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  • Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of Clay Reynolds (1949-2022): A Literary Appreciation

    Texas author Clay Reynolds was a literary giant who understood deeply what it meant to be a Texan. He was a great scholar of history and literature and also a dedicated teacher. His novels tackled all kinds of social issues of today and yesterday; they were populated with characters who could be lovely, offbeat or even detestable. But he could also find sympathetic and even heroic qualities in the most ordinary of people (such as with the Gil Hooley character in his novel Tentmaker). Reynolds pursued his art both brilliantly and relentlessly — and with humor and compassion. Reynold’s Texas stories reveal the complexity of character and the worlds they inhabited; these stories will be treasured for generations.

    By Robert Nagle, Blogger and Editor of Personville Press

    (Read my 10-part interview with Clay Reynolds, Wikipage article about Clay Reynolds, the author’s official home page and the obituary)

    At the end of this page is a list of the best Clay Reynolds books & essays to start off with. Several of Mr. Reynolds books were published as ebooks by Baen Books and are available on all major ebook stores. The official author page for Clay Reynolds contains lots of links to published essays and online articles. Several books (like Sandhill County Lines) are only available in print and can be bought on Amazon and other places. Sandhill County Lines is also an audiobook available on Audible and other places.

    Tony Daniel did an 80 minute interview with Reynolds for the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast.

    (Here is a 2017 reading Clay Reynolds gave where he tells a beautiful story about his father’s work as a railway man in a small Texas town).

    I came to know author Clay Reynolds during his last year of life. No, I never met the man or even talked to him on the phone, but we corresponded often over the last year about literary matters. We shared a few common friends on Facebook, and several years ago, after I noticed that there was no Wikipedia page about him, I offered to set one up for him (as I had done before for several Texas authors). It took more than a year for Mr. Reynolds to respond — at first, he was a bit suspicious, but he opened up a bit after learning that my Personville Press was named after a small town outside Dallas. Reynolds loved to write about small towns in Texas like Quanah, Texas where he grew up.

    As it turns out, Mr. Reynolds and I had many connections. Both of us passed through Trinity University (I had gotten my B.A. in 1988 and Reynolds had studied there as an undergraduate and received his master’s in 1974). By some miraculous coincidence, both of us took creative writing classes with playwright Eugene McKinney and were both ardent fans of the fiction of Robert Flynn (who taught fiction writing at Trinity and also used Texas as a backdrop for his fiction). As luck would have it, during the years I was at Trinity, Clay Reynolds had visited several times to give lectures about fiction — although strangely, I never knew about it at the time).

    Actually though, my first contact with Clay Reynolds came through book reviews he regularly wrote for the Houston Chronicle. Unbeknownst to me at the time, after my mom saw one of Reynolds’ book reviews in 1996, she bought the book and mailed it to me during me Peace Corps service in Albania. (That book happened to be Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States by Bill Bryson and was delightful).

    After Mr. Reynolds responded and I realized all the common connections, I suggested that in addition to writing the Wikipedia page article that I would like to interview him separately by email. Reynolds already had a long distinguished career in academia and publishing, and it was semi-scandalous that no Wikipedia page existed about him.

    Lone Star Literary Life had already done an in-depth interview with Mr. Reynolds in 2016, but it was clear that many more topics remained to be covered — and besides, Reynolds was the perfect interview subject because he would eagerly answer any question thrown at him. Indeed, purely as a pastime, Reynolds had answered over 1300 questions on the Quora.com website about history, culture, Texas, you name it. My email interview with Reynolds started in mid-January 2021 and ended in January 2022. The interview itself is about 45,000 words and will be released online on one of my websites by Summer, 2022.

    6 Interesting/Peculiar Things about Clay Reynolds

    He was loquacious about his own literary creations and the creative process itself. Many authors are reluctant to engage so openly in this kind of introspection. Not Reynolds. When Baen republished his titles as ebooks, he wrote 2 new prefaces — (one for Vox Populi, and one for Tentmaker — you can read them by clicking the Sample button on the book page to read it in a browser). Reynolds wrote a similar kind of preface essay for his Sandhill County Lines short story collection. He delivered an address about creativity and biography called “A Cow Can Moo” (PDF) . You get the point.

    Reynolds had an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and history. (He actually received his undergraduate degree in history and wrote his doctorate on literary history (American Social Drama in the 1930s). Just for the hell of it, during his retirement he liked to answer random questions about history on Quora.com He answered 1300 questions (with his last answer about the price of horses in the USA just before the advent of the car). He rarely asked questions on quora.com except one –what was the asking price for the street price of raw opium in 1916? (now that he asked it, I am kind of curious about the answer!)

    Reynolds had a knack for writing about people with rough edges. Critic John Pitchfork remarked that one of the best features of Reynolds fiction is “the recurrent pattern of tongue-tied and not very bright good old Texas boys courting the mystery of beauty they cannot understand nor resist.” Sandhill County Lines has tough rednecks (“A better class of people”), vulgar frat boys (Mexico), domineering parents (“The Prodigal”). (Don’t worry, it also has lots of kind-hearted people as well). One of my fave stories is “Nickelby” about an adjunct English professor who moves next door to a mean-tempered man who mistreats his dog and how her desire to protect the dog forces a confrontation. Tentmaker is populated with outlaws, prostitutes and all sorts of misfits.

    Reynolds was a stickler about historical accuracy in his old Western novels. He spent about 2 years researching the 1992 novel Franklin’s Crossing and did all kinds of field research to learn about dress, weapons, transportation. He visited the archives of a Tennessee hotel to learn what kinds of dinner they served. In the BAEN interview, he said he assumed that everybody ate steak in the 1870s only to find out that almost nobody could eat beef because it couldn’t be preserved (in contrast to fish, pork, fowl, which could be). He had no idea how big wagons were during that time (and how much they could hold) or how to use a saddle with a 19th century tack. This research also shows in his later novel, Tentmaker. (2002)

    6 Clay Reynolds works to start off with

    Clay Reynolds has written a ton of stuff. I have read only a fraction of them, but I sorta know what most of them are about. There’s enough to keep a bookworm busy for years (if not decades). Here’s some tips about how to get started. You can buy DRM-free ebooks of these titles directly at the baen.com website and print copies and also buy them at the same price on Amazon, Google, Apple, etc. Don’t be fooled by the lack of customer reviews of these books on Amazon. All are interesting and dramatic and beautiful.

    1. Of Snakes & sex & Playing in the Rain: Random Thoughts on Harmful Things (Baen 2013) This is a great and funny and poetic collection of personal essays about all sorts of topics ranging from “macho” topics (like trout fishing, golf, baseball, etc) to pop culture (Elvis, first dates, coffee, warning labels) to personal reflections about the legacy of long lost relatives. This is the perfect gift book for the I-Know-How-To-Read-But-I’d-never-be-caught-dead-reading-Proust-or-Faulkner-or-Morrison type of reader.

    2. The Vigil (1986) was his widely acclaimed first novel. It’s about a mother who loses her daughter in a Texas town. It received very positive reviews in the national press.

    3. Tentmaker (2012) is a historic novel about Gil Hooley, an ordinary fellow who travels to Texas in the late 19th century after his wife leaves him. He is (you guessed it) a tentmaker. After his wagon breaks down in the middle of nowhere, he decides to live in his tent. The novel is about the society which forms around him — including a brothel! — and how this emerging group tries to fend off various outlaws and calamities. The first chapter begins with a shocking and gruesome crime, and the rest of the novel alternates between the perspective of the outlaws and the various people trying to make a living around Hooley’s tent city. This novel was meticulously researched, has a lot of bawdy humor and does a great job of conjuring up what early settlements were like before they turned into actual towns. I love this book; as I said, the first few chapters are pretty gruesome, but it heads off into many unexpected directions.

    4. Sandhill County Lines (Stories) 2007 (No Ebook) If you can, try to listen to this audio book instead of reading it. Hearing captures the variety of dialects and speech patterns of various characters. My only “complaint” is that the stories are longer than the typical short story (ranging in the 15,000-25,000 word range). They feel almost like novellas. I love “Dogstar” which is about two state highway patrolmen investigating the death of a homeless man. The story “Bush League” is a great story about the love life of a talent scout for a professional baseball team. The opening story, “A Better Class of People” kind of appalled me when I first read it; it’s about rednecks who beat up some college students who happened to visit a bar one day. But when I heard it aloud on the audiobook, I really appreciated the subtle characterizations and gradual rise in dramatic tension. Also, the spoken dialogue is really masterful — simple, guttural, good at conveying anger and dread. (There’s no ebook edition of this collection, but the book is still in print and relatively cheap.)

    5. Ars Poetica: A Postmodern Parable (2003, Baen ebook, print book by Texas Review Press). No, I haven’t read it yet — so what do I know — but it’s an academic satire set in academic times about an aging poet in academia. Serious readers may groan at such books (hasn’t this subject been written to death? ) but I actually like the genre, and frankly Reynolds is precisely the type of author who is erudite and witty enough to pull it off. (Novelist George Garrett liked it a lot, and the novel eventually won a 2002 Texas Review literary prize.) I know 95% of readers may roll their eyes at the idea of reading another campus novel, but for fans of postmodern fiction and John Barth, this is our catnip.

    6. Vox Populi: Novel of the Common Man (2013) is basically a novel in stories in a much lighter and gentler vein. It shows how ordinary Texans interact with one another in various places: the flea market, the car wash, the lunch cafe; perhaps it lacks the melodrama or violence of the Sandhill stories, but it’s also a quirky, entertaining read. Texas Book Lover Michelle Newby Lancaster wrote a nice review of it (archived version), saying

    Clay Reynolds is uncannily skilled at rendering vignettes of strangers forced to occupy the same physical space. He is an astute observer of our smallest gestures and expressions and his dialogue is spot-on, complete with malapropisms that had me laughing aloud. His physical descriptions are detailed to an impressive degree. I could picture these people standing in front of me, to the last vivid detail. At the beginning of Vox, the nameless but not-quite-anonymous narrator seems to be a rather dull blank slate with no personality of his own and at the mercy of the seemingly stronger personalities surrounding him. As the sketches progress, though, our narrator begins to slowly but surely engage more substantively, confidently and empathetically – which is to say, successfully. It is a subtle performance. 

    Others? I confess that I have not read a lot of the other novels except maybe the blurbs. If you feel strongly about a novel, feel free to make a case for it in the comment section!

    Essays to Read Online

    Clay Reynolds has been diligent about publishing his essays, book reviews and academic articles online. (Really his website is full of great stuff). A lot of stuff from the 1980s and 1990s have not been digitized, but there are PDFs of some of his more interesting essays available.

    TV Pandemic Log II (2020-2022). (PDF) During COVID, Reynolds watched a lot of movies and TV shows (as did all of us). He kept an idiosyncratic journal of everything he watched, assigning it a score and giving it a capsule review. He watched stuff from almost all the streaming services (and noted which service they’re on– helpful! ) He watched an awful lot of mysteries and historical dramas — and was very critical about series that didn’t quite get the history right.

    Reaching the Summit: A Confession and a Valediction (PDF) (published in 2016) is one of Clay Reynolds’ most philosophical (and yes somber) essays. It’s about retirement and confronting the fact that the attainment of his intellectual and literary goals still leaves him unsatisfied.

    Bookish Topics: Literary Worth and Popular Tastes (2000) describes how the struggle between popular fiction and literary fiction has always been with us.

    Various Articles about College Life: Sexual Harassment and the Academy (1995). Long exploration of the legal and practical difficulties in trying to protect the rights of the victims and accused. The Real Crisis of Higher Education (2006) how the increasing cost plus lower standards are undermining the overall value of a college education. Trigger Warnings (2015) about the recent trend toward warning college students in advance about potentially disturbing texts. U No What I Meen: Technology and Illiteracy (2001) how Internet and technology is changing the way students learn. Campus
    Carry offers no benefit while increasing risks (2021)     Reynolds signs up for a gun safety class and concludes that the Texas law to allow students to bring guns on campus will make no difference.

    Homage to “Mad Magazine” (2019) and how it affected a boy living in a small Texas town.

    History of a campaign that failed: The story of Sarah Palin, former Governator of a Really Big state, told by Clay Reynolds. (Satire) (PDF) October 2009. Sarah Palin was an easy target of satire; Reynolds took it to an entirely different plane by writing a monologue diatribe using Sarah Palin’s peculiar form of speaking. It perhaps is longer than it needs to be, but Reynolds had a great ear for speech patterns.

    From Castro to Cancun (2014). (PDF) Reynolds offered an eyewitness account of visiting Cuba at about the time that the Obama Administration loosened rules on travelling to that country. He said he enjoyed seeing the vintage cars on the road and thought the place was relatively free — though he felt certain that Cuba’s unique culture would soon be Americanized.

    Happy Reading!


  • Robert’s Roundup #15 (Winter Smashwords Edition)

    View the Roundup series || View Raves & Reviews || Mike’s Likes ||  Read how I compile this list. || How to Submit Smashword deals || How to Submit your own Ebook Deals in the Comment Section || Commercial Disclosures

    View Previous Roundup and Next Roundup (View All)

    Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited, LE means that lending of this Kindle title is allowed, and APUB means it was published under an Amazon imprint.

    Preface

    I found some great deals on Smashwords titles which were valid in the last 2 weeks of December. Prices jumped back to normal in January, but my guess is that the prices are still pretty low.

    I’ve been busy on publishing stuff for most of 2020, so haven’t been able to post this column in a while. With my new blogging strategy, I expect to be writing Robert’s Roundup columns once a month. I’ll post the column page at the beginning of the month and then add it to over it over time. This kills a lot of birds with one stone. First, it ensures that I post more regularly and that I can post individual links more regularly. I used to treat this post as being time-sensitive, but over the past year I’ve decided that it’s less important to publish temporary sale prices than to make people aware of new authors and books. If you want, you can always set up price alerts on ereaderiq if you want instant notifications (perhaps Bookbub has that same functionality by now; can’t remember). I belong to the Smashwords affiliate marketing program, so you’ll notice that I do direct links to Smashwords ebooks. (I doubt if my affiliate payouts have amounted to more than $5 over the past year). More importantly, I like Smashwords because it’s very author-friendly, DRM-free and pays great royalties to authors.

    I’ve stopped providing direct links to Amazon books mainly because they cancelled my affiliate account, but also because I see no reason to promote the Kindle platform because it’s so dominant. Another reason is that it’s time consuming to manage all those links — and frankly everybody knows how to google. Anyway, I think it’s more important to link to the author’s own website because they can direct you to the ebookstore they like the best.

    In 2020 55% of my ebook spending came from Amazon.com, 30% came from Smashwords, 10% came from Google Play Books (GPB) and 5% came from buying directly from the publisher.

    I expect to buy a lot more ebooks from GPB over the next year. GPB now pays indie authors one of the highest rates in the publishing world. Amazon only pays 35% for ebooks priced below 2.99; indeed for ebooks with a larger file size, Amazon will reduce author royalties by 15 cents for each MB of the ebook file as a “delivery fee.” This is crap, and both Smashwords and Google Play Books charge no such fee. For that reason, I try to buy indie titles on GPB or Smashwords instead of Amazon for ebooks priced at below 2.99. Of course, Kindle Unlimited titles are exclusive to Amazon, so you have no choice.

    Indie Author Spotlight

    (Read about indie authors profiled in previous months).

    Frank Prem (Website is here) is an Australian poet who writes and performs poetry about the ordinary aspects of living — such as going shopping!

    Sales on Smashwords

    Here are the most interesting presses I’ve seen so far on Smashwords: Unsolicited Press | Fomite Press | Whitepoint Press | OpenBooks (interesting but overrpriced?), Bold Venture Press (republishes classic, pulp and genre fiction | Lethe Press | ReAnimus Press (established scifi press which republishes lots of things) | LDB Press | Black Opal Books | Propertius Press (too expensive though) | Atthis Arts | Leaf Garden Press (mainly poetry — see here)

    Read by Strangers: Stories (Free!) by Philip Dean Walker (author website). A collection of sixteen queer stories exploring the complexities of the human experience. One review describes it as “result is a deep dissection of lives where the barriers to human connection can take on sometimes-comic, sometimes-monstrous proportions.”

    Lethe Press has a variety of titles (notably gay fiction, sci fi, paranormal and some some general fiction and stories. Some good discounts here –highlights:

    • Vanishing Point by E.V. Legters (author website) — FREE! Novel about a turbulent affair a lonely housewife has with an emotionally unstable man. (called by Kirkus a “heartbreaking and exquisite story about emotional violence.”) See also: Connecting Underneath (on Amazon for $2, not SW) , her debut novel about teenage girl journey to discover who her father was. (Kirkus: engaging meditation on the most basic desire—to know oneself. )

    Senior Touring Society by Donald Kemp

    Isolde Kurz: A Cultural Anthology, translated by Becca Menon (free!) Kurz is a

    Kissing Booth and other stories by A.C. Wise (3.75) — whoops, maybe I thought the price was lower? Gay surreal scifi fiction about time machines, robots, aliens, etc.

    ReAnimus Press republishes out-of-print sci fi novels and story collections for 3.99 (no discount; it’s the same price as Amazon). (Update: I see that you can buy DRM-stuff for the same price directly from the publisher . If you subscribe to the newsletter, you get 20% off first purchase — and hopefully info about more promotions. I generally like buying directly from the publisher because author royalties tend to be higher). Still Smashwords has a lot of these titles — I found lots of James Gunn stories and Robert Silverberg novellas. From Gunn, I’m starting with Future Imperfect story collection, but there’s a lot to choose from. The Silverberg link above went to several 60,000 word collections of 3 novellas by well-known people. Wow, does sci fi have a lock on the 15,000 word novella?

    John Flynn (aka Basil Rosa) Basil Rosa — a pseudonym (author website) for John Flynn has discounted all his 3.99 titles to 99 cents for this week — including his Lotion State Trilogy. Alas, I see that he has 3 poetry collections on Smashwords for free — which is great. Fun fact, Flynn served in Peace Corp Moldava in 1993-1995, and I lived in both Albania (1995-7) and Ukraine (1997-9) with Peace Corps and Soros Foundation (respectively). Moldava is right next door to Ukraine, and our country director in Albania came there directly in Moldava, so I have an affinity with this author already. His poetry comes from Leaf Garden which publishes a lot of free and low cost poetry.

    Nature’s Confession by JL Morin and Loveoid Nature’s Confession is a YA climate change novel (descriptions and reviews here). Also, Morin has a Huffpost author page containing climate change articles.

    Sussurus on Mars by Hal Duncan (1$) is another novella about Greek mythology, botany, philosophy, gay fiction

    Richard Herley (author website) is a versatile English author who has already achieved a fair amount of commercial success and has published a lot of his titles on Smashwords (as well as Amazon). On both stores, a significant fraction of the ebooks are priced at free, but everything is under $3. On his author’s website, he has helpful advice about which books to read first and next.

    Frank Prem is a gifted Australian poet who I mentioned in a previous column. (author website). I really love his stuff (and you should listen to  Frank Prem’s youtube pages.) . He has two poetry ebooks on Smashwords: Pebbles to Poems (free) and Herjo Devastation – a poetic collaboration with a storyteller

    I have already highlighted Whitepoint Press in previous roundups. Whitepoint has published a few new titles in 2020: Bread and Salt by Valerie Minor (author website). (Note: This is just one title — more are sold on Amazon). Also, Mom’s Dead by Gerard Lafond (author website) and the poetry title Of Covenants by C. Kubasta (author website, also an interview here and here).

    A brush with life by Steven Mayoff. (author homepage)

    Various by Basil Rosa — pseudonym (author website).

    Rasmenia Massoud (author page)

    ISOLDE KURZ: A Cultural Anthology: Edited, Translated & Iluminated by Becca Menon FREE!

    Man in the Seventh Row: and Related Stories of the Human Condition by Brian Pendreigh 99 cents. Novel by film critic about man who is sucked into various movies (see Purple Rose of Cairo, etc) . Several good reviews on Amazon (where it is on sale for the same price). Here’s his Smashwords interview.

    Real World by Kathleen Jowett (author home page and book page). Novel by English writer about a gay woman torn between her desire to marry her girlfriend and the desire to serve as a vicar. From her website, a LGBTQ reading list. A few years ago Jowett published a well-received award-winning novel Speak its Name.

    Two YA books by JL Morin: Nature’s Confession and Loveoid.

    Deals published by Amazon imprints

    Some of the Amazon imprints produce very inexpensive ebooks of varying quality. Some titles though are superb (and you should check previous roundups for my recommendations — I frankly ignore most of the genre stuff and focus on the international authors and biographies. Follow this link to see which titles are 99 cents for the month.  (check previous columns here, here and here), so maybe my recs will be sparser than usual. All are KU APUB, (but not lendable!).

    The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo, trans. from the French by Nicholas Elliott. 99 cents (KU, APUB). French prize winner inspired by a historical event about a man who traveled to Guinea and conquered a region in order to build a railway. Reviews are mixed though.

    Under the Radar

    Talking is Wasted Breath (Tales from the Deccan Plateau) by Rasana Atreya (free, preorder on Amazon and Smashwords).

    Gotcha! Inside Trump’s 2000 Campaign – A Novel by Ed Weinberger (99 cents). I usually pass on fiction about topical politics, but Weinberger is a legendary TV writer — wrote for Mary Tyler Moore, co-created Taxi and several other shows. Also, he and Ed Asner wrote an entertaining pseudo-history, Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution against right-wing hypocrites and nutjobs.

    Three Stages of Amazement: A novel by Carol Edgarian (bought on sale for 2.99). (Author website). The first thing I noticed about the book page is that the author was the cofounder of Narrative Magazine (which is very well done). Wow, I read the first chapter a long while back — it’s a contemporary California story about love affairs, social classes, venture capital, current events (sorry for phoning it in; it’s been a while). But it seems competently written and Edgarian is definitely someone to watch (she’s even achieved a fair degree of mainstream success).

    I swear, I keep bumping into the ebooks of John Vance, (author website) who is a retired academic who has written in a lot of genres — most titles run for 99 cents up to 2.99 on Amazon, so the price definitely is right. Professor and the Don’s Girl, Men Behaving Badly,

    Empty Cell by Paulette Alden (author website). Alden won a Stegner Fellowship and wrote a novel about lynching in the 1940s.

    Believe it or not, I bought one low priced collection of Penthouse Letters and found them surprisingly entertaining and well-written. Fun reading if you’re into that kind of thing — and not just as stroke material.

    Dog Logic by Tom Stretlich (LE). (Author website) Satirical novel about a damaged caretaker at a pet cemetery. Stretlich’s thing is mainly being a playwright, so this is an extension of a play he wrote previously. I’m probably not describing the book fairly, so let’s hear from the author himself.

    Regrets by Milton Schacter 1.99 (KU, LE). Well-reviewed crime novel about a defense attorney who is killed as a robber and returns to life as a 15 year old black boy. No author website, but the Amazon author profile is one of the longest I’ve ever read!

    Inside the Robe: Judge’s Candid Tale of Criminal Justice in America by Katherine Mader (author website). (free)

    Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and Making of Cultures by Antonio R. Damasio 0.99 Philosophical book about how homeostasis explains human evolution and lots of other things.

    For $1 each I’ve picked up 4 volumes of the sci fi series Eden’s Trial by Barry Kirwan (author website) who apparently in not the Irish folk singer with the same name. The premise is about humans who travel in a space ship to find a better planet after earth is ruined by war and climate change. You know I’m a sucker for those kinds of books.

    Newspaper Widow (Novel) by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

    Snapshots by Eliot Parker. 99 cents. Stories set in Eastern Kentucky/West Virginia. Stories about life’s quirky ironies, usually with a twist.

    Film Writing mini-guides by John Gaspard. The series is called Fast, Cheap Filmmaking Books (KU) . I got Fast, Cheap & Written That Way: Top Screenwriters on Writing for Low-Budget Movies for free.

    Blink and It’s Gone Sales

    (books which go temporarily on sale for a day and then jump back to regular price; to hear about them, you generally need to set up price alerts on ereaderiq).

    Cosmos by Witold Gombrowicz . 1.99 Award-winning book by Polish author whom Milan Kundera proclaims one of the great novelists of our century. Described as “a metaphysical noir thriller narrated by Witold, a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns.” I tried reading Ferdydurke earlier without really getting into it, but my critic friend raved about his other book Pornografia, so I’m willing to give him a second look. (Sometimes I throw aside books too quickly — a personality flaw).

    Second World War by Antony Beevor. 3.99 (a fat ebook!) A well-researched comprehensive book which retells the whole narrative

    Ecstasy is Necessary: a practical guide to sex, relationships and oh, so much more. by Barbara Carrellas. (A guide to having a good sex life sells for 99 cents on amazon — what a deal!). If you’re looking for a great book about sex and relationships (seriously), I recommend the book Sexual Intelligence by Marty Klein. (Here’s the author’s website). I also have thumbed through but not actually read his two other books about porn and “America’s War on Sex.”

    Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. (author website). This much lauded first novel is one of a series and about a communist double agent from Vietnam who travels to America in order to spy on immigrants already in America. He has written other novels The Refugees and The Committed which give different perspective on the plight of post-war Vietnamese. Nguyen has written lots of essays and fiction (here’s a recent essay from NYT called “Post-Trump Future of Literature”). Here’s a long excerpt:

    That much of the literary world was willing to give Mr. Obama’s drone strike and deportation policies a pass, partly because he was such a literary, empathetic president, indicates some of the hollowness of liberalism and multiculturalism. Empathy, their emotional signature, is perfectly compatible with killing people overseas — many of them innocent — and backing up a police and carceral system that disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous and other people of color and the poor. It turns out that a president can have a taste for both drone strikes and annual reading lists heavy on multicultural literature.

    And here, marginalized writers who tell stories about marginalized populations do not get a pass. Take immigrant literature. During the xenophobic Trump years, when immigrants and refugees were demonized, simply standing up for immigrants became a politically worthwhile cause. But so much of immigrant literature, despite bringing attention to the racial, cultural and economic difficulties that immigrants face, also ultimately affirms an American dream that is sometimes lofty and aspirational, and at other times a mask for the structural inequities of a settler colonial state. Most Americans have never heard of settler colonialism, much less used it to describe their country. That’s because Americans prefer to call settler colonialism the American dream.

    Too much of immigrant and multicultural literature fails to rip off that mask. Yet the politicization of these populations does pose a threat to the white nation that Mr. Trump represents. White identity politics has always been the dominant politics of this country, but so long as it was ascendant and unthreatened, it was never explicitly white. It was simply normative, and most white writers (and white people) never questioned the normativity of whiteness. But the long, incomplete march toward racial equality from 1865 to the present has slowly eroded white dominance, with the most significant rupture occurring during the war in Vietnam.

    I, Claudius by Robert Graves ($2). I’ve heard good things about this.

    Indie /DRM-free Ebook Deals

    Once or twice a year, the radical publisher Verso Books discounts critical/leftist ebooks. Most Verso titles are brilliant radical works — often about economics, sociology, media studies, literary criticism (and occasionally even fiction). To my delight, I saw that Derrida‘s Politics of Friendship was discounted. I am somewhat well-read in Derrida, but as it happens, I attended the first public reading of the 1st chapter while at JHU in 1989. Although Derrida’s analytical method is fairly abtruse, he recited his thoughts carefully and intensely (leading me to believe that I understand most of what Derrida was speaking about. (I made small talk with him at a wine and cheese party afterwards). Verso has a lot of interesting “deep thoughts” books; it’s definitely worth signing up for the newsletter to be informed of when things go on sale.

    Note: Verso Books sells DRM-free versions directly to the consumer and in multiple formats. Everything is also on Amazon, but discounted prices come only from directly purchasing on Verso’s site.

    Creative Commons — Academic — Public Domain

    Some more free titles from Cornell U Press that I hadn’t picked up already. This set comes from the series, Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought. I’m reasonably well-versed in German literature and for a while was reading advanced stuff in German (including 2/3 of Hermann Broch‘s Sleepwalkers). Sleepwalkers is a great work; I probably should revisit it in an age of Trump.

    • On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought by Daniel Leonhard Purdy
    • The Total Work of Art in European Modernism by David Roberts
    • Benjamin’s Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque by Jane O. Newman
    • Lyric Orientations: Hölderlin, Rilke, and the Poetics of Community by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge
    • Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman by Tobias Boes.

    I have delved into the Cornell Open Access Project a bit. (See the newest free titles). There’s a lot there, and perhaps next month I’ll cover the offerings (many of which I’ve already downloaded). Suffice to say that on the Cornell website you can download epubs and pdfs, but on Amazon they are available at kindle files. If you download from Cornell directly, you should be sure to give the downloadable file a recognizable name. COAP has titles on a lot of subjects (maybe 1/4 are literary topics). Lots of social science, history and political economy,

    Once in a Lifetime Deals

    Improvement by Joan Silber, 2$

    a

    Poetry

    See my blurb about R.S. Gwynn below.

    Texas

    Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island by Scott Semegran.

    Republic of Jack by Jeffrey Kerr (author website). A satirical look at the Texas government who entertains the secession movement for political purposes. Kerr (who also makes movies) has a great sense of Texas politics — here’s a fun Texas history lesson he gave to the Austin public access TV.

    Levee by Paul Otremba. (a Houston poet who died at 40 of stomach cancer). Here’s a very nice interview in American Literary Review in 2019. Here’s one lovely description: From a nice article about the book:

    Levee—set in and around the Ship Channel, lush greenery, and crawfish boils of the Bayou City—is a thoughtful, sometimes ironic work that examines living in a time besieged by climate change and perpetual violence in a place forged from industry and greed. It’s also some of Otremba’s most personal work, drawing, as it does, from the poet’s own confrontation with mortality.

    “He used his own illness as the background and metaphor for the illnesses of the world,” explains Otremba’s wife, Holly Holmes.

    Morgan Kenney, Houstonia Magazine.

    Demagoguery and Democracy by Patricia Roberts-Miller. (author blog).

    Clay Reynolds is a distinguished and erudite Texas author (website) whom I’m currently interviewing. Curiously, despite his being born 16 years after me, he went to Trinity and we share a lot of cultural reference points. I’m excited to get into his fiction and essays which have overlooked way too long. I’ll be posting more about his fiction eventually, but two places to start is his 2004 public lecture A Cow Can Moo: The Irony of the Artistic Lie (PDF). It’s a detailed discussion about the evolution of a Texas writer’s sensibility and how you develop a sense of irony. Deep, heavy stuff. For something lighter, here’s a 2006 interview with Reynolds in Lone Star Literary Life. One curious thing about Reynolds is that he talks freely about his fiction. When Baen released ebook editions, he wrote new introductions for almost all of them.

    From Barsoom to Malacandra: Musings on Things Past and Things to Come by John C. Wright (author website) Also: Transhuman and Subhuman. ( 99 cents KU, LE) Wright is a retired lawyer, editor and sci fi novelist. Here are two collections of essays about science fiction and the genre’s authors.

    Review Copies Received

    Erotica

    To prepare for the interview with Texas novelist Clay Reynolds (author website), I received two great-looking print books by Clay Reynolds: Of Snakes & Sex & Playing in the Rain (essay collection) and

    Printed books bought (Better World Books, Amazon, etc)

    If you are looking for a great book about elephant society and how mammals communicate and emote, check out the brilliant and fascinating Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. by Carl Safina. (author home page). A great fascinating work about the animal kingdom.

    Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Believe it or not, this comic was really big during college, but I never read it until a month ago.

    Several volumes by George Singleton: These People are Us, Half-Mammals of Dixie, Calloustown, Between Wrecks.

    Argument for Stillness by Erik Campbell. Found a poem in a litmag that blew me away, and finally tracked the book it came from.

    Two books on medicine and philosophical questions: How We Die by Sherwin Nuland and Art of Aging. Here’s his NYT obituary a bio on his foundation website and two TED Talks.

    How to Create a Flawless Universe: In Just Eight Days by Godfather Publications is one of my favorite novelty books. They’re giving away copies for nothing, and it is a clever humorous scrapbook kind of book.

    Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. Lepore has covered weightier subjects, but this treatment of cultural history was engrossing.

    Goethe, Goethe, Goethe. I’ve been a fan of the Princeton U Press multivolume set of Goethe Translations from the 1990s. This Christmas I broke down and bought two volumes — one of plays, the other of poetry. (That means I have 3 volumes so far).

    No Word of Farewell: Selected Poems, 1970-2000 by R.S. Gwynn. Gwynn came highly recommended to me by Texas novelist Clay Reynolds, and he happens to be spending his retirement very close to Houston! By the way, I’ll be reading more works by Clay Reynolds, stay tuned.

    I couldn’t resist. I’m an admirer of the book cover designer George Salter, a German-born Jewish artist who designed some immortal covers — both for German publishers and (after fleeing Nazi Germany) all the major US publishers. Someone gathered all his illustration work with commentary and packaged it into a print book. called Classic Book Jackets by Milton Glaser. You can view a sampling of Salter’s covers here . I have picked up a handful of books with Salter covers already, but it might be nice to collect these books (all the books sound cool too).

    Personville Press Giveaways and Deals

    I run Personville Press, a small literary book press where all the ebooks cost less than $4. All the titles are discounted on Smashwords for less that price — and usually under $1.50. Pay attention to any 100% coupon codes which I occasionally list below — they can be redeemed only a small number of times, so first come, first serve. Smashwords only sells epub versions of these titles, but you can easily convert them to Amazon’s mobi format by using Kindle Previewer or Calibre.

  • NO DRM, plus my crappy attempt to persuade people to buy more ebooks!

    I’ll be posting a superlong Robert’s Roundup this weekend and then another normal-sized one in the last week of December about the Smashwords (SW) ebook deals.

    As a general rule, I do NOT link to Amazon anymore (unless there is a special reason). Everyone knows how to use search engines, plus it saves time. For the most part, all of my column links will go to DRM-free links (mainly Smashwords, Project Gutenberg, etc). I generally try to link to the author’s home page if there is one.

    Here are 3 labels I use when listing titles on Amazon.

    • KU means that the ebook is part of Kindle Unlimited collection. I mention this not to encourage people to sign up for KU, but notably because KU ebooks are more likely to be discounted to free — so you can set up price alerts. These free promotions are limited to 3 days every 90 days. Often authors keep their ebooks in KU for the first 3-6 months only, so you should verify if it is still in KU.
    • LE means that lending is allowed for this Amazon ebook. This lending functionality is somewhat limited, but better than nothing. Hey, if you want to borrow one of these lendable titles, feel free to email me the title. I will almost always say yes! (idiotprogrammer AT fastmailbox.net)
    • APUB means that ebook is published under an Amazon Imprint (see a list). This means that Amazon’s inhouse publishing department has acquired these titles and promote them actively using Amazon’s tools. These titles stay low-priced, and their prices tend to remain the same for the entire month. Every 3-6 months, their prices go down to 99 cents or 1.99 (so, set those price alerts!) Generally, these titles are high quality, more likely genre, slickly produced and promoted (in the best sense of the word). Many are from international authors. Little A is for literary fiction; AmazonCrossing is for translated titles.

    Why do so many authors and publishers refuse to make Amazon ebooks lendable?

    But Amazon invented a cool sharing/lending function for their titles. It actually works pretty well, is of limited duration and poses no piracy risk for publishers. It might reduce the tendency of someone to buy the title, but more than likely it just gives the person more time to explore the ebook. That is usually a good thing.

    As it happens, on Amazon almost zero big publishers have enabled this feature, and about 50% of indie authors haven’t enabled it either. Why? Honestly, I really miss not being able to lend purchased titles with friends or swap recommendations. There’s so much cool stuff which I’d love to share with friends (or vice versa). By opting out of lending, authors are missing out on the possibility to get ebooks in front of new customers.

    In praise of DRM free ebooks

    I alternate between hating and loving Amazon (now I’m in a hating phase), but I have especially strong feelings against ebook DRM. It’s so unnecessary and counterproductive. I noticed that imore has a very nice list of DRM-free publishers. Obviously Smashwords is the biggest outlet for DRM-free, but there’s also Verso, Humble Bundle, Tor, Baen and various tech publishers (Packt, Oreilly, No Starch, Apress).

    DRM-free ebooks are better because their use cannot be limited or cancelled by a bookstore’s infrastructure. I bought a few dozen ebooks from ebook sellers who went out of business, and now I am stuck. This day will happen for all booksellers eventually. The usual excuse for DRM is to prevent piracy. This is not a terrible argument, but it adds an extra layer of complexity and dependency. Also, aside from reducing piracy on high-priced bestselling titles, DRM doesn’t really help most indie authors. (One method that would deter me is “social DRM” — i.e., using identifying watermarks — like “This ebook is licensed exclusively to Robert Nagle”).

    This is not a great risk right now, but what if Google and Amazon fought and Amazon suddenly decided: hey, let’s not support a Kindle app on android devices anymore! What could consumers do? Essentially nothing. They could not move their purchased ebooks out of one ebook distribution system into another.

    Practically speaking, major publishers and authors sell only at bookstores which use DRM. You can submit ebooks DRM-free to bookstores, but it would be somewhat complicated to move these ebooks into another book infrastructure.

    On the other hand, books without DRM have their own problems.

    First, you have to keep your files safe. (Solution: Upload everything into Google Drive or Dropbox. Problem solved!)

    Second, you need an easy interface to view cloud-based ebooks offline. That means uploading ebooks, organizing into shelves and making the interface usable. We don’t have a good interface for that yet, but we are almost there.

    Third, you have to manage space limitations. This is actually a bigger problem than you believe. Devices have limited storage space, and Google Play is a huge memory hog, and there’s no way to figure out which ebooks are taking up the most space. Fortunately, this problem is solvable though the booksellers have not tried to fix it.

    New blog feature: Crappy Interstitial Ebook Ads (sort of)

    A year ago I started offering free ebook ads for Smashwords ebooks. Smashwords is DRM-free and indie-friendly and provides better royalties. Second, if I’m recommending ebooks, it costs me nothing really to provide free ads for them. I signed up for SW’s affiliating marketing program (which meant having to cancel participation in Amazon’s affiliate program — good riddance). Making money is not my primary motive here, but I’m not allergic to doing so.

    A few months ago, I had a dose of reality. First, earnings from SW affiliate marketing program were practically nonexistent. This is partly because ebooks bought directly from SW are still a small portion of the ebook market. But 55% of my web surfers on this blog read on mobile phones, and another 8% are on tablets. My right sidebar containing the ads doesn’t even show up for these people.

    I still want to feature some ebook promotions and am working on a solution that is not too distracting or complicated to implement.

    Fortunately, WordPress might help with that. I really don’t want to use a plugin — especially an ad server, but the built in Gutenberg text editor lets you insert custom boilerplate blocks of text wherever you want. So I could design a few boilerplates and insert them strategically in blogposts. Perspicacious readers may notice that at the bottom of ebook columns, I’ve been doing this anyway. I may enhance this slightly — and keep them under the fold so that they don’t appear on the main URL for literary-oriented posts.

    On the main URL I will include short posts including my promotions in differentiated texts. These short promotional posts won’t be too distracting, I promise. Also, even though I potentially derive financial benefit from them, I still endorse these ebooks!

    I want this blog to remain personal and basically noncommercial while still promoting no-DRM publishers and indie authors. Hopefully these new changes will not change the overall readability of this blog.

  • Mike’s Likes #1 (Book Reports — June, 2019)

    (“Mike’s Likes” is the first book column for what will soon be a regular feature on this blog. Michael Barrett is a San Antonio critic and longtime college friend. He has been writing erudite cinema reviews at Popmatters for over a decade — I even did a long interview with him about cinema on this blog. Although Barrett is happy with the film critic label, he reads widely too. With his permission, I will occasionally compile some “book reports” which Barrett has recently posted on Facebook).

    View Robert’s Roundups || View the Mike’s Likes Series ||View the Raves & Reviews series ||

    BASIC BLACK WITH PEARLS by Helen Weinzweig

    NYRB classic reprint, Checked out of the library!

    The narrator is a cultured married woman who seems to spend her days flying the world for rendezvous with her spy-lover, who changes his appearance easily and communicates cryptically via National Geographics.

    The novel’s present is a couple of weekends, one in Guatemala where he calls her on the phone to cancel and say he’ll meet her next weekend in Toronto, where she actually lives or used to with her family, and then that Toronto weekend as she wanders through her memories and fantasies of her life and repressed tragedies, until she magically comes to a resolve that may be as imaginary as everything else, for we suspect she’s refracting her experience through breakdowns and dreams. The ending involves a doppelganger derived partly from the author’s own life. It becomes impossible to know if she really travels the world for spy affairs–and if she does, whether she just sleeps with random lovers whom she identifies as the same person, or whether these are messages to herself, or whether she stays home and reads magazines.

    The style is lucid and hyper-real yet bewildering and dreamy, esp. when she has a dialogue with a woman in a Bonnard painting that echoes the narrator of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” The whole affair becomes increasingly psychological and symbolic, with tossed-off nuggets like “I was afraid that I had finally capitulated to vacuity” and incidents like this (amid the curious punctuation, I must wonder why the semi-colon):

    “When I was forced to come to a stop by a street photographer, a lean young man in a green corduroy suit who stood feet astride in my path, I became angry. He had apparently taken my picture. He offered me the print for a dollar. I uttered a sharp No! He could not have known that he copied a likeness I no longer wanted. He persisted in holding the picture up to me, saying, It’s no use to me. Nor to me, I answered. He tore it up before my eyes; tossed the glossy bits into the gutter. Perhaps, it occurred to me, through the ‘evil eye of the box’ the photographer had removed a soul that was weary of wandering. Despite the breeze, the pieces of my soul just lay there. Good, I said to myself. Good riddance.”

    When the rats come out, or What a peste

    Audiobook of Albert Camus’ THE PLAGUE, Checked out of the library!

    My second recent visit to Oran after THE SHELTERING SKY. The most surprising thing is how this supposedly atheist/existentialist tract of alienation and desperation could so easily lend itself to a Catholic interpretation. The priest is presented as in dialectic with another character (not the narrator but the diarist) but they’re not so much opposites as alternate facets; both believe man is tainted by Original Sin, though the latter calls it the plague we all carry, the guilt of collaborating with civilization’s crimes. The priest is given two long sermons, the latter of which has him arriving at a potentially heretical-existential “all or nothing” theory of choosing God consciously. Both characters come to the same conclusion of committing themselves completely to their convictions and die of them. Much is made of the “crucifying” nature of the death contortions, which take about as long as the agonies on the cross, and the plague breaks its fever, as it were, on Christmas. The narrator-doctor is even watched over by a beatific mother. The finale of this essentially philosophical book, which aims to be a “factual record” in the manner of Defoe’s (invented) “Journal of the Plague Year,” pulls off two brilliantly orchestrated bits of melodrama.

    Although the setting feels removed from time and space to accentuate isolation, to the extent that the action takes place in a French colonial town in Algeria (with no Algerians–that conscience was pricked with the murder in THE STRANGER), this can also be seen as a political commentary or allegory of the colonial adventure that Camus presumably foresaw swallowing up and depleting France, for several characters (like the priest) state that the town has brought its troubles on itself. This arguably makes it less universal than an exclusively and specifically French catastrophe. The one who’s glad of the plague is a criminal who wishes to escape justice. His implication is that when everyone’s in the same boat, all are alike and therefore it’s a town of criminals. No explicit political comments are made; it’s left implicit for those who can see to see, with remarks on the initial incompetence of officials and special disaster meted out to a magistrate. (This would be a very different reading from the more common one of celebrating French resistance to Nazis.)

    TALK by Linda Rosenkrantz

    Checked out of the library!

    For anyone who’s wished they had recorded conversations of their brilliant witty friends, at least one person went and did it.

    The raw material, accent on raw, of Linda Rosenkrantz’s 1968 TALK is tape-recorded conversations among three arty New York friends from the summer of 1965. Two women, one of whom (“Marsha”) is recording these tapes, even when she’s absent, and a male homosexual painter (before it was cool to discuss such things casually and frankly) hash and thrash over every minute analysis of each other’s behavior and blather endlessly, sometimes hilariously about sex, friends, lovers, shrinks, art, abortions and the cat, roughly in that order, while lounging on the beach, interrupting each other, preparing and eating food, and hanging out. They’re full of exaggeration, one-liners, insight and witty play for each other’s benefit.

    Apparently Linda/Marsha didn’t alter the tapes, only selected which ones to use from hundreds of hours, and they’re merely transcribed as play dialogue without directions or commentary. References to Warhol (whom they know personally) remind us that he believed a film is what happens when you turn on a camera and record whatever someone is doing, and that sometimes the camera alters their behavior and sometimes not. These friends are all circa 30 (one divorcee, who has just emerged from alkie rehab, is “punching 30”), reminding us also of the line in “The Great Gatsby” (quoted, though not that line) in which the narrator suddenly ends a chapter by remembering that it’s his 30th birthday. As Rosenkrantz reminds us in a 50-years-later note, this came out one year before Roth’s PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT and mortified her mother.

    Related: Judy Berman reviews the book and a (paywalled) NYT profile/interview.

    3 curiouser and curiouser not-long novels

    Checked out of the library!

    Ray Russell’s brisk THE CASE AGAINST SATAN reads like a blueprint for THE EXORCIST. In what may be a coincidence, one character is a Father Halloran, and someone with that name was involved in a 1949 case that allegedly inspired Blatty. Mostly dialogue or argumentative dialectic punctuated with grotesque moments. As an example of the author’s careful construction, a lengthy passage on “dung” might make us think he’s avoiding the word “shit,” and he is, but only so he can later use it to maximum effect in a single moment when it has the whole paragraph to itself. The argument carefully leaves itself ambiguous as it exposes what must have seemed especially shocking elements in 1962, but although the main priest states at the end that all the elements could have a rational explanation, he forgets to mention the catapulting against the wall and that fact that three people had to pry the victim off. The ingeniously handled climax tosses in a quick whodunit.

    If Ursula Le Guin’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN has a continual shifting of reality superficially similar to Philip K. Dick, the earlier CITY OF ILLUSIONS is an onion-peeler that keeps redefining what we should believe before revealing its final truth. The amnesiac lynx-eyed alien hero, who awakes naked and frantic in a forest and makes his way across a North America of a few millennia in the future, might foreshadow other amnesiac heroes like in Silverberg’s LORD VALENTINE’S CASTLE. A romantic picaresque full of vivid scenes, basic characters, shifts of setting that keeps a tight grip on the hero’s perspective even at his most confused. The fortuitous ending is based on tremendous mental powers and the ability to maintain two identities in one’s brain.

    Barbara Comyns’ THE JUNIPER TREE, named after a Grimm tale, has a deadpan “naive” female narrator (as in the wonderful OUR SPOONS CAME FROM WOOLWORTH’S) calmly unrolling what seems at times like a fairy-tale romance, at times a realistic portrait of a single mother making her way in the world of antiques and junk, at times a casual reportage of tragedies that come out of the blue and are told with the same sense of detail and balance as the happier events. A world of vivid passing characters is conveyed in this rapidly moving tale.

    How to live with loss in a science fiction universe

    RE: Sarah Pinsker’s SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA
    Checked out of the library!

    Most of the stories are narrated by lesbians (two of them rock stars), and all are about the consequences of living with things lost: mothers, grandmothers (a nod to Ray Bradbury’s “I Sing the Body Electric”), an arm (the only story with a male protagonist), a husband (the story about a straight couple), an imaginary daughter (a nod to John Wyndham’s MIDWICH CUCKOOS, and this is one of two stories about sirens on rocks), a viable world. Two stories submerge the pulp adventure to a distant undiscussed memory that still has repercussions. One Stevensonian tale that’s really about self-acceptance is told by what used to be called a hermaphrodite and now is called intersex.

    The last two stories are the funniest and most brilliant: “The Narwhal” (the only story not previously published) is about a road trip in a supercar shaped like a whale. “And Then There Were (N-One)” nods to Agatha Christie in a multiverse conference in which all the attendees are variants of the same person (named Sarah Pinsker, but the narrator isn’t “our” Pinsker who won a Nebula, but she’s there too) and somebody gets murdered. It’s about how we’re never satisfied with our choices, even good ones, and it’s not really a spoiler to say the lady-or-tiger ending is totally appropriate. Compare with Sean Farrell’s time-travel novel MAN IN THE EMPTY SUIT.

    “Our Lady of the Open Road”, the least fantastical story here, is the one that won the Nebula, while a whopping four others were nominees–including “(N-One)”, in which the Nebula Award is used as a murder weapon (!) and which was also a Hugo nominee. In short, this book is a one-stop for recently acclaimed stories and a very gentle intro to SF for people who might be nervous about it.

    When the honeymoon’s over, baby


    Antal Szerb’s JOURNEY BY MOONLIGHT
    NYRB edition, translated by Len Rix, Checked out of the library!

    I can easily believe this is among the 20th Century’s most delicate and pleasurable novels, although it feels like a spoiler to call it a comedy and perhaps it’s really not. It’s a human comedy, or humane comedy.

    Antal Szerb

    This 1937 Hungarian work, also known as THE TRAVELER and (most literally) THE TRAVELER AND THE MOONLIGHT, is a kind of proto-existential odyssey about a hapless young misfit, chafing at working for his father’s business, who tries to cure his abnormality by marrying a woman who scandalously divorced her rich husband for him, but he semi-accidentally ditches her on the honeymoon for a dreamlike stay in Italy, as though he has Stendhal Syndrome. In a state of inertia marked by restlessness and panic, he reminisces about his youth with insular brother/sister play-acting twins (along with a brash scoundrel and a Jewish scholar who converts to become a Catholic monk) and indulges thoughts of the suicidal death-wish, which he discusses with a bombastic religious/literary Hungarian colleague and a Christian English doctor after a brief affair with a good-natured, gloriously stupid American “art student.” There’s a rich Persian “tiger” and surreal and absurd moments.

    Could be accurately yet misleadingly described to sound like a gloomy plod, when in fact it’s funny and surprising, the work of an urbane witty man whose compassion for others, even at his most satirical and jaundiced, is based upon knowing and forgiving himself. Friendship and understanding are major themes, as well as love and gently observed despair. Although touching on grim topics, it wears them with the cosmopolitan irony we associate with Kafka, Kundera and other Eastern Europeans.

    It’s a pleasure to be in the presence of this creative generous mind, whose other works include untranslated histories of Hungarian and world literature that make him seem like his country’s Martin Seymour-Smith. Speaking of whom, MSS’ Guide to Mod World Lit doesn’t seem to know this novel but remarks of Szerb’s history of world lit that its author “has been, of course, told off by everyone in the most grudging manner, even while they make use of it.” Szerb has also written a fantasy-thriller, THE PENDRAGON LEGEND. Must track down.

    According a German source on Wiki’s page, when Szerb was sent to a labor camp in 1944 for his Jewish origin (though raised a Catholic), he rejected friends’ attempts to get him released on false papers, and that’s why he died there the following year. Let’s pause to think about that.

    ALSO: I see more translations are coming.

    Michael Barrett is a writer, librarian and critic based in San Antonio. In addition to writing film criticism for Popmatters, Rotten Tomatoes and other national publications, he has published two works of children’s fiction. You can follow his daily posts on his Facebook page (and read a long interview with him on this blog). For the last 10 years he has written a Christmas letter detailing things read and watched for each year. Periodically, his book reports from Facebook are reposted here as “Mike’s Likes.”

  • Robert’s Raves & Reviews #1 (Books & Ebooks)

    Like my Robert’s Roundup series, I want to write a regular series about cool book reviews I’ve been finding. On occasion I will post my own reviews, but most of the column will be be links to reviews by other people.

    Amazon has another Kindle Unlimited 2 month trial offer. From now on Kindle titles won’t receive hyperlinks, but I’ll include website links for authors/reviewers. FYI: “KU” will indicate Kindle Unlimited ebook.

    View the Raves & Reviews series || View Robert’s Roundups || Read background for Raves & Reviews ||

    View Next Raves & Reviews

    Fiction

    “The only proper way to read the fiction of Kathryn Davis is in a state of happy, profound, and irreducible uncertainty. Here is the place where the membrane between the mundane and the mystical becomes so thin as to be transparent. No answers will be supplied, and the metaphors will bend your imagination to its breaking point.” (Laura Miller (Twitter) on the fiction of Kathryn Davis. (author website). Specifically she recommends starting out with Thin Place which she read with “baffled wonder”. (Aside, it’s always a delight to come across Miller’s columns on Salon, Slate, etc.).

    About Susan Choi‘s novel Trust Exercise, Laura Miller writes, Each of the novel’s three parts (the third is a relatively short coda) concerns a woman who feels betrayed, her trust violated—but the locus of that betrayal, the truly guilty party, looks different to the reader than it does to the women themselves. The first time around, though, how can the reader know any better? Like the unanalyzed souls Karen pities for their lack of self-knowledge, the reader of Sarah’s “novel” is blind. What choice is there but to fall into her version of what happened? And what choice can there be, once we’ve heard another, if equally blinkered, version, than to recognize just how easily trust can be misplaced or abused—often right under our noses, and with nobody any the wiser? [FUN FACT: Susan Choi grew up in Houston, and according to Miller, attended HSPVA]

    Lord, I can never keep up with M.L. Orthofer‘s blog or book reviews, but I’ll be quoting a number of the reviews — with the caveat that I prefer to cover US -born authors. Still it’s nice browsing through the index. It’s nice seeing his reviews of prize-winners and books with erotic themes. Oh, so much!

    I’m happy to discover the great book review section of Cleaver Magazine. I’ll be digging through their archives over the weeks.

    YOU’LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor: (review by Claire Rudy Foster). QUOTE:  In the States, where “sympathetic” characters are considered evocative and powerful, where we’re taught to see ourselves in every paragraph and written across every landscape, this type of description will not do. And yet, Taylor’s fiction pushes us beyond the boundaries of ourselves; if anything, she’s doing the reader a favor. Without the distraction of the ego, the chronic me me me that American fiction encourages through its unrelenting “relatability,” the story is stripped bare. It’s telling that, in most of these stories, the main characters hide under awnings and umbrellas, holding a book—not to read, but as a barrier. A means of escape.

    From Foster, here’s a nice piece about why kinky writing is also tight writing: Short-short fiction is not about being clever. It is about the essential parts of story. The bones. The steel rods and rings. The skin that goes white with tension. Tolerating that kind of discomfort takes practice, yes, but it is exhilarating. It is a pleasure. The closer I draw the words around me, the more I feel my power. I feel everything until I am numb. Then, I can squeeze my way into the story. It makes a shape that is tight, and smooth, and takes your breath away. (Wow, apparently rumpus.net has a semi-regular column, (K)ink: Writing While Deviant — i.e., ” a series about how looking at the world through the lens of an alternative sexual orientation influences the modes and strategies with which one approaches one’s creative work. “

    TYPEWRITERS, BOMBS, JELLYFISH: ESSAYS by Tom McCarthy (reviewed by William Morris) This collection itself is “a complex, spring-like structure” filled with literary and cultural references that recur throughout, often becoming “embedded one within the other.” How else to explain McCarthy’s transitions between Thomas Pynchon and MC Hammer, Don DeLillo and Zinedine Zidane? And stretched throughout the book, an almost constant stream of Mallarmé. There are essays on the weather in London, Kafka’s letters, David Lynch, and J.G. Ballard, making Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish an unceasingly eclectic collection. (Morris also recommends the McCarthy novel Satin Island). QUOTE: For writers in the nouveau roman style, and for McCarthy, reality is the collision of the will and the world. Toussaint’s heroes enact their will through refusal. They reject the tedium of inauthentic daily life. “The only escape route,” McCarthy writes, “from this [present moment], from its simultaneity, its loops and repetitions, would be violence.” The “irremediably inauthentic” must be punctured with violence to escape life’s ennui.

    TRYSTING by Emmanuelle Pagano (reviewed by Rachel Taube).
    Though they lose some nuances of expression and must forfeit some of the clarity of the French, Higgins and Lewis successfully reimagine the poetry and intensity of the original…. At the same time, because each piece is in the first person, the narrators begin to blur together from one story to the next. The female point of view in one story bleeds into the next. The narrator’s gender is rarely clear, so that we don’t know if the relationships are heterosexual or homosexual or meant to represent something else. This effect seems intentional, and as I got farther into the book, I began to see it as an exercise in exploring queerness. We can’t identify a gender, and it doesn’t matter. Interestingly, though, this doesn’t quite align with the reading of the book in its original French. In French, gender is more visible in the language.

    TROMPE L’OEIL by Nancy Reisman (reviewed by Michelle Fost) Reisman can sound like Virginia Woolf, but her experimentation also places her in the company of contemporary film directors like Terence Malick and Richard Linklater. If she has written a love letter to cinema, it’s not a traditional or straightforward letter. I don’t think anyone in the Murphy family ever so much as steps a foot in a movie theater in the many decades that we follow them. We hear about great painters, but no filmmakers, no directors, no actors. Instead, we can understand the Murphy family itself as a stand-in for a film being made. Moments accumulate to form their story, and we read of these moments sequentially.

    White Dancing Elephants. Stories by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. (Reviewed by K.C. Mead-Brewer). Gods, myths, stories within stories—Bhuvaneswar’s quiet, magical real style reveals a beauty that is constant and unflinching, found even in the face of D/death. Throughout this collection, her fascination with Indian myths and poetic traditions is folded into the everyday lives of her characters. In many ways, these stories almost read like modern-day fairytales—timely and timeless, magical even as they haunt. See also the reviews of an Alfred Doblin story collection and Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt. ( In Aidt’s writing, we’re made to see the ugliness in love and the beauty in monsters. We’re called to empathize with those we would rather discard and deny. We’re called to openness and curiosity. Don’t look away, she seems to say. Don’t look away, this is important. This is where it gets good).

    Nonfiction/Special Interest

    Texas Stuff

    ” Washington’s subtle, dynamic and flexible stories play out across the city’s sprawling and multiethnic neighborhoods. His characters move through streets named so often — Richmond and Waugh, Rusk and Fairview — that they come to have talismanic power, like the street names in Springsteen songs. ” Dwight Garner reviews Bryan Washington’s Lot (author site) Washington is a Houston author, and by the way, I know all of these neighborhoods very well. Here’s an interview on Lone Star. Asked to name his fave short story writers, he said, “Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Victor Lodato, Xuan Juliana Wang, Jamel Brinkley, Yukiko Motoya, Osama Alomar, Amelia Gray, ZZ Packer, Sandra Cisneros, Alejandro Zambra, Ha Jin, and Patricia Engel are doing work that I admire deeply. ” (A nice bunch of unfamiliar names!)

    Public Domain

    Book Review Digests. For the past two years I have been volunteering to proof various annual editions of Book Review Digest for Project Gutenberg. These volumes are incredible. As I write this post, only two volumes have been released. I can promise you there are about 15 more volumes still being worked on (I’ve worked on about half of them). It conveys firsthand what kinds of books were being released and talked about. Most of the “reviews” are 1-4 sentences long, but good enough to get a sense of whether a book is worth reading. It’s also clear that book reviewing standards in the 1900s and 1910s were very high (I even recognized some of the reviewer’s names. One was F.M. Ford!) To my astonishment, about half of the literary books have bio pages on wikipedia or elsewhere, but a surprising number of books reviewed from that time period have never been digitalized. For example, because PG already has 89 ebooks by Henry James, you’d assume that it’s pretty complete. Yet one of the Book Review Digests revealed two other works by James which still haven’t been digitalized (travel books, I think). Here for example is every page of the 1917 edition on a single HTML page (long!) I would guess 80-90% of these books haven’t been digitalized except in image form. For this edition, links to PG ebooks were included, making it even more useful. Some day, these reviews will be parsed and appear on the download page and reveal more masterpieces. The good news is that the 1921 edition is currently being processed by PG and that it’s only a matter of time before it gets to the 1923 scans. From now on, when I stumble upon an interesting review which has been digitalized, I’ll mention it on this section of the reviews.

    Eddy: A novel of To-day . By Clarence Louis Cullen (bio) . Tells of the regeneration of an immoral woman by a strong, loyal-hearted daughter who after finishing school goes to live in her mother’s home. “In spite of vagaries of diction Mr. Cullen has written a really good novel. It scores a triumph in that, despite its subject, it leaves a clean and wholesome impression.” + – N. Y. Times. 15: 213. Ap. 16, ’10. 300w.

    Cavanagh–forest ranger; a romance of the mountain west by Hamlin Garland. This story, one of the best things Mr. Garland has ever done, portrays the passing of the old west–the west of the miner, the cattle man, the wolf and the eagle–and the establishment of the dominion which compels the ranger to transfer his allegiance to Uncle Sam and his conservation policies. The old order is symbolized by a coarse, slovenly, boarding-house keeper in a “little fly-bit cow town,” under whose uncouth, even repulsive exterior can often be detected a strain of fairness and honesty; and the new dominion finds its parallel in the woman’s daughter, who, after ten years of training in the east, returns to her mother, and, obnoxious as the process is, puts filth and dirt to route and institutes a cleanly régime. In Cavanagh, the hero, we find a faithful portrayal of the fight which the strong young men of the Forest service are called upon to put up against rangers opposed to law and innovations. It is an interesting story, but with a certain vitality, much realistic detail, and often beauty of line and color.” Margaret Sherwood. The Atlantic, 1910., (Garland later won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, Daughter of the Middle Border).

    Ashton Hilliers Master-girl: a romance. (1910) Aha, it’s a pseudonym for British zoologist Henry Marriage Wallis.A story of prehistoric times with a young savage for a hero who fares forth to appropriate a wife from a neighboring tribe and is generously blessed by the gods of his Sun-*men race. The master girl his wife, “stands a primitive human document,” a heroic specimen of cave woman thru whose elemental passions gleams something of the fine unselfishness and loyalty of her later generations. The author draws vivid pictures of the fight these people made for existence against the ravages of beasts, enemies and cold.The story furnishes an argument in favor of woman’s rights, and its archeology is unimpeachable.” A. L. A. Bkl. 7: 36. S. ’10.

    “It is an entertaining tale, written with a good deal of imaginative power, and held in its descriptions fairly close to the accepted scientific accounts of the way in which the cave men are supposed to have lived.” N. Y. Times. 15: 247. Ap. 30, ’10. 210w.

    A Public Domain Mystery

    To my astonishment, I discovered a 1910 praised novel, Odd Man by a certain Arnold Holcombe, for which there is practically no information! (and no scans!)

    A story of the petty persecutions and insolence which some villagers heap upon a peculiar, hermit-like man who dwells in their midst. “The odd man is a village recluse, half gipsy, half student–a carpenter when he chooses to work–who lives alone in a ramshackle cottage on a patch of land much coveted by speculators when the village becomes a rising suburb.” (Sat. R.)

    “The author’s chief fault is that he overaccentuates. The book has unusual originality, its thoughts are clearly put, and it is worth reading. If it has fallen short of its intention, it is, nevertheless, a well-constructed bit of fiction.”- N. Y. Times. 14: 806. D. 18. ’09. 200w.

    This certainly sounds worth investigating. A clue is found on an Italian book page which lists Holcombe as a pseudonym for Arnold Golsworthy (1865-1939). Here’s a long description of this author but note that this is a rare books site. Apparently he came from a London literary background, published a few mysteries and did a lot of random things. Hathiway Trust has a few things and Google Books has 2 things.

    General Literary Essays

    My dirty secret is that Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale is one of the favorite novels — and one of the first I ever read on an ebook reader. Later, I read the Riceyman Steps (also good, but not great) and How to Live on 24 Hours a Day . I was delighted to discover an essay by one of my favorite essayists Wendy Lesser has written about Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale (in response to Virginia Woolf’s castigating essay about his fiction).
    Yet Woolf is absolutely wrong about the nature of the excess information. The part of the book that is about rents and houses is all fascinating, as are the parts about stenography (a fledgling career for young women), newspaper advertising, the travails of lodging-house management, and the general ugliness of life in the industrial Five Towns, the famous Staffordshire Potteries where Bennett set so many of his novels. Occasionally in ”Hilda Lessways” and much more often in ”Clayhanger,” Arnold Bennett writes marvelously on the stuff of life. He makes you understand what it must have been like to sit at a Victorian deathbed, to give in to an autocratic father, to work in a print shop, to belong to a local political club and to live out one’s time in a smoky little provincial town, longing all the while for a cleaner, larger, more satisfying existence. When he’s in top form, Bennett manages to suggest how all these material things help to mold, defeat or in some cases enrich the individual soul or spirit — what Woolf, I imagine, would call character.

    (Lesser runs the great Threepenny Review but also been blogging about the nonliterary arts. I’ve loved two books by her: Why I read and Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (which I got discounted on ebook).

    Simon Heffer wrote a similar pro-Bennett/anti-Woolf essay.

    Christian Lorentzen’s Like This or Die, a long thing .

    In some ways, mainstream book coverage is coming down from its historically lofty perch to join the rest of arts coverage, catering less to the intelligentsia and more to the casual reader, who may not be interested in literary fiction or nonfiction. With so much to watch and read and listen to—and so many people chiming in on what to watch and read and listen to—it’s no surprise readers are hungering for a trusted source who can point them in the direction of books tailored to their interests. And those same readers may be looking for the kind of full-court, blogosphere press typically reserved for watercooler shows like Sharp Objects and meme machines like A Star Is Born.

    Here a consumerist vision of reading is presented as a form of anti-­elitism. The quaint use of “intelligentsia” suggests a suspect class of self-regarding intellectuals with an echo of Cold War red-baiting. And then a fantastic fictional character: the casual reader who disdains literary books but is eager for, say, the New York Times to tell her which nonliterary books to read when she isn’t busy watching HBO or listening to podcasts. And what does “full-court, blogosphere press” describe but hastily written, barely edited, cheap, and utterly disposable online jetsam? Such is the nature of the new “books coverage.” I was aware of the trend. Two months before Eichner’s story ran, my contract to review books at New York magazine was dropped. I had been told that although its books coverage would be expanding, what I did—book reviews—had “little value.”

    Liking Books is Not a Personality. by Hannah MacGregor. Ouch, this is a good long historical look at how book collecting has changed, but ultimately, I don’t like the essay because it doesn’t recommend any books!

    I just wanted to rave about the Novel: A Survival Skill (The Literary Agenda) by Tim Parks. (author website).

    Our Personal Libraries: A symposium. by Richard Brookhiser. Kind of a puff piece even for National Review, but at least it mentions titles.

    Where to Begin by Michael Overa. (an author talks about first lines).

    Ron Rosenbaum wrote a compelling historical piece about the travails of the Munich Post during Hitler’s rise. Hitler’s clownish behavior threw his enemies offguard, and how lying became “normalized.”

    Hitler’s method was to lie until he got what he wanted, by which point it was too late. At first, he pledged no territorial demands. Then he quietly rolled his tanks into the Rhineland. He had no designs on Czechoslovakia — just the Sudetenland, because so many of its German-born citizens were begging him to help shelter them from persecution. But soon came the absorption of the rest of Czechoslovakia. After Czechoslovakia, he’d be satisfied. Europe could return to normal. Lie! There is, of course, no comparison with Trump in terms of scale. His biggest policy decisions so far have been to name reprehensible figures to various cabinet posts and to enact dreadful executive orders. But this, too, is a form of destruction. While marchers and the courts have put up a fight after the Muslim ban, each new act, each new lie, accepted by default, seems less outrageous. Let’s call it what it is: defining mendacity down.

    Rosenbaum has written Explaining Hitler and more interestingly, the Shakespeare Wars. Wow, I just realized that I’ve already read several of his New Yorker pieces and his piece about ditching grad school to become a literary journalist.

    Dan Green published a 80+ page PDF about experimental fiction. He has several ebook compilations of his essays. I used to read his blogs a while back. I’ll be catching up on his older book reviews, and I’ll do a quick review of some of his literary criticism on Amazon. (most is available under KU).

    As it happens, Green wrote a long book review essay about Jonathan Baumbach who died recently (NYT obituary). About Baumbach’s most lauded work, Green writes, “ Finally the truest subject of Chez Charlotte and Emily is the marriage of Joshua and Genevieve, but unlike Baumbach’s other, later examinations of marital discord and romantic incompetence, this novel is able to realize the subject with the kind of formal ingenuity that fully confirms Baumbach’s reputation as an experimental writer whose efforts contributed to an enlargement of the conceptual possibilities available to adventurous writers. “ About his 2004 novel B, Green writes, “B is the Baumbach protagonist most transparently a stand-in for the author, so we should of course respect the metafictional distance B’s lowering of the “metaphorical disguise” paradoxically imposes, but B is finally such a familiar figure in Baumbach’s work, resembling so many of the other apparent surrogates in behavior and attitude, while the circumstances and events recounted in B so often echo the particulars found across Baumbach’s fiction, that the self-reflexive references to the protagonist’s vocation become more the essentially realistic details underpinning a work that itself never strays too far from its own kind of episodic realism. [Dzanc Books is selling some of Baumbach’s works as ebooks, Amazingly, there’s been almost no reader reviews on Amazon.com, which just goes to show you….]

  • Author Jack Matthews on the storytelling craft (Video)

    You might already know that my Personville Press publishes various fiction titles by Jack Matthews (1925-2013). A year before he died, I went to Ohio and interviewed him about various things. I shot some video footage as well as audio footage about his books and life as an author.

    Here’s one audio slideshow I put together of excerpts where he talks about a Worker’s Writebook . I recently published a second edition of it and even included a 2019 afterward.

    In the last 4 minutes, Jack Matthews reads a chapter from his ebook titled “The Pointedness of the Tale.”

    0:00 CAN A BOOK EVER TEACH A PERSON TO WRITE WELL?
    1:38 ARCHETYPAL THEMES IN LITERATURE
    4:04 HABITS OF GOOD WRITERS
    4:44 WHAT I READ AS A COLLEGE STUDENT
    5:33 MATTHEWS READ A CHAPTER FROM “A WORKER’S WRITEBOOK,” “POINTEDNESS OF THE TALE”

    I plan to produce several different slideshows/videos to accompany Jack Matthews ebooks. Some people are not into “video trailers,” but I generally enjoy hearing the author describe a book project in his own words. (I might produce a shorter version for Amazon, haven’t decided).

    As my last post indicates, the ebook is now free on Smashwords: Here is that information again: A worker’s Writebook by Jack Matthews. Ebook. (More about the ebook).

  • Introducing Robert’s Raves and Reviews

    Although it’s fun to link to lots of ebook deals (especially if I end up obtaining the ebook myself), I recognize that reviews are more useful to readers than deal announcements. So I’ll alternate my ebook deal posts with a column with links to many reviews (with a few I have personally written).

    Book reviewers are saints, I tell you. Reviewing books can be a thankless task — especially if you are busy with your own writing projects. With the explosion in indie titles over the past decade, it’s become clear how many indie titles are being ignored by national book reviews. Amazon.com and other places have provided a platform for overlooked authors to receive reviews. Horray! At the same time, these amateur reviewers (much as people may castigate them) are in short supply –especially as the number of books released each year continues to grow.

    Although I’ve written competent book reviews, I’ve never considered book reviewing to be my forte. To write book reviews, you have to do them regularly and with consistent standards. Also you have to get inside what the book is supposed to do — and sometimes that is a challenge.

    You also have to finish books — something I’m bad about — even for fiction. I read a lot, but mostly for a specific purpose (i.e., research for something I’m working on). I am constantly interrupting my reading to read other things. Short story collections mitigate the problem somewhat because all you have to do is get to the end of one story before leaping onto another book. I like reading novels, but do it so rarely (hey, I’m working on that, I promise!)

    Even when I get into some book, with all the interruptions it can take months to finish. I started Babbitt months ago and still haven’t finished it — though this is not the book’s fault. Should I review it? Committing to review something only adds to the burden of reading. Sometimes this burden is an acceptable one — especially for book titles which have been overlooked. On the other hand, does anyone really care about my opinions on Babbitt?

    I grow weary of longish reviews by the professional book reviewer. Sure, it’s good to have some cultural context or background about the author’s previous works, but not every book requires a review essay worth being published on New York Review of Books. Reading reviews shouldn’t be an intellectual burden. Also, you don’t really need analysis until you’ve finished reading something. These sorts of reviews aren’t particularly helpful for the initial “Should I or Shouldn’t I read this?” decision. From a promotional and informational perspective, sometimes a 1 or 2 sentence summary of the book’s premise and style is all you really need to decide whether to go for it.

    So I’ll try to write brief reviews when I can, longer things when I have more to say. But I’ll spend more time linking to book reviews by others — especially for overlooked/indie ebooks. I’ll also give a slight preference for Smashwords titles. (read my commercial disclosures here).

    Book reviews are much less time-sensitive, so I’m not worried whether the review or the title reviewed is new. Here are some categories that suggest itself.

    • Book(s) of the Month
    • Genre
    • Public Domain
    • Texas
    • Poetry
    • Creative Nonfiction
    • others?

    I’ve noticed that nonfiction books or topical books are easier to review; hence, I’ll avoid reviewing them (unless I can’t help myself).

  • Smashwords vs. Amazon: An ebook comparison

    Sept 2022 Update: Reflected to show the combined merger of Smashwords + Draft2Digital.

    The next two days will feature posts about ebook distribution and affiliate marketing for blogs. Today’s post will compare two leading ebook distributors (Amazon and Smashwords). Tomorrow’s post (which is here) will explore the dilemmas faced by a blogger in promoting purchases from one distributor over another.

    Amazon and Smashwords both sell ebooks, and lately I’ve been keeping a list of the pluses and minus of both distributors. Comparing the two is slightly absurd because ebooks are Smashword’s core competency (perhaps its only competency), while for Amazon, ebooks are just one part of its commercial empire. Amazon sells not only dedicated devices but creates apps for major mobile platforms. It sells digital content which you can own or stream or rent. It’s tempting to say that because Amazon is bigger, it’s also better. That’s not necessarily true. As a smaller (and more nimble) ebook provider, Smashwords offers several advantages over Amazon.

    Author-Friendliness

    • Author royalties for low cost books? Smashwords wins. (Below 2.99, amazon pays 30% to author, while Smashwords pays 50-70%). 2020 Update. Google Books is paying 70% royalties on all ebooks regardless of price and allows you to set price to free — which is a really big deal.
    • Buyer has full access and use of the purchased ebook file (without drm)? Smashwords wins.
    • Royalties on large file ebooks? Amazon charges a “file delivery fee” on large ebook files which essentially drive you to 35% royalties. In contrast, file size does not affect author earnings on Smashwords.
    • Supports epub — the international standard for ebooks? Smashwords wins. Amazon’s ebook readers and reading systems lets you import pdf, mobi and MS Word, but it plays dumb when it comes to epub files.
    • Allows free and pay-what-you-want ebooks? Smashwords wins.
    • Author can make coupons to distribute to fans? Smashwords wins. Coupon manager is one of their best features.
    • Offers ebook creation tools? Both suck, but amazon has more tools and Kindle Previewer for testing.Update: Now both have their own ebook creation tools and accept epubs directly. Draft2Digital has some very nice templates.
    • Author can put videos on book page? Smashwords wins. Amazon only lets you do it on Author Central book page
    • Affiliate marketing features? Smashwords has better rates and features, but a smaller customer base.
    • Author giveaways. Amazon requires authors to buy their own ebooks to give them away. Smashwords lets you make unlimited number of freebie coupons. Update: Upon request, KDP publishers can use price-matching to bring a price down to free (I explain how at the bottom of this long article).
    • Provide ways to produce printed books? Both do this now I believe.
    • Book page. Smashwords has much fewer distractions. Book marketing guru David Gaughran wrote, “As I write these words, there are currently 248 different titles on the product page of the Kindle edition of “Let’s Get Digital.” Between the ads, Also Boughts, Also Vieweds, Amazon promotion, and other links, there are hundreds of things that could distract a reader before they purchase.

    Consumer Side of Ebooks

    • Has a nice cloud-based solution for multiple devices? Amazon wins. Smashwords doesn’t have a cloud-based ereader, but the consumer has the freedom to import purchases into whatever reading system can read DRM-free ebook files. Smashwords also can serve files to Dropbox.
    • Offers ebook samples? Amazon wins. Smashwords occasionally offers samples, but it’s clumsy.
    • Is easier to get ebooks on a preferred device? Amazon wins. Amazon has built reading systems for almost any device. It will automatically forward purchased items to your device. Smashwords requires that you choose a third party reading system which you will manually upload the file to your preferred device and reading system.
    • Has price-alert tools? Amazon wins by a long shot. Ereaderiq and others.
    • More freebies? Smashwords wins. Amazon has lots of freebies too, but often they are temporary or made through special arrangement between a publisher and amazon.
    • User-friendly shopping cart? Amazon is better, but Smashwords paypal shopping cart has gotten somewhat better over the years
    • Offers a monthly all you-can-eat option? Amazon wins with Kindle Unlimited (KU). On the other hand, most authors on KU are promising to let amazon be exclusive distributor, which is wrong.
    • Lets you view word count? Smashwords gives exact word counts of ebooks it sells. With Amazon, it’s less clear how much content is in an individual ebook.
    • Easier for non-us audiences? Smashwords has one store for everybody; Amazon has different stores for each region. This sounds easier, but it also means that consumers are not eligible for certain promotions.
    • Resolves customer service issues? Amazon wins slightly. You can ask for an ebook refund within a week, which is extremely generous. Smashwords customer support tickets are handled very promptly (and I have never had issues with them).
    • Which ebooks are better formatted? Varies widely, but generally because amazon has a higher percentage of ebooks by professional publishers, their ebooks look better. 12/2019 Update: SW now allows direct uploading of more than one version of an ebook (i.e., mobi & epub), so now publishers no longer need to rely on the inhouse conversion tool to make ebooks –horray!)
    • Which has better ebook management/font options/annotation? Amazon wins simply because Smashwords doesn’t have a cloud-based reading system; you must choose your own solution. That said, Amazon’s reading system is powerful; it lets you organize by bookshelves and collections. You assign ebooks into one or more collections either from within the Kindle itself or the Amazon site.
    • Which website is easier to browse? Smashwords has many different ways to browse through and filter results. Often it’s easier to view ebook descriptions. Amazon used to be good, but they disabled audience-created lists. Amazon search results show a definite favoritism towards bigger publishers and those who have paid to advertise. On the plus side, amazon has autogenerated “also boughts” which show up on the ebook page; this occasionally can lead you to interesting titles.
    • Which let you browse by publisher? Smashwords is much better. On Smashwords, it’s relatively easy to view titles by one publisher (such as Fomite Press) You could search on Amazon, but often the results are harder to browse through.
    • Which allows lending? Tie. Amazon has a nifty lending feature, but most big publishers have disabled this feature. Because Smashwords sell everything without drm, lending is always permitted, though it must be done manually.
    • Can you keep your ebooks if the distributor goes bankrupt? Presumably Amazon is big enough not to be in danger of going bankrupt anytime soon. But unless Amazon makes alternate arrangements, it’s not likely that books bought there will transfer to another ebook platform. Smashwords lets you keep the ebook files and import them into another reading system later.

    Overall mindshare in the reading world

    I define mindshare as the benefits that accrue from a product having a bigger audience. How does the size of the audience enhance the service for customers?

    • Which has more reviews? Amazon wins by a long shot (but Draft2Digital customers can simply look at Amazon reviews too!)
    • More technical/professional ebooks? Amazon is the market leader Draft2Digital doesn’t even come close, mainly because until recently publishers had to use the company’s ebook creation tool. (Now, you can upload an epub file directly).
    • which has more ebooks and authors? Amazon has probably 10x the number, but prices on Smashwords are generally cheaper and quality freebies are easier to find.
    • Which have more name brand authors and publishers? Definitely Amazon. Draft2Digital has very few major publishers or authors. (Major publishers avoid distributors which lack drm)
    • Which has cheaper prices? Smashwords has more seasonal sales and deep discount sales. Amazon has more tools (inhouse-and third party) to manage pricing and promotions.
    • Which is publishing/promoting individual authors? Definitely Amazon wins. A few years ago, amazon started various ebook imprints — Amazon Crossing, little a, etc which has delivered many incredible low-cost exclusive ebooks to consumers. One week in 2018 they offered a dozen freebie titles of extremely talented international authors. Amazon has the big bucks and the inhouse expertise to pull off stunts like this. Smashwords has stayed out of the review/recommendation game altogether
    • which have more sexually explicit titles? Draft2Digital is much better. It has more liberal policies towards sexually explicit content while letting consumers filter what they want. Amazon has a lot of explicit content too, but I’ve heard some authors complain about Amazon blocking their ebook (or at least a ebook with a racy title or cover).
    • Which has the better book community? Amazon runs GoodReads which is an extremely active and book-friendly community (and not too centered around loving Amazon). On the other hand, Amazon is marketed towards everybody while Smashwords is marketed specifically at rabid ebook fans who are more willing to take a chance with an unfamiliar author, less likely to read the next bestseller. Amazon definitely has a long tail, but they also offer a lot of books by celebrities and right-wing pundits and self-help gurus. Amazon reflects the priorities of big publishers and bestseller lists, while Smashwords just offers a collection of random self-published authors who are trying to thrive outside of Amazon’s reach. On Smashwords you get a lot more amateurish stuff, but also edgier, less commercial stuff.

    Have I forgotten any key features for this comparison matrix? Feel free to add in the comments below.

    Feb 19 Update. I just noticed that Smashwords is making tweaks to customer-facing interfaces: wishlists, libraries, etc. This is a very good sign.

  • How I compile Robert’s Roundups

    View the post series | View the Smashwords deal roundups || Read how I compile this list. || How to Submit Smashword deals || How to Submit your own Ebook Deals in the Comment Section

    I  throw  these ebook deal roundups quickly so   often I won’t bother including links — just  names and titles.  Everyone here knows how to look up things on Amazon, right? 

    Most of the time I have not read ebooks  mentioned on these roundups.  On a daily basis I take quick looks at dozens (if not hundreds) of new ebooks at a low price and pick the titles that sounds most promising. If you want a clue about my reading preferences/biases,  take a look at   my book review guidelines.  My literary standards are lot more flexible and adventurous about low-cost or free titles. (Just this afternoon I bought an ebook about edible  insects — hey, it was only 99 cents!). 

    My main interests are titles under 50,000 words (25,000 words for  poetry), price  under $2, non-series and self-published or indie-published things. No hard and fast rules though. I am generally not going to mention books that are regularly discounted or very familiar to book lovers — unless the deal is exceptional.

    Outside the USA?  Most of the discounted titles and URLs in this  roundup  are for the Amazon.com US store. Unfortunately for non-US Amazon customers,  you may not have access to the free or discounted prices.  Sorry! On the bright side,  indie authors usually apply the same discount worldwide so you will probably see the same discount percentages. Also, bigger publishers (the main culprits behind these price disparities) have gotten better and more efficient about uniformly pricing their titles across markets. Unfortunately, the free-on-Amazon ebooks seem to be specific to the Amazon.com US store.

    Don’t like Amazon? Lately I’ve noticed that publishers are applying their discounted titles across bookstores. That means that it’s becoming easier to find the same price on Apple, Google, BN, Kobo, etc. Also, I am a big fan of Smashwords too (read why below).

    (more…)

  • How to Submit Ebook Deals in the comment section

    View the post series | View the Smashwords deal roundups || Read how I compile this list. || How to Submit Smashword deals || How to Submit your own Ebook Deals in the Comment Section

    Starting on the week of November 18, 2018, I will be posting regular lists of ebook deals that I have discovered recently.

    If you are an author and would like to make  readers of this blog aware of your under $2 ebook titles (or are  just an enthusiastic reader wishing to alert people to a great deal), I welcome your comments below the blog posts about these titles. Here are some guidelines. 

    (more…)

  • Ebooks — Changing the Blog’s Focus

    Even though this blog has been fairly dormant for the last two years, starting now I’m going to be doing a lot more reviews about ebooks.

    Let me explain.

    I continue to write fiction and produce ebooks for Personville Press. That keeps me busy. In the past decade or so, I’ve said that I just haven’t had time for book reviews — although I have always kept a detailed list of books I’m reading (here’s the 2018 list and goodreads list of recent reads).

    Even though books are the center of my life (and always have been), I haven’t felt particularly inclined to write book reviews. First, although I’m a “good” book critic, I wouldn’t call myself a great one — and more importantly, I am not a particularly fast one. It’s true that in the early 2000s I posted over a 100 reviews on Amazon.com, but a lot of them were IT/technology nonfiction books, and often I needed only to skim them to form an interesting opinion.

    Book reviews are so …. forgettable. I’ve published some great book reviews, but I’m too slow and careful; also, my memory for details isn’t that good. I’m no James Wood or Michael Barrett or Daniel Green or Dan Schneider or  Michael Dirda or Steve Moore. At the same time I have been writing a fair number of essays for the Personville titles, and although they are analytical and carefully written, they have an explicitly promotional purpose.

    In the early 1990s I used to write reviews for the Houston Post and maybe other small publications, but it was a thankless task. It can take 10 hours just to read the damn book, and 4 hours to write about it; who has that sort of time? My literary/film critic Michael Barrett can dash these things off, but for me, I’m not as glib about it. Also, I can get sidetracked by deeper issues of aesthetics and storytelling. For most of my life, it’s very hard to write a 500 word or even a 1000 word review. I can do it, I can even enjoy doing it, but others can do it much better.

    Over the last decade or two, some strange things have happened. Indie publishing and ebooks exploded, and the quality of book reviewers have declined. There are bloggers to take up the slack, but not entirely. For one thing, the “advance review copy” distribution apparatus has been extremely favorable to the NY publishing world. I have nothing against authors like George Saunders or Celeste Ng or Min Jin Lee, but individual books by these author have been reviewed THOUSANDS of times. Frankly, I tire of critics and bloggers who claim to have high literary standards and then review only titles available on Net Galley or Amazon Vine. I used to think NYTBR or Washington Book Review had daring book reviews, but that is not really the case; the reviewers themselves may be distinguished authors, but the books they review are often the same old books from Random House and FSG

    A Cost-Conscious Approach to Ebooks 

    As a literary cheapskate, I pay a lot more attention to the freebie and 99 cent titles by authors that nobody has ever heard of. This year (and maybe part of last year) I have rediscovered pleasure reading — and to my dismay I am noting the dearth of reviews about high quality indie or self-published titles. I just started reading — for example — a nice story collection by an Irish author living in Thailand and all kinds of special interest books which are lucky to receive more than 5 reviews. Yes, if an indie title has 5 reviews, 2 or 3 are by friends who rave about it, one is a random person eager to dump over a random author, and one is a shallow 2 sentence review by a reader with juvenile standards.

    I’m not saying that a book review needs to be long or in-depth. Sometimes just a paragraph is enough to convey the gist, but often we’re not even getting that. In August I was finding remarkable 99 cent titles from Simon & Schuster (i.e., a major publisher), and I was horrified to see how many titles weren’t being reviewed.

    One of the problems is related to reduced prices and reduced marketing budgets of indie authors. The bigger problem is the glut of titles and the declining demand for books in general. This may be an oversimplification; casual readers may simply be unaware of how many cheap ebooks are now available, so they end up paying $10 for a title with ample word of mouth. 

    Frankly, I am spending a lot of time searching/uncovering and promoting interesting-sounding books which I haven’t yet read. For the Simon & Schuster sale items, I did this because I wanted to let people know about the titles before they returned to their regular prices. But over this year I’ve become extremely comfortable recommending books that I’ve only read a chapter or two from. First, I’ve already researched these titles to know that I would like them and read enough to confirm this suspicion. I’m reasonably confident that my high opinion will be confirmed when I finally read them from start to finish. Consider the titles below:

    EXAMPLE:
    Nearly complete works of Donald Harington
    Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli
    Nothing remains the same by Wendy Lesser
    Life in the Lion’s Mouth by James Dubbs
    Love and Other Afflictions by Jonathan Finch
    Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett
    Broken Places by Susan Perabo
    New and Selected Poems by Charles Simic
    Marlene and Sofia by Pedro Barrento
    Soil by Jamie Kornegay
    Favorites by Mary Yukari Waters
    Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko
    My Last Continent by Midge Raymond
    South Street by David Bradley
    Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
    White Tiger on Snow Mountain by David Gordon

    Aside from the Simic and Dobelli title, I’ve only read one or two chapters from each title, and yet I’m pretty sure that all of them are going to be terrific! (I obtained almost all of these for 99 cents each!)

    About half of these titles (the ones published by Simon and Schuster) are currently priced at $12 or so (ugh!), but if you set up a price alert (on ereaderiq), you can almost certainly buy every title for under $3.

    The amazing thing about publishing today is that many high quality ebooks are very cheap. Seriously, if I had enough time, I could  make a list that is 3 times as long.

    My methods of finding good cheap ebooks are not esoteric. I subscribe to 20+ ebook deal newsletters (and actually read them every day!)  but really the only ones that matter (from the standpoint of indie publishing) are bookgorilla, bargainbooksy and booksends. For midlist titles from the bigger publishers, earlybirdbooks and bookbub will give you more low-cost ebooks than you know what to do with.

    Also: I have included my most useful ebook deal links on my blogroll to the right.

    Finally Amazon posts some remarkable deals, and indeed, every month it picks about 100 titles published by its inhouse publishing imprints and discounts them to 99 cents. I am not a fan of Kindle Unlimited/Prime Reading, but an increasing percentage of indie published titles are available to read through that.

    As if that weren’t enough, Smashwords publishes a lot of low cost/free titles that for some reason don’t make it to Amazon. Often titles are on both Smashwords and Amazon

    Certainly an ebook’s price is not the primary consideration when deciding on an ebook to read or buy. Some library enthusiasts say that the price of an ebook should be irrelevant to the consideration of the book’s value because …. can’t you find it for free from the public library?

    This indifference to the price of ebooks can be infuriating.

    First, I have library cards with three public libraries (two of which are well-stocked and well-funded). I can safely say that these libraries fail to buy about 80% of the new titles out there, and probably 95-97% of the new indie titles.

    Second, although I strongly endorse lending services like Lendle which facilitate the lending of Kindle ebooks, publishers of most commercial titles have turned OFF the lending feature for the Kindle version of their ebooks. (To its credit, lendle has been outstanding for sharing and borrowing titles by indie authors on Amazon).

    Third, public library systems have their own priorities about what ebooks they acquire. They remain susceptible to the promotions of the Big 5. Also, they have social and community goals (literacy, inclusiveness, political diversity) that doesn’t always result in the smartest of acquisitions. If you don’t believe me, go to your library’s ebook system and look up how many ebooks the library possesses of these authors: 1)Donald Harington, 2)Jack Matthews, 3)Ronan Bennett and 4)Barry Yourgrau.

    Next go to your library ebook’s system and look up books by these authors: 1)Ann Coulter, 2)Bill Oreilly, 3)Suzie Orman and 4)Stephanie Meyer.

    After you have recovered, taken a shower and (hopefully) gone to confession, you should understand how public libraries can fall short.

    For this reason, I’m going to invest more time in publicizing and talking about overlooked books (even if I haven’t actually read them!)   Usually this will take the form of book reviews, capsule reviews and roundups. For the last year or two I have been posting announcements about ebook sales on reddit, teleread and social media. Now though I’m going to try to put as much original stuff on my blog (and then copy them to other places).

    New Focus: Smashwords 

    Finally, I am giving special attention to the ebook distributor Smashwords.  I recently posted something about how my blog can help Smashwords authors.

    First, I am participating in Smashwords’ affiliate marketing program and would love to find a way to monetize this blog AND help other indie authors. (PS, Amazon’s affiliate marketing officially sucks!)

    Second, Smashwords is really the best alternative to Amazon.com at the moment.

    Third, Smashwords offers coupon codes and lets you price things temporarily for free. These are things not easily done on the Amazon site.

    Fourth, Smashwords offers DRM free ebooks — and EPUBs! Horray for ebook standards!

    I don’t want to sound anti-Amazon. Amazon is awesome to authors and publishers and readers. But so is Smashwords, and there is no reason why the quality of Smashwords catalog cannot be as high as or higher than Amazon.

    Finally and perhaps least importantly, when talking about ebooks on this blog, I’m not going to include an image of the cover of every ebook I talk about. Sounds easy, but actually it’s a chore to do — especially when you’re book blogging. Also, I like my home page to contain full articles (not just the first paragraph or two).  If I include a ton of ebook covers, that will just cause the website to load more slowly.

  • Cornyn: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    Cornyn: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    Dear Senator Cornyn,

    Friday, you said on the floor of the US Senate: “We will not be bullied by the screams of paid protesters and name-calling by the mob.”

    To my knowledge, it is not illegal for people to be paid to protest. I know that lobbyists are paid to make their opinion known to you. I know that political organizations provide grants and scholarships for research and opinion pieces. I also know that the overwhelming majority of people who participate in rallies are doing it not primarily for financial reasons but to express their political values. I’m generally fine with that. I know many people who protest without receiving any form of compensation. I also know that political activism is often organized by political groups, which requires some expenses (for signs, etc.) From my limited experience, I know that large donors have deep pockets, while the smaller organizations they support are often run on very little money. And the volunteers they solicit are certainly not paid at all (except through T-shirts and buttons and that sort of thing).

    Referring specifically to the Kavanaugh protests, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of protesters were not paid in any fashion. I have googled around and I have seen no supporting information about this claim (except for a gofundme set up to help defray Ms. Blasey Ford’s expenses — which seems reasonable under the circumstances).

    Yet you feel comfortable making this poisonous claim without evidence.

    Recently, I saw the above  photo which is hilarious/disturbing on so many levels.

    First, the men outnumber the women here! Second, these signs weren’t hand made; somebody paid for the t-shirts, signs and even the bus. Update: The 501(c)(3) “Concerned Women For America” which has a 2 score on Charity Navigator, is funded by the Koch Brothers network including Freedom Partners, the Center To Protect Patient Rights, Tc4 Trust, and DonorsTrust. (Source).

    Personally, I’m more bothered by these polite but well-funded activists  funded by fossil fuel billionaires than the rowdy people who probably had minimal access to this kind of funding.

    I have never voted for you, but it so happens that you and I both graduated from Trinity University (which I was able to attend only because of an academic scholarship).

    In early 2004, after a Republican Administration supported by you launched a needless war in Iraq on the flimsiest of evidence, there was a Trinity alumni event which both you and I attended. It was an event intended to help new alumni to do job networking. Your appearance was added to the agenda at the last minute.

    I’m guessing that at least half of the Trinity alumns attending had no idea that you were coming — much less who you were. Yet I certainly looked forward to the opportunity to shake your hand and express in a minute or so my concerns about what the US was doing in Iraq.

    As you know, some Trinity alumni are politically-minded, but we are generally middle of the road and follow a certain decorum at alumni functions. It was extremely unlikely for anyone to turn it into a protest or shouting match.

    To my dismay, when you showed up at the event (where 100 alumni already were present at), you promptly moved to a part of the house which prevented people from talking to you.  Talking to you was not the MAIN reason I was there, but I kept an eye out for an opportunity to have a minute of your time. This event was for job networking — talking to strangers for 1 or 2 minutes was PRECISELY THE POINT of this event.

    As far as I know, during that event, you talked to NOBODY. You didn’t shake  hands with anyone but the event’s organizer; all you did was come up to the front when you were introduced. 

    At that point, you talked for 4-5 minutes about returning from a trip you had just made to Iraq and what great things the US government was doing there. You talked about how proud we should be of US soldiers in Iraq. At that point, you left.

    Your hasty departure left me speechless. Was the whole point of your visit to lecture Trinity alumni about how great the war effort was?

    Perhaps on that particular day you were feeling unwell, or had personal business to attend to. But  I was always struck by your rushed exit.  You didn’t even make a minimal effort to meet with and talk to people who basically had no axe to grind or message to deliver. Trinity alumni are not necessarily representative of   Texas demographics; to be frank, many are affluent and Republican-leaning. Yet I was a loss to understand why you were so unwilling to talk to any of them. Do you treat your constituents merely as people to lecture at rather than to listen to?

    Personally I’m outraged about the Kavanaugh hearings for a variety of reasons.

    First, on substantive grounds I thought Kavanaugh’s rulings on environmental cases was crazy and dangerous. I was concerned that Kavanaugh was involved in numerous partisan activities that was unbecoming for a judge.

    Second, I think the Senate and White House blocked the releases of a lot of records related to Kavanaugh’s past.

    Third, I thought Kavanaugh’s testimony about the accusations was belligerent and immoderate; some of his answers bordered on the risible.  This is not the desired temperament for a Supreme Court justice.

    Fourth, the way the Senate and White House attacked the accusers was pretty awful. I thought Ms. Swetnick’s claims were very credible. Even if they didn’t implicate Kavanaugh directly, they came from one of many eyewitnesses who say that Mr. Kavanaugh engaged in a considerable amount of drinking and boorish behavior in high school and college. They suggest a pattern of youthful behavior which I found disturbing. I am Kavanaugh’s age and like him attended  an all-boys Jesuit high school  — and yet I never drank. Most of the smart and responsible people I knew at Strake Jesuit in Houston rarely or never drank. As much as I would like to say that people outgrow their excesses of high school and college, I have to wonder whether Mr. Kavanaugh has properly owned up to his past and whether other  judges with less excessive pasts are out there.

    Fifth, I was really disturbed by the way  Senate Republicans released sensitive sexual history information of Ms. Swetnick, a witness who made a very serious claim about Kavanaugh’s behavior in high school. The National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic violence condemned this practice: 

    We are appalled and outraged that the Senate Judiciary Committee leadership has released a statement about comments of a sexual nature allegedly made by Julie Swetnick. Such a statement is unacceptable in all events, but particularly because it attempts to smear someone who has not had the opportunity to be interviewed by the FBI. The release of this statement violates the intent of the Rape Shield Rule drafted by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 and voted into law by Congress in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994. This federal rule is meant to safeguard the victim against the invasion of privacy, potential embarrassment and sexual stereotyping that is associated with public disclosure of intimate sexual details and the infusion of sexual innuendo into the factfinding process. The Senate Judiciary Committee has posted this statement on its website, in violation of the spirit of its own Rule.

    In a sworn statement, Ms. Swetnick states she was sexually assaulted. Yet to date, she has not been interviewed by the FBI. Nevertheless, Senate leadership has engaged in a no-holds-barred personal attack on her. It is not unusual for a survivor to describe an experience of sexual violence in ways that do not reveal the full reality of the experience or to try and normalize the experience. However, even aside from these very common reactions, it is unthinkable that the Senate Judiciary Committee would have released this statement publicly and attacked her in this way.

    I have written you in the past about climate change and health care and possibly other issues. In general, your position have upheld corporate interests and showed a lack of concern for the underclass.

    Perhaps you have been listening to the wrong kinds of people.

    Robert Nagle is a Houston writer and blogger who dreams one day of being paid to protest — or  being paid in general.  He runs the ebook press, Personville Press. 

    Update 1. Washington Post debunks the nation perpetrated by Trump and others that Soros is bankrolling Kavanaugh protesters. 

  • CATS ON FILM by Anne Billson (BOOK REVIEW)

    CATS ON FILM by Anne Billson (2017),  300  pages with illustrations. Author’s Website and Book Blog 

    Ebook: Amazon/Smashwords  . Price: $6.99

    Print Editions: Used copies are available, but with ebooks so cheap, why bother?

    Summary: Critical  look at movies with cats in them. The book is a real hoot to read — great insights and erudite movie  snark.

    Recommended if you like:  Quirky film references, anything catty, Disney movies, horror movies.

    CATS ON FILM gives a delightful and irreverent tour through world cinema from the standpoint of the cats who appear in it. This book grew out of a blog with the same name and  does not take itself too seriously. The book introduces various cat archetypes: CATAGONIST, HEROPUSS, CAPANION, CATZILLA, PUSILLA, CATRIFICE, CATGUFFIN and many more. To be honest, I am not particularly a cat lover (they’re ok, but…), and I had  hardly given a second thought about cats in film until picking up this book.  Probably the only movie I could think of with a cat theme would be CAT PEOPLE, and this book doesn’t talk about it at all except parenthetically.  What a shock it was to see discussions of so many movies with significant cat cameos.  THIRD MAN, NYMPHOMANIAC (!), Kieslowski’s BLUE, the GODFATHER, the original POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, the original FLY, LA DOLCE VITA, STRAW DOGS,  CLOCKWORK ORANGE (!) 1900, PROOF,  TRUE GRIT, DAY FOR NIGHT, AWFUL TRUTH, GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (!), THE LEOPARD, and many, many more. My first reaction was, wow, there are cats in all these movies? Aside from HARRY AND TONTO, I had hardly noticed them!

    This is a logical and well-organized work — you can find a list of film discussed at the logical Table of Contents at the beginning (though it would have been better to have hyperlinks).   It can be fun to stumble upon the unexpected, and the book itself has  glorious color photographs and helpful labels like “Major Cat Movie.” Clearly Ms. Billson writes with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema (she has also published several movie guides and writes about movies regularly for the “Guardian”). I found new insights about movies I thought I already knew (or at least, I thought I did!) I  now know about a lot of obscure films simply because of the odd fact that it has a cat in it.

    Because Billson already is an accomplished novelist (specifically in horror, mystery, vampires and other things), the book has unexpected bonuses. For the movie ALIEN she does a brilliant interior monologue of the same story from the cat’s point of view. (You remembered that there was a cat in that movie, right? I didn’t!) For the movie INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, the book has a nice extended piece (The Moggyssey) teasing out the Homeric aspects to the plot. (By the way, I totally did not remember the movie having a cat in it!) For STUART LITTLE, she makes a tongue-in-cheek proposal to change the title of the movie to “Snowbell” (because the cat  character is more interesting and complex). Billson writes:

    Since Hollywood is largely run by dog people, cats are often relegated to secondary characters with bad attitudes, typified by animated propaganda such as LADY AND THE TRAMP, CINDERELLA, TOM AND JERRY or MERRY MELODIES shorts featuring Tweetie Pie and Sylvester, which try to brainwash children into thinking cats are evil or stupid, while dogs, rodents and birds are virtuous and should be given carte blanche to torment the felines.

    These creative takes are fun, clever and interesting.

    The book spends a lot of time on cats in genres like horror, James Bond and kid’s movies (which is to be expected). I particularly appreciated Billson’s speculation about the cats themselves as opposed to the role they are expected to play in the movie. She guesses when more than one cat is used for the same cat character in a movie (like THIRD MAN) and provides horrifying backstory about how cats were actually mistreated during the shooting of the film (as in ADVENTURES OF MILO AND OTIS).

    This clever book is based on a conceit that cats are more than story props. It’s an intriguing (though now obvious) idea. Fake soliloquys notwithstanding, I don’t get the impression that the book is trying to anthropomorphize the cat characters; it is just suggesting an alternate and yes, a more compassionate way to read movies. The book is a celebration of cats for what they naturally are in mainstream movies; At the same time, there’s more than enough  obscure Japanese, European, animation and old genre movies described here to make the ardent film buff happy.

    RELATED: I also recommend the illustrated book of fairy tales, A Cat may look at a King

  • Stop — Don’t Stop!

    (I performed this story at the Houston Liars’ Contest about 6 months ago).

    Last Friday I was taking a walk through my neighborhood when I happened to lean against a stop sign.

    To my surprise, the sign started tilting, and before I could do anything, it fell into the street.

    “You idiot!” a voice cried. “Look what you’ve done.”

    I looked around but saw nobody except the cars passing. To be honest, I didn’t know what to do. Should I report it?

    “Get me up!” the same voice cried.

    “What?”

    “Why did you push me on the ground?”

    As strange as that seemed, the voice seemed to come from the stop sign —  or a tiny speaker attached to it.

    “Get me up! If I get run over by one of these cars, you’re going to get in big trouble!”

    The Stop sign was tall and heavy. I lifted the sign  and the pole  onto the grass, but it was too big and heavy to  return to the upright position. The stop sign itself was barely hanging from the bracket.

    “Well, aren’t you going to apologize?”

    “Sorry,” I said.

    “I can’t believe you broke my bracket. You owe me!”

    “What do you want from me then?” I asked.

    “Well … I hear the new Star Wars movie is out.”

    “What?”

    “Rogue One. All the kids are talking about it.”

    I didn’t know what to say. “So you want to watch the Star Wars movie?”

    “That’s right.”

    “Can’t you just wait until it comes out on DVD?”

    “No, it’s always better at the theater.”

    Just then a bird came over and landed on the sign sign.

    “Stop that!” the sign yelled. “Get him off me please!”

    I swung my hand in the general direction, and the bird flew away.

    “Stupid birds!” the sign yelled. “They never obey street signs. All they do is flutter around, sing those annoying songs and land on your head when you’re trying to take a nap.”

    “Don’t worry; the movie theater is indoors — no birds.”

    I felt  self-conscious about carrying the stop sign into my car.  But once we were driving, that stop sign became a chatterbox.

    “Can you turn the radio louder? I love that Lady Gaga! Why don’t you ever clean your windows? Look — Detour ahead!”

    My stop sign buddy had an annoying habit of reciting the words on every single sign he noticed. “Speed Limit 35 mph. Hey, there’s no parking there between 4 and 6. Stop! What time does the movie start? Yield! Stupid human drivers.”

    We were at the movie theatre. I carried the stop sign to the ticket booth. “One please,” I said.

    The teenage worker looked confused. “Sir, are you bringing that inside?”

    “Yes,” I said.

    “Hey, you forgot to buy me a ticket,” the stop sign said.

    “You don’t need one.”

    “But that’s not fair! I deserve my own seat.”

    “Fine, you want a ticket? I’ll get one. But no more complaining. Two tickets please.”

    We entered the movie theater, ignoring the stares from people around me. As I passed the concession stand, I said, “I suppose you expect me to buy you popcorn too.”

    “Of course not,” the stop sign said. “Who ever heard of a stop sign eating pop corn?”

    The theater was fairly crowded, but there were still good seats.  The stop sign, I am sorry to report, kept bugging me with questions.

    “Which one is Darth Vader? Who is that guy? Is this supposed to be the best episode? Why are there no stop signs on that planet?”

    “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t like stop signs.”

    “Barbarism! No wonder the Imperial Force is beating them.”

    At the end the audience applauded, and the stop sign rattled a bit too.

    As I brought him to the car, the stop sign said, “What’s next?”

    “What do you mean, ‘What’s next?’ I fulfilled my end of the bargain, so I’m bringing you back to the intersection.”

    “But it’s early.”

    “Too bad!”

    “I didn’t want to bring this up, but as a talking sign sign, I do have some special abilities. If you agree to be my chaperone for the rest of the day, I have the power to grant you 3 wishes.”

    I thought about it a moment and said, “Ok, what would you like to do?”

    “I’d like to see a game.”

    “What kind of game? Like a game at a stadium?”

    “Let’s just go to a park or something where we can watch people play basketball or volleyball.”

    “Fine,” I said.

    We went driving to a nearby park, and the stop sign says, “I’ve heard a lot about this thing called Bowling. Also, the people are always talking about Frappucinos. Can you find one for me?”

    “I suppose.”

    “Branson — is that close to here?”

    “Not at all.”

    “Hey, yield!” the stop sign shouted.

    “Yes, sir,” I said. “By the way, my name is not “Hey.” It’s Robert.”

    “Robert?” the stop sign repeated. “I guess you want to know my name too.”

    “What is it?”

    “It’s Stoppy McStoperson.”

    “Really?”

    “No, just kidding. My name is “Fleetwood Mac.” Like the 70s rock band. Really, that’s my name. What can I say? I’m a product of the 70s. My parents call me Fleet. Oh, stop there! Stop! Stop!”

    “What is it?”

    “That stop sign we just passed — she’s a knockout! Did you see her angles? They’re a perfect 45 degrees.”

    “They all look the same to me,” I said.

    “You have to turn around and introduce us.”

    “Ok,” I said, parking the car. I carried Fleet to the stop sign at the corner. Immediately Fleet starts conversing with her.

    “Comment se va?”

    “Bien merci.“

    “Are you speaking French?” I asked.

    “Of course!”

    Then he whispers, “Hey, Robert, I think we’re really hitting it off. Maybe you could bring her along to the park?”

    “Even if I wanted to,” I said, “I don’t have tools to remove the sign.”

    “At least can you tilt me over so that our corners can touch?”

    “Ok.”

    I move the sign over until one of his corners touches with one of hers. I hear giggling and random bursts of “Je ‘t’aime.” “Tu es belle.” …“Tu me manques.”

    “Time to go,” I said.

    We find a park two blocks away. The basketball courts are empty, but I see a small baseball game played by boys who  looked like they were in  7th or 8th grade.

    “That looks like a good game,” Fleet says.

    “Sure,” I say, carrying the sign over to the field.

    At first the boys pay no attention, but it doesn’t take long for one of them to notice me there.

    “What are you doing with the stop sign?” the boy asked.

    “Long story,” I said.

    The stop sign peppered me with questions. “Why are you out after 3 strikes? What happens if the catcher doesn’t catch the ball? Why do they call that guy the short stop? He doesn’t look like a real stop sign to me — and he’s very tall.”

    Finally, the stop sign said, “Maybe you can ask them if I can play too.”

    “You gotta be kidding me.”

    “They have the home plate — they let him play. Why can’t I take his place?”

    “Home plates have to be a certain size,” I explain. “Plus, you’re red!”

    “Oh, sure, bring that up again! People are always discriminating because of your color. Can’t you just ask them? And remember, if you can’t persuade them, don’t expect to get your 3 wishes.”

    Now, I’ll be honest with you. I wasn’t entirely confident that this stop sign had the power to grant wishes. I gave it a 50% chance. But I had already figured out my three wishes. One involved a new home. The other involved solving climate change. The third involved a weekend getaway in the Canary Islands with movie star Parker Posey.

    I called out to the teenagers.

    “I got a strange proposition, ” I said. “If you’d play baseball and use this stop sign for home plate, I’d give you –” I opened my wallet, “One hundred — and sixty — dollars.”

    All of them look quizzically at me. Finally the pitcher says, “Is this some kind of YouTube prank?”

    “No, it’s legit… The money is yours — it’s easy money.”

    The pitcher calls a huddle. Finally, the pitcher turns to me and asks, “Can you pay us in advance?”

    “Sure.”

    “Play ball then.”

    I put Fleet down where home plate is supposed to be and watch them play. Before the pitcher starts his windup, I hear, “Hey, Batter, hey batter batter, Swing.”

    Either I’m the only one who hears Fleet’s chattering  or the rest of the players were ignoring him on purpose.

    One team got a batter on third. The score was tied, so everybody was on their guard.

    “Stay alive outfielders!” Fleet  yelled. “Easy Out,  easy out.”

    The next batter hit a fly ball into center field. The outfielder caught it, but noticed that the runner was rounding third and charging to home. The catcher stood guarding home plate with the ferocity of a bulldog. The outfielder hurled the ball, but it was too high! The catcher could not reach it, and the runner rushed to touch home plate.

    But then the stop sign stood upright and started running – at first randomly and then in the general direction of first base. For a while, the runner was confused, but as the catcher tried to tag him out, the runner realized that he still needed to touch home plate for the score to count.

    So he ran after Fleet, and so did the catcher and pretty much the whole team. Then I realized something. If this stop sign got away, I wouldn’t get my wishes. I wouldn’t get my dream vacation with Parker Posey.

    “Stop!” I called out. “What are you doing?”

    But Fleet paid no attention.

    “Fleet! Stop! Come back!”

    Fleet paused for a moment, then announced melodramatically, “All of you guys look at me and say, he’s just a stop sign, but I’m different from all of you!

    “I Don’t Stop Thinking about tomorrow
    Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here
    It’s be better than before.
    Yesterday’s gone, yesterdays gone.”

    After that dramatic speech, he dashed away, probably in search of a Frappuccino. And I never got those 3 wishes!

    CC licensesd Thecrazyfilmgirl

  • TITASPEED: A new acronym for chat

    TITASPEED is an acronym which means: “Texting is too awkward; speaking produces easy effective decisions.” It is useful in chat and email.

    TITASPEED: Acronym for “Texting is too awkward; speaking produces easy effective decisions.” When used in a text conversation it can mean

    1. I recommend speaking over the telephone to discuss this matter.
    2. I feel that answering the original question as a text message oversimplifies the matter considerably and may provide misleading information.
    3. I am way too busy to provide a detailed answer now. A telephone call is more convenient for me.

    Here is the context when it is needed.

    I have noticed the tendency of some people to try to ask  questions via text which requires complex answers.   Sometimes a person will text this complex question because they know that answering it fully is impossible; perhaps they honestly fail to appreciate the effort involved to give an adequate answer. The asking of this complex or open-ended question thus places a burden on the recipient to either oversimplify or to spend a lot of time writing an answer.

    But this is an unfair burden on the recipient. In rare cases, it may be necessary, but more often  complex thoughts, directions and nuances can be more effectively communicated over the phone. (Yes, I realize that face-2-face is even better, but that is rarely practical).

    I faced this question often in email communication as a technical writer.  When you ask a question via email, you are placing a burden on the recipient. Sometimes this burden is necessary and useful, but sometimes it asks the recipient to do more work. Recipients sometimes assume that emailed questions are better because the recipient can answer them asynchronously, but actually the opposite is the case because when writing, you have to give a complete answer to take into account every possible nuance.

    Responding  to emails is cumbersome; that is why it is good for the asker always to give the recipient the choice to answer by text or by phone. 9 Times out of 10, it is easier to communicate by phone; the reason people avoid doing so is that they usually fear getting sucked up in a longer social conversation.  The problem is, texting or emailing a series of questions can be extremely awkward and confusing; when you talk, you can check for understanding or clarify something right then rather than having to write something in reply.  Often the responder has no idea what the asker doesn’t understand. But when you are actually talking, it is easier to pinpoint the source of the misunderstanding.

    I have written before that  texting messages is an inefficient method of communicating — and should be limited to a small number of contexts. Alas, people are relying more on their phone and voice-activated dictation to communicate. This has a cost; it can sometimes take forever to arrive at a thought, and it can be tedious for the recipient to engage in such a strung-out conversation.  Asynchronous and abbreviated conversation can be useful when you seeking a specific bit of information (the room number, the cost, the flight number) and the matter is  not terribly urgent.  Also, it can be useful when you are sure that the person is actively checking messages. But often that isn’t the case.

    The TITASPEED acronym is a short way to communicate your belief that having a text chat is an inferior way to have a conversation.  More generally it can make people ask themselves what is the best way to seek information and advice.

    Overcoming TITASPEED

    In order for the questioner to avoid burdening the recipient with the burden of replying, the best way is to ask a detailed YES/NO question. It is not a burden when the recipient merely needs to type 4 or 5 words.

    Text Example:

    “Blah blah blah X Y Z blah blach thingamajob.” Is this statement an accurate way to describe the functionality of a thingamajob?

    No.

    Actually when I did this as a technical writer, I was surprised at how often technical experts who were usually unavailable would suddenly find time to throw together two or three sentences to explain what is wrong or missing with my original statement. Sometimes it can be helpful to throw together something half-right because it makes clear what information you are missing.

  • Hook Up Hysteria, Abstinence, Absolutism and Snap Judgments

    (Here’s a post I wrote 2 years ago and forgot to publish).

    You don’t actually have to read the original article,  but the complaints on CNN  about the alleged outbreak of hookups are more insightful (and funny).

    I had taken Matt to be making fun of the way these articles about the “hookup culture” are set pieces that have been written the same way for decades. The articles always take the same same basic phenomenon (college kids having sex with people they barely know while drunk), wildly overstate its prevalence, and write from the perspective of (invariably female) students who aren’t interested. Invariably the article presents the “hookup culture” as some novel phenomenon, despite the fact that people have been writing the same article for decades.

    The “date” is dead as a phenomenon on college campuses, but there are scads of students who engage in romantic, non-hookup dating. Invariably these articles ignore those couples in favor of interviewing (female) students who complain that all the guys are interested in is hooking up. The possibility that the interviewees are unrepresentative is never explored.

    This article is a perfect example of the genre.

    ***

    This is one ridiculous piece of journalism. It makes me think back to the tripe that the Vanderbilt Hustler used to put forth back before I recently graduated, I reference the Hustler because Ms. Boyle used to write some of the most jaded and noxious columns in the editorial section, and this piece wreaks of that similar stench. Raging at Vanderbilt? I went to Vandy, I was in a fraternity, and I drank and partied quite a bit, most undoubtedly more than others, but Vanderbilt is one of the more tame campuses you are likely to find. Furthermore, the hook-up culture is pervasive. That they would pick a small private school where the average cost of attendance is over $50,000 per year as a microcosm of university life is ludicrous. Next, that they would reference one student taking a stand against hooking up and incorporate "true role models" like Lady GaGa, illustrates the short-sighted nature of this article. Who the heck cares what someone chooses to do or not do? It’s none of my business. All I know is that decrying the hook-up culture on college campuses does nothing to put an end to it. There’s drinking to be done in pretty much any college, and drinking promotes bad decisions. However, it’s a lifestyle that some, like myself, chose, and to tell you the truth it’s really pretty lame to hear this tired old rhetoric time after time. Seriously, what utter garbage

    ***

    The report states: "An April 2010 study from James Madison University in Virginia revealed more college women tend to want a relationship out of a hook up compared with men who prefer to stay independent." Note to James Madison University – you actually needed to conduct such a study to find this out??!! Note to everyone else – make sure you don’t attend this university!!

    ***

    Of course the article most certainly not written by a dude….

    ***

    If you find inspiration from Lada Gaga to maintain your celibacy, YOU’RE A COMPLETE IDIOT. Period.

    ***

    Wow imagine going to school to learn….wow!!!!

    ***

    this poor girl just committed social suicide

    no she didn’t. haven’t you seen any John Hughes movies? she’s going to hold out. the cool jock is going to try to woo her. then he’s going to change his ways and they’re going to fall in love.

    ***

    Dating can be expensive, especially if you’re a guy and you have traditional women expecting you to foot all or most of the bill. If women want to go on dates, about they invite us and pay for it. As a college student living on a budget, I’d rather spend my five bucks at a frat party and get laid. As long as you’re protected, it’s a lot of fun. For every chick who gives up on hooking up, there are thousands more who welcome it. Gotta love freshman girls.
    Plenty of time to go on awkward dates and $80 dinners (appetizers, main course, wine, dessert for 2) after college when we actually have jobs (if we get lucky with this recession).

    ***

    I’m deeply, deeply disappointed that the link to Lady Gaga declaring her celibacy is dead.

    ***

    Over the years I’ve grown sick of these kinds of articles and the false morality they profess, as well as interviews with alleged experts. I think an article can and should be written about the topic, but you can do without delving too deeply into lurid  details and  actually offer  insights about what dating on campus is actually like. I have less of a problem with abstinence per se than those who are promoting it and shouting down those who refuse to see things in black and white.  Abstinence is not really an abstract decision but something arising from your situation and the people involved. The problem with “abstinence” is that people tend to regard it as a good in and of itself. But of course it’s not intrinsically good (except for ministers and monks).   It’s not a bad thing either; I regard it as neutral.

    I once faced a dilemma about a dating profile on eharmony.  A woman’s profile was moderately interesting (and curiously, one of the few without a photo). But her profile sounded more interesting than 75% of the others on eharmony. She was 33 or 35 or 37 or something like that, and she specified in her profile that she was dedicated to the idea of “No Sex Before Marriage.”  The question become: should I respond to this ad?

    I hemmed and hawed. Frankly, the thought of  meeting a woman who refused the very idea of  sex before marriage did not particularly bother me  (I mean, I had already been celibate for quite some time, so a year of no-sex dating would not be an undue burden). On the other hand, I had complex views on the subject and merely because I agreed to contact her/go out with her did not imply that I necessarily agreed with her point of view: it would merely mean  that I would be willing to make an exception in her case. At the same time,  her statement of principles would compel me to state my own principles prematurely. I could easily anticipate a first date consisting only of a discussion of why she promoted no-sex-bef0re-marriage and why I had reservations about it.

    I didn’t want to have that kind of conversation, especially on a first date. It  was (to put it crudely) a dick-shriveling topic. It took the excitement out of the romantic pursuit; it turned the focus away from attraction and romance towards religion and condemnation. Practically speaking, I probably talk to lots of women who are determined not to have sex before marriage; they just don’t wear this belief on a sign!  The fact that this woman on eharmony was announcing it on her profile meant that she was establishing it as a filtering mechanism towards all future husbands. Maybe her intent was simply to ward off casual dating, but it served also as a signaling device. If the woman had absolutist positions regarding sex, just imagine what her positions would be about politics/art/career/ the environment.

    Frankly, if I had met this person at a party and I never knew about her beliefs, I might have gotten to know her better. Who knows? That’s the  thing about online dating. In many instances, I acknowledged that my own criteria weren’t correct, but sometimes you have to make snap  judgments.

    At college I dated a lovely girl whom I surprised one day …. lighting up a cigarette!   She had been hiding her habit from me because she thought (accurately as it turns out) that I was very anti-smoking. It’s true. I almost never would view a smoker as a potential life partner. But when I discovered her subterfuges, I realized that my unspoken rule about smokers just didn’t matter in this case.  This girl  was a great person in every other respect; it would be folly to exclude her from my affections just for that . (As it turns out, her religious beliefs made her oppose premarital sex as a matter of principle, so I guess abstinence  really does exist on campus).

    Online dating is one example of the follies of snap judgments. But there are many instances where initial impressions mislead. Looking for a job is a classic case of this. A perfectly qualified person can have a lousy interview or lack sufficient number of  buzzwords on the resume, and still turn out to be a great employee. I’m currently hiring voice talent for an audio play, and frankly, I’m not sure whether my criteria for choosing a candidate will result in the best qualified candidate getting the job. In fact, they all look good in their own way.

    Two years ago, I decided that I would no longer apply for any technical writer positions in the fossil fuel industry.  I had been reading a lot about climate change and remain convinced that the fossil fuel industries were contributing to the problem in a huge way. But now that I have set my core principle of values, how do I implement it? Practically speaking,  I find that many kinds of companies in Houston are embedded with the oil and gas industry in some way, and it  is often  hard to draw the line. What if a company merely provided software for the fossil fuel industries? What if a company merely provided IT services? What if a company were providing safety inspections for an oil rig and needed someone to write the safety manual? What if  a company designed software which could be used by oil companies, but also on many other kinds of projects? What if a law firm wrote and reviewed leases for oil companies, but that was only about 40% of their business? These are real-life examples where the ethical dimensions are not clear cut.

    The problem comes when your discriminating principles don’t allow exceptions or flexibility.   I almost never read genre fiction; frankly I find science fiction to be a bore – although I’m occasionally surprised. Intellectually, I know that a certain percentage of writers in any genre are doing amazing things; in fact I almost delight in stumbling upon someone in a genre who is actually writing outstanding things. Literary genres are a marketing construct; do I really despise “chicklit” as much as I assume? (For the record, I greatly enjoyed Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City”). Legal thrillers, spy novels, YA. I don’t know what these terms actually mean – and I guess my problem is more with the low ambitions of people who write for these genres. At the same time, we need labels to separate things into different piles, or else we would go insane!

    When you buy something like a cell phone, you are dealing with a known set of features. The options may be ridiculously complex, but essentially we all know what 2 MB Camera or “free weekend minutes” mean. But when you are selecting a book or an employee or a romantic partner,  you are dealing with a infinitely complex set of features.  I haven’t read Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice yet but it’s hard to deny his central argument that  the endless number of options can be paralyzing for the consumer. Instead of giving him more freedoms, they give him more stress. 

    The irony is that most of these differences are minor. Often when I buy software or devices, I end up agonizing over features or specifications which I rarely notice or use after I make a purchase. I need to buy a laptop, a subject that I am generally familiar with.  But there are dozens of brands and dozens of cost-reducing or cost-increasing features which I need to sort through.   I need to read customer comments  and also consider how this laptop might run in Ubuntu. I also  need to consider where exactly I will buy this product and the general reputation of the brand (and distributor).

    Then again, I can simply visit a local computer store and buy something. Ugh!  I have $800 to spend. What’s the best thing in the store? I can take the thing home in 2 hours, and as long as I don’t fret too much about better and cheaper products for sale at other stores, I’ll be fine. I like how online stores   use faceted Search  to let the user feature out certain products (“8 gigs or more” or “Between 100-150$”). At the same time, this sort of precise filtering leads manufacturers to cheat a little. So a laptop may have 8 gigs of RAM but have a crappy CPU (something the consumer wouldn’t know enough to look for).  I can go onto a Slashdot page and hide all the results which were ranked 3 stars or lower. This basically guarantees that all the comments I see are interesting and relevant. But it also means that I am missing a lot of insights because – let’s face it, the best comments rarely get the karma love they deserve.

    Taking shortcuts is necessary because frankly we rarely have enough time to consider our options as closely and carefully as we would like. Maybe it was for the best that I chose to filter out smokers on match.com; I didn’t want to face the time burden of distinguishing between smokers who were not health conscious and the rare pretty and liberal and generally health-conscious woman who still smoked but was trying to quit. I was once dismissed by a match.com woman who wrote a polite but pointed reply saying, “My ex was a clueless playwright. I have no interest in dating artistic types anymore.” 

    Ouch. I guess it feels different to be on the receiving end of a snap judgment. I have been trying to promote an author’s ebook and I find curiously that many decent critics rarely review ebooks or even indie-produced ebooks.  It must be a book by a well-known publisher. Is that fair? No. (Indeed, I would argue that that it makes these people less effective critics).

    It’s possible to waste a LOT of time reading a mediocre book. But how allergic are you to mediocrity? If you wanted, you could read nothing but Nobel Prize winners (and maybe National Book Award winners if you tire). Using that criteria exposes you to a lot of interesting and profound literature, but is that enough? It exposes you to only a small number of literary types. You end up missing  so many things, so many different ways of looking at the world.

    I used to be extremely fussy about what I read.  But  this fussiness presupposed that my initial impressions (based on packaging and book reviews and literary awards)   guaranteed  quality (or at least, what seems to be quality to me).  A book cover can signal many things about what a book is about, but a bad book cover doesn’t signal anything. Anyway, the ultimate goal of reading is to read a good book, not  something with a good cover or critical reviews.

    One curious result of this ebook revolution is that there are now oodles of free and low-cost ebooks, most of which are crap. But there are also lots of high quality free titles out there – as long as you’re willing to look and take  chances. Yesterday I downloaded about 50 free titles from the free page for Amazon. I regularly go to Inkmesh to download the free Nook titles (my preferred device).  Truthfully, I don’t read most of these free titles, and even the ones I read I barely finish. But I’m grateful to have access to these kinds of freebies.

    Time, time, time. Everything  boils down to time.  Lately I have been ripping a lot of CDs, both from the library and from CDs I bought. I read consumer guides to music, and even though I enjoy flipping through these things, one can’t regard them as gospel.  For example, Village Voice critic Robert Christgau has reviewed a LOT of music. Most of the albums he assigns an A or A- letter grade to are pretty good, but he overlooks a lot of good stuff (and even mocks them sometimes).

    I often will put on hold music CDs  which have been recommended to me by  critics and find them unremarkable. At the same time, I will randomly pick random albums off the shelves and discover remarkable things just as often (see this, this and this)

    Dating is supposed to be a serious choice. Hook ups are supposed to represent a failure to exercise good judgment and yes, taste. Alas, I have spent way too much time refining my tastes in all realms, even dating….and am I the better for it? I don’t know. I don’t know.