So I’ve decided to add a new category to this blog. In honor of Mr. Alistair Cooke, I will now post “Letters from America” in which I try to explain what the hell is going on here to people who may not be watching 18 hours of cable news a day while surfing the Internet.

I will be starting this work in earnest next week, but meantime I have to meditate and cleanse in preparation for the upcoming International 3 Day Novel Competition, which begins at 12:00 AM on Saturday, September 4.  It would also be a good idea if I maybe wrote an outline or something (which is legal) prior to the contest, but because they actually invited me to enter this year (as a prize for making the short list last year) and I didn’t have to shell out the fifty bucks, I am completely unmotivated.  This probably has to do with my being an American. If something is offered for free, we don’t value it. Charge us, however, and we will line up like the born suckers we are.

Meantime for those of you wondering why Sarah Palin is still in the news, who Glenn Beck is and what’s all this about mosques on hallowed ground, not to mention why a sizable number of Americans are convinced the President is a secret Muslim from Kenya, I’ll leave you with some reading material.  Last week’s New Yorker offered a brilliant article  by Jane Mayer, Covert Operations exposing the shadowy billionaire brothers Koch  who along with Rupert Murdoch are responsible for a lot the disinformation being spread around.

I also blame the Internets and cable television. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that many people no longer get even slightly credible news from the networks or newspapers or magazines, but instead rely on Fox News and right-wing blogs.  These gullible saps swallow whatever swill they are given no matter how ridiculous. Even mainstream news outlets such as CNN have taken to inviting wingnut bloggers with no legitimate credentials or expertise to lie freely on their airwaves.  A good source for anyone wishing to find out more about this is Media Matters.

Finally, Obama was wrong about at least one thing. There is not one America.  There used to be a North/South divide, but Dixie culture is spreading.  There is a racist element that has felt disenfranchised ever since the end of slavery and for whom the election of a black President — even one with a white mother who was mostly raised by his white grandparents who were both from Kansas (Kansas for Chistsakses!) has proved to be too much.  Many of these people haven’t been involved in the political process before and are being brought in by the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.  While it’s hard to imagine that they have anywhere near the numbers to elect her president, it would be foolish to underestimate the possible damage rousing this rabble can cause. It’s already enabled a virtual shutdown of congress and there have been several incidents at mosques and other hate crimes.

This ignorant element was called the “boobswasie” by H.L. Mencken, an American journalist best remembered today for his quip that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people” — which I believe Palin may be adopting as her campaign slogan.  As a journalist, he covered the Scopes Monkey Trial, the first time that the teaching of evolution was on trial.  The trial was a pivotal event in American history because Clarence Darrow defended Scopes and Williams Jennings Bryan took the prosecutions’ role.  Evolution lost by the way, but Scopes got off on a technicality.  Years later there was a play dramatizing the trial and later a well known film. Inherit the Wind. Gene Kelly played the Mencken like character in the movie.  It’s more than a bit dated, but I’d recommend it to anyone trying to a handle on the current situation.  Here’s a clip:

This deal with the devil was predicted in the original film version of The Manchurian Candidate when Angela Lansberry finally explains to her son the plot that will lead to her sides’ being “swept into the White House with “such powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy.”  That’s one way to prevent socialism and thwart the liberal agenda.  (Anyone know if Pam Geller has kids?)

Here’s the proof:

It was back in the 1980’s. I’m not sure of the year, and if I were, I wouldn’t tell you because it would make me sound ancient, but it was sometime before we all had PC’s, before even the big boxy cell phones.

In those days there were still companies like Wang that made one-function computers called “word processors,” and the people who worked on these machines were also called “word processors,” and the ones who did this only on occasion while imagining they were destined for better things were called “temps.”

Yes, dear reader, I was a temp.

My specialty was Wang, and though I wasn’t the world’s fastest typist (that means keyboarder children), I was good enough to sometimes join the elite who worked graveyard shift. Graveyard was almost exclusively at large firms. The pace could be quick, but often there was lots of downtime waiting for lawyers and paralegals to make their changes. Sometimes the computer “system” would mysteriously go “down” and people would sit around for hours on some corporate client’s dime. There were perks like free food, and many companies would pay for a car service either to or from the office. There was also a fat hourly pay differential.

I wasn’t getting a lot of night work, so I decided to expand my skills by learning another word processing program. This one could be done on a regular computer like IBM and was called, Wordstar. Unlike Wang — an ancestor programming-wise of Word — Wordstar was command, not menu driven. I’d taught myself using a book in a friend’s office and was good enough to pass the temp agency test.

My first Wordstar assignment was at a small firm located in midtown on the 19th floor of the Chrysler Building. There was no car service offered, so I drove in from pre-hipster Williamsburg in my 1972 Dodge Dart and easily found a space good till 8:00 am when I’d be out. This was not like my Wang gigs. I arrived and found a tiny office with just one other temp working who was about to go off shift. Like me she was somewhere in her twenties. Unlike me she was African-American a bit zoftig, with braids. She immediately started telling me how she was really a writer and had had a meeting with Spike Lee. She kept calling him Spike and was very excited. She didn’t ask me about my own ambitions or dreams, and I remember thinking that she was either insane or soon to be famous. Strangely, as it would turn out, the latter was true and this was in fact an encounter with greatness.

The lawyer came in, and Suzan-Lori-Parks left. He wasn’t so old either and explained the assignment to me. He’d be bringing in more copy and edits throughout the evening. It was a very important contract and due in the morning. I got started. He’d come in with more stuff, kind of nervous. Sometimes I’d walk down the hall to where he was working to ask a question. Often he was in the bathroom. This was not uncommon. Lawyers working the night shift during the 1980’s seemed to spend a lot of time in the bathroom and often emerged with new found energy, but they tended to have a very short fuse.

At some point, I had to do some repaging and I ran into a problem. The problem was that I was completely without a clue. I had no idea what to do. It was the middle of the night and I couldn’t think of anyone who could help. Well, one person maybe, a friend who was a professional word processing supervisor, but I didn’t have my phone book with me, and I couldn’t get an outside line anyway, and this was before cell phones and the Internet and he probably would have been sound asleep.

The lawyer came in more on edge because it was now getting very late. I stalled. He left. I tried a couple of things but couldn’t figure it out. I went back to look for him, ready to confess my incompetence, and scared for my safety. He was in the men’s room again.

I looked down the hall at the office I had come from. I looked at the men’s room that the lawyer would emerge from any second. I looked at the silent elevators which required a key that I didn’t have and the lawyer in the men’s room did, and then I looked at the emergency fire exit door.

I opened the door. No alarm sounded. I made my way down one flight of stairs after another. Strangely, I emerged on the street almost right in front of the Dart. I got in and drove home as dawn broke in New York City.

For a while I screened the calls as they came through the answering machine. I didn’t hear anything from the temp agency till about two weeks later. I picked up. They wanted to send me out on a job. I told all to the very nice counselor who hadn’t heard about my disgraceful behavior.

She replied, “Well, Freed Frank requested you and that’s Wang. We won’t send you on anymore Wordstar.”

I don’t know what happened to that lawyer when his document wasn’t ready that morning. Maybe they got Suzan-Lori Parks back to save the day.

So happy weekend to all however you celebrate and enjoy the links.

New Yorkers are a peaceful people. Even in the midst of Post 9/11 hysteria, hundreds of thousands of us came out to protest the war in Iraq.

We are tolerant of different religions and customs. Clerks in department stores say, “Happy Holidays,” not because they are anti-Christmas or Christian, but because it’s inclusive and courteous given the diversity of our city. Go to Jackson Heights and you’ll see Indians and Pakistanis who share a culture, if not a religion living peacefully side by side.

We are even tolerant of the many visitors from other parts of the country who believe that “Ground Zero” is a tourist attraction.

But we have no tolerance for people like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin who have taken it upon themselves to lecture us and bully us about how we should live. We’re also not too crazy about warmongering former mayors, who snicker at our “cosmopolitan” ways to prove their Republican street cred, weighing in on this either, and we despise the hypocrisy of suburban congressmen who have  their own checkered history of support for violent terrorists.

In our city, building decisions are made locally by community boards consisting of people who actually live in the community. It’s none of your business where a religious institution wants to build a community center or house of worship. We think it’s bigoted and goes against our values to suggest to a church, synagogue, mosque, Buddhist or Hindu temple, etc. that they are not wanted or “don’t belong” on a particular street or in a particular neighborhood.

We understand your “values” may be different than ours. They may in fact be different from those of the founding fathers of our country, and you certainly have a right to hold those opinions however repugnant we find them. But we also have a constitutional right to tell you to shut the &*%@ up already and stop telling us how we should live our lives.

So after endless discussion and debate — internal and external, I finally bought a Kindle DX.  As my regular readers (I’m talking to you Kirkland and Walsall) know, I love books – the look and feel of them, the way they turn to dust and crumble in your hand. I love used books that have yellowing paper that breaks off if you try to fold a corner to save a place. But there’s only so much room in my apartment.

Why a Kindle? Why not a Nook, or Sony E-Reader, or Brand X, or I-PAD?

After reading the recent New Yorker article on Bezos v. Jobs and Big Publishing, I decided maybe it was worth supporting Amazon. If we’re all going to be reading e-books in the future, it would be nice to be reading them cheap, and Bezos at least acknowledges that it costs much less to produce an e-book than a print book and some of those savings should be passed on to consumers.  As a print consumer, most of the books I buy are discounted or more likely used. I like the idea of more cheap content, and Amazon offers droves of it. As a writer, I love that Kindle offers easy access to self-publishing with 70% royalty, which also deserves supporting.

I get the utility of the I-PAD as an easy display to show off your photos, watch movies, surf the web, etc.  It’s great for reading art books, graphic novels and those “books of the future” with lots of live links including to video clips, photos, etc. However, for reading words on a page,  the Kindle is far superior. No backlight, good contrast, and lightweight.  It doesn’t give me a screen headache.  Call me a relic, but I’m fine surfing the web on my computer, and if I had unlimited income I’d buy an I-PAD as well, but for reading books and other texts, this works best.

I chose the DX, a big price jump from the regular Kindles, because I wanted the screen size. The Nook, by the way, doesn’t come big.  I’ve always been farsighted and since passing into my decrepitude, small print has been a lot of work. The DX allows me a full screen of text displayed in a reasonably large font.  It’s a nice size for reading and storing work-related PDFs and an alternative to printing them out.

What I’ve Learned So Far:

Proofreading. Who knew?

One thing I didn’t even think would be useful is the “text to voice” feature. Just as an experiment, I turned it on to listen to my  novel, Loisaida. Despite having proofread several times the old-fashioned way and with friends as readers, I was suddenly “seeing” a ton of errors and formatting inconsistencies I hadn’t caught before. I was able to note them using the mark-up feature. It’s awkward for editing as you can’t directly change the text, and the keyboard isn’t great. But the combination of being able to read something that looks like print and hear the words clearly (albeit mechanically) is a terrific proofreading tool.

Sharing, not encouraged.

I’m enjoying my two-week free trial subscription to The New York Times on Kindle.  It’s great to browse through the articles one at a time and not have to move from page 1 to page 13 to finish reading something. I thought I’d be able to save some trees and chuck my home delivery subscription, however, here we run into a problem. I am pair-bonded.  Even if my better-half had his own Kindle, he’d need his own subscription to read The Times on it.  I suppose the idea would be for him to get his own Kindle and we could each trade off with different subscriptions, but this is not happening anytime soon, Mr. Bezos. While my husband says he’s fine reading the paper on the computer screen, he says it in an “I’ll just read in the dark” tone, so for now at least we’ll stick to the paper version of the paper.

(Of course, I’m hardly the first to notice the sharing issue  and there is a less than perfect fix. Apparently, if we bought another Kindle and kept my name on the account for both devices, The Times could go to both. But that would destroy our sense of individuality and hence the marriage itself, leading to a court fights over custody of the content when we divorce.)

Thumb fatigue and the Plight of the Left-Handed

I wish there were a better way to turn the page. The button that needs to be pushed, feels counter-intuitive. Why not a touchscreen (like I-PAD) for this one feature?  I noticed also when I was reading intensely (my proofreading binge), my right arm from thumb to elbow started to ache.  I’m a righty, but would have liked to switch hands. The only way to do that is to turn the image upside down and then turn the Kindle itself upside down. This means, however, that the page turning arrows will be pointing in the wrong direction and the keyboard — in case you want to make notes, adjust the font, etc., — will also be upside down. I don’t know whether or not the other devices are more “left-hand friendly,” but I wouldn’t recommend this one to a lefty.

One Click Buying Adds Up

I’m no expert on the  economics of the Kindle, but I imagine the main money is not in the sales of the apparatus itself, but in all the Amazon products bought once you own one. While the Kindle doesn’t surf the web, it does surf the Amazon store quite easily and allows you to purchase anything you want with just one-click. Impulse buying is encouraged and just about every periodical and blog comes with a free two-week trial, which you have to remember to cancel before they start charging you.

And Finally: The Kindle Community — Are we just talking to ourselves?

Another glitch, probably worthy of it’s own dissertation or at least a post — the Kindle of course comes with its own “Kindle Community” of forums because  couldn’t we all use more social networking?  There are tons of threads.  Some are about Kindle devices.  Many are about content, and most of these  seem to be self-published Kindle authors hawking their wares. This leads me suspect that in some ways, the “Kindle Community” isn’t very different from the “Authonomy Community” with one exception.  Whereas, Harper Collins allows writers to display their work for each other to see and comment on free of charge, Amazon charges for downloading other people’s work, counting these as “book sales” and gets a 30-65%  (depending on price) piece of the action. While there are tens of thousands of self-published books available on Kindle,  it’s not at clear who is buying other than other self-published writers. ]]> http://www.marionstein.net/2010/08/01/my-kindle-week-two/feed/ http://www.marionstein.net/2010/07/25/eric-lowe-author-of-the-daguerreotypist-where-are-you/ http://www.marionstein.net/2010/07/25/eric-lowe-author-of-the-daguerreotypist-where-are-you/#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 18:55:22 +0000 Marion http://www.marionstein.net/?p=872 Around a year ago, on a writing website for the published-challenged, I came across a novel excerpt, The Daguerreotypist by Eric Lowe.  While I’d read a lot of fiction on the site that I thought was publishable, some very good, The Daguerreotypist, struck me as being the most likely to hit big. The hook was terrific and original — a dangerous immortal who wasn’t exactly a vampire is sought out by a lapsed-Mormon call girl seeking immortality who has  a clever scheme for contacting the undead. The voice was quirky and unique, the pace quick and there were no excess adverbs or other annoying habits to slow a reader down.

The novel and Eric disappeared from the site as quickly as they had arrived. For all I know, Eric decided that someone might steal his brilliant concept, or maybe an agent or publisher had seen it and snatched him up.

I keep waiting to read a review or see a copy in a bookstore. I can’t get the book out of my mind and want to read past the eight chapters I saw so long ago.

I’m hoping Eric will one day search for himself or his title on google and maybe come across this.

Eric, if you’re out there, I’m harmless, not a stalker and unfortunately not someone who can help you get an agent or find a publisher, but I’d love to read the rest of your story.

Don’t be shy.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to comment on a book-in-progress or excerpt, they once got a peek at that then seemed to disappear forever, feel free to drop a line.