and a buzzing computer screen. Hours and hours of my day are spent with my eyes glazed over, thinking, waiting, trying to figure things out.
The muse is a sweet idea, like the tooth fairy. The muse supposedly comes down like lightning and fills your fingers with the necessary voltage to type up something brilliant. But nobody ever made a living depending on a muse.”
- excerpted from What now?, by novelist Ann Patchett
Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn 1/31/2010
Sunday moment of zen for Old Pepper and Baby Belle...
More than half of the “best-selling” e-books on the Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-reader, are available at no charge.
Publishers including Harlequin, Random House and Scholastic are offering free versions of digital books to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-retailers, as well as on author Web sites, as a way of allowing readers to try out the work of unfamiliar writers. The hope is that customers who like what they read will go on to obtain another title for money.
The digital giveaways come as publishers are panicking about price pressure on e-books in general. Amazon and other online retailers have set $9.99 as the putative e-book price for new releases and best sellers, and publishers worry that such pricing ultimately creates expectations among consumers that new books are no longer worth, say, $25 (the average list price of a new hardcover), or even $13 (a standard list price for trade paperbacks).
Executives at some houses said that given such actions, offering free content amounts to industry hypocrisy.
“At a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, “it is illogical to give books away for free.”
Brian O’Leary, a principal at Magellan Media Consulting Partners, which advises publishers, said that while it appeared that free downloads led to an uptick in actual book buying, there was a risk that free reading could eventually “supplant paid reading.”
Indeed, said Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollins, “free is not a business model.”
- With Kindle, The Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell, NY Times, 1/22/2010
[Reading. You've digitized it, Kindled it, abandoned it to Amazon and turned it into a commodity sold at the cheapest price. Stuck it all into a generic, battery operated box.
Congratulations - enjoy your own special place in retail hell. - J. ]
