Someone bring me my Police tapes and a walker...

The BBC is trying to make me feel old. BBC News -- Giving Up My iPod for a Walkman 

The kid took three days to figure out that the tape had another side. Sadly, that doesn't mean the kid's stupid, it just means that I've reached that age when the things I coveted as a child are no longer recognizable to the current batch of whippersnappers. He probably looked at his dad with the same look I gave my dad at that age when he told me that people used to shave with a straight razor*.  

Stupendous. I mean, get real, kid, that's some bona fide high technology there. Before that, we had to carry around a Barbie record player if we wanted to listen to music on the go. Next you're going to tell me that the Atari 64 isn't the wave of the future... 

Much like the iPod, those things were pretty expensive for the time and my parents didn't see any reason to hand a piece of expensive technology to a kid. Especially a kid who couldn't keep from dropping a peanut butter sandwich, much less a tapedeck the size of a small paperback. They were probably right -- If I hadn't dropped it, I would have lost it because that's the sort of thing I'm famous for. Ask me about my retainer some time.  

Not that I owned a Barbie record player either. Our "Hi FI" stereo set was a piece of furniture. It was made of wood and was roughly the size of the USS Constitution (though it may have contained more trees). My sister and I sat in front of it listening to the Carpenters and Roy Clark with my mom and dad. We had a little turntable in our room that our Aunt Cookie gave us for Christmas but it sat on a little rollie-cart and couldn't be taken anywhere. The whole thing was anti-portable. It was big and clunky and by golly we liked it! Carried it uphill to school in the driving snow... and... um... (grumble) 

I eventually bought a Walkman, of course. With my own money after the price came down and they weren't as trendy anymore. It's probably still knocking around in a box somewhere. Shortly after I obtained my precious tapedeck, the CD was introduced. It taught me that chasing technology is an unwinnable game and you should note that I still don't own an iPod or whatever. 

By the end of the week I'll officially be six years past the point where I became untrustworthy by the standards of my parents' generation**. (That's pretty funny to me.) And this creates an interesting through-line for my nephews: The things you are so desperate to have now will be silly and/or alien to your kids. 

Meanwhile, my Walkman will be a certified antique and I can sell it to my grand niece or nephew and retire on the proceeds. Cranky old curmudgeons have to plan ahead.  

---  

* We'll ignore for the moment that when I do shave (which obviously isn't often), I use my great grandfather's straight razor.  

** The internet wants me to believe Pat Boone said it, but it was probably just a cover of someone else's quip.

It takes an imaginary village. . .

Most children have imaginary playmates. I would be intrigued to find that some researchers have interviewed writers and non-writers to chart the incidence of imaginary friends as it correlates to storytelling in later life.

For my part, I had an entire village, called "Westmoore". It was woven of snippets of Sherlock Holmes and Wordsworth's moor wandering, and not a little of Tolkien's bucolic Britain. Like one of those mythical islands sitting on the back of a giant sea turtle, Westmoore wandered from fantasy locations to real ones as suited my playtime needs. It was a secret base for GI Joe, a setting-off point for Hobbits and elves, and a waystation for all manner of imagined heroes and villains.

Cobbled lanes pass underfoot as the wanderer enters the village. A lumbering haycart trundles past, the mists wrapping tendrils through the spokes as the farmer gives you a tip of his cap and an appraising look on his way by. Lights filter through the soot-stained glass of the Cat & Fiddle where the echoes of frivolity keep back the gathering night. Half-timbered houses wander away into the gloom and up on the hill overlooking the town, the ruined castle (there has to be a castle) watches over the bucolic scene.

By the end of my childhood, Westmoore had become anchored in an imaginary corner of the Lake Country of northern England. The Hobbits and elves had wandered off to points unknown and more modern adventures were taking place in the mists of Westmoore. My first full-length novel took place almost entirely in Westmoore and amid the rooms and secret passages of that castle. It's a book that may never see print because books by lads of fifteen so rarely do (with good reason) but it did serve to finally cement the place in the modern era.

In the book I'm currently trying to sell, Westmoore makes a cameo appearance. A teensy tiny bit of the action takes place under the skeptical eye of the matron of the Cat & Fiddle. It gave me a bit of a thrill to take my readers to a place I loved so much as a child, to allow part of my mysteries to unfold among the misty byways where I wandered as a child.

Future editors may excise it as unnecessary, or object to a journey through a very real swath of England that ends in an imaginary village. But for the moment, it lives and breathes once more -- an imaginary village where Wordsworth walked arm-in-arm with Tolkien for a little while in the mind of an asthmatic kid crafting adventures in his head.

Welcome to Westmoore.

Feverse

Weather Scott

Good thing I'm not that into math because that looks like it hurts. Yeah, I'm not feeling well, but I have stuff to do so here I sit at my laptop. Which is a bad idea for many reasons, not least of which is that fever is bad for me. It makes me do things I wouldn't normally do, like posting word puzzles and thinking in verse. Don't worry, tomorrow, you'll wake up and find out this was all a dream... Recursing Want to sleep to de-stress, Wake up in a new mess, New stress & old stress, Sent to my address, To much shit to confess Go to sleep to de-stress. Grounded by our old views, Old Ways are the new ruse, Villains leave the most clues, But heroes owe the most dues, Drowning in the crying hews, Because we saw it all on Fox News. Sleeping 'till the phone rings, A mattress made by old kings, With new stress on the old things, And old stress on our new things, Duck the shit that life brings, And sleep until the phone rings. Film @ Eleven Impending doom sells the seconds, Millions for the moments between disasters, Square jaws clench in concern, Pale cheeks flush with the stress Of telling us we're all going to die, (after these words from our sponsors). Millions die, Disasters multiply. Take all you want, We'll make more.

Random Thoughts On a Monday!

Website overhaul! I'm working on getting my internet presence worked around to a more professional site. Someone owns ScottPerkins.com and wants to sell it to me so I'm contemplating some other permutation of my name or perhaps this blog that will be simple enough to remember, yet wholly mine. Leave your suggestion in comments! (And be nice! My mom reads this blog.) "This Bespells Doom..." The New York Times today had an article about authors trying to figure out how best to adorn an e-Book with thier signature. David Sedaris signed one "To Marty -- This bespells doom" and other authors are reporting being asked to sign the things too. Amazon needs to come up with a digi-pen signature or something before Kindles start to look like the side of an elevated train. Then again, that might be an improvement, they are rather sterile-looking to my eye. Living in the present tense... The Onion announced today that funding cuts have forced underfunded schools to cut the past tense from their language programs. During budget negotiation, administration officials apparently decided that "...the past tense was deemed by school administrators to be too expensive to keep in primary and secondary education." Indeed. In the future, we won't need the past, that's what makes the future perfect. In all seriousness... If you haven't seen Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk, you are missing out. Sooooo much of what she has to say is immediately germane to my life. Inspiring. Ole!!

Father's Day

I miss you dad. Love, Scotty

Fun With Sleeping Cats

Because revising is boring (and I have a strange Jim Henson fixation) it's easy to get distracted by the cats snoozing on the windowseat next to me... Oh, like you've never wondered what it would look like if a Muppet tried to eat your cat.

Holden On-Hold (For Now)

Catcher In the Rye pseudo-sequel has been halted for 10 days by command of a federal judge. Here's the story at the New York Times. I guess that it's a day for lawsuits and copyright musings at P2T.

The Goblet of Lawsuits

There's a court case brewing against Harry Potter's author and publisher over allegations that JK Rowling stole concepts and ideas for Goblet of Fire from a 36-page self-published 1987 booklet called "Willy the Wizard". The suit alleges that the author of Willy sent his manuscript to Rowling's agent in '87 and 13 years later, shenanigans ensued. Among other things, the suit alleges that Willy's author originated the ideas of a wizarding tournament, problem-solving in the John and that wizards travel by train. From this remove, I'd say that this appears to be a dodgy proposition at best. The author of the novelette - or in this case, his estate - would have to prove that not only did Rowling's agent have the Willy manuscript, but that he passed it along to Rowling and that she strip-mined it into a book the size of a cinder block*. That seems to be quite a hurdle. It's possible that Rowling may find that her own plaint that Goblet of Fire was the hardest to write and that she got stuck midway through. Which just goes to show that you should never admit to writer's block. I'm not 100% familiar with UK copyright law, but in the United States, ideas and concepts are not protected by copyright. In a manner of speaking, it's the material execution of ideas that are protected in US copyright law. The moment you put it down on paper, it's theoretically protected as you executed it but not the ideas behind it. Ideas are in the air, not on the page. The bookshelves are alive with various treatments (and outright knockoffs) of popular ideas. Been into the Young Adult section of a bookstore recently? You can't toss a stake without knocking over a pile of Young Adult vampire novels hanging on Twilight's coattails, which would then tumble into the previous wave of Harry Potter inspired young wizards and witches. Not to mention that if concepts are protected under copyright, then a lot of people owe the Tolkien estate a metric boatload** of money. From where I sit, I see a world of recycled memes and this lawsuit feels to me like someone fishing for a big settlement. --- * 636 pages in the UK, 734 pages in the US according to Wikipedia ** equal to 1.45 Imperial Boatloads

A writer on the hoof...

Awhile back, I gave up running for various reasons. Mostly because it hurts and I'm something of a wimp. But as soon as my broken toes heal I promised myself the supreme joy and mind bending torture of taking it up again from scratch.

When I first got into it, my reasons were many: Showing-up are those gym teachers who seemed to take sadistic pleasure in torturing the nerdy unathletic kid (how that would work, exactly, I can't tell you ), being able to sniff at joggers and say "I'm a runner", and mostly because I agreed to run a 5K for breast cancer.

Whatever my reasons, I kept with it (sporadically) for awhile because I discovered that running fascinates me. Admittedly, it’s sort of the same way that the strange itching ache and strange colors of the scab on my knee fascinate me, but all the same...

My main fascination with running is why we do it when no one's chasing us. Because - let's face it - running hurts. Period. I mean it, really, really hurts. A famous distance-runner once said that the best thing about running is that when it gets really, really terrible… it stops getting worse. Her name is Ann Trason and she was once clocked doing a mile in 6:44.

Not impressed? Then how about this, she did it 62 consecutive times to complete a 100K race in world-record time.

She does this for a living and is arguably the foremost female distance runner in the world. This woman is also - by all accounts - otherwise perfectly sane. I went out on the 'net to see if I could find anyone who had anything nice to say about running and was struck by the number of famous runners who agree with me.

Here’s more of what some of the world's foremost authorities on distance running have to say on the topic:

"You have to forget your last marathon before you try another. Your mind can't know what's coming." Frank Shorter - gold medalist 1972 Olympics

"If you start to feel good during a [race], don’t worry you will get over it." Gene Thibault - x-country race champion

“To describe the agony of a marathon to someone who's never run it is like trying to explain color to someone who was born blind.” Jerome Drayton - winner of Boston Marathon 1977

“Marathon running is a terrible experience: monotonous, heavy and exhausting.” Veikko Karvonen, - 1954 European & Boston Marathon Champ
And my personal favorite…

“It’s like cutting yourself unexpectedly. You dip into the pain so gradually that the damage is done before you are aware of it. Unfortunately, when awareness comes, it is excruciating.” John Farrington - Australian marathoner

In any other professional sport, these people would be called “ambassadors for the sport”. Ann Trason is practically the sport’s posterchild! Wow, sounds like fun, sign me up! 

These people must be nuts. What other sport do you find where the foremost proponents of the game describe every moment as “monotonous, heavy and exhausting”? Ever heard Wayne Gretzky describe hockey as painful drudgery, moaning about the agony of every minute they’re on the ice? Ever heard Brett Favre say that? Ok, maybe Favre would say it, but for most other high-end players, the answer would be no.

So what person in their right mind would put themselves through this daily horror of running necessary to compete in even a piddling 5K? When even the people who are at the front of the pack (which I am nowhere near) seem to hate it so much? People do this on purpose?

At this point you’re saying to yourself “Wow, Scott really hates running.” But I don’t. And that’s the weird thing, and why it - like the scab on my knee - is so fascinating to me. I love running. Since I started running, my posture has improved because you can’t breathe when you slouch (your diaphragm gets constricted). My legs are stronger and even when my knees ache, they feel better and stronger than otherwise. And when I’m running I get up earlier, sleep deeper and feel better 90% of the time. The remaining 10%? Well... that’s the time spent running and recovering from running. At that point I feel like crap. But it isn’t just the benefits of exercise. If it was, I’d take up weight lifting or yoga or something that doesn’t make you feel like crap. It’s not about exercise, it’s about the run.  The journey.

Truth be told if I was on a treadmill I really would defer to yoga or something. Momma didn’t raise no hamster. I gotta be going somewhere.

I live out in the country, on an island in Puget Sound and it seems made for this. There are long stretches of level blacktop with shoulders wide enough to accommodate a pedestrian and cars. There are hills that will kill you with a dull machete and hills that will apologetically stab you in the side with a sharp stiletto. The fog swirls around your ankles on morning runs and permeates your shuddering lungs with the fragrance of green and growing things and the distant tang of sea air. Much of my usual route takes me close to the shore, which is sadly lined with houses because that’s where the best blacktop is to be found. But what houses these are! Multi-million dollar estates framing the most breathtaking views (if I had any breath to take at the time) of Puget Sound.

If I’m out early enough, I get to catch the end of the lightshow from the distant city, as the night relinquishes its grasp on the world of man and the Xenon stars wink out at the onset of day. It’s a selfish sport really. It’s about personal bests. Whether you run a mile in 6:44 or 11:25 or 30:22, it’s not about the other guy. There is no other guy. Just you, the clop of your rubber on the tarmac, and the wheezing of your asthma-ravaged lunges whistling in your ears.

It’s a time for introspection, for measuring your stamina, for building your reserves, for proving to yourself once and for all that if you had to, if you really, really had to, you could outrun that maniac with a chainsaw you saw on the movie last night. You could just about outrun anything. Even sickness and sorrow and heartache.

It’s about life. The run. The journey.

And it’s also about staying a couple steps ahead of that lunatic with the chainsaw.

Wheezing and wandering… Yours faithfully, Scott

Good? That's a matter of opinion...

If the value of an experience outweighs the quality of what's in my cup, then I can definitely stand up and say that some of the best coffee I have ever had has also been some of the worst. The most memorable events in my life - ranging from the fine or merely the defining - have all been punctuated and underscored by mugs of some of the foulest venom ever squeezed from a diner's drip coffee maker. I'm talking about java that tastes like it has been filtered through an old sock and then left on the 'warmer' so long that all the water has boiled out of it, leaving it as dry as David Sedaris' wit and twice as acidic. Undeniably, it was all terrible coffee. Yet, if the persistence of memory and the affection of nostalgia are to be trusted, it was also some of the best I ever had simply because of the events it punctuated. I spent Easter Sunday, 1998 hunkered down in a tent in Rocky Mountain National park, waiting for a storm to pass. It was there that I sipped acrid coffee made using a French Press touted as 'unbreakable' by it's manufacturer which had a long crack running through it. It had been brewed from snow, melted boiled over an MSR Whisperlite stove in the wind shadow of my tent. If you are unfamiliar with single-burner camp stoves, the Whisperlite is the hind-end of a very small jet engine with two settings, 'off' and 'afterburner'. It has no finesse and certainly no temperature control. And if Coors ads have convinced you of the purity of Rocky Mountain snow, I feel sorry for you. Fine coffee is beyond your reach in a situation like that. And yet we all drank it. You might thing we drank it because we were afraid of freezing to death. Write off that horrible java as a survival necessity. But that wouldn't be true. Four well-equipped people in down sleeping bags and a decent tent a day's ski from a ranger station isn't cause for survivalist mentality. We had hot cocoa with us, powdered Tang and Gatorade, all of which could have warmed our innards. But we made coffee anyway. We made wonderfully terrible coffee in a defective press, because it was our minds we wanted to warm, not our stomachs. Perhaps I was cursed from the beginning. My first sip of coffee comes vividly to mind. It was brought to me by my sister and my cousin Julie. "It's tea" they told me. Being eight I hadn't yet read the Iliad, so I didn't know yet not to trust people bearing unmerited gifts. It wasn't tea, it was instant Sanka. It was gross. I spat it back into the cup as I recall. It would be another twelve years before someone could persuade me that coffee wasn't all like that. Since I was finally brought back into the caffeinated fold by my dear cousin Chris, I have sipped amazing coffee from some of the finest roasters in the United States. From Cedarburg Coffee Roastery in Wisconsin, where I learned for the first time about why some coffee was good and others were terrible to the back alley coffeehouses of Denver and Seattle where good coffee is a religion and Starbucks heathens are laughed out the door when they order a double-tall-half-caf-extra-dry-vanilla-nut-pumpkin-spice-why bother'. Oh, I can recall the coffee I drink in those fine establishments and even sometimes tell you who I was with. But I don't remember what day it was or what the weather was doing outside, or much else. How is it that the best coffees have the least hold on my memory? I remember every tortuous sip of the coffee I made in that tent in Colorado. I can clearly recall every word of the conversations I had with my tentmates during that blizzard. Horrid coffee, made with water from melted snow, from beans ground the day before and hurriedly prepared and decanted into our mugs before the water leaked out of the cracked press, giving it no time to fully steep. But I remember it and savor the memory more than other, much finer cups. It can be argued that the odd situation cements that memory more than the coffee. It would be a fair assertion, except that mountaintop brewing isn't the only fond memory accompanied by the pungent stench of a bad brew. At an Irish-themed pub in Dayton, Ohio I found - quite possibly - the world's most honest waiter. He came over to offer us a round of after-dinner coffees. "Is it any good?" I asked him. "Not really." came the response. How can you resist a sales pitch like that? I ordered the coffee anyway and found that he was right. I seem to remember saying "Anything that tastes that bad should have alcohol in it" and the second round did. The conversation at that table (punctuated by the terrible coffee and later by much better single-malt scotch) was later turned into the plot of a wonderful (and sadly unpublished) novel by my enterprising cousin Chris. While somewhat-lost in the middle of nowhere in Illinois I stopped at a diner to escape the sudden deluge that had managed to make my windshield all but opaque. There I sipped coffee that could well have been an attempt by the waitress to kill me. I later learned that the thunderstorm I was escaping had spawned several tornados across Iowa and Illinois. On a diner napkin I wrote the first lines that would one day become the novel The Paleographer. The coffee was terrible but I will always remember it fondly because of the novel on the napkin and because I was on a trip to visit the woman who would one day be my wife. It was Friday, 1 October 1999. I still have that napkin somewhere and there's a mug ring at the edge of it. Perhaps someday I'll have it tested to see if that swill really did begin its life as coffee. And there are many many more. I realize that there are several fronts in the war over what defines a fine cup of Coffee. I distill them into two major camps, effectively splitting the debate over the aesthetics of coffee into what side of a 70/30 split you are on between the quality of the coffee and the manner & environment of its service. Do we savor the experience first, the atmosphere, the circumstances that brought us to the coffeeshop ere we ever taste drop one of our beverage? Does that define the experience? Or do we wait, our minds a blank slate until written upon by that first sip of God's nectar, only then taking in our surroundings, paying heed to the babble of the crowd around us? I tend to come down on the experiential end of the continuum. For some reason I often find myself in memorable situations, far from any hope of decent coffee, and those are the memories writ large on the folders I have filed away in the drawer of my mind marked "Coffee".

Good Reads

Scott's book montage

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Catcher in the Lie?

There's a long tradition of dusting off the typewriters of the fallen and carrying on in their guise. There's a sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide coming, penned by Eoin Colfer. Sebastian Faulks was retained to write Devil May Care "as Ian Fleming" by Fleming's family. And it's not a new phenomenon: Sherlock Holmes never got any rest during Arthur Conan Doyle's life and the sleuth has hardly paused to catch his breath since, and it's almost comical the attempts to postulate a finish for Edwin Drood. As a society we are not well-disposed toward letting go of our literary heroes, despite the mortality of the authors. It's almost heartwarming when it isn't creepy and depressing. Some few of these have been profound tributes and expansions upon the source material (Laurie King's delightful take on the retired Sherlock Holmes and his wife, Mary Russell comes to mind) but most have been rather banal and forgettable (Betancourt's "Dawn of Amber" series leaps into mind). It's an inescapable truth that some characters had a story to tell and those stories were finished with the final page that passed beneath the pen of the original author. Which brings us to the counter-culture icon Holden Caulfield who has decided to go for another walk... this time tiptoeing through the intricacies of copyright law. If you follow me on Twitter, back in May you saw my reaction to the news that there's a "sequel" to Catcher In the Rye coming out that wasn't written by JD Salinger. Not a parody, not a critical work, an out and out sequel to the original book. Which on the surface isn't really all that surprising unless you take into account the fact that Mr. Salinger - whatever else can be said about him - is most definitely still alive. My initial reaction to this was dismay. Holden hails from the halls of the literary protagonist with but one story to tell. The eternally misunderstood youth, the personification of alienation and angst. He forever stalks the streets of our shared imagination, scowling at ducks and toying with his hat. Copyright is a funny thing and I recently bemoaned the fact that it stifles works that are tangential to or inspired by the original work. If I wrote a character who was strongly inspired by and referred to Disney cartoons it would probably never see the light of day because Disney would likely insist upon an endless list of licensing fees or litigation that would tie up publication in lawsuits to the extent that no publisher would be interested in looking at it. Unless I'm writing a parody making fun of Disney or a critical work examining Disney, their material is off-limits. Such is the nature of current copyright law. Likewise, I can quote Shakespeare, Robert Frost and Arthur Conan Doyle to my heart's content and write all the books I like using their characters because those authors are no longer living or their works protected. Othello meets Moriarty on a path that diverges in a wood? No problem. But I can't write a sequel to The Shining no matter how much I might want to. I cannot write and publish a sequel to The Highlander no matter how greatly I desire to put right the travesties of the authorized sequels. And that's fine. I wouldn't want to have someone appropriate my characters and have them haring off in rogue adventures and expect to profit from the venture. That's why we have copyright laws. It's mine, you can mess with it when I'm good and gone, but hands-off for now! Why would anyone think it's ok to write a sequel to Catcher In the Rye whilst Salinger draws breath? When my local NPR station asked that question, I responded with a more emphatic statement than this because - even on NPR - there's little room for nuance in a soundbyte. The truth is, I've been watching this thing unfold with a jaundiced eye, wondering if - in fact - the jokesters at the Swedish printshop trying to foist this thing off on the world aren't engaged in some sort of hijinx. They readily-admit that they're jokesters out to poke the world in the eye. The ascendancy of the copyright-protest "Pirate Party" in Europe and especially Sweden makes me wonder if this may simply be an attempt to make some sort of elaborate point. It's gratifying to note that I'm not alone in wondering if this isn't the first prong of a cinema verite copyright protest. By tweaking the nose of one of our most famous living literary figures, this hitherto unremarkable Swedish printhouse has drawn international focus. By drawing a notorious literary curmudgeon out of hiding and into a mudslinging match, they've generated a LOT of publicity from the self-appointed cultural commentators and blogs (myself included). Up to this point, aside from the mention on Twitter, I've refrained from commenting because bandwagons make me carsick. But whatever their intentions or whether or not the book exists outside of the Amazon description that sparked the controversy, a worldwide discussion has begun. A debate on the nature and reach of copyright and intellectual property. For good or ill, they've let the genie out of the bottle, dragging this debate out of the blogosphere and into the so-called legitimate media. There's no doubt in my mind that a sequel to a copyright-protected work is a violation of copyright. There must be some protection for creators or we're on a roadtrip back to the days when Charles Dickens was the bestselling author in America without ever seeing a dime from the sales of his books. Nevertheless, this is a valuable discussion and one that is overdue. Let us hope that what comes out the other end is going to encourage innovation, allow for creativity and fall well short of someone reading over your shoulder has to deposit $.50 for the privilege.

Stories That Write Themselves...

With guys like this running around, it's almost like thriller writers aren't even a necessary part of our ecosystem. --- From WIRED Magazine.

Olfactory satisfaction...

Tired of your Kindle's faint smell of ozone? Does your Sony eReader smell too much of the assembly line and too little of the moldering old paperbacks you know and love? Fret no more! Smell of books has you covered! It's e-bookerific! --- (Thanks for the heads-up, Todd!)

Long Is the way and hard that out of hell leads up to light...

One of the tricks illustrators sometimes use is to draw upside-down because it forces them to view objects differently, a pattern of object and void. I'm posting snippets of the novel I'm editing here for much the same reason. By selecting out tidbits, it forces me to look at them devoid of their surrounding context, focusing my attention on the writing... it's an interesting exercise if you've never tried it. This is what it looks like in the rough draft... ----- The footsteps entered the hall outside as he kicked the closet door shut. They were no longer interested in stealth. They were coming for him. Voices called out commands and responses as he lay wracked by pain just beyond the louvered closet door from them. Booted feet squeaked on the hardwood as they searched for him, room by room drawing ever closer to his hiding place. He used the ties hanging on the wall rack to pull himself upright. His fingernails looked black in the slanted light coming through the door as he scrabbled for the coat-hook hidden behind the hanging suits. The hook spun and clicked and he fell through the secret door into the space beyond. Down the spiral stairs he tumbled, aware that he had made a racket, aware that the men would hear it and come after him. The envelope led the way, held out before him like a talisman as he lurched across the stone floor and up a set of steep concrete steps. The heavy cellar door resisted but he would not be balked, drawn upwards and out by the cold night air. The frigid whip of the rain against his face revived him somewhat and he was able to stumble down the driveway to the street. He leaned against the light pole, trying to catch his breath. His chest felt as though something wild had been caged within and was clawing its way out. Behind him, the shout went up. No more time. He staggered out into the street. His eyes fixed on his destination -- on the innocuous blue box sitting atop the opposite curb. The stylized eagle of the US Postal Service winked at him. His failing sight narrowed to a darkening tunnel at the end of which the mail slot beckoned. He had to reach the handle. Get the envelope in that box before they… “MacLeod!” He spun around, searching with failing eyes for the source of the voice. He stumbled and fell. He could barely feel the bite of the pavement on his palms and knees. Blinding light seared his eyes. His heart shuddered… paused… beat again… Tires screeched. The pain was excruciating, but only for a moment.

Rethinking Reading

In this article from WIRED Magazine, Clive Thompson proposes a bold rethink of books as static entities. Books have always been a mostly one-sided conversation between the author and the reader. The eBook has the possibility of changing that dynamic, opening up the conversation so that it can flow both ways. This is already being done by allowing a form of digital marginalia. Of old, these were notes and comments jotted in the margins and between lines by those who were inclined to do so. (I used to do this, but these days I tend to use the Post-it). These notes could be added to or commented upon in-turn by the next reader I passed it along to and lie waiting for me on the page until I pick up the book to re-read. It thus became a conversation among friends in a time before Facebook and eBooks... In the digital version, the book would be divided into modules, a chapter or even a paragraph long and shared among readers online utilizing a modular commenting system. In essence, you could think of every section as a blog post with a comments section devoted to it. The other day I was commenting upon the need to recognize the shared-experience of the book as a cultural conversation. A recognition that is notably absent from the sort of Digital Rights Managment that we've been discussing, the sort that says I'm essentially leasing the books in my digital library and the provider can yank them at any time if I do something they don't like... such as loaning my copy of Basbane's divine work A Gentle Madness to a friend. Regardless of how I, my friend or Mr. Basbane might feel about it. This model of the novel as a modular entity, alive with conversation and interaction between readers and writers brings the idea of the novel out of the dusty stacks and off the page to dance among the electrons. An intriguing idea that could be either sublime or devolve into inarticulate chaos, rife with the same trolls and flamewars endemic to other interactive Internet phenomena, easily remedied by allowing us to limit comments we see to our friends list. It's a system that one imagines as allowing the communal aspect of the artform to not only survive but flourish. It still has a long way to go as a viable publishing model, but as Mr. Thompson says in the Wired article: "We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading." Read the article. It really is an interesting direction to explore...

A Pedestrian Work At Best?

Lawrence Block is the author of over a hundred books in a career spanning the timeline of modern suspense fiction. Among the stacks of the Block library, I would single out his fine turn at the typewriter as a contributing columnist at Writer's Digest which were collected into the book Telling Lies for Fun & Profit. I've talked about that book before and you'll no doubt hear it again at some point. Unlike King's On Writing, which doubled as a memoir of sorts, in Telling Lies, Block's strange career path are present only in brief glimpses and anecdotes told to underline his points. The book is a collection of essays on the writer's craft, after all. Hidden behind a veil of self-deprecating humor, he tells you just enough to make you wonder how many stories he has left to tell and look forward to the telling. Block has obligingly penned a memoir (which I missed entirely until I saw this article) and early reviews are heartening for his many fans. It is no secret that Block has tangled with alcoholism -- a topic that bled through into his fiction as the irascible Matthew Scudder followed him onto the wagon -- and he even gave us a wonderful writer-oriented serenity prayer as his closing salvo in Telling Lies. And one expects there to be a certain amount of the 'Drying out' story in his memoir. Also according to the book, he began his career penning stories for the confession magazines popular in the 1950's and eventually made his way into novels by strange roads. And for all the anecdotes and rumors of anecdotes he gives us in Telling Lies, you get the impression that there's more where those came from. The sort that his editors at Writer's Digest didn't have the stomach to print. Oddly - perhaps perversely - his memoir focuses less on telling us of the bizarre path he took to achieve the transition from a career penning 'I Was a Teenage Lesbian Hitchhiker' (or whatever) to become the grand master of suspense fiction. It apparently focuses primarily on his pursuit of pedestrian glory as a competitive racewalker. Normally, I would find the notion of a literary memoir told through the lens of competetive racewalking to be dubious at best. But this is Larry Block. And if anyone can pull off the subtle racewalking metaphor... well... I have to believe he can. So another book has been inserted into my summer reading list. Just as soon as I finish Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow I'll track down Mr. Block's tale. A tale of a man putting one foot in front of the other and striving to get some distance between where he started and the finish line before he runs out of time...

E-ink

E Ink, the maker of the high-resolution screens used by the Kindle and the Sony Reader has announced its sale to a Taiwan company for $215 million.