Barnes & Noble is considering selling Nook to Microsoft. I think this is B&N getting ahead of the curve here, actually.  It’d be nice if they could keep getting some sort of share of sales of ereaders, but I don’t think there is a huge future in them. With tablets becoming more ubiquitous and more powerful, and the screens getting better, needing a dedicated reading device is going to become more and more unnecessary. At that point, does B&N have the infrastructure to be a player on the global tablet market against the likes of Apples, the various PC tablet makers, and Amazon? I don’t think so, and I’m guessing they are seeing that writing on the wall. They have been able to use Nook to keep afloat, to weather the storm of the initial push into the digital age, and now they need to find a way to establish themselves as booksellers in this market rather than technology sellers.

It’s at this point that finding some sort of partnership with MS makes a lot of sense. MS is big enough to run with the hardware end, and the software end comes naturally.  Also, B&N can become a bit of  a gateway to content for MS, depending on where B&N wants to take itself I’m a bit under the weather and my head is still pretty cloudy from lack of sleep, sickness, overmedication, and coffee, so it is a bit difficult to get my thoughts organized about this. However, it seems MS wants the next xbox to be even more of a media hub. Part of that is print – books, magazines, whatever. B&N seems to be a natural gateway for that. If they can find a way to scratch eachother’s needs, it could be hugely beneficial to them.

Haruki Murakami translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese, and here is something he wrote about it. I’m a Murakami fan and a Gatsby fan, so this was pretty much up my alley. A good read.

Okay, I don’t have as much to talk about as I thought, so I think I’m ending it here.

CNet has a quick article up about Tor’s success with digital books with no DRM.  I think the proliferation of DRM has helped give Amazon a leg up on the digital world, and the publishers have been making a huge mistake in not moving away from DRM. They have fears that if their digital books aren’t protected in some way, that there will be rampant piracy of their works. But it hasn’t happened with Tor. And it shouldn’t have been expected to happen.  You just have to look at the music industry to see how successful DRM is. Or the movie industry. With the piracy of media, I think it’s more a question of desirability. I just don’t see a big market for pirated written works. There is something about music and movies that are like the soft drinks of cultural consumption. You get them, you devour them, you move on. now, sometimes you will re-watch a movie, or listen to an album a few times in a row. If you’re dedicated to those forms, maybe you write a blog about them, or you post at a message board dedicated to them, but there isn’t a huge time investment with either of them. It is a bit different with the written word. It takes time to work your way through a novel, or a collection of stories, or even a lit mag. It’s a sort of investment that I think lends more readily to people investing monetarily in it rather than pirating it, because the time/effort investment is higher. Maybe piracy is less of a problem for books because people who are interested enough in books to invest in an ereader, and to find them online, are more okay investing their money into something they feel they get adequate value from.

More international titles are being published in the US. Not surprisingly, the rise of digital media is paired with this. I’m a fan of international literature, I try to read what I can, when I can and what I enjoyed most about attending AWP a couple of years back was buying some international titles I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. And it’s always a good thing to see literature crossing more lines.

Finally, 45 fan designed covers for The Great Gatsby. I liked the novel, I’m not a fan of what I’ve seen of Luhrmann’s upcoming movie (wasn’t a fan of Moulin Rouge or Romeo + Juliet, either, so maybe I’m just not a Luhrmann fan).

For one, it’s a good novel, especially a first novel. At the same time, I couldn’t read the whole thing. It bogs down in the middle where I just lost interest. I ended up literally skipping pages because nothing was really happening. This sounds horrible, and I know it might turn people off entirely, and that I don’t like giving negative reviews (and sort of promised not to, especially for new authors, etc.) but it’s still a good read. It’s still worth picking up, and it might just not be up my alley as far as style and genre goes.

So, what is it about? It’s about a husband and wife, the trials of being married, and each trying to find happiness, purpose, etc. The husband tries it through secretly writing a novel about a husband secretly wishing his wife was dead and devising ways for it to happen but not be culpable. The wife eats a lot, and then tries to change that. there’s also a story about a detective whose past mirrors that of the main character’s current life in many ways.  The wife, of damn near everyone, ends up dead, and unraveling the hows and whys make up the last 3/4 of the novel.

As I said, I just got tired around halfway through and started skimming/skipping. Part of the problem was the novel, but part of the problem has also been the amount of time I’ve been able to allocate to reading.  It was read in twenty minute bursts, and it made reading it drag out. at the same time, I feel that probably a hundred pages or so could have been cut off and it would have been all the stronger for it.  It drags. It repeats. The bit with the detective/doctor is labored. There are times where it feels like Mr. Ross had two ideas for where the novel could go, and instead of picking one and running with it, he tried to fuse them together. it just didn’t work for me.

anyway, not a glowing review, but I encourage anyone to check it out.  It at least tries to do something, it’s a bit risky with its form, and it’s a decent read.

Go buy Mr. Peanut from Barnes and Noble.

I don’t want a new prequel to The Shining. What made the original Shining movie great wasn’t Stephen King, it wasn’t the hotel, it wasn’t Colorado. It was Stanley Kubrick directing Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duval, and Jake Loyd. Want proof? Look at the more recent tv miniseries.  To pile on the negatives, this wouldn’t have King’s blessing and it will be based on material even he cut from the original book.  Want to do a horror movie set in a hotel? Great. have at it. Just leave The Shining out of it. And, for God’s sake, get good people involved.

I don’t want Amazon getting involved in every damn part of media experience. This includes television. I’m complained about Amazon enough, but on this level I feel roughly the same about a handful of companies owning the majority of our television and radio stations, how our newspapers are being swept under larger and larger umbrellas, how cable/phone companies have increasingly monopolies, etc. It’s never good when one company has their hands in too many cookie jars.

I don’t want to never read another Roger Ebert blog or tweet. I have Ebert’s RSS feed in my google reader, something else I don’t want to see go away, and I haven’t ready any of the posts that are still marked unread. I’ve read them on Ebert’s actual blog site, but through the reader. Because then they would no longer be unread. And they would disappear. I don’t want them to disappear. I watched Siskel and Ebert, and I was crushed when Siskel died. I never warmed to Roeper. I became a devotee of Ebert’s website.  He was really the only the movie critic I bothered to read any more. I’ve found his like/dislike to be a fair barometer of how I will enjoy a movie. Right or wrong, I found that I often agreed with him on whether or not a movie was worth watching. We probably disagreed on why, but if he liked a movie, I was reasonably confidant in it. Now, well, I don’t know.

Alright, I think I’m done. Just an ugly day, and I feel gripey. Had to get it out of my system, I guess.

that was a half hour ago.

I’m not real thrilled right now with where we bought these things, but mistakes happen. It’s just another mistake/problem, though, tacked on to a laundry list of problems lately.  I think I’m going to give up on getting either today, and go lock up the basement door.

edit: about three hours after my initial call, the lady I talked to from the store called me back and asked if anyone had contacted me. When I told her no, she put me on hold, and got me on the phone with someone. I gave them my information, and they seemed a bit lost trying to figure out what happened to my washer and dryer and offered to call me back in a few minutes. Forty minutes later I got a call from another person who seemed to be part of management who apologized a lot, and told me that the part that needed fixed didn’t arrive when the repairman was there. The part has finally arrived, and the repair guy would be out again next Tuesday, and picked up for delivery on Wednesday. I’ll get it Friday. so. Yeah. My washer and dryer are still at the store. waiting for aknob to be fixed (a knob that requires the entire control circuit board to be replaced). Some day I will have a washer and dryer.

I tried to fix a toilet. It was leaking between the bowl and the tank, and after deciding it wasn’t leaking from the bolts that connect the two, I figured it was the gasket between the two. So I got the gasket, and an extra set of bolts, just in case. Everything went awesomely well. I got the tank dried out, I got it off the bowl. I replaced the gasket (the old one was cracked down one side and looked rough in general). I got everything back together. I flushed it. And the fill valve/ball failed. So I go to Lowes, and buy a new fill valve kit that is supposed to be compatible with any toilet. Okay, great. $15 for this, and the $10 or so I already spent on the other stuff, is still far cheaper than buying a new toilet. The problem is that while it’s apparently compatible with any toilet, it’s not compatible with any overflow tube.  whoever did the internals originally used an overflow tube that had the flapper literally built around it, instead of off to the side like pretty much every other overflow tube/flapper on the market. So now I have to either get a new overflow tube, or go back and buy parts to piece meal the entire system together. I’m getting a new overflow tube and will have essentially replaced all of the guts in the toilet. Lesson learned. Whenever you have to replace one big component in a toilet, just buy the kit and replace all of it. Saves hassle and money in the long run.

I’ve also been busy cleaning up the basement. It’s a mess. It doesn’t appear to have been cleaned in years. It’s frustrating, it’s aggravating, and it feels like it never ends. It sucks. But I know I’m making progress. I need to go down and finish sweeping it up today. get some more junk out of it. Etc. Then I can start looking at patching holes and maybe putting a topcoat on to level it. I can also start cleaning up the section of the basement that has a sandstone floor, which is also where I need to use a couple of floor jacks to level the kitchen floor. I’ve found a website that is supposed to teach me to calculate dead and live loads, which I can use to determine who big of a beam I should use. So, soon I will be delving deep into the realms of math. I’m not looking forward to this.

On a slightly related note to cleaning up the house, our trash hasn’t been collected this week. Apparently teamsters are on strike, it hasn’t been resolved, and so my big blue container is just sitting beside the road, waiting. I finally fired off an email to the trash people today, bitching about it, and asking how they are going to refund a week’s worth of their payment to me for the lack of service. I got a call back in like ten minutes, and they’re actually taking more than the week’s worth off my next bill (though apparently because it’s easier to take a round amount off played a fair part in this decision). However, I still have a bunch of trash that needs to be put into its big blue tub that is currently full with last week’s trash. As you can imagine, the amount of trash is a bit higher than normal since we’re cleaning up a house that has been vacant for a year and was nearing foreclosure.

Publishers are starting to complain a bit more about Amazon. Here’s my problem, though: they might bitch about it, but what are they doing about it? Not a whole lot as far as I can see. They need to wade into the digital retail space, and assert themselves. Either work harder to make another site (like B&N) the place to buy books, or set up their own sites.  Of course, this doesn’t touch Amazon hauling in cheaper editions from other regions, their tax advantages, etc. But I don’t see publishers really moving to fight those problems, either. What I see is an industry that is crying and moaning while the rats nibble it to death.

No on is talking enough about CISPA. It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does that people get so riled up about the government possibly putting restrictions on buying a gun, but you barely hear a word over things like the Patriot Act, CISPA, etc. The government takes away our civil rights piece by piece and that’s fine, but threaten to restrict what rifle we buy…

Speaking of gun control, yes, senators are cowards. there’s been some talk about why, about how the NRA is too powerful, etc., but I think what it really comes down to is the horrible gerrymandering we allow to happen every ten years when the census come around. Whoever is in charge takes the opportunity to create the most ridiculous and advantageous districts imaginable to all but guarantee the election/re-election of folks in their party while limiting whatever gains are likely possible by their opposition. It creates an environment where 90% of the population might favor something, but senators and congressman only have to worry about the fraction of the populace that actually votes for them, and often only the fraction of that from their own party. This is because with the ridiculous redistricting maps, they are more vulnerable to challengers from within their own party than in the general election. So we have politicians pandering ever more to the extreme elements of their own bases because they know that trying to gather votes from across the aisle is a losing strategy. Want better legislation and better politicians? Put redistricting in the hands of third parties or in bi-partisan coalitions.

Okay, and I just discovered that the coupon for 10% off my next purchase at Lowes isn’t working. So, despite wanting to buy my crap online and just have it shipped to me, the cheap part of me is thinking that I will  have to print off my list of stuff and drive over to the store and buy the stuff in person and bitch about the coupon not working. Which I’m not looking forward to because I really don’t care for one of the people working the customer service desk who is really the least helpful person I’ve met at a customer service desk anywhere. On the other hand,  I could probably bring the lawnmower home with me and be able to mow the yard tomorrow.

Also, Sears has not called me to set up a delivery time for tomorrow. This does not fill me with hope and confidence in Sears.

Financial regulators who managed to find no reason to go after Wall Street executives who caused the 2008 financial crisis...are now getting jobs on Wall Street. Shocking.

There’s a first listen on NPR of the new album by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, Love Has Come For You.  I’ve been listening to it as I write this blog up, and it’s good. At the very least, go to NPR and give the album a listen. It’s 40 mminutes of Martin on Banjo and Brickell singing.  Yesterday I was watching a youtube clip of Steve Martin on the Tonight Show in 1978 with Johnny Carson, and the artistic journey he’s made is pretty amazing. I don’t know enough about music to comment on Edie Brickell, though I’m probably going to look up some more of her music after listening to this.

Alright, I think that’s all for now. I need to try to be mildly productive in other areas for awhile.

On the other hand, I finished nearly all of my grading this morning. And I think I tracked down the shut off valves to the second floor shower. At first I thought they would be concealed in closet of an adjoining bathroom, because that would make total sense.  So, I removed a loose panel in the closet, and was confident I would find a couple of knobs to turn. Well, no knobs.  there were these bizarre upside down copper udders, though. Did some looking through Lowes’ website and found that they are supposed to remove knocking in the lines from air. Kinda neat, actually, but an odd thing to see for the first time. I think I’ve found the cutoff valves in the basement, so when it warms up a bit, I can start tearing apart the tub faucet to see what I need to replace. I’m hoping the shower head is just clogged, but I think it’s going to more likely be the cartridge.

Also, I need to fix the toilet in the half bath. It won’t stop flushing once it starts. An easy enough fix, really.

More adventures in the basement. I hauled the majority of rubber backed rugs out of the basement yesterday. We think they played a role in deteriorating the cement in one third of the basement. In the middle third, they covered a couple of spots where it seems a previous owner tried to use a sledge hammer to level out the natural stone floor. Yeah, not sure what the was going through their heads and why they didn’t just go rent a grinder to take the high spots down slowly. Or, if the sandstone floor bothered them that much, why they didn’t just replace it with cement when they poured floors in the two other sections of basement.  It was definitely bizarre, and a bit disheartening to see the floor damage. Right now we’re thinking of hammering out the two spots that are damaged and seeing if we can find replacement chunks of sand stone to drop in.  Then I discovered that they managed to store more…stuff?… in a couple of crawlspaces in the basement under an addition they did. So I have to haul a small step ladder into the basement to boost up into these crawlspaces to haul out lord knows what. Yay.

On the non-house front, ebooks now make up 23% of all book sales. Not only that, but book sales in general were good. the digital market will continue to grow, and it becoming the dominant format is likely inevitable. At the same time, there is a tangible, tactile quality to paper bound books that is undeniable.  I still haven’t bought an ereader or tablet, I’m not sure when I ever will, but the market is undeniable.

Entertainment Weekly has an article up about a possible Shining movie prequel, and they got a couple of quotes from King about it. King doesn’t sound thrilled, and I don’t really blame him. For one, it’s not going to come close to Kubrick’s masterpiece of horror. Secondly, who cares about what happened to the previous caretaker? We know that already. Dude went nuts, axed his family. If they want to do something at the hotel, fine, but just take it out of The Shining world and use new characters and new events.

And Jeff Bezos with a letter that I disagree with. He can try to dress up his shop window and make it look like a part of the community of publishing/writing/etc., but Amazon is the new WalMart. If you were ever against Walmart because of how they drive smaller stores and companies out of business, you have no reason to feel differently about Amazon. While the publishing world certainly doesn’t do itself any favors with how it has approached the digital transition, Amazon has played an active role in hastening their downfall and turning small(ish) mistakes into catastrophes. It’s not all about the customer, it’s about control and it is about dominance, and in the end it’s about making as money as possible. If you’re going to shop there, either admit you don’t care or that you can’t afford to care. It’s okay, I couldn’t always afford to care, either. But now I can, so I make different choices.

Finally, something else I want to talk about that is a bit off the beaten path: Fox and CBS might become cable networks. The whys of it don’t particularly matter to me, but if you’re curious, it’s a good blog post from SF Chronicle. What I want to do is to pair this with the news that the city of Santa Clara is going to have free wifi. From my understanding of the history of television, the government essentially gave the broadcasting airspace to networks provided they give time back to the public in the form of providing the news. So, for basically an hour a night. And for decades it’s been a steal for the government, in that it has allowed for a populace informed about the nation and the world at a relatively low cost and high access. However, that has changed over the past decade or so. This isn’t about the quality of the nightly news, but the rise of the internet and the connected world. Television has become less important in our every day lives, at least in the sense of sitting down in front of a television and watching your favorite show at 9pm on Tuesdays. If you’re like me and my family, you don’t have cable, dish, or antenna. You just get all of your info from the web. You have a twitter feed you keep track of, you have a facebook account, you’re tapped into various rivers of information.  The problem is that this connection comes with a price. Here it seems to be anywhere from $30-120 a month. Thirty bucks doesn’t sound like a lot, but compare that to the nothing people are accustomed to paying for their broadcast television and their ability to get the news every night for nothing other than sitting through some commercials. And the Washington Post had a report from back in February about how the FCC wants to buy back some of these airwaves from broadcasters to set up a national free wifi network.

And this is why it is important. Not so we can surf gawker for free, but so that our populace – a populace becoming increasingly urban – can benefit from the sort of free access to news and information that previous generations of Americans benefited from. Would it eat into profits for wireless carriers and giant telecoms? Almost definitely, but it’s also entirely in the public’s good to push forward with such initiatives. This isn’t about getting something for nothing, but about knowledge and access.

For one, we bought a house. We moved into the house. We’re still in the process of unpacking, cleaning, fixing. And it’s like three and a half weeks later. After we bought the house, the wife got really sick, a boiler that heats half the house essentially failed – rendering said half  uncomfortable as all hell to be in, let alone do all of the things you have to do to move into a place. there was Easter, which was fun but which also killed a weekend. The weather still sucked. We bought a washer/dryer that will now be delivered a week later than it was supposed to because the repair guy couldn’t fix a broken knob and had to order parts. And the kid got sick with something entirely unrelated to what the wife had. So…yeah.  we moved, and life just sort of fell apart the past few weeks.

Meanwhile, I’m still trying to maintain my job, fix supper, etc. To fix supper, I have to journey back and forth between two halves of the house, because it was divided up for an inlaw suite. Right now we’re living in the inlaw suite. The fridge is in the main part of the house. Hence having to go back and forth just to fix a meal.

Sooooooo, I’ve been busy. That’s really all for now. Time to try grading.

Which are the negatives. The positive is that the rest of the collection is a good read. The first story, “Pilot, Copilot, Writer,” is a gentle wading into the literary lake Gonzales put together. It is told through the eyes of the unnamed Writer aboard a plane hijacked by the pilot and forever circling in the air over Dallas thanks to a briefly mentioned perpetual oil. It’s something that makes for a nice short story,but also begs to be pulled out, expanded upon, to a novel about the drudgery of such an existence. This might be the biggest complaint against the collection – none of the stories feel solid, singular, as if they are one contained piece that says something. I don’t think this is something that is peculiar to Gonzales, but is fairly spread around contemporary short fiction.  A lack of definition seems to be in vogue right now, leaving stories open to radical interpretation or maybe meant to reflect the undefinable nature of modernity, though a lot of that hits a hollow chord for me, a noise that reverberates but doesn’t resonate.

The cover story is probably the most fully realized story that works best. In it, a man who works somewhere that specializes in miniaturizing things (literally shrinking fullsize objects down to much small scales) accidentally miniaturizes his wife. We’re then treated to a timeline of escalating violence between the two before we are given an ending where the man has apparently shrunk himself down to journey across the house to his wife’s “territory” with the desire to throttle her.

Maybe my favorite story in this collection is “Life On Capra II.” I might just be way off in my interpretation, but I swear it’s a story about a video game told from the perspective of the main character in the video game. There is a soldier on a wildly hostile planet with swamp creatures and robots, and endless supply of weapons and ammo that the soldier is amazed he never runs out of . The reason for being there is bland, characters seem to re-spawn with each new “level,” and the destruction doesn’t seem to affect some characters (such as the love interest) at all.  Maybe this wasn’t what Gonzales was shooting for at all, but it’s what I took from it, and I think the openness of the style works very well with the idea of a never-ending, continuously re-spawning video game world of fighting robots and swamp monsters, while seeing your fellow soldiers do wildly stupid things, get blown to bits, only to be there again at the next level.  Another direction I was curious about is if the name of the planet is in any way tied to the director Frank Capra. I can’t really find it, but maybe it’s there. It also closely resembles Caprica, the homeworld from Battlestar Gallactica. Maybe it’s a play on that, too.

This review ended up sounding far more negative than I intended it to. The thing is, despite the flaws that come up now, when thinking about it in retrospect, I enjoyed reading it more than the George Saunders collection I recently reviewed, The Tenth of December. Saunder’s collection was better, unquestionably better for my money, but it wasn’t as enjoyable. So, check this guy out.  It is a very good collection, he is a very good read, and it is most certainly worth the time and effort. Hell, I even accrued library fines because of my desire to finish it. And I’m a cheap bastard, so that’s a pretty big deal.

As always, the B&N link to the collection is below and I collect no monies from my suggesting/whoring them.  B&N Miniature Wife: And Other Stories

Tenth of December (TOD) didn’t start off well for  me. The first story, “Victory Lap,” felt gimmicky and tiresome when it began. It seemed to be more concerned with its flair than with its story, though of course part of the story is the flair. the first handful of pages lacked balance, though, and I was tempted to just skip to the next story and see if it was any quicker off the line. I stuck with it, though, and there came a point where Saunders just sort of hit his stride and the story took off. He found his balance, and the story just worked.  I think it was the moment the third character, the would be murderer/rapist, enters the story.  Until then the story was like a table with only two legs, doomed to always topple over because at least three legs are required for stability (bonus points for anyone getting the KitH reference).

Then I just sort of stuck with the collection. None of the stories are bad, but the first time I picked the book up and flipped to the table of contents I couldn’t truly recall what each of the stories had been about aside from “Escape from Spiderhead.” I didn’t recall this story because I enjoyed it appreciably more than any other story, I’m not sure why I recalled it at all, but the rest of the stories blended into a haze. Flipping through the book and re-reading a page or two here and there would later bring each story back to me, allowing me to fill in the bits and pieces of what I had read, but they still didn’t create any real lasting impression.

If you’re a fan of Saunders, I’m going to guess that you’re going to love this collection. If you haven’t been a fan of Saunders (like me), this might be the collection to get so you can say you’ve read him.

Barnes and Noble