The Reluctant Blogger

A sense of where I was

2012-01-25T14:43:00.005-06:00

This morning I took my camera, a new GPS receiver attached to its hot shoe, up to the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois, one of my favorite spots for photography. My goal was to see how well the GPS works in embedding geographical latitude and longitude, altitude and compass direction data into the digital files of my photographs at the instant I take them.

I stopped on the footbridge between the Botanic Garden's main island and the visitor center and took a quick shot (above) of the frozen channel between lagoons just southeast of the bridge. Then I went home and loaded the photograph file into my computer and called it up with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 software.

Quickly I clicked a button that took me over the wi-fi to Google Maps, and the result (considerably enlarged) is shown in the screen-grab illustration below. The green arrow marks the spot where I was standing when I took the shot. ~~The red "A" symbol marks the point where the camera was aimed.~~ The arrow and the symbol are absolutely dead on. [Later: I was mistaken about the nature of that "A" symbol. It simply marks the mailing address nearest to the arrow—in this case, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, IL 60022. That's still useful.]

The point, of course, is that weeks, months and even years from now, I will be able to recover from the computer's memory, if not my own, the exact spot where the photograph was taken.

Soon I'll be riding the California Zephyr through winding canyons of the Colorado Rockies and twisting ridges of the Sierra Nevada, shooting madly out the train's windows in the service of gathering photographs for the upcoming e-edition of Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. If all goes well, I'll be able to pinpoint (and describe) the location of every photograph with perfect accuracy rather than relying on my aging brain's ability to recall places and details.

Isn't that absolutely cool?

A sense of where you were

2012-01-14T15:54:00.002-06:00

The device on top of the camera is a GPS receiver.

One of the tasks of a travel author is to take decent photographs of the locales he is writing about, both as aides-memoires for the text and icing on the book's cake in the form of a photo section. Come March, the Lady Friend and I will be taking a ten-day-long trip to San Francisco Bay aboard Amtrak's California Zephyr primarily to gather new photos for the upcoming e-edition of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America.

As a photographer I tend to be an indiscriminate shooter, pointing the camera at anything and everything that appears in front of me, hoping to remember later what the subjects were all about and especially where they were shot. Is that a photo of the Colorado River at Dotsero or was it Orestod? Does this abandoned rail yard lie at Soldier Summit or somewhere else?

Some years ago I took a shot of a beautiful rock formation from the open vestibule window of a private car behind an eastbound Zephyr, but never used it anywhere because I couldn't identify the locale. Only after seeing someone else's similar picture of the same place a few weeks ago did I realize that I'd captured the western approach to Castle Gate, Utah, one of the lordliest sights possible from American rails. It's going to go right into the e-book of Zephyr.

Of course I should have taken notes on the individual frames, as a good photojournalist should, but "should" and "did" have different meanings. As a writer I am careful to do due diligence, but as a photographer I just have been too undisciplined.

But now there is a brand new gadget in my photo bag that I hope will make life much easier for me.

It is a Pentax O-GPS1, an inexpensive ($200) little GPS receiver that attaches to the hot shoes of the current crop of Pentax digital single-lens-reflex cameras.

The receiver records not only the precise latitude and longitude of the spot where the photographer was standing when he snapped the shutter, but also its altitude above sea level and the compass direction in which the camera was pointing.

The camera embeds in the digital file of the photo all this information, along with the customary "metadata" about the f-stop, shutter speed, sensor sensitivity (or ISO), lens focal length, camera make and model, etc.

When I upload the photo files into my computer, I can use special geotagging software to find their precise locations on Google Earth or a similar mapping site. Being able to locate on a map the exact spots where I took my shots is going to be an enormous help.

That is, if the device works as I hope it will. I don't yet know if it will lock on to at least four satellites from the windows of a train speeding at 79 miles an hour, or if it can lock on from deep in a canyon. We'll find out in February, when the Lady Friend and I will take Amtrak's Capitol Limited to Washington, D.C.

Shot in the dark

2012-01-12T05:49:00.003-06:00

The biggest problem I've run into while updating my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America for ebook publication this spring is tracking down the old Amtrak train crew members the book celebrates.

I rode the California Zephyr with a dozen of them and interviewed another dozen or so in crew bases and at stations. That was in 1991, more than 20 years ago.

The idea is to tell "Where They Are Today" in a long epilogue written for the new edition.

So far I have located ten crew members and station personnel, plus two civilians also featured in the book. But there are seven to go, and despite my best efforts they are elusive.

Part of the problem is my lack of resources. If I were wealthy, I could hire a skip-tracer private eye to do the magic they do on television cop shows with computers and supergeeks. But no, I've had to rely on free Internet tools available to me, such as whitepages.com.

The trouble with these Internet resources is that they are at bottom commercial ones and naturally want to be paid. They may find people with the same names (and ages) as the ones you're looking for, but more often than not the information they display is old and outdated (the phone numbers tend to be out of service) and if you check the box to see what the most recent info might be, you get a page asking for money first. A couple of times I've paid, but to no avail.

Of course some of the old crew members I have found have been helpful—they remember that So-and-so moved to this locality and here's his phone number, but it's ten years old. Often checking a local phone directory for that locality yields a number of identical names, and a couple of times just eliminating them one by one finds the man or woman I'm looking for.

What about Amtrak's media relations and personnel people? Won't they help? I have asked, but they seem to be extremely busy as well as perhaps overextended—right now the national railroad is streamlining its management ranks by downsizing with buyouts and the like. I doubt that they have the resources to help out writers of old forgotten books.

And so here's a shot in the dark—these are the old crew and personnel from 1991 I'm still trying to find:

Reggie Howard, train chief based out of Chicago, now returned to sleeper service
John Davis, chef, based out of Chicago
Altagracia Romo, food specialist, based out of Chicago
Noel Prell, lounge car lead service attendant, based out of Chicago but a resident of New Orleans
Mimi Earley, Denver station manager
Chris Younger, assistant engineer based in Oakland
Bob Pimm, conductor based in Oakland

If by some chance you are a rail buff and happen to know where any of them might be, pray let me know. You'll get a free copy of the e-book in the format of your choice as well as my undying gratitude, for whatever it's worth.

Helen Frankenthaler meets Dick Cheney

2012-01-01T13:03:00.001-06:00

When the great abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler died last week, I was taken back to 1979 and an interview in the Manhattan home of Bernard Malamud, who had just published his comic novel Dubin's Lives. As Malamud busied himself making tea in the kitchen, a pair of paintings in his foyer caught my eye.

"Helen Frankenthaler originals," said Miriam Berkley, the free-lance literary photographer who had accompanied me to the interview. Miriam, who had modeled for the painter Raphael Soyer, knew something about art.

After the interview I made it my business to learn about Frankenthaler's work—simply possessing it said a great deal about Malamud—even though I was embarrassed to admit I'd never heard of her. One has to start somewhere, after all.

Yesterday I read, in Joseph Epstein's splendid new book Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, an anecdote that made me feel a bit less self-conscious about my enormous ignorance.

One night in 1991, Epstein writes, he and Frankenthaler were at dinner in Washington with Irving Kristol, the neoconservative thinker, and his wife Bea, also known as Gertrude Himmelfarb, the renowned Victorian historian. Later in the evening Dick and Lynne Cheney joined the company for dessert. Lynne Cheney, then chair of the National Endowment of the Arts, wanted to know what Epstein and Frankenthaler, both members of the NEA's council, thought about its operation.

According to Epstein, Dick Cheney was "self-effacing and modest," choosing to remain in the background while his wife did the conversational heavy lifting. "Perhaps it was a relief to be silent after crowded days at the Pentagon and after appearing so frequently on television . . . with Colin Powell at his side, to answer questions on how the war [Gulf War I] was going."

After the Cheneys left the restaurant, Epstein continues, "I found myself much impressed with them. So, too, did Helen Frankenthaler, who said: 'She is a very bright woman. Her questions were genuinely penetrating. Very impressive. Really smart, Lynne Cheney. But tell me, her husband, what does he do?"

"Bea, Irving, and I looked at one another.

"'Actually,' I said, 'he's secretary of defense.'"

Somehow that delicious bit of gossip makes me feel better about all the holes in my knowledge.

Backlist eBooks

2011-12-27T16:56:00.004-06:00

One of the toughest things about promoting one's self-published ebooks is that there really are not many choices that aren't expensive. You can of course post frequent reminders on Twitter and Facebook that your books are available, but people generally find repeated pitches highly annoying. Worse, many writers use Twitter and Facebook exclusively for self-promotion and never comment on other people's posts. These wretches are quickly de-friended.

Two veteran writers, Patricia Ryan and Doranna Durgin, came up with a keen new idea last August: Backlist eBooks, a web site devoted entirely to the promotion of ebooks previously published in hardcover (or softcover) by legitimate publishers, not vanity presses. The ebooks featured on Backlist eBooks have all been written by professionals, then acquired and line-edited and copy-edited by professionals. They are not crude amateur offerings.

They run the gamut of popular genres: contemporary romance, fantasy, historical romance, mainstream fiction, mystery & suspense, nonfiction, paranormal romance, romantic suspense, science fiction, women's fiction and young adult fiction.

The site features a dozen ebook versions of Ryan's medieval romances and seven of her mystery novels. Durgin is represented by 18 ebook examples of her fantasies and romances. These clearly are old pros who know the popular fiction business inside and out.

I emailed Ryan and asked what gave her and Durgin the idea for the site.

"I had just published 12 backlist ebooks, and I refused to accept that my professional strategies consisted basically of Facebook and Twitter," she replied. "Back when I lived in New York City, I was promotion manager for a division of Van Nostrand Reinhold Publishing (now defunct) so I've always been interested in self-promotion. Several readers had mentioned in forums and blog comments that they wished there was one central list of authors who were self-publishing their backlists, because these were professionally vetted and edited books for great prices. The light bulb went off. I talked to Doranna about it, and it just took off from there."

At this point Backlist eBooks has a little more than 100 authors, including me, and almost all have promotional pages up on the web site. Here's mine.

Some of the authors are like me, midlist writers cut loose from their original publishers during the economic downturn. Some are staying with their publishers but have talked them into reverting ebook rights. Others, Ryan wrote, have been offered print contracts but are turning them down because they're unwilling to accept the standard 25 per cent royalties for ebooks. "They know they can publish themselves better and make a lot more money."

Is there a way to quantify how well Backlist eBooks has done in increasing sales for its authors? "Not really," Ryan wrote, "partly because our website is pretty new (we had a simpler interim website previously) and partly because only the authors really know how well they're doing. I will say that we get plenty of website hits and click-throughs to the sales venues on the book pages."

It costs $40 to join and $30 a year thereafter to stay on Backlist eBooks—a sum that I think is going to be well spent.

The Nativity

2011-12-23T09:17:00.001-06:00

For me, the greatest contribution of historical Christianity to the world has been its powerful art, and every year I try to pay homage to that idea with a fresh display of work by artists familiar and unfamiliar. This one is by the Englishman Robert Campin (c. 1380-1444), also known as the Master of Flemalle. The painting, executed c. 1425-1430, is in the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, and has been hailed as an early masterpiece of the use of landscape. Click on the painting for a larger version.

Rehab

2011-12-10T12:29:00.011-06:00

The Alden Estates rehabilitation center in Skokie, Illinois, where I am an inmate--oops, patient--while my new right knee recovers from implantation Dec. 1, is quite a place. Because it caters only to knee and hip replacement patients, no long lines of moribund wheelchair-bound aged clog its corridors. (Actually, the only visible difference is that the equally elderly replacement patients hobble around with walkers and canes. The level of social excitement is only incremental.)

The ambience is small-cruise-ship, the corridors artfully disguised to make you think you're belowdecks. There's a small dining room whose staff seems to have been plucked off a Holland-America liner, complete with napkin origami famous among Filipino crews, and a cheery ice cream bar. The cuisine is to hospital food as Cordon Bleu is to Mickey D's.

The nurses, aides and physical therapy staff are uniformly sunny and competent.

The idea, the staff tells me, is to provide the happiest possible atmosphere for people recovering from joint surgery. A contented and motivated patient does better down in the bilges, where the torture chamber--oops, the therapy room--is located. The dungeon is camouflaged as an upscale fitness center, complete with reproductions of 1930s European golfing and skiing posters instead of shackles and fetters. Each day brings three therapy sessions.

The physical therapists may all be cheery and warm personalities, but they do have the dedication of Torquemada in getting their victims, er, patients to confess, er, work on range-of-motion and strength issues. That's what makes good PTs: one moment you want to hug them, the next strangle them. And they can take a joke. "My husband," confided one, "calls me a physical terrorist."

So exceptional is this place that society surgeons at nobby Gold Coast hospitals are shipping in their patients. You can tell them by their togs, tans, bling and botched plastic surgery.

For a mere middle-class Medicare patient who's an amateur bird photographer, Alden has another big attraction: a roomy aviary full of colorful canaries and finches. You can view some of the results on my other blog.

Call me contented. Most of the (Ow! That oits!) time.

Beauty amid pain: Therapy birds at the Alden Rehab Center.

Take a knee, team

2011-12-07T06:15:00.000-06:00

My uncharacteristic silence (maybe it's becoming characteristic) on this blog the last month can be laid at a couple of doors.

First, I've been busy getting Zephyr ready for e-book publication, of course. All the heavy lifting is done and I'm now writing the Epilogue for the new edition. This keeps me burning the midnight electrons. After all, this blog was conceived as a means to keep the fingers limber and the mind oiled while struggling to escape bouts of writer's block. If you don't see fresh posts every day, that means things are going well.

The second reason for my absence is acquisition of a new right knee Dec. 1. That went well and I am now in the first week of what promises to be a three-week stay in a rehab center. Probably I shouldn't blog while under the influence of large draughts of happy juice, but, looking over what I've written so far, it doesn't seem as if I've been at all indiscreet.

It wouldn't do to tell you that I hobbled down the hall with my walker and saw my broad-beamed rehab center neighbor bending over naked, would it? So I'll let that go unmentioned.

A cover for the e-'Zephyr'

2011-11-10T05:44:00.006-06:00

By George, I think I've got it: a suitable cover for the e-book edition of my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America. I'm aiming for early spring 2012 publication, for there's a lot to do.

I found the photograph of Amtrak's latter-day California Zephyr on a keen web site called railpictures.net, where photographers of all skill levels post their favorite shots. This one of a westbound Zephyr in Colorado's majestic Glenwood Canyon is by Scott McClarrinon, who kindly assented to its use for my purposes.

The font used for the title and byline is aptly called Zephyr Gothic, and it is based on the actual font the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy/Denver & Rio Grande Western/Western Pacific railroads used for the train and car name boards on their original stainless-steel Vista-Domed streamliner California Zephyr in 1949. I found the font on another rail-themed site, railfonts.com.

Coming up with a cover design for a nonfiction e-book is decidedly easier than for a mystery novel. Nonfiction lends itself to the use of photograph illustration much more easily than fiction. The designer doesn't have to struggle so much to be creative. (It helps to have a chum who's adept with Photoshop, and Tina Davidson helped me with a vexing problem. She'll also be doing the route maps for the e-book.)

Now that the original book and its photographs (plus some new shots from my archives and others from railpictures.net) have been scanned into my computer, the next task is to track down all those Amtrak crew members I wrote about 20 years ago and re-interview them for a new Epilogue. I've found some, but quite a few are elusive, for there have been deaths and retirements and changes of career.

Onward, as they say.

Whoops!

2011-11-06T14:06:00.002-06:00

Bear with me.

Having finished the scanning of Zephyr, I had some off time today, and decided to spend part of it fooling around with the templates of Google Blogger, which underlies this blog.

Unfortunately I couldn't find my way back to the original blog design, so am stuck with this one for the nonce. It's not bad -- not bad at all -- but I'm not absolutely sure the new nameplate is right for the layout. Might tinker with it a bit more.

That's a male common merganser, by the way. We see them every day in front of our cabin on Lake Superior.

This one's for the foamers

2011-11-02T06:19:00.002-05:00

A "foamer" is railroadese for the intense train buff who drools and bubbles at the lips when discussing his favorite subject. Foamers who get in the way of professional railroaders are called "ferns," short for "fucking rail nuts." They are also sometimes known as "flims," for "fans living with Mother."

Not that I am anything more than your ordinary garden-variety train lover, he said loftily, dabbing his mouth with a hanky.

My latest dispatch as an official TrainWeb Field Reporter, made during the recent train travel photography and writing workshop co-taught with Carl Morrison at La Plata, Missouri, is here.

Think of it (if at all) as a lesson in using photographs to provide the narrative of a travel story.

Scanning and scrubbing not tiresome at all

2011-10-26T15:02:00.000-05:00

This book-scanning-and-cleaning-up business isn't as tough as expected. Now that the learning process--not sweaty at all--is done, getting my 1994 book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America into e-print is going rapidly.

I'm using a 2009 Mac mini and a seven-year-old Epson Perfection 1650 Photo scanner with VueScan scanner software and the ABBYY Finereader Express optical character recognition program. The process is quick and simple: Slap a page from the book (I cannibalized a paperback copy) into the flatbed scanner, then tell VueScan to scan the page and save it as a TIFF file. Once that's done, VueScan automatically fires up ABBYY Finereader, which reads the TIFF and, when prompted, saves the text as a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file.

That takes about 30 seconds for each page.

Once all 16 or 20 pages of a chapter have been scanned, I then open a new Word file, then click on each successive .rtf file, copying and pasting it one by one into the Word file.

In less than a minute Word will reformat the chapter to specs. I'll then read it as carefully as I can, cleaning up the (very) few OCR errors as I go, and finally give it a swift kick with the spell check.

The next step is to e-mail each chapter to the loyal volunteer railfan proofreaders and wait for their responses. (One caught me in an egregious error in the original book, an error that went unmentioned for 18 years.)

The whole process takes about 90 minutes for each chapter, including making notes of items to update for the future Epilogue.

I'm doing just one chapter a day. That prevents me from growing weary and careless. And hey, there's life outside books.

In two weeks all 12 chapters and the Author's Note should be done and the original book completely converted into Word, ready for conversion into e-book formats.

Except maybe for the index. I'll have to research the possibilities of adding an index to the e-book version. That might be the toughest job of all.

Small bump in the publishing road

2011-10-24T10:43:00.003-05:00

It was as I expected: that 3 1/2-inch floppy disk stored in the safe deposit box and containing the original manuscript of Zephyr, the 1994 book that I hope to revive as an e-book, is unusable.

First, the file dates back to December of 1992 and is a copy of the unedited e-manuscript I submitted to Times Books/Random House that month, hoping the publisher would accept it. It's not a copy of the final edited manuscript that I had hoped it was. So much work is done on a manuscript in a publishing house that the raw original is a poor shadow of the book that finally appears.

Also, the manuscripts (original and edited) were written with XyWrite, a pre-Windows word processor, and saved in that format. If any XyWrite documents are readable today, only specialized (and expensive) file rescue services can save them. And there's no guarantee that any, let alone all, the bits and bytes in that magnetic file have survived 19 years.

There's more. The two 3 1/2-inch floppy drives I kept all these years are no longer readable by any of my computers, not even my wife's six-year-old G5 iMac.

Finally, there were a few errors in the original hardcover Zephyr of 1994 that were corrected for the paperback edition of 1995 -- and I've forgotten what they were!

And so I shall apply myself to scanning every page of the paperback, reading the resultant file with optical character recognition software, and finally cleaning it up with Word. After a little more research (including another ride on the California Zephyr) and re-interviewing of principals in the original book, I'll write an epilogue bringing the project up to date.

I'll also have to scan in all the original photographs used in both books -- and maybe take some more shots for the epilogue.

A very good friend with considerable scanning experience has offered to scan the book for free, and believe me, I'm tempted. But the painstaking scanning process will force me to pay more attention to the words than I otherwise might, and so I've elected to do it myself.

Once it's done and formatted, I'll send the thing out to my loyal corps of proofreading volunteers before republishing it as an e-book (and, I think, a publish-on-demand paperback).

The first task is to buy OCR software, and I'll give the trial version of the much-praised ABBYY Fineprint Express for the Mac a whirl before plunking down the $99 for it.

(Deep breath.) Here goes.

'Zephyr' to rise anew

2011-10-18T13:20:00.002-05:00

Had some good news today. Crown Publishing, parent of Random House, has reverted all rights to my 1994 railroad travel book Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, clearing the way for me to update and republish it as an e-book.

This means, of course, that I'll have to ride the Amtrak California Zephyr from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay and back at least once and maybe twice (and if I'm lucky, thrice), stopping to re-interview Amtrak personnel featured in that book for the update. Such a task will hardly be onerous, and I'm eagerly looking forward to it.

What I'm not exactly looking forward to is restoring the old manuscript. I do have a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk (remember those?) somewhere in the safe deposit box, but as I wrote last week, magnetic media are not terribly durable over time. All those little byte-sized electrons have a tendency to leak out and roll under the bed, never to be retrieved.

So it looks as if I might have to scan every page of the book into my computer, read the scan with character recognition software, then clean up the text with the help of crowdsourcing, the technical term for shamelessly begging loyal readers to lend their proofreading skills to an impoverished author.

But this task is sure to keep me off the streets and out of gin mills for the next few months. Look for Zephyr II to appear at the e-book vendors sometime next spring.

Feeling the tug of the train

2011-10-05T14:10:00.001-05:00

I'm back from Upper Michigan at winter quarters in Evanston, Illinois, and getting ready for another workshop--the one for train travel writers and photographers that I'm co-teaching with rail lensman Carl Morrison at the Depot Inn & Suites in La Plata, Missouri. It runs Oct. 16-21 and there's still room for participants, if you're interested.

Now that the three mystery novels are now available as e-books (Kindle, Nook and other platforms), I'm thinking about updating my 1994 nonfiction book about life aboard a transcontinental train, Zephyr: Tracking a Dream Across America, and re-publishing it as an e-book. That is, if I can get Random House (which seems to have no interest in bringing it out as an e-book) to revert the rights to me.

That would keep me busy for quite a while. The manuscript exists on a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk kept in a safe deposit box, but I have no idea if the disk is still good--magnetic media tends to spring leaks over time. I might have to laboriously scan the book, page by page.

Whether or not an e-book of Zephyr happens, some heavy-duty rail riding (and rail writing) lie in the future. The Lady Friend and I are planning a round-the-West Amtrak trip for next March--the Southwest Chief from Chicago to L.A., then the Coast Starlight from L.A. to Portland or Seattle, and finally the Empire Builder back to Chicago. That's six days and five nights enroute, with a stopover in either Portland or Seattle. I'll be in heaven.

We're also woodshedding a trip next fall on VIA Rail's Ocean round-trip from Montreal to Halifax, with a 10-day tour of Canada's Maritime Provinces.

It'll be nice to get back into training.

It's done. For now.

2011-09-29T04:46:00.006-05:00

After considerable flatulating about yesterday with Photoshop Elements and three years' worth of forest and bird photographs, I came up with this banner for my books web site.

The previous portrait of a red-tailed hawk stayed. I tried various other birds of prey, including a great horned owl and even a turkey vulture, but nothing suggested the nobly hawkish gaze of a Lakota lawman as well as that red-tail.

Many other web sites feature a large portrait of the mystery writer on the banner. This is fine so long as the writer is impossibly handsome or an out-and-out knockout, but not if he or she is grizzled, bald, jowly, and dumpy. That hawk is far more photogenic than I am.

Briefly a gun and badge appeared on the banner, but the result just looked too cluttered.

Solution: Simplify, simplify, simplify. That hawk, a forest background to suggest Sheriff Steve Martinez's wilderness jurisdiction, and the words "THE MYSTERY NOVELS OF . . ." rather than "THE BOOKS OF . . ." to sharpen the marketing focus.

I tried a number of fonts for the text, but kept coming back to Charlemagne. Love those bold serifs.

More changes may be afoot, but this banner will do for now.

I also changed the sub-banners on the linked pages from a sunset to a forest-and-hawk. This added a bit of unity to the site.

And that's my story. What's yours?

Something like this, maybe . . .

2011-09-28T05:57:00.000-05:00

The illustration above is the latest idea for a new banner for henrykisor.com, the web site devoted to my books. It's by no means the final version, but it's getting there.

A number of folks suggested the site's focus be sharpenened -- on the mystery novels, not my books in general. And so the language in the banner (see the blog entry for September 27 below) was changed.

More than one proposed the addition of mystery-novel symbols, such as a badge and gun. Done. (My series hero, Sheriff Steve Martinez, carries a retro weapon, an old-fashioned but highly reliable revolver.)

The red-tailed hawk portrait perhaps should give way to a fresher woodsy photograph for a background, but I haven't found the right one yet. More rummaging in the archives will be required.

Stay tuned, and please keep on with the suggestions. Thank you.

Housecleaning

2011-09-27T12:50:00.001-05:00

Now that the novels are all e-booked and half the storm shutters have gone up on the Writer's Lair before we start south this weekend, I'm taking a mop, bucket and paintpot to the old web site. Until a few days ago it hadn't been updated for more than a year, and the cobwebs and dust-bunnies are showing.

Maybe all it needs is a fresh banner, the home-page photograph that bears the name of the site. Here's the present one (click on it, and all the others, for larger versions):

That red-tailed hawk portrait is one of my favorite bird shots, but after a year it's too much the same old same old. Maybe one of the summer's better merganser photos:

On the other hand, maybe those piggybacking babies are too cuddly-cozy for a Web site that features murder mysteries. Perhaps a young bald eagle would be more macho:

Briefly last year there was an eagle banner, but the photograph made the home page a little too deep to be viewed without scrolling on most monitors:

For a while I used a couple of grizzly bear shots taken during an Alaskan trip, but eventually they seemed not quite appropriate for the Web site of a mystery author who writes about a region that harbors only black bears:

That Alaskan trip also yielded a picturesque shot of a White Pass & Yukon train entering a tunnel, but probably the photo would work better as the herald of my rail travel blog:

Same, perhaps, with this shot of the West Texas desert taken from the last car of Amtrak's Sunset Limited:

There's a soft spot in my heart for Lake Superior sunrises and sunsets, but are they really effective illustrations for a mystery author's web site?

Last year I simply loved Arches and Canyonlands National Parks for their breathtaking scenery and tried a couple of banners, but let's face it, Utah just doesn't convey the green forest-wilderness ambience of Upper Michigan, where my sheriff hero works:

I'd appreciate your thoughts. Which of these banners, in your opinion, would be the most effective for an Upper Michigan mystery writer's home page?

'Season's Revenge' online at last

2011-09-26T19:42:00.001-05:00

Season's Revenge, the 2003 novel that was the first in my Steve Martinez mystery series, has finally joined Cache of Corpses and A Venture into Murder on Kindles and Nooks.

Pretty soon it'll be available along with the others in the series, for iPads, iPhones, iPod Touches, Sony Readers and other e-book appliances, as soon as Smashwords (the big e-book clearinghouse and publisher) gets it out to the vendors.

By the way, Char Searl, my old colleague on the Chicago Sun-Times who, among other things, designed layouts and provided art for the book section I edited, did the illustration of the slavering bear on the cover.

Now I can get away from the computer and do something else for a change -- such as button up the Writer's Lair for the winter. The leaves have changed, the wind is blowing and the surf's up on Lake Superior.

Hogan 1999-2011

2011-09-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

Hogan on the beach at the Writer's Lair, summer 2011

I don't believe in "dog heaven" or any kind of afterlife, but I do believe in human memory, and I think Hogan will live on as long my mystery novels have readers. He first appeared in Cache of Corpses as Tommy Standing Bear's companion:

Hogan “had the graceful, alert conformation of a Lab and from a distance could be mistaken for a purebred. But the vet said his deep-set teeth, broad chest, narrow waist, slim tail, basketball head and steam-shovel chops suggested pit bull somewhere in his ancestry and probably not far back, either. . .

“At home, boy and dog immediately became inseparable. Hogan lay under the desk while Tommy worked, under the table while Tommy ate, and by his bed while Tommy slept. Out on the beach, they played for hours, chasing each other up and down in great explosions of sand. Despite his Labrador genes Hogan showed absolutely no interest in swimming and just gazed at Tommy in puzzlement when he threw a stick for the dog to fetch. Instead, Hogan displayed the pit bull’s propensity for dashing about in happy abandon, butt tucked underneath, eyes rolling, ears flying. . . .

"He had both the Lab’s sweet, clumsy nature and the pittie’s unbridled, tail-wagging exuberance—a singular and sometimes dangerous combination for delicate objects on the coffee table, especially since he quickly filled out, soon reaching a solid eighty-five pounds of muscle and bone. When asked if he wanted to go for a walk or to be fed, Hogan would suddenly burst into an excited little dance Ginny called 'the pit bull two-step,' his claws drumming an Irish dancer’s rat-tat-tat on the wooden floor.”

He was a hell of a dog, and I believe he knew it.

Now 'Venture' is live as an e-book

2011-09-21T09:52:00.002-05:00

Today the second novel in my Porcupine County mystery series, A Venture into Murder, went online in both Amazon.com Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook editions. The price: $2.99.

Along with the third, Cache of Corpses, Venture is also awaiting distribution by Smashwords, the online publisher that sends e-books out to a variety of vendors, including Apple's iBooks and Sony's eReader.

It has required a lot of sweaty labor at the keyboard, but this endeavor has taught me that the electronic manuscripts of my books were nowhere as pristinely formatted as I had thought they were.

Now to wait for the revenue stream--er, trickle--to begin.

Meanwhile, we (my sainted volunteer proofreaders and I) are working on the first in the series, Season's Revenge. Stay tuned.

‘Cache’ finally goes live as an e-book

2011-09-18T07:36:00.004-05:00

The reason I’ve been so silent lately is a nose-to-the-grindstone devotion to preparing my mystery novels for e-book publication—and getting them published in Amazon.com’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook formats.

The $2.99 Kindle version of Cache of Corpses went online last night, and the Nook edition (same price) went live today.

It took a while to get ’er done. Self-publishing old printed books as e-books is not rocket science but requires time-consuming attention to detail.

An unedited electronic manuscript for Cache—the one submitted to Forge Books away back in 2006—existed, but the hardcover publisher's edits had to be applied to it, a few mistakes rectified, and the end result carefully proofread.

Fortunately a couple of loyal readers volunteered to proofread the cleaned-up e-version, and they found quite a few typos as well as a couple of infelicities the publisher's copy editors missed. To protect their privacy I will not name these volunteers, but hey, I’m grateful. You know who you are.

Because Forge did not give me the rights to the jacket art when it returned author's rights to me, I had to come up with a new cover—and my friend Tina Davidson, a gifted artist, was an immense help here.

The next step was to convert the e-manuscript from Microsoft Word to Kindle and Nook formats. First I saved the manuscript (with maps) as a HTML file, then ran that file through a keen (and free!) program called Calibre, which quickly coughed out pristine versions in Kindle’s .mobi format and Nook’s ePub format.

Publishing the result (and the cover) on Kindle Direct Publishing and Barnes & Noble’s PubIt! wasn't difficult, but I wish I’d gone through all the steps (except for actual publication) for practice before actually posting the book. That would have saved a lot of backing and filling, looking up bank routing numbers and old review quotes to post on the book's web pages. I also had to redo the cover—both Amazon and Barnes & Noble want rather large versions for their web store pages, though the original was fine for the actual e-books.

The most difficult decision was whether to apply Digital Rights Management encryption to the book to prevent freebie hounds from pirating it. After talking with a few other mystery writers, I decided against DRM. In their experience, applying DRM irritates readers who might want to share good reads with a few friends. Only pathological tightwads, they said, would avoid paying the $2.99 pittance. If they’re wrong I can always go back and check the DRM box.

Now the hard part begins: getting the word out that the book’s available. Social media will help, but it’s going to require a lot of electronic shoe leather to reach mystery fans.

And, oh yes, there's Season’s Revenge and A Venture into Murder to get online. Very soon now.

N723PH

2011-09-02T17:15:00.007-05:00

Bell 407 N723PH landing at Ontonagon, Michigan, Sept. 2, 2011

You know all those sentimental stories about octogenarian former B-17 crewmen once again riding, with mighty lumps in their throats, aboard a preserved Flying Fortress, the bomber in which they survived enemy fire over Europe during World War II?

Something a little like that happened to me this afternoon when a Bell 407 medevac helicopter visited Ontonagon, Michigan, for a little show-and-tell at the town's annual Labor Day festival. N723PH is the very same aircraft that almost exactly two years ago, on August 23, 2009, ferried me from Ontonagon Hospital to Aspirus Hospital in Wausau, Wisconsin. I had just had a heart attack and two days later would undergo a triple bypass.

Not that I wanted to ride in her again. Once was enough. But it was nice, very nice, to say hello again to a machine in which I had survived a memorable—to say the least—morning of my life. Lump in the throat? Sure.

My "battle station" in the helicopter.

Tweaking

2011-09-02T07:46:00.000-05:00

Here's the A Venture into Murder e-book cover art again, adjusted according to the suggestions from commentators yesterday.

I'm thinking maybe the skull-and-pickaxes could be even smaller than they are now, but maybe we're getting close to the final version.

Possibly the background color could be different, maybe a pale green? Or would the red title clash with that?

Another Venture into cover art

2011-09-01T10:52:00.002-05:00

The above is a preliminary cover for the forthcoming e-book version of my second Steve Martinez novel, A Venture into Murder (2005). What say, people? (I'm thinking the space above the title and below "A Steve Martinez Mystery" ought to be equalized.)

The novel concerns murders past and present involving an old copper mine in Upper Michigan. The title font, Pickax, is a free one, and the illustration elements are in the public domain.

Tina Davidson helped me learn how to move stuff around in Photoshop Elements to produce this hopeful work of art.

I think we've got 'er now

2011-08-24T05:48:00.001-05:00

The original cover idea for my mystery novel Cache of Corpses simplified, with a snippet of topo map suggesting the location of a body inserted into the window of the enlarged GPS receiver. I think this'll work for the e-book version. Thanks to all for your suggestions.

Yesterday I finished applying all the hardcover publisher's edits to the electronic manuscript of Cache and have started sending it out to volunteer proofreaders. (If you volunteered but haven't been contacted, that's because I don't have your e-mail address; please send that to me.)

New 'Cache of Corpses' cover

2011-08-21T10:09:00.001-05:00

Applying the hardcover publisher's edits to the original manuscript of my mystery novel Cache of Corpses so that I can re-publish it as an e-book is a time-consuming process, but I'm nearly two-thirds done with the job. Meanwhile, my chum Tina Davidson has designed a preliminary "cover" for the project, and here it is.

What do you think? Any areas for improvement you can see? Please let me know. Now that I am on my own as an e-book publisher I'll be relying on volunteer editorial opinions.

Off the top of my head I think the illustration of the GPS receiver is a little crowded up under that of the the .357 Combat Magnum (you'll recall that's the retro sidearm Sheriff Steve Martinez prefers to more modern automatic pistols), but it'll be a simple task to move that a few hairs to the right, perhaps centering it over the byline.

I rather like the bullet-holed, gore-spattered font used for the book title. It's called "Parents Suck," and it's a free font from Fontspace.com.

What say? Leave a comment below, please.

E-books are on the way

2011-08-12T13:12:00.002-05:00

Get ready for some Henry Kisor e-books.

This week the original publisher of the first three Steve Martinez mysteries reverted all rights to me, clearing the way to convert the whodunits into e-books to be published as Kindle, Nook and iBook versions.

The books all exist on disk, but it'll take time to add the publisher's edits to the electronic manuscripts and then repeatedly proofread the results (volunteers wanted!) before preparing the files for final e-book form. I'll also have to come up with new jacket designs for each volume.

Look for the first in the Porcupine County series, Season's Revenge, to appear this fall, with A Venture into Murder and Cache of Corpses following close aboard.

Meanwhile, Hang Fire, the fourth in the series, is still being considered by a tree-book publisher.

L'école des Beach-Arts

2011-08-05T06:50:00.009-05:00

Tina Davidson dry fits "found art" from the beach into an U-shaped mirror frame constructed from a pine board and a couple of lengths of lath.

Rather than writing or photographing or riding trains or cogitating on important cultural matters, I've been spending my time building a new medicine cabinet for our rustic cabin's bathroom in what might be called the Lake Superior Beach Arts Style.

This is to scour the sand in front of the Writer's Lair for tiny objets d'art (pretty stones, agates, fossils, sea glass, insect galls, tiny clamshells, shreds of birch and pine bark, acorns, miniature evergreen cones and bits of oddly shaped driftwood).

Then the items are encrusted atop and around a mirror frame crafted out of pine in the barn shop. Finally the frame is affixed to a wooden cabinet built to fit the hole in the plywood wall that once held a cheap (and now rusty) metal cabinet from the hardware store.

Slathering on the adhesive grout.

The technique is actually quite simple and makes a fine pastime for small children and ham-handed grandfathers. For me the project involved a couple of false starts, for I'm a longtime member of the Measure Once, Eff Up Twice Club.

First, when building the frame, I had a fight with the router (didn't lock the bit in the chuck tightly enough) and after the loose bit slashed up the wood, it fell out of the chuck and went spinning and caroming at umpteen thousand RPM around the shop floor like a maddened top, requiring me to do a frenzied toe dance to avoid getting my ankles carved up.

Of course I had to start all over again, and from then on things went well, but later on I forgot which way the hinges went on the finished mirror frame, necessitating fitting and refitting until the light finally dawned. Eventually (and with only a little swearing) I got 'er done, as they say in the Upper Peninsula.

Placing the treasures in the frame.

Construction of the cabinet and mirror frame was hardly brain surgery, but it did take some care and minor tweaking.

First, I built the medicine cabinet carcass out of leftover 1x6 pine, and gave it a 1/4" mahogany plywood back (from shop scraps) and a couple of 4-inch shelves. Then I test-fit the cabinet into the wall and achieved success after power-sanding a few rough spots off ragged edges. Finally I applied several coats of clear satin acrylic varnish and set the carcass aside to dry.

Next, I ripped an 8-foot-long 1x4 pine board on the table saw to 2 1/4 inches wide, then glued and nailed two 8-foot-long, 1 1/8-inch wide quarter-inch-thick pine laths to it. This formed the material for the U-shaped (cross section) mirror frame to receive the "beach art."

When the glue dried, I routed a 1/4" deep by 3/8" wide rabbet all the way along one edge. This cut the depression that would receive the mirror. (Of course Eff-Up No. 1 occurred here, and I started over.)

Sprinkling sand over the items embedded in the still damp grout.

Next step was to use the table saw and miter guide to cut two 20" and two 16" pieces out of the U-shaped board with 45 degree miter corners, then glue and nail up the pieces (with a pneumatic nailer; I can't hammer a nail without bending it) to make a mirror frame, making sure the rabbet ran along the inside edge.

Patting down the sand gently to embed a thin layer in the grout.

Sometimes getting everything square with a $99 Home Depot table saw can be tricky, but this part of the operation went swimmingly.

Next I brushed several coats of clear satin acrylic varnish onto the frame, sanding lightly between coats.

While everything dried, Tina Davidson, who is an accomplished artist as well as a family friend and house guest, took over the project. First she combed the beach in front of our cabin for goodies. She came up with quite a haul of small treasures.

Spraying gloss varnish onto the work.

Next she placed the completed frame on a table and carefully dry-fitted all the found-beach-art items into it until she was happy with the arrangement.

After that, she and the Lady Friend carefully removed the items and placed them in their original order outside the frame for the next step.

This was to use a putty knife to butter a 1/8-to-1/4-inch-thick coat of acrylic adhesive tile grout (emphasis on the adhesive; ordinary grout won't grip) into the U-shaped depression all around the frame. Both care and a little speed are needed here, for the grout sets in about 30 minutes.

Then Tina and the L.F. carefully pressed the tiny items into the grout until they bottomed on the wood underneath.

Finally, they sprinkled a thick coating of dry beach sand onto the whole thing, gently patting the sand down with their fingers so that a thin layer would sink into the grout.


The cabinet base, affixed into the wall.

After the grout had dried overnight and we shook and brushed off the loose sand, we sealed everything with half a dozen coats of quick-drying spray gloss acrylic varnish. You can use flat or satin varnish if you prefer, but gloss brings out the highlights in the stone and wood.

The next day we drove an hour east to Houghton to pick up a mirror at a glass company there. (Ontonagon has none.) We specified 1/4 inch thick silvered glass rather than 1/8 inch, for strength, and ordered it 3/16" shorter in each dimension than the mirror frame cutout.

Finally, we covered the back of the frame with quarter-inch plywood.

After the aforementioned struggle with the hinges, the job was done, and I'm as proud of it as I am of any of my mystery novels.

Finished and up on the wall. That's the shower curtain in the mirror.

Agawa Canyon

2011-07-30T11:35:00.007-05:00

The Agawa Canyon Tour Train during its 90-minute layover in the Ontario gorge.

The report on my trip last week to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and the Agawa Canyon Tour Train is now online at my train travel blog.

The gist: It's a great ride, but probably not for the Disneyland-and-Wisconsin Dells crowd.

In bed with the enemy

2011-07-18T07:17:00.003-05:00

Years ago I had a good friend and colleague, one quite a bit higher up the editorial ladder from my modest rung, who refused to attend social events involving politicians or public servants of any kind. As we went out the door to hoist one with a local alderman or cop, he'd shake his head and hang back.

"You don't socialize with the people you cover," he'd say when pressed.

Some of us thought he was being needlessly priggish, perhaps just covering for an innate shyness, an inability to relate to others outside the office. It's important, we journos told ourselves, to know our subjects fully, and to do so we need to experience their company in friendly and relaxed surroundings. We need to see them when they let their hair down.

On the other hand, every time I read about Washington journalists hanging out after hours with Capitol Hill pols and federal government functionaries, even to throwing huge parties for them, I've wondered about that wisdom. How honest and objective can a journalist be if he's drinking buddies with the people he's writing about? Can he throw a chum under the bus for the sake of truth and enlightenment if it should come to that?

Over the last few days, as revelation after revelation has burst in London of News Corporation writers and editors partying with Scotland Yard honchos and members of Parliament (even at their country houses) during the years in which a titanic phone hacking scandal struggled to emerge from a massive cover-up, I kept thinking of my old colleague.

Maybe he wasn't so shy and stiff-necked, after all. Maybe he was smarter than the rest of us. Surely he was prescient.

Off to the Agawa Canyon

2011-07-12T07:19:00.005-05:00

Courtesy of the Algoma Central Ry. Click on the map for larger version.

In a few days I'm driving the 5 1/2 hours across the Upper Peninsula from Ontonagon to the Soo to ride a train -- the Agawa Canyon Tour Train of the Algoma Central Railway.

The train runs 114 winding miles northward from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., through the thickly forested Canadian Shield to Agawa Canyon, said to be one of the most spectacular rubbernecking sites in Ontario. It's an all-day trip, leaving at 8 a.m. and returning about 6 p.m. The train stops at the waterfall-bedecked canyon for 1 1/2 hours so that passengers can debark to hike and lollygag, then heads back to the Soo.

I'm making the trip wearing my field reporter's cap for Trainweb.org, and will be an on-board guest of Canadian National Railways, owner of the Algoma Central.

Past reviews of the journey on TripAdvisor.com have been all over the map. Some people hated it, some loved it, and many were indifferent. The two 2011 reviews so far posted on TripAdvisor, however, are four- and five-star, leading me to think that the winter refurbishment of the train has been a success. Many of the coaches have been replaced by rebuilt cars from the recently defunct Rio Grande Ski Train, which once carried skiers from Denver to Winter Park.

One of the new attractions of the train is a GPS-driven on-board narration (in five languages) of the tour that tells you exactly what you're seeing as you see it. Out of curiosity I asked the CN marketing people if they provided a printed script of the narration for the deaf and hearing-impaired -- and they do. They emailed me a link to the script for printing out, and I'll be carrying it on the train.

Full report to come.

Draggin' dictation

2011-06-27T07:21:00.003-05:00

When I saw David Pogue's breathless encomium to Dragon Dictation for the iPad 2 in his New York Times column, I said to myself, "Henry, you've got to try this one. It's free. And it might even work."

I have "deaf speech" that was once described as sounding like "rusty bathtub pipes." My production is breathy, my enunciation muddy. I'm understandable in a quiet room if my interlocutor pays close attention. In the presence of background noise or human impatience, I might as well be shouting down a bottomless hole.

I once took speech therapy until the returns began to diminish. At the age of almost 71 there isn't much point in subjecting myself to that kind of hard work anymore. After all, I'm not about to address the British Empire on the eve of World War II.

Still I hope for a breakthrough. Perhaps the easy-to-use Dragon Dictation app, which translates spoken words to text, might be a useful engine for sharpening my speech--if it could reproduce what I say with any accuracy. Perhaps a bit of practice would increase that accuracy, however incrementally.

So I downloaded it to my iPad 2 and gave it a try.

Here is what I said:

"In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself."

Here is what Dragon Dictation said I said:

"Gran Mammo human Pidfile Net-Arping couldn't you think badly of voodoo mind him through okay Omega ring to message spoken with a PaymentInfo caring bridge women in favor and go to the print FoodGang. Close to you."

Your Majesty and Mr. Logue, you have nothing to worry about from the likes of me.

Happy Father's Day

2011-06-19T11:25:00.002-05:00

As part of his annual Father's Day email to me, my second son offered the following. It is too good not to share with the rest of the world. (Dramatis personae: Conan and Annie, parents; Emmet, 5, and Alice, 2 1/2.)

As a special treat, I will provide a transcript of Saturday morning's breakfast table conversation:

Conan: Emmet, did you go to the pool yesterday? Please eat your waffles.

Emmet: When there's danger, you need a Space Ranger! Wheeeeeoooooo Wheeeeeooooo (siren sound).

Alice: Yeah, and you have a peanut butter hat. I went pee in the pool. Do you have a microphone hat?

Annie: Alice, we don't dunk our bacon in our milk. Would you like me to cut your bacon for you?

Emmet: . . . And then Jack bonked Quinn, and Quinn bonked Bobby, and I said, "Do you want to be arrested?"

Annie: Alice, don't. Please don't.

Conan: Wait--Alice, did you pee in the pool?

Alice: Yeah! On your mud hat. On the cement. Do you have a paper-airplane hat?

Annie: She peed on the pool deck in front of everyone. Mortifying.

Emmet: So I bonked Quinn and then he bonked Jack again. Donna's teeth are far apart. Dad, show me your teeth.

Alice: ... and I climbed up on the roof, and peed all over, and told the police officer, "You get them. I am a princess!" Where is your bucket?

Conan: My bucket?

Alice: For your bucket hat, you Foopie. You are a bucket hat. You Foopie. Foopie, foopie, foopie, foopie.

Emmet: Alice!

Annie: People were staring. Emily Maines came up and said the kid she was babysitting for did the same thing. The weird thing was, Alice had pooped in the potty like 10 minutes earlier. She needs to connect that you can pee and poop in the same go.

Emmet: Alice! Stop it! Why do you keep saying Foopie?

Alice: . . . Foopie, Foopie, Foopie, Foopie . . .

Conan: What time do we have to be in Downers Grove?

Annie: After naps. Although Alice never naps anymore. I don't know why I pretend that's an actual time of day.

Alice: You have banana soup, you Foopie. And mud soup!

Emmet: After Quinn got out of jail, he went right back up and bonked Jack again.

Alice: May I have some more bacon please?

And that, Conan assures me, is a typical breakfast-table conversation at their house.

An iPad 2 comes to my house

2011-06-02T07:33:00.002-05:00

I have succumbed. Surrendered. Thrown in the towel. Gone over to the enemy.

Three weeks ago I bought myself an iPad 2.

A year ago I resisted mightily, choosing to buy a new netbook rather than the original iPad. To me the iPad was a toy, not a tool. Also, it's just an iPhone on steroids. And it was not so hot as an e-book reader, because you can't use it in the sun.

But realities and fealties change. In my travels I found myself humping a netbook, a Kindle, an iPod Touch and a cell phone everywhere. Most of those devices did their discrete jobs very well and still do. The netbook is fine for writing and editing, the Kindle for reading, the iPod Touch for playing -- but the cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone's keypad is lousy for old-man texting. (Being deaf, I don't do voice calls.)

Still, four separate tools to do four separate jobs are a lot to keep track of when you're traveling. Each doesn't weigh much, but added up they start to load down the baggage. Keeping track of them while getting the full-monty patdown at airport security is a nightmare unless you're traveling with a companion who can keep an eye out for light fingers.

And so when the iPad 2 came out earlier this year, I started to think that maybe a single device that can do all four tasks reasonably well might be what I needed.

So I took the $629 plunge on a 16-gigabyte Verizon G3 model from B&H Photo in New York. (No sales tax plus free shipping.) I don't listen to music and don't watch a lot of movies, so don't need the extra memory of the 32GB and 64GB versions.

The G3 cellular capability, I reasoned, would allow me to send and receive texts outside free wi-fi range just about anywhere in the country, even on the wild shore of Lake Superior in upper Michigan, and Verizon's minimum $20-per-month, no-contract plan for 1GB of data is affordable. Since I'm almost always around a free wi-fi node, 1GB probably will work just fine for texting (with the free TextNow app) and light Web surfing with Safari.

The iPad 2's touch-screen "keyboard" is just fine for texting succinct messages to family as well as cab dispatchers while I'm on the road. It works well with the IP-Relay deaf telephone relay service, too, and I can jot short Facebook entries or comments without much trouble with the Friendly app.

That keyboard, however, is absolutely useless for writing, even with two excellent apps, iA Writer and Apple's Pages, at least with my arthritic fingers. For that I bought a compact and lightweight $66 Apple wireless keyboard, and that makes text entry quite usable although I wouldn't want to do heavy editing with the iPad. Much too clumsy.

Using the New York Times app (I'm a paying subscriber now) on the iPad is an absolute joy. So is the sophisticated app for New Yorker subscribers, as are the apps for free news from NPR, BBC News, CNN, the AP, Bloomberg and al-Jazeera. The free Intellicast weather app, with its colorful moving radar map, keeps me informed about malevolent thunderboomers. The game apps for solitaire (SolBox Free) and Scrabble keep me from getting bored.

And I've discovered the Netflix streaming video app, which for $8 a month allows me to watch unlimited movies and TV shows with subtitles on the iPad. Only about 30 per cent of Netflix' content is subtitled at present, but the provider promises to raise that figure to 80 per cent by the end of 2011.

I can download captioned movies from Apple's iTunes and watch them with Apple's own movie app, but downloading a single $4.99 film can take a couple of hours on a slow 801g wireless connection. One movie eats up about 3 or 4 gigs of memory on the iPad, and once you've started you have just 24 hours to watch it to the end. Streaming on Netflix is more efficient, and you can pick up where you left off at any time.

Gotta be careful with that, though. Yesterday the receptionist in the doctor's office was giving me dirty looks as I watched a Netflix foreign film -- until I realized the sound was turned up all the way. Quickly I muted the iPad, but not soon enough for her.

I haven't yet explored the iPad 2 for photography use, but can see that it may make a good "photo bank" for storing backup files from my camera during out-of-town trips. There are lots of apps, some of them free, for simple processing of photos.

As for e-books, I wouldn't say the Kindle and Apple iBooks apps make reading on the iPad 2 as restful as it is on the genuine Kindle, but indoors it comes close. So much so that the Lady Friend says she actually prefers the iPad to the Kindle for that task.

In fact, she's threatening to hog the iPad 2. To save our marriage I just might have to get her one for her birthday.

Hard times

2011-05-27T20:46:00.001-05:00

That Michigan's Upper Peninsula is on its uppers is no news to the people who live there, both the hardy folks who struggle to survive and those fortunate enough (like the Lady Friend and me) to have made their pile elsewhere so they can spend their summers in these glorious woods on the shore of Lake Superior.

But now word is getting out. A crack Associated Press reporter named John Flesher came up from lower Michigan and looked around, and he filed a sobering report this morning that so far has appeared in 164 newspapers and television-station web sites, including the Daily Mail in London.

Ontonagon (Porcupine City in my mystery novels) is growing famous, even if the fame is the wrong kind: an international object lesson in the economic decline of rural America.

Still, there are opportunities up here. Living expenses are low, so low that many folks who live in urban Illinois and Minnesota are buying up properties for summer and retirement homes.

They have a love-hate relationship with the locals, some of whom call them, among other things, "FIBs." That's short for "Fucking Illinois Bastard," coined by a local waitress stiffed on the tip by a customer who drove off in a car with Land of Lincoln plates.

FIBs buy homes, many of which are foreclosures, that locals are too poor to afford even at absurdly low prices. Up here you can score a roomy, well-maintained three-bedroom home in town for $35,000 -- a home that might go for $350,000 in a Chicago suburb.

Still FIBs are not all bad. We bring in sorely needed money. We hire local tradesmen and spend our retirement checks in local supermarkets, some of which have expanded (especially their wine departments) to attract the summer crowd. Many of us fall deeply in love with the place and participate as much as we can in its cultural events, donating whatever we can to support local institutions.

True, some FIBs are truly arrogant bastards and attempt to lord it over the locals, but others try hard to win their hearts, knowing that will take time and effort. They volunteer their labor as well as their lucre -- and they ask for help in turn. If they're lucky, they get it.

You know you're on the way to acceptance when a neighbor brings over a clutch of eggs and a clump of chives for transplanting in your yard, when new friends quietly drop off (and stack) a spare cord or two of firewood after you've left for the winter, knowing you'll need it the coming chilly spring.

Today I'm going to wear my T-shirt that says "I Wasn't Born in the UP, But I Got Here as Soon as I Could."

Visiting Dan's Cabin

2011-05-21T19:14:00.001-05:00

Clockwise from lower left: Karen Berg, Barbara Braithwaite, Bernard Malaga, Deborah Abbott, Dave Braithwaite (guide), Lynn Israel, Susan Giesen, Steve Robinson, Irene Haller, Leslie Toombs, Bruce Ruutila (guide), Bubba (Lab) and Wendy Anderson.

Today my class at the Friends of the Porkies Folk School Writers' Workshop in Upper Michigan's Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park spent the morning discussing their work of the previous week.

Afterward, we hiked deep in the woods to Dan's Cabin, a rustic and beautiful timber-framed lodge where the Friends' artists-in-residence live and work during their stints.

During the next couple of weeks the students will be writing about their experiences and observations at the cabin and on the trail to it, and, believe me, I'm looking forward to reading their stuff.

Helping these doughty and talented folks with their writing for the last couple of weeks has been a tonic for a jaded old retired newsie and occasional mystery novelist like me.

The students listen to critiques during the morning session at the Folk School.

Dan's Cabin somewhere deep in the Porkies, where artists-in-residence create.


The "back porch" of Dan's Cabin

Bruce Ruutila (left) explains the fine points of timber framing construction.

A few steps away from the cabin lies a beautiful glen with a waterfall.

The dark side of keyword searching

2011-05-13T14:55:00.002-05:00

Not so long ago, when intelligent and educated readers still kept newspapers alive, copy editors delighted in writing witty, pun-soaked headlines to go atop lighter stories. The editor who could consistently come up with a zinger of a "hed" 30 seconds before the presses started rolling was highly valued by his bosses and sometimes made $10 a week more than his compatriots on the copy desk.

An example was a headline over a Chicago Daily News review of a book about the irritation-plagued life of the humorist James Thurber: "Great Jokes from Little Achings Grow." That was not mine but written by my boss, Bill Newman, big brother of Edwin Newman, the celebrated NBC pundit. (Pun intended.)

But now the witty headline is a fast disappearing art. As newspapers latch onto the online teat, search engines need to lock on important keywords in headlines so that readers can find the stories. Puns would turn Googling into paroxysms of bada-Bing.

Of necessity that Thurber headline would have to read: "James Thurber Led Troubled Life, Book Says."

It does tell the story -- but oh, so lamely.

True, a talent for witty headlines could sometimes get out of hand. Over a one-paragraph Daily News short about Asian villagers succumbing to an invasion of poisonous tree frogs, an editor wrote: "Croak."

Unhappily, the slot man let it through and the story made it onto the bottom of Page One. Just for one edition, but the damage was done.

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post opined on the subject yesterday in a funny but acerbic column.

P.S. This post was intended to be online two days ago, but Google trashed its own software while taking Blogger down for what was supposed to be an hour of maintenance and it was dark for 48 hours.

Sunrise on Lake Superior, May 9, 2011

2011-05-09T18:55:00.001-05:00

This morning I stepped outside the cabin at 6:30 a.m. to capture the sun at the moment of its rising. Before 9 a beaver, several buffleheads and mergansers, a brace of mallards, a couple of crows, an eagle and a turkey vulture had crossed my line of sight.

And the clueless still ask me why I prefer the North Woods of upper Michigan to the concrete wasteland of Chicago.

Click on the photo for a glorious bedsheet-sized version. If you dare.

The professor is in

2011-05-08T05:16:00.000-05:00

It seems that the writing-instructor cap has taken up semipermanent residence on my head.

This coming Saturday opens the four-weekend Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park Writers' Workshop in the Friends of the Porkies' Folk School at the park in western Upper Michigan. There I'll be teaching nine students the fine points of writing about wilderness.

And next October 16 through 21, I'll be co-teaching a workshop on railroad photography and travel writing at the Depot Inn & Suites in La Plata, Missouri. My partner is Carl Morrison, a noted California rail photographer and fellow "field reporter" for Trainweb.org.

You can read all about it here.

Decades ago, when I taught at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, I prepared copies of my lectures and ran them off on an electronic copier to hand out to all students in my classes. I'd read the lectures aloud while the students followed along. Naturally many if not most would read ahead to the end and stop, bored expressions on their faces, while I caught up. Sometimes it took a long time to catch up.

This was an inefficient way to overcome my sometimes-hard-to-understand "deaf speech," but there was nothing else to do. In the end, it worked.

This time I'll be using another method to convey the text of my lectures: Keynote (the Mac version of PowerPoint) presentations, salted with photographs. This has worked well for bookstore pitches and library talks. I can see no reason it shouldn't in the classroom as well.

Luncheon at LaSalle Language Academy

2011-04-30T07:08:00.001-05:00

Yesterday the Lady Friend and I did something unusual: We talked about our children's book One TV Blasting and a Pig Outdoors at a literary tea party-luncheon sponsored by Ms. Deborah Cohen's fourth grade class at LaSalle Language Academy, a celebrated magnet school in Chicago's Old Town that is part of the sprawling Chicago Public Schools system.

In case you didn't know, One TV Blasting is the book the Lady Friend (who goes by the nom de plume Deborah Abbott) based on the original 1990 edition of my What's That Pig Outdoors?: A Memoir of Deafness. One TV Blasting was published in 1994 and is still in print, bringing in a trickle of royalties every year.

We've done countless appearances at bookstores and libraries, but this was something new for us -- and we had a splendid time.

The kids asked sharp questions ("How old were you when you became deaf?" and "Why don't you know sign language?" among them). In unison they demonstrated their expertise in fingerspelling, a skill I am sorely lacking.

They allowed us -- and the many parents present -- to read and critique the books they themselves had created for Ms. Cohen's class. (Many of those youngsters, believe me, have a lot of talent.) They asked me to autograph their books, and I did so eagerly.

To wrap up the event, they put on a talent show, including a rousing medley of songs.

What impressed me the most about this school deep in the heart of Chicago was the joyous affection and respect this multicultural group of kids -- divided almost equally among whites, blacks, Latinos and Asians -- showed for each other and for their teacher. On the basis of just a couple of hours' observation, I'd say Ms. Cohen deserves a Golden Apple with oak leaf clusters. (So, I am told, does the rest of the faculty.)

What a contrast this was with the often out-of-control classrooms even in suburban Evanston, where the Lady Friend and I live.

As its name implies, the school focuses on teaching foreign languages every day from kindergarten through 8th grade while also grounding its pupils in math, science, music and other educational staples. Kids can choose among Spanish, French, Italian and Mandarin Chinese. Upper-grade pupils travel to Europe and China to practice their languages, and they also host students from abroad.

Need it be mentioned that their standardized state test scores tend to land in the upper 90th percentiles?

These clearly are very bright youngsters, and the competition to get into the school is intense. Their parents are equally committed. Quite a few fathers took off a few hours from work to attend the event -- something you don't often see in suburban schools.

What an education yesterday was for us.

Workin' on the railroad . . .

2011-04-12T11:22:00.006-05:00

Amtrak No. 4, the eastbound Southwest Chief, stops to pick us up at Winslow, Ariz.

. . . all the livelong week. That's why I've been missing in action for so long. The Lady Friend and I took a brief trip aboard Amtrak's Southwest Chief to La Plata, Mo., and Winslow, Ariz., and the trip report for Trainweb is here.

Go-arounds

2011-03-31T05:28:00.006-05:00

Yesterday the Washington Post printed a mildly scary story about an Alaska Airlines jet landing at National Airport (I know it's Reagan National, but all pilots call it "National") and suddenly zooming sharply away in what pilots call a "go-around," startling passengers and spectators on the ground.

Another airplane, the Post said, was on the runway. It had just landed but hadn't yet turned off onto a taxiway, so the tower ordered the incoming jet to abort its landing and go around the circuit for another try. Safety first, you know.

If it hadn't been for an air traffic controller falling asleep in the wee hours at National last week, the event wouldn't have been a story. But travelers are nervous, and newspapers have to make money, and an enterprising reporter capitalized on an opportunity.

The reporter admitted that at National Airport go-arounds happen a lot -- ten to 20 times a month -- because traffic there is so congested that the tower has to space incoming planes tightly. Sometimes the controllers' timing is slightly off and an incoming plane follows the preceding one a little too closely. Solution: If there's any doubt, any doubt at all, the tower (or the captain of the plane about to land) calls a go-around and things are rejuggled. Nobody is endangered -- not in the slightest.

Those incidents never make the news.

Some years ago I was aboard a United 737 on short final at National. Less than a quarter of a mile from touchdown, the pilot suddenly poured on the coal, cleaned up the landing gear and roared away. The woman next to me grabbed the seat rest and gasped, no doubt thinking we had escaped death by the skin of our chins. The guy across the aisle chuckled and shook his head. He'd been there before.

Nor was I perturbed, because as a small plane pilot I had repeatedly been trained to perform that maneuver almost from the first day of flight instruction.

"Always keep your eyes on that runway," said Tom, my instructor, "and expect somebody to surprise you. The second you think something's not right, shove in that throttle and get the hell outta there."

Again and again, even when the airport was deserted except for us, Tom would clap my leg just as I lifted the plane's nose to touch down on the mains and shout "Go around!"

Pilots are trained never to relax in the landing pattern but to stay alert, keeping a hand lightly on the throttle, ready to ram the ball to the wall at the slightest sign of potential danger.

During 15 years and more than 1,300 hours in the cockpit, I was forced to perform more than a dozen actual go-arounds. Once an airplane landed well ahead of me but turned around and back-taxied down the runway, its pilot oblivious to incoming traffic. More than once a student pilot holding in the pocket failed to look up to check incoming airplanes before taxiing onto the numbers for takeoff.

Several times animals -- deer, coyotes and once a magnificent elk -- sauntered onto the runway when I was on short final.

None of these go-arounds were close calls, although a passenger or two might have been a little perturbed. (I don't think I ever said "Oh shit!" with someone in the right seat. Pilots should never do that, even in mild irritation.)

And I was an amateur, a private pilot, a weekend puddle-jumper driver. Air transport pilots are even more on edge during landings, because they're responsible for scores of passengers. As I did, they train and train and train until go-arounds become second nature. (They don't have to wait for a controller's order, either.)

Go-arounds are safe. They're designed to keep you safe. Don't fret.

Coming up for air

2011-03-30T11:39:00.007-05:00

The rumors of my demise are exaggerated, although it is true that with every passing year I slide further into decrepitude.

I have not posted on either blog for nearly two weeks because:

1. I've been very busy working to get my books' rights back from the publishers so I can republish them as e-books. (It takes the lawyers forever, and more than a few lunches, to get things done.) I've got big plans for one of them, but don't want to get ahead of events here.

2. The Lady Friend has press-ganged me into donating my labor (chiefly installing new Macs and printing labels) to her favorite cause, the Evanston Public Library Friends' new "Mighty Twig" branchette. For that matter, it has become my favorite cause, too.

3. I've been preparing lessons for my half of a Train Travel Writers and Photographers Workshop to be held October 15-21, 2011, at the Depot Inn & Suites in La Plata, Missouri. (I'm doing the writing half.) More about this later.

4. I just haven't had much to opine about lately. The goings-on in the world (Libya and Wisconsin to mention only two of them) have got me utterly befuddled. Do you need still another blogger to comment on the obvious -- that the world is going to hell in a handbasket?

The recruiter is in

2011-03-16T07:48:00.038-05:00

Starting May 14, I'll be teaching again -- this time a writers' workshop for the Porcupine Mountains Folk School at the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park just east of Silver City in western Upper Michigan. You all are invited, especially if you live in the western UP.

Here's the prospectus:

Words and the Porkies: An informal workshop for writers with the Porcupine Mountains as the backdrop and inspiration

Time: Four Saturdays, May 14 & 21, June 4 & 11, 2011, from 10:00 a.m. to noon.

Cost: $25 includes all four Saturdays. Scholarships are available. Please inquire at registration (906-884-4188)

Description: Students will focus on writing about “The Porkies” in a broad choice of genres, including the travel article, the essay, the journal, memoir, fiction, children's stories and poetry -- whatever is comfortable for each student. There will be readings of short passages about the wilderness by famous writers and poets as well as work by Porcupine Mountains artists-in-residence. Techniques of observation and fact-gathering, including interviewing, will be discussed. Basic assignments on subjects about The Porkies will be made in consultation with the students. Student work will be read and discussed and suggestions made, but no grading will be done.

Lake of the Clouds, the Porkies' most-photographed site.

Requirements: A desire to write and the ability to use a typewriter or a computer. It is hoped that students will have access to them, as well as a printer, but some accommodation can be made for those who do not.

Special notes: A choice among short guided hikes and indoor activities will be offered to provide subjects for writing. Casual clothes and suitable shoes are recommended for the outdoor activities.

The instructor, Henry Kisor, assisted by Deborah Abbott, will be available for private consultations (included in the price) all weekend on those dates, either in person at the Folk School or via e-mail at author@henrykisor.com.

About the instructor: Henry Kisor is a retired literary editor of the Chicago Sun-Times as well as the author of three nonfiction books and four mystery novels. He has been a summer visitor to the Porkies since 1966. He and his wife, the children's book critic and author Deborah Abbott, spend their summers at a cabin on the shore of Lake Superior at Green, Michigan, that her father built in 1947.

Why is this workshop so inexpensive? It's a pilot project for the Friends of the Porkies Folk School, testing the waters to see if such an offering will attract people to the Porkies -- and I'm donating my time and experience.

Come on up and see us.

Falls on the Presque Isle River in the Porkies

Mention in Dispatches

2011-03-11T16:53:00.003-06:00

Scored a modest success with one of my macrophotographs in a local contest today:

(scroll down to bottom of the page)

See here.

New TrainWeb dispatch

2011-03-10T13:30:00.000-06:00

A new travel post, about our short hops earlier this week on a pair of workaday Amtrak trains on the Atlantic Coast, is on my TrainWeb site.

Only two months to go

2011-03-04T15:58:00.000-06:00

Our friend David Braithwaite, whose house lies on the shore of Lake Superior a few hundred yards west of our summer place, dropped by it today and took this photograph of the boarded-up Writer's Lair through an ice arch out on the lake. That made me realize with a pleased start that only two months remain before the Lady Friend and I move our household back north until the middle of October. Thanks, Dave.

Further adventures of 'Hang Fire'

2011-03-03T10:33:00.003-06:00

Last week Hang Fire, the fourth in the Steve Martinez mystery series, came close to being sold to a British publisher who markets his wares in the United States. The deal-breaker was that he wanted a two-book contract, with the second book delivered within six months.

Unfortunately I can't write that fast. Two years, I said. Nope, he said. He needed to strike with the second book while the market was still hot. Or words to that effect.

So we parted with nice sentiments for each other. (He said he liked Hang Fire very much and was sorry we couldn't seal a deal.)

Yesterday Hang Fire was sent to one more publisher, and I have my fingers crossed.

It took quite a bit of work to reformat the manuscript for that new publisher. I had written it (as I had done the earlier novels) with OpenOffice.org, an excellent free word processor that reads and writes Microsoft Word files.

But the publisher's reformatting instructions are both complex and Word-oriented. I probably could have done the job with OpenOffice, but that would have meant really learning the program's command structure -- and I never had learned anything more than I needed to in order to produce a manuscript.

Stupid of me. Instead of inserting page breaks at the end of every chapter, as the new publisher demands, I had just hit the return key until I'd inserted blank lines enough to start a new chapter. (That will screw up the formatting every time you change to a different word processor.)

So I borrowed the Lady Friend's copy of Microsoft Word, imported the file, and did the reformatting. Took quite a while, especially since I also had to reformat all my em dashes (never put them within spaces!) and get rid of all tabs (which I had used to start new paragraphs).

The experience was highly instructive. No matter where Hang Fire ends up--with a publisher or self-published as an e-book--I won't have to do that sweaty stuff all over again.

Snag that low bucket fare

2011-02-24T06:22:00.000-06:00

There's a new post on my train travel site. It's all about a new online tool that helps one score the lowest prices for Amtrak tickets.

On to Arizona

2011-02-19T05:35:00.006-06:00

Wanderlust strikes again.

The Lady Friend and I have booked a trip to Winslow, Arizona, in early April. We will be traveling aboard Amtrak's Southwest Chief and I will be wearing my new official outfit as a Field Reporter for Trainweb.com and Railnews.net.

Actually the uniform consists of a big camera and a small press card, to be flashed at opportune moments in the hope of impressing officialdom.

Why Winslow? The town used to be an important stop on Route US 66 on the way to L.A., but the coming of the Interstates and the decline of passenger railroading nearly turned the place into a ghost town.

But it has struggled back. Its chief attraction is the restored La Posada Hotel, built in 1930 by the Fred Harvey chain as a waypoint on the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Beautiful (and properly chaperoned) young ladies known as Harvey Girls greeted weary travelers from both the highway and the high iron, and fed them in the roomy restaurant. We'll be staying there two nights.

The hotel lies spang on the busy Burlington Northern Santa Fe main line, affording camera-bedecked railfans (who me?) considerable opportunity for photography from deck chairs scattered about the property. The Amtrak station occupies part of the hotel grounds.

Good thing, for there isn't much else to do in Winslow proper. Homolovi Ruins State Park just north of town has been closed for the last year by budget-beleaguered Arizona, but is reopening March 18, and we'll pay it a visit. We are also renting a car and will either drive 67 miles north to see the Hopi pueblos near the Four Corners so magnificently celebrated in Tony Hillerman's mysteries, or head 20 miles west to Meteor Crater, the mile-wide hole blasted out of the ground by an asteroid 50,000 years ago.

There will of course be a full report.

There will also be a full dispatch on our night's stopover along the way at La Plata, Missouri, and the Depot Inn & Suites, headquarters of Trainweb/Railnet. I've been there once and enjoyed it mightily (reports are here and here).

'Booooard!

Book review

2011-02-13T16:51:00.000-06:00

Having made a living for 33 years reviewing books, I do not do that any more. I made a clean break from that profession in 2006, when I retired from the Chicago Sun-Times.

But there are exceptions, especially if the book in question is about train travel. Now that I am an official and certified (complete with press credentials) reporter for TrainWeb/RailNet, the nation's largest railroad-oriented web site, it's part of the job for me to assess and report upon new choo-choo books.

Which I did today here.

Now you know.

Al-Jazeera

2011-02-12T07:40:00.003-06:00

One of the beneficiaries of the Egyptian revolution -- in the United States, at least -- seems to be the Arabic broadcast network Al-Jazeera.

Long reviled by right-wing Islamophobes as "anti-American," Al-Jazeera displayed no such bias -- at least that I could see -- in its coverage of the events of the last three weeks in Tunisia and Egypt. Sure, its opinionators displayed points of view that could be called liberal or leftish, but no more so than the pundits of MSNBC or HuffPo.

In its early reporting Al-Jazeera was far ahead of the Western news organizations, all of which were caught flatfooted by the events in North Africa. Like generals and senators, editors and pundits tend to fight the last foreign wars and aren't very good at spotting unfamiliar blips on radar screens.

As American news organizations continue to shrink their foreign coverage, outlets like al-Jazeera are going to become ever more important to our knowledge of what's going on in the world as well as our understanding of the points of view of other cultures.

You can read the English-language reports of Al-Jazeera here, and also see its streaming video here.

Al-Jazeera is now a regular stop on my morning Internet newscrawl, and I hope a cable network will ignore the blinkered and bombastic Bill O'Reillys and start broadcasting the station live in the United States.

FEBRUARY 13: More on this issue here. Note the comments after the piece.

Send to Kindle

2011-02-07T07:07:00.003-06:00

You're scanning the news websites in a hurry, skimming the headlines and making mental notes to return to read the stories. Of course, the mental notes fall out of your head and roll under the bed with the dust-kitties.

If you have a Kindle and also are using Google's Chrome as a browser, you can use a new Chrome extension called "Send to Kindle" to do just as it says -- send the entire text of a web article to your Kindle for later reading. It's terrific and it's free.

Among the sites I visit regularly are Arts & Letters Daily, Bookforum and The Browser, all handy compendiums of interesting but longish articles and reviews published elsewhere. Reading them on the Kindle instead of a backlighted computer screen is much more restful on the eyes.

Stop at an article on your computer. Click on a little check mark box in the Chrome header. Then click again -- and the article is sent to your Kindle mail address for uploading to your e-reader the next time you turn it on within wi-fi range. It takes just a few minutes for Amazon.com to do its thing and relay it to you.

You can get the Send to Kindle extension here. (You'll need to be using Chrome to download it.)

Sorry, it works only with Chrome, not Firefox or Internet Explorer or any of the non-Google browsers.

My new conductor's cap

2011-02-06T06:06:00.001-06:00

I've just joined the official correspondent's corps of TrainWeb/RailNet, the nation's largest rail buff Internet forum, as a "Field Reporter."

Actually, the job will consist mostly of repackaging, in TrainWeb style, future Reluctant Blogger blogposts on my train travels -- you'll see them here as well as there. But I'll also be going out on the high iron with increased frequency to exercise my press credentials.

I won't be writing merely about life aboard trains, but also will yarn about my adventures during stopovers and at destinations. (My first effort is here.)

Of course there will be photographs, lots of them.

Come along for the ride.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your Kindles

2011-02-04T06:22:00.001-06:00

The judges of the English-speaking literary world's highest honor have been issued Kindles to help them read the 140-odd heavy-duty submissions to the Man Booker Prize.

Here's the story in the Independent.

Not everybody thinks it's a good idea, of course. Highlighting passages and making marginal notes is much easier with tree-books -- and that's one reason why printed copies as well as electronic versions are being submitted to the judges.

But the e-handwriting is on the wall.

My car

2011-02-02T12:36:00.002-06:00

This doesn't need a caption, does it now?

Covers

2011-01-31T16:36:00.001-06:00

These days authors not only have to take up more and more of the tasks publishers used to handle -- mostly publicity and promotion -- but they're also being asked to provide ideas for jacket art. And if they self-publish their books, they either have to hire artists to create jackets or design the covers themselves.

My fourth Steve Martinez novel, Hang Fire, is still making the rounds in New York, but it seems increasingly likely that I'll have to self-publish it later this year as an e-book with Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Apple.

Even e-books need covers, not only at the head of the text but also in promotional materials. So I've started fooling around with ideas.

Hmmm. For a first try with Photoshop Elements, let's keep it simple.

The most salient visual characteristic of the story is muzzle-loading arms, especially the British Army "Brown Bess" musket of the eras of the Revolutionary War and of Lewis and Clark (1800-1840). (I wrote about handling a genuine Bess on January 11.)

There are lots of free online photographs, many of them uncopyrighted, of the Brown Bess. And there are lots of free online "colonial" fonts such as Caslon Antique.

Combine a Bess with Caslon Antique and three colors, and we get the cover at upper right.

Not bad. But could it be improved? Probably.

You got any ideas? If so, let's hear them. I'm thinking, for instance, that that yellow background should be paler, almost pastel.

I'm also thinking that "A Steve Martinez Mystery" or "A Porcupine County Mystery" ought to go under the author's name.

Tripadvisor reports

2011-01-29T07:38:00.004-06:00

Earlier this week Tripadvisor, the Internet travel forum, published a report on "Ten Dirtiest Hotels -- United States 2011." Each hotel's low rating was a compendium of individual reports by disgusted travelers, and I have no doubt that in general each hotel deserved its dismal standing.

Still, I've spent some time looking over the individual Tripadvisor reports on hotels in places I plan to visit, and have come to the conclusion that these reports are extremely subjective and personal. People do bring different demands and expectations to a hotel stay.

One traveler gave a hotel 1 out of 5 stars just because he found mouseturds next to the bathtub. Think about it. The place otherwise might have been lovely, and cleaned carefully, by a maid five minutes before an itinerant mouse passed through the room and hung up his hat for a couple of minutes.

(My aging eyes probably never would have spotted the calling cards.)

I've heard people complain about the cleanliness of hotels because the toilet seat wasn't wrapped and the toilet paper foldy-pointed, small touches that they were used to in the hostelries that they most often frequented.

Some people judge hotels and motels by the quality of their free breakfasts, never mind the other amenities.

Some people think a hotel without a swimming pool isn't worth a stay. Likewise a fitness center.

Probably the best way to approach Tripadvisor hotel reports is to compare each individual report about a hotel with the others. If enough people complain about the same things, that probably gives an accurate picture of the state of a hotel. But if the subjects of the complaints are wildly different, then maybe they should be taken with a grain of salt.

Maybe each of us should think about our own needs and expectations and bring those to a reading of Tripadvisor reports.

My needs are simple: a clean room, a clean bed, a decent desk and chair, a sufficiently bright lamp, a reasonably healthful breakfast. Most Super 8s do me fine.

But the Lady Friend prefers higher standards when we are on vacation, so when we travel together I look for more upscale hostelries.

But if I have to pay for Internet access, I automatically knock one star off the hotel rating. Charging for the Internet is cheesy beyond belief and I cannot understand why so many five star hotels do that. One New Orleans hotel charged me twice for a day's Internet access, once for my laptop and once for my iPod Touch. I protested and the hotel yielded one of its goddam 12 bucks-per-day charges.

If the upscale hostelry delivers only McPaper to the room in the morning, it loses a star. If it also delivers the New York Times or Wall Street Journal or Washington Post or even the local daily, it gains a star.

What are your expectations and wishes of a hotel/motel? Bet they're considerably different from mine.

Rejection

2011-01-25T12:07:00.002-06:00

The hammer fell yesterday: The publisher of my three Upper Michigan mysteries announced apologetically that it couldn't take the fourth, Hang Fire, which I'd submitted away back in October, and was cutting me loose.

This was hardly unexpected.

My mysteries have been widely and well reviewed -- they've earned favorable notices in Marilyn Stasio's New York Times Book Review column on crime fiction -- but they are regional whodunits. They take place in the rural setting of a part of the country not many people visit. They do bring in thousands of readers -- but not enough thousands. Not in this economic climate. The bulk of mystery readers live in big cities, and most of those want their fiction set in urban jungles, not wilderness thickets.

Also, these days publishers are hurting. So are bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Hardcover book sales are down, way down.

As a result, midlist writers -- those whose books earn only modest profits for their publishers -- are being let go everywhere. And so I've joined that melancholy crowd.

My agent tells me that moving a commercial fiction series from one publisher to another is very difficult. But she's going to try a small house that has been known to adopt orphaned series, and see what happens.

I'm hoping good things will. But if they don't, I've got a Plan B: Self-publishing.

Not of printed books. All too many authors spend thousands of dollars to have their work published by a subsidy house, but even with sweaty self-promotion, their boxes and boxes of books almost always languish on skids in the garage. I'm a retiree and don't have that kind of money to waste.

But there is a solution: publishing the novel as an e-book with Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Apple. The overhead is minuscule, so the initial layout of dollars is small.

The tough part will be getting the news about a new e-book out to all my old readers. I've got some experience -- not a lot -- in book promotion. I'm a veteran of the bookstore and library circuit, but without tangible goods for the bookstores to sell and the libraries to lend, those may no longer be workable venues. (How do you autograph an e-book, anyway?)

Still there are ways, and in the coming months I'll tell you what they are.

Ulysses S. Grant on the living Constitution

2011-01-24T12:09:00.002-06:00

I have been reading on my Kindle The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, downloaded from Gutenberg.org, that magnificent online repository of classical texts converted to e-books. This morning I came across the following passage:

The framers were wise in their generation and wanted to do the very best possible to secure their own liberty and independence, and that also of their descendants to the latest days. It is preposterous to suppose that the people of one generation can lay down the best and only rules of government for all who are to come after them, and under unforeseen contingencies. At the time of the framing of our constitution the only physical forces that had been subdued and made to serve man and his labor, were the currents in the streams and in the air we breathe. Rude machinery, propelled by water power, had been invented, sails to propel ships upon the waters had been set to catch the passing breeze -- but the application of steam to propel vessels against both wind and current, and the machinery to do all manner of work had not been thought of. The instantaneous transmission of messages around the world by means of electricity would probably at that day have been attributed to witchcraft or a league with the Devil. Immaterial circumstances have changed as greatly as material ones. We could not and ought not to be rigidly bound by the rules laid down under circumstances so different for emergencies so utterly unanticipated. The fathers themselves would have been the first to declare that their prerogatives were not irrevocable. They would surely have resisted secession could they have lived to see the shape it assumed.

Grant wrote that piece of wisdom before 1885, when his Memoirs were published. It shows that for at least 125 years, the ablest Americans have been advocating a "living Constitution," interpreting the document in light of the realities of the day rather than embracing the rigid and unimaginative "originalist" viewpoint (currently espoused by the Tea Party and its hero Antonin Scalia) that the meanings of its phrases and clauses are graven in stone and immutable.

Our greatest general was not only perceptive and farsighted, but also wrote beautifully. His modest "plain style" of prose is still remarkably readable, and becomes the man as well as the book. I am enjoying his Memoirs immensely.

Remembering the men in gray and butternut

2011-01-18T08:18:00.003-06:00

The Stars and Stripes, not Stars and Bars, flies at Confederate Memorial Hall.

One of New Orleans' lesser-known treasures (to visitors from the North, at any rate) is the little Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall on 929 Camp Street in the Warehouse District a block south of the St. Charles streetcar line.

It sits in the shadow of the huge National World War II Museum down the block. The Lady Friend and I having just one full day in New Orleans on this visit, we decided to skip the big place -- it reportedly takes a full day to explore -- and try the Civil War Museum instead.

The sign outside says "Civil War Museum," but inside it's really the Confederate Museum it has been since 1891. The place was renamed after Katrina shattered tourism to New Orleans in 2005, in the hope that visitors from the North would be less apt to turn away from symbols of the South's slave history. "You're not offended?" the lady at the door asked when we inquired about the name change.

No, we weren't, for we're not unreconstructed rebels with disdain for political correctness. Besides, the little brick building turned out to be a somber, even melancholy repository of human memories, not a vainglorious display of defiance. Whatever one might say about their cause, these soldiers, the museum seems to say, fought and died for what they believed in, and even if they lost the war, their courage should not go unnoticed. There's nothing celebratory about this museum, as there too often is in national shrines to victory.

Though it's the second largest Southern war museum in the country (the biggest is the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond), It's fairly small as such institutions go, with one large room and a corridor full of display cases of artifacts from 1861-1865. Some five thousand objects are on display, with 95,000 others stored for research at Tulane University.

Among the items on view: The personal belongings of Confederate President Jefferson Davis; the uniforms, sword and saddle of Gen. Braxton Bragg; the uniform of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard; various swords, cannons and arms, and personal relics such as musette bags and letters home. There are bloodstained regimental battle flags, notably one carried at First Manassas (Bull Run) in 1861. The letters and documents humanize the people who wrote and carried them.

One particular item of interest is a tattered blue Confederate infantryman's uniform worn at First Manassas. Because there was confusion over who was whom in the heat of battle, the Confederates switched to gray-and-butternut uniforms for the rest of the war.

The museum takes only an hour to visit thoroughly, and you'll come away with respect for the human beings -- fellow Americans -- who mostly by accident of birthplace fought and died on the wrong side of history.

This is the last blogpost about our visit last week to New Orleans, but we'll continue to post photos of the trip on the other blog.

Interior of the museum. Despite the No Photography sign, long shots are OK.

Cheap eats in the Big Easy

2011-01-17T08:10:00.002-06:00

The unprepossessing Camellia Grill in the French Quarter.

Interior of the Camellia Grill: Standard American Diner decor.

A Camellia grillman works on an enormous omelet.

Before taking a train trip anywhere, I consult the habitues of TrainWeb's Amtrak forum, an invaluable repository of information about hotels and restaurants as well as rail travel. This time I wanted to know where to eat in New Orleans that wasn't either touristy or budget-busting, and the collective wisdom came through again.

Go where the locals go, they said, not the pricey establishments of the famous TV chefs, and they came up with a number of suggestions.

On our first evening in New Orleans, the Lady Friend and I dined at a highly recommended Cajun bistro called Cafe Maspero at 601 Decatur Street, cattycorner from the old Jax Brewery, on the edge of the French Quarter.

We weren't disappointed by either the prices (low) or the portions (huge). Or by the house merlot, remarkably good for $4.50 a glass. I passed up the much-praised muffaletta and jambalaya for a dish I've always loved, redbeans and andouille sausage over rice with a side of French bread. First-rate, and so large I couldn't clean the plate. (In the interest of full disclosure: the Lady Friend said hers was OK, only OK.)

The next morning we did the touristy thing and, after a few minutes photographing the sights at Jackson Square, broke our fast at Cafe du Monde, the historic coffeehouse in the French Market on the waterfront. As always, the beignets and cafe au lait were delicate and warming. The weather being unusually cold for New Orleans, just above freezing, the cafe's famous outdoor tables were closed, but there was room inside, where French Quarter workers grabbed take-outs for the office.

After two hours of camera work in the Quarter, we stopped at another highly recommended restaurant, the Camellia Grill on the corner of Toulouse and Chartres. (There's another on St. Charles Street near Tulane University, and branches in Baton Rouge and Destin, Florida.) Now this is where you find the locals on a workday morning.

This Camellia is an unprepossessing place in classic American Diner Style, with two large U-shaped counters flanked by fixed stools. On one side lie two grills and half a dozen workers.

On the Trainweb forum I was warned that the Camellia Grill omelets were hubcap-sized, way too big to finish. So the Lady Friend and I shared a ham-and-cheeser that was cut and served on separate plates, with separate piles of hash browns -- and still was way too big to finish.

I considered the omelet excellent, and the Lady Friend thought hers nonpareil. But the real attraction of the place turned out to be the chattering camaraderie among countermen, grillmen and customers. Amusing conversation ebbs and flows and surges all day, and the staff seemed as friendly to the two lone tourists as they were to the locals, telling stories of deep freezes of past years in the Big Easy.

And the prices are standard for diner fare -- inexpensive, but not dirt cheap.

After haring with our cameras all over frozen New Orleans all day, we returned to our hotel tired and cold, and both my back and knees were bothering me from the unaccustomed activity. At dinnertime we looked at each other and decided not to hobble out in the frigid wind again, but to remain snug and warm at the Omni Royal Orleans and dine in its Rib Room, no matter what it cost.

The Rib Room is definitely pricey -- two entrees, two glasses of wine and a shared chocolate mousse set us back more than a C-note, with tip. But this is New Orleans, and even the hotel dining rooms -- so often disappointing elsewhere -- live up to the city's high standards. The Lady Friend still swoons over her blackened salmon over stone-ground grits, drizzled with tabasco butter sauce. I was not in the least bit disappointed by my grilled black drum, fresh from the Gulf.

On this trip, life was finger-lickin' good, if you'll excuse the expression.

Inside the Cafe du Monde on an unseasonably cold January morning.

Aboard the City of New Orleans

2011-01-16T07:06:00.002-06:00

Our train trip to New Orleans last week was the same as every other Amtrak ride we've taken in the last year: Fine, with a couple of niggles.

The niggles first.

The sleeping cars on the City of New Orleans both ways were reasonably comfortable, but they are showing their age. They were from the original two-story Superliner order of 1979-81, and were rebuilt some time in the 1990s. Now the refurbishing has lost its shine. The interior looks OK for the most part, but seams -- especially in the bathrooms -- are gaping and no amount of caulking can bridge them.

What's more, the in-room electrical outlets in our roomettes in both northbound and southbound sleepers were not working. Fortunately this was not a writing trip laboring over a laptop, or I would have been upset. I was able to recharge my iPod Touch in the "Cross Country Cafe" dining car, which has outlets at every seat.

The closet door of the southbound roomette wouldn't latch shut. This is why veteran Amtrak travelers bring along a roll of duct tape, the world's greatest rattle-dampener.

During the night on the southbound trip, one of the two footlatches that hold down the roomette seats to form a lower bunk slipped open, causing one seat to slide partially back and giving me the sensation of trying to sleep on the edge of a ski jump. This happened at 3 a.m. and I decided not to awaken the Lady Friend in the berth above me by calling the attendant for a fix. So I got up and read in an empty roomette until breakfast at 6:30 a.m. (Later I learned that it would have taken the attendant 20 seconds to push the bed back down and pull up on the footlatch to secure it.)

These sleeping cars clearly are due for another rebuild, but the refurbished dining and lounge cars were nearly spanking fresh -- no complaints there.

I did venture into one of the three coaches behind the lounge car to use a downstairs bathroom, and was horrified. All four bathrooms in the tattered old coach were damp, filthy and bedecked with tendrils and scraps of toilet paper. Either the riders had no manners or the attendant was too lazy or overwhelmed to police the place.

Otherwise I found no fault with the service crews in both directions. Our southbound sleeper attendant seemed to spend a lot of time chatting with other crew in the dining car, but he was always present when we wanted him. The northbound attendant was quite solicitous, checking with us often to see if we needed anything. And the dining-car waitstaffs were both efficient and friendly.

The cuisine? Acceptable American Road Food, nothing more -- and nothing less. I did not try the special New Orleans dishes. At lunch on the southbound, there was no salad to go with the gumbo, and at dinner on the northbound I decided the New York strip steak was likely to be the most reliable item on the menu. (Amtrak steak dinners are consistently superior to the other dishes.)

One does not ride the City of New Orleans for the scenery. Southbound in January, first light does not come until after Memphis, and the trackside views of Tennessee and Mississippi are unremarkable, unless one has a soft spot for derelict industrial buildings and auto graveyards.

Only in the last hour (or first, northbound) of the ride does the scenery become interesting as the train speeds through Louisiana bayou country and past Lake Pontchartrain. Hundreds and hundreds of egrets and pelicans nest in cypress swamps along the tracks. Getting good photos from the train is not easy, because the City of New Orleans pounds along seemingly at better than 70 miles an hour on the straight stretches. The scenery just zips by too fast.

There was a brief item of interest on the northbound train: three security dogs (two German shepherds and a black Lab) handled by a four-person team of Amtrak cops. They all watched the passengers passing through the portal at New Orleans Union Terminal, the dogs' noses close by. The two shepherds rode in the lounge car, their handlers telling passersby gently but firmly not to pet them because they were working. The Lab rode in the crew car behind the locomotive.

All three dogs debarked (excuse me) at the first stop, Hammond in central Louisiana, and did their sniffy thing in the hold of the baggage-coach behind the lounge car as we watched. It made sense. If drug smugglers or terrorists manage to slip through the Port of New Orleans, they might think loading their contraband or bombs at a station down the line would fool the cops. I suspect the dog teams inspect the trains at random, dividing their time among three runs that begin in the Big Easy -- the City of New Orleans, the Sunset Limited to Los Angeles and the Crescent to Washington and New York.

Or maybe it's all for show. When we asked a conductor in the lounge car if the dogs were hunting drugs or explosives, he rolled his eyes, waggled his eyebrows and said with a wry smile, "Sorry, I can't say."

The timekeeping? Both trains ran 20 to 30 minutes late most of the way, but thanks to schedule padding arrived in New Orleans and Chicago on time -- or close to it.

Streetcars of New Orleans

2011-01-15T08:59:00.004-06:00

A classic St. Charles Ave. streetcar turns around on New Orleans' Canal Street.

For the tourist who is an unreconstructed rail buff, the streetcars of New Orleans are a powerful attraction, and of course I just had to ride them during my recent two-day visit to the Big Easy.

Actually, I had time to patronize just one of the three lines -- the oldest, the 7 1/2-mile-long St. Charles Avenue line, which has existed since 1835. One morning I rode it for several miles west from Canal Street along the Garden District all the way to Tulane University, and was struck by the fact that native New Orleanians, not just tourists, ride the line heavily. That should not be surprising, for each ride costs just $1.25, and seniors and PWDs get a discount. (In Chicago, the regular fare is $2.25.)

The St. Charles line has an interesting history. Originally steam locomotives pulled the cars, but when those who lived along the street finally had their fill of smoke and cinders, horses and mules were employed as motive power. That's backwards. Usually early streetcar lines began with horses and later moved to steam.

In 1893 the line was electrified.

Rail buffs notice instantly that the distance between rails is 5 feet 2 1/2 inches, not the conventional 4 feet 8 1/2 inches of American railroading. Supposedly broad-gauge tracks give a better, stabler ride with less rocking. One of the other two lines, the Riverfront line, was originally built in 1988 to the 4 feet 8 1/2 inch standard, but was regauged in 1997 to broad gauge so that its cars could run on the other two lines to the storage barns.

The colorful red cars on the Canal St. and Riverfront lines are fairly new or recent rebuilds, but the classic green Perley Thomas streetcars on the St. Charles run date back to 1923 and 1924.

When Hurricane Katrina wrecked the city in 2005, all the lines were badly damaged and the red cars were ruined by floodwaters. The green cars, however, had been stored on high ground and escaped damage. Not until late 2008 were all three lines fully restored to service.

New Orleans clearly loves its streetcars. The Lady Friend and I noticed that the motormen and motorwomen, like service people everywhere in the city, are unfailingly kind to everyone, locals and tourists, and are quick to give directions when asked. That, in our experience, rarely happens in Chicago or New York.

That shouldn't be surprising. New Orleans still has not completely recovered from Katrina, and its people know that the best way to attract tourists again is to make them feel welcome and perhaps valued for something more than their money.

They sure did me.

FEBRUARY 7: The New York Times' transit blog reports that New Orleans plans to expand its streetcar lines in a big way.

The motorman's view down St. Charles Street in the Garden District.

Kindling

2011-01-14T12:33:00.001-06:00

"One morning last month," begins a casual in the New Yorker this week, "Lady Antonia Fraser was stuck in a security line at the Toronto Airport and missed her plane. She didn't mind, because she had a Kindle and spent the time reading a novel."

And just last week Roger Ebert wrote, in one of his blogs, that he had bought a Kindle because his repeated surgeries had weakened his shoulder muscles so much that reading a book in bed had become difficult. Reading with a lightweight Kindle solved that problem.

If one of the world's most distinguished historical biographers (Mary, Queen of Scots, Cromwell and Charles II are among Lady Antonia's books) can adopt e-reading in her 80th year, and if one of the nation's most celebrated film critics and bibliophiles can use an e-reader to deal with an infirmity, it is fair to say that the Kindle and Nook and their ilk are not only here to stay but also are going to eclipse the tree-book before long. Maybe they already have.

Not that e-readers are without annoying idiosyncrasies, but Amazon.com for one seems to have prepared for at least two of them.

Last Sunday I opened my three-month-old Kindle 3 shortly after boarding the City of New Orleans for a train journey south, and discovered that it was dead. It would not start. It would not recharge. The little yellow light that signals recharging would not go on. Damn.

But I had thought to bring along my iPod Touch, the little machine with which I first began reading e-books, and used its Kindle app to read a couple of whodunits stored inside just in case.

I was not worried overmuch. Last month my Kindle had been behaving oddly -- randomly restarting itself and losing my bookmarks -- because the leather cover that protected the machine was intermittently shorting out its innards. I contacted Amazon.com and was immediately told that it was a known problem with the leather cover, and to send it back. Amazon.com would not only give me full credit for the return but also a new leather cover with a built-in book light, no charge.

Even though I had to pay the small shipping cost both ways, I was delighted with this customer service. And so I was confident Amazon would fix or replace my ailing Kindle under warranty, no questions asked.

"RTFM, Henry, RTFM!" a small voice insisted as I sat down yesterday to e-mail Amazon.com about the problem. I rd TFM, and am glad I did. In the manual's appendix, a chapter about troubleshooting suggested holding the Kindle's on/off spring switch open for at least 15 seconds, then trying a recharge.

It worked. As soon as I plugged in the charger cord, the little yellow light came on and the machine reset itself. Half an hour later I unplugged the charger cord and tried the on/off switch.

The green light came on, and the Kindle awakened at the place in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra where I had last closed the cover.

All is well in the world. Mine, anyway.

Brown Bess

2011-01-13T16:31:00.005-06:00

NEW ORLEANS --"Unless I miss my guess," I told the Lady Friend as we looked in the window of James H. Cohen & Sons, an antique firearms, swords, currency and coins establishment at 437 Royal Street in the Vieux Carre, "that's a genuine Brown Bess."

I was captivated because a Brown Bess -- the flintlock muzzle-loading musket that was the standard British infantry long arm from 1722 to 1838 -- is an important furnishing in my fourth Steve Martinez novel. I'd seen replicas, but never the real thing.

So in the interest of research we entered the shop. Upon being told that I was a novelist and had written about the weapon, the saleslady took the Bess down from its honored place in a long rack of scores upon scores of antique muzzle-loaders, and handed it to me while the Lady Friend captured the event with her camera. It was like grasping a piece of history.

The .75 caliber Bess was to both Redcoats and Continental soldiers in the Revolutionary War what the tommy gun was to Al Capone and the M-1 to the GIs of World War II. Like those weapons, the Bess was more than a tool; it was also a symbol -- in this case a symbol of Empire.

This particular Brown Bess was dated 1805, and it did not take much of a leap of imagination to think the weapon might have served on either side at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

The musket even has figured in literary history. Rudyard Kipling dedicated a long poem, "Brown Bess," to it. Here are the first three stanzas:

In the days of lace-ruffles, perukes and brocade
Brown Bess was a partner whom none could despise--
An out-spoken, flinty-lipped, brazen-faced jade,
With a habit of looking men straight in the eyes--
At Blenheim and Ramillies fops would confess
They were pierced to the heart by the charms of Brown Bess.

Though her sight was not long and her weight was not small,
Yet her actions were winning, her language was clear;
And everyone bowed as she opened the ball
On the arm of some high-gaitered, grim grenadier.
Half Europe admitted the striking success
Of the dances and routs that were given by Brown Bess.

When ruffles were turned into stiff leather stocks,
And people wore pigtails instead of perukes,
Brown Bess never altered her iron-grey locks.
She knew she was valued for more than her looks.
"Oh, powder and patches was always my dress,
And I think I am killing enough," said Brown Bess . . .

For a long moment I considered adding this Bess to my arsenal of whodunit artifacts, but one look at the price tag -- $8,650 -- squelched that thought.

It was enough just to caress the patina of the 206-year-old brown steel.

There are some closeup views of the Cohens' Bess here.

Guest appearance

2011-01-06T05:56:00.000-06:00

Today's blogpost, on how a mystery writer employs a camera as well as a laptop, appears on the Crime Writers' Chronicle, a forum maintained by four fellow whodunit writers.

They are Robert Knightly, Robin Hathaway, Annamaria Alfieri (Patricia King) and Kate Gallison (Irene Fleming).

Go have a look.

What's this?

2011-01-03T14:52:00.001-06:00

This visitor to my backyard bird feeder today looks like some kind of warbler to me, but I can't find an exact match in my bird book. Possibly it's a pine warbler, but the yellow patch is considerably smaller than the bird book suggests. The bird's about the size of a chickadee, maybe a tad larger, but noticeably smaller than a sparrow. Can any of you eagle-eyed birdwatchers identify it? Click on the photos for larger versions.

An excellent sentence

2011-01-02T05:54:00.000-06:00

"Write with your ear," my literary mentors told me again and again. "Prose that sounds good to the ear reads well to the mind."

Today I came across a snippet of writing that beautifully drives home the point. It is by the novelist and journalist Katie Roiphe in today's New York Times Book Review:

"... the critic has one important function: to write well.

"By this I mean that critics must strive to write stylishly, to concentrate on the excellent sentence."

Now that is in itself a hell of an excellent sentence . (Note the internal triple rhymes of "strive to write stylishly" and "excellent sentence.") It sings.

Bravo, Ms. Roiphe. Lead the way.

Pancake ice

2010-12-26T12:02:00.000-06:00

By necessity I'm stuck down here for the winter in the Chicago area although I'd much rather be up at the Writer's Lair on the shore of Lake Superior in upper Michigan.

But the next best thing to being on the spot is the photographs our friends who live on the Big Lake send us frequently. For instance, our neighbor Dave Braithwaite took these shots of pancake ice late in the afternoon near our cabin just a couple of days ago.

Pancake ice is formed when freezing slush forms into round, flat cakes with turned-up edges created as the cakes collide with each other in wind and waves. They look for all the world like deep-dish pizzas, don't they?

The Adoration of the Magi

2010-12-25T00:01:00.038-06:00

Fray Juan Bautista Maino, The Adoration of the Magi, 1613. Oil on canvas, 315 x 64 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Click for large version.

Where's Santa at this very moment?

2010-12-24T07:37:00.004-06:00

Find out here.

Meanwhile, is it true that H0H 0H0 is Santa's postal code in Canada? Snopes.com has the answer.

And see this, in Roger Ebert's Journal in today's Chicago Sun-Times.

Deck Us All . . .

2010-12-23T06:05:00.003-06:00

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

If you recognize those lyrics (and can recite the rest of them), you belong to my generation, the one that grew up in the 1950s when Walt Kelly's immortal "Pogo" comic strip appeared in every American newspaper worth its ink.

Every day when my father came home with the Chicago Daily News, my older brother and I would fall upon him for first dibs to the funnies, and we'd read the strip out loud to each other. "Pogo" was hands down the family favorite -- except for Mother, who never could see what the fuss was all about.

"Pogo" awakened my love of wordplay, of antics with language. Kelly was a joyous master at it, and every holiday season he'd roll out the barrel of "Boston Charlie" with Pogo, Albert the Alligator, Mam'selle Hepzibah, Porky Pine and even Grundoon all chiming in. Dad, Buck and I would join in, and at about the third Christmas we could recite all the lyrics without prompting.

I'd give them here, but there's some pointed copyright language on the official Pogo website, so I'll direct you to the proper page.

Now then, one two three . . .

Another Mention in Dispatches

2010-12-21T05:29:00.005-06:00

My ego is flagging on a gray, cloudy morning that brought four inches of overnight snow and promises all-day sheets of sleet.

It's not so much that I'll be stuck in the house all day with a gimpy knee and a touchy back -- it's the uncertainty of being a midlist author in a terrible economy for the publishing business. When will I hear from my agent that Hang Fire, the fourth Steve Martinez mystery, has either been accepted or rejected? It's been almost three months since I sent off the manuscript.

But there is a glimmer of sunlight in the gloom. One of my old books, Flight of the Gin Fizz, got a very nice mention in a roundup of aviation reading posted on General Aviation News.

There's nothing that bucks up a despairing writer more than a kindly nod to an almost forgotten book. Especially when his name appears on the same page as those of Lindbergh, Saint-Exupery and Ernest K. Gann. And when there's a copy of his book in the photo that accompanies the piece.

Let it rain.

Whatever your creed, this is absolutely charming

2010-12-20T05:31:00.006-06:00

The view will be larger if you click on the video while it's running.

With thanks to Bosco Keown for the heads-up.

Our holiday newsletter

2010-12-19T00:01:00.009-06:00

ANNO TWENTY-TEN turned out to be another huge, huge year for the magnificently overachieving Kisors, enabling us to issue still another unbeatable holiday brag sheet.

As always, retirees Debby and Henry spent half the year in Evanston, half the year in Upper Michigan and half the year traveling, during which they photographed rocks in Utah and whales in the Gulf of Alaska.

Henry managed to slip through the entire year without acquiring new replacement hardware for his aging carcass. He published a second and updated edition of What's That Pig Outdoors? in August and was insufferable for weeks afterward. He also waited and whined while his publisher weighed the fourth Steve Martinez novel, Hang Fire (and at this writing is still waiting and whining).

Deborah (The Lady Friend) forged ahead in her newfound mission to save the world one library at a time, while learning a new art, the mysterious one of glass beading.

At the Department of Justice in Washington, elder son Colin continued to encourage felons on new career paths in their countries of origin while also herding stray swabbies into the brig as a reserve Navy prosecutor. Verily he is the instrument of the Lord’s wrath.

Spouse Melody added full-time student to her motherly duties while wearing out two laptops taking online graduate courses from Albany Medical College in search of a M.S. in Bioethics.

Their son William, 8, went to court to have his name legally changed to "Willy," all the while plowing through his father's old Tintins while keeping his flying-superhero emergency room visits to a minimum.

His sister Ellie, 4, taught herself to read and was soon soaking up Wuthering Heights while studying the trade of a ballerina en pointe.

In Edison Park, the Far Northwest Side Chicago neighborhood where cops and firefighters live as far away from City Hall as they can get, younger son Conan flight-tested B-17s for Boeing and persuaded Marketing to dub them “Flying Fortresses.” In his spare time he directed the Bears' resurgence from his nosebleed seat at Soldier Field but met a little resistance in his campaign to whip the Cubs to another pennant.

Mama Annie continued to mother-hen misplaced but still famous authors around town for the Chicago Public Library while coaching outgoing Mayor Daley in instructing the entire City of Chicago on the subject of what to read.

As soon as he turned 4, young Emmet told everybody he was “almost 5” and founded a contracting firm in the basement, warning his clients not to cut corners with hinky Chinese drywall.

Sister Alice, 2, moved from defensive end to weak-side linebacker to make better use of her closing speed. She also showered remarkable Zen wisdom on everyone within earshot.

And finally Hogan, 77, racked up a score of 123-0 against UPS, a world record for both his species and his age group.

So there it is. Eat your hearts out, underachievers, and enjoy your extended tax breaks for another year. If there are any.

Credits: The text is by HK for a change, aided and abetted by CAK and CHWK. The photo of our Lake Superior cabin in winter is by our Ontonagon chum David Braithwaite. The photo of the extended family below is by our Evanston pal Craig Peterson.

City of New Orleans

2010-12-16T06:24:00.002-06:00

Good morning America how are you?
Don't you know me I'm your native son,
I'm the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I'll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.

Dealin' card games with the old men in the club car.
Penny a point ain't no one keepin' score.
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel.
Mothers with their babes asleep,
Are rockin' to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.

I never heard Arlo Guthrie sing Steve Goodman's immortal lyrics, but after the first of the year the Lady Friend and I will do the next best thing: we'll experience them by riding Amtrak's version of the City of New Orleans.

Our trip will be just a 19-hour, 934-mile overnight joyride for a couple of days in New Orleans. We'll enjoy coffee and beignets at the Morning Call, po'boys for lunch and Cajun cuisine for dinner, and we'll exercise our cameras in the Vieux Carre. Then we'll return to Chicago on the northbound CONO.

It'll be our first trip on Numbers 58 and 59, although both of us have ridden the Chicago-to-West-Coast trains, especially Nos. 5 and 6 (the California Zephyr) countless times.

As Amtrak hardware the CONO is nothing special -- several double-deck Superliners and one P42 engine, same as everywhere else except the East Coast, where single-level trains must run. There's one difference: the on-board cuisine is said to have a distinct Cajun flavor -- bread pudding and redbeans and rice, for instance. I'm a sucker for both.

The last three times I've ridden a long-distance Amtrak train, the on-board experience has been much better than it was in the early 2000s. The once spotty dining-car cuisine has improved to reliable American-Road-Food standards, and seemingly the service crews have been to both efficiency and charm schools.

Afterward I'll of course post a full report for the civilized travelers among you.

15 people who irritate me

2010-12-08T08:45:00.000-06:00

1. People who say "vade mecum" instead of "reference book."

2. People who claim the Bible is the world's most authoritative vade mecum.

3. People who declare I'm anti-Christian for pointing out that the Bible isn't the authority they think it is.

4. People who think aggressive ignorance is a legitimate point of view. (Especially in matters of global warming.)

5. People who attack a speaker's supposed motives instead of challenging his facts.

6. People who say "he went" instead of "he said" and "he goes" instead of "he says."

7. People who say "I was like . . ." instead of "I thought . . ." or the rest of it.

8. People who say "Me and him went to the park."

9. People who say "Comin' with?" (Unless they're from Chicago. They can't help it.)

10. People who wait until the sales clerk rings up the total before digging deep into their purses for their cash or credit cards. Especially when I'm seventh or eighth in line.

11. People who say "Thank you" to the sales clerk after handing over their money. What?

12. People who take five minutes to tell me what they didn't like about my book before taking five seconds to tell me what they liked. (If they ever get around to it.)

13. Well-to-do people who declare that they'll wait and check my book out of the library instead of buying it. (Students and pensioners excepted.)

14. People who think all books should be free.

15. People who grab you by the lapel and tell you what irritates them.

No wonder I have few friends left. I'm fast turning into Andy Rooney.

(Feel free to contribute your own pet irritations in a comment.)

John McPhee

2010-12-06T07:00:00.004-06:00

Yesterday I picked up a dogeared paperback copy of A Sense of Where You Are, John McPhee's first book, his classic 1965 study of Bill Bradley as a basketball player. Within seconds I was rapt in the prose of this master of "explanatory journalism," a weak and clumsy phrase for the magic he creates.

It reminded me that over the years I've reviewed several of his books, but the only such notice that seems to survive on the Web is this one of Assembling California, a book in which he brilliantly brought the difficult subject of plate tectonics to life for the common reader:

By Henry Kisor
Chicago Sun-Times, February 7, 1993

By the second page of his newest book, John McPhee drops on the reader's foot the word "lithosphere." Not for 10 more pages does he apologize by way of explanation: the lithosphere is "crustal rock and mantle rock down to a zone in the mantle that is lubricious enough to allow the (Earth's) plates to move."

This is McPhee's way of warning readers that they won't be spoon-fed the science in Assembling California (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21). To understand it, you have to pay attention, to concentrate. I did, and found the rewards great.

Assembling California is the fourth and last volume of McPhee's paean to geology, Annals of the Modern World. The others are Basin and Range (1980), In Suspect Terrain (1982) and Rising from the Plains (1986). Most of the challenging text of all four appeared in the New Yorker and confounded many readers, this one included. It's easier to concentrate on a book than on an article in the narrow columns of a magazine, in which there are just too many distractions, like ads and cartoons.

These books - actually marvels of literary economy and clarity - are all about plate tectonics, or the collisions of vast chunks of Earth, in which continents, mountain ranges and valleys have been created in a never-ending rearrangement ever since the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea many eons ago. A dry subject? Not in McPhee's hands. He gives it all the liveliness of rock 'n roll, because that's exactly what the ground does under our feet when pieces of the lithosphere collide and grind past one another.

Not that the Terran Two-Step kicks up dust every day, at least in our limited appreciation of time. McPhee distinguishes between human time (measured in hundreds of years) and geologic time (measured in hundreds of millions of years). What interests him - and ultimately us - are the points where the two time scales intersect.

To help us understand those points, McPhee enlists a geologist. Geologists are like dermatologists, McPhee writes in one of his many happy metaphors; they "crawl around like fleas on the world's tough hide," trying to "figure out what makes the animal move."

Eldridge Moores is the son of a miner, an accomplished cellist, and a geologist at the University of California at Davis. In his car (which bears the bumpersticker "Stop Continental Drift"), Moores takes McPhee and the reader westward over outcrops and through roadcuts on Interstate 80 over the Sierra Nevada. In this way we learn how pieces of Earth fused over the eons to form California.

On Donner Pass we encounter a quadrillion-ton batholith, a 40-square-mile, bottomless chunk of granite vomited up from the ocean floor as molten magma some 80 to 200 million years ago. A few miles farther west geologic time encounters human time in Gold Rush country, where we learn how 19th century miners used hydraulic artillery - 120-m.p.h. jets of water - to carve away entire mountains and get at gold deposited eons ago.

We learn how the sea floor, spreading slowly up and out of deep fissures, shoved the irresistible Pacific Plate up against the immovable slab of North America, carrying with the flow smaller irregular pieces that jumbled up and became the Sierras, the Central Valley and the Coast Range. They're still grinding against one another along several seams, one of which is called the San Andreas Fault.

The faults are not clean breaks but complex and imperfectly mapped frontiers. Nature is nothing if not messy, and that's one reason why the theory of plate tectonics, which is only about 25 years old, is constantly being revised.

Why should we be so interested in plate tectonics? If you live in California, or anywhere else earthquakes are common, it'll help you understand what's going on under your feet even though there may not be much you can do about it, except go someplace else. The best chapter of Assembling California is the last one, McPhee's step-by-step retelling of the state's brief but violent disassembly along the San Andreas Fault in October, 1989. As the Pacific Plate took a seven-foot leap north, "21,000 homes and commercial buildings were cracked, crumpled, or destroyed, and nature's invoice for a few moments of shaking was six billion dollars."

And the Big One is yet to come. When and where? Hard to say. Within 20 years, maybe. In human terms, that's a long time, but in geologic time, it's a micromillisecond. McPhee's genius is to show us the difference and what it means. And that meaning? Why, nothing more than what happens when humans try to outguess the gods that live deep in the Earth.

In McPhee's hands, geology isn't something that happened millyuns and millyuns of years ago, as the TV popularizer Carl Sagan gushed. It's happening right now, even if your attention span is too short for you to grasp that fact quickly.

Mark Twain inflamed

2010-12-01T00:01:00.018-06:00

Writers who do not despise their editors are either spineless or unbelievably lucky. A century ago one great American writer had his problems with a certain editor, and while that was unfortunate for the author it still benefits his readers today. For a pissed-off Mark Twain is magnificent to behold.

Some background: In 1899, according to the new University of California edition of Twain's Autobiography, a maladroit editor named T. Douglas Murray asked the world-renowned author to write an introduction to a translation of the trial record for Joan of Arc. Without even asking, Murray edited the introduction heavily, provoking Twain's ire because the edits were not only high-handed but also ham-handed.

The University of California Press edition for the first time reproduces the entire piece containing Murray's misemendations. Twain's objections in a fiery letter to Murray follow, and they are a hilarious lesson in why even a decent editor should leave a masterly writer's prose the hell alone.

One of Murray's transgressions was to Frenchify the piece, changing every "Joan of Arc" to "Jeanne d'Arc." This caused Twain to write:

"'Jeanne d'Arc.' This is rather cheaply pedantic, and is not in very good taste. Joan is not known by that name among plain people of our race and tongue. I notice that the name of the Deity occurs several times in the brief instalment of the Trials which you have favored me with; to be consistent, it will be necessary that you strike out 'God' and put in 'Dieu.' Do not neglect this."

Twain is only warming up. A few paragraphs later he writes, "Now you have begun on my punctuation. Don't you realize that you ought not to intrude your help in a delicate art like that, with your limitations?"

He hits his stride with "It is discouraging to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. And you ought to use it sometimes; that would help. If you had done this every now and then along through life, it would not have petrified."

Of one altered sentence Twain observes: "It cost me an hour's study before I found out what it meant. I see, now, that it is intended to mean what it meant before. It really does accomplish its intent, I think, though in a most intricate and slovenly fashion."

And: "You ought never to edit when awake." "O unteachable ass." "It was sound English before you decayed it. Sell it to the museum." "You got it out of 'How to Write Literary Without Any Apprenticeship.'" "It seems to me that for a person of your elegance of language you are curiously lacking in certain other delicacies."

Twain's invective goes on like this for pages and pages, until every competent writer I know will be falling over with glee.

Later in life Twain would observe, "I am glad I said no harsh things to him, but spared him, the same as I would a tape-worm. It is reward enough for me to know that my children will be proud of their father for this, when I am gone. I could have said hundreds of unpleasant things about this tadpole, but I did not even feel them."

A pity that Twain never mailed the letter. A glory that he preserved it for us.

His mother's crotch?

2010-11-30T05:26:00.002-06:00

I have a great deal of admiration for the people who provide instant closed captions for television news programs. Captioning on the fly with any amount of accuracy is difficult, even with the assistance of powerful computers. The job has to be done immediately; there's no time to look up things. But there's plenty of time to screw up things.

Sometimes a captioner has to render an unfamiliar name, word, or phrase phonetically and just hope the viewer gets it. The name of a long-dead economist, for example, might appear as "John May Nard Canes." When you think about that a little, it's clear, sort of.

The other night I was stunned when a local NBC newsreader seemingly reported that a police officer had cornered a suspect "in his mother's crotch."

Huh? Then I got it. We Chicagoans pronounce "garage" as "grotch."

Clearly the captioner wasn't from our neck of the woods.

Olive Logan

2010-11-25T14:57:00.004-06:00

Olive Logan (Wikipedia Commons)

If you think that the media creature of unearned distinction (such as Britney, Paris, Snooki or any of the Palins) is a late 20th century phenomenon, consider one Olive Logan, a writer, actress and lecturer of the 1870s whose manufactured celebrity bemused Mark Twain.

Logan "did write and publish little things in newspapers and obscure periodicals," Twain wrote in his Autobiography (newly edited and reissued by the University of California Press), "but there was no talent in them, and nothing resembling it."

Rather, her husband, a third-rate journalist, salted paragraphs about her throughout the newspapers of the Northeast.

"It is said that Olive Logan has taken a cottage at Nahant, and will spend the summer there."

And: "Olive Logan has set her face decidedly against the adoption of the short skirt for afternoon wear."

Moreover: "Olive Logan has so far recovered from her alarming illness that if she continues to improve her physicians will cease from issuing bulletins tomorrow."

The result, Twain wrote, was that the "simple public" talked about her all the time, but had no idea who she actually "was or what she had done -- if anything."

"Well, then, how does she come to be celebrated?" a credulous listener asked.

"Oh," another said. "it's about something, I don't know what. I never inquired, but I supposed everybody knew."

"On the strength of this oddly created notoriety Olive Logan went on the platform, and for at least two seasons the United States flocked to the lecture halls to look at her," Twain marveled. "She was merely a name and some rich and costly clothes, and neither of these properties had any lasting quality, though for a while they were able to command a fee of $100 a night. She dropped out of the memories of men a quarter of a century ago."

Not entirely. She lives on in a brief and remarkably colorless Wikipedia entry, whose facts seem to be taken from an ancient and forgotten encyclopedia as well as Twain's memory.

Random and unconnected thoughts

2010-11-22T07:06:00.005-06:00

* If John Boehner, incoming Republican Speaker of the House, thinks he's going to stick a finger in Nancy Pelosi's eye by flying commercial, he had goddam well better go through Airport Peep-and-Grope like the rest of us. Every single time he flies.

* Why do so many know-nothings deny the human impact on global warming despite the huge, huge preponderance of scientific opinion on the other side? Are they thinking only of short-term profits rather than taking the long view? Or are they just aggressively anti-intellectual?

* John Buchan's 1915 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, one of the prototypes of the spy thriller, is still remarkably readable -- and free for the downloading on one's Kindle. There's a little too much Scots dialect wha hae muckle glee, and the hero Richard Hannay is a chip off the old Empire, but the action is crisply modern.

* The year's best book is Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, about the great African-American migration north and west away from Jim Crow in the South between World War I and the 1970s. Bigoted whites who think civil rights are over won't read it, but they should. I thought I was enlightened, but Wilkerson astonished me.

* What am I reading on the Kindle now? A surprise best-seller, the new edition of The Autobiography of Mark Twain from the University of California Press. Before getting to the meat, one has to plow through chapters and chapters about the multiple abortive attempts Twain made to write his memoirs. This is only intermittently interesting to a non-academic like me, but it is a scholarly work. (The tree-book, the first of three volumes, is $35 list; $19.22 on Amazon.com, and the e-book is $9.99.)

* I am going to miss Christopher Hitchens, the world's most likable intellectual bomb-thrower.

* Roger Ebert writes the best blog anywhere, and it's not about the movies. He has a generous and expansive mind, and always displays a graceful humility.

* I crave the new Pentax K-5 camera but not its $1500 street price, which for me is about $300 too high.

* I have at long last become interested in local politics because of the city of Evanston's misguided and maladroit attempt to kill its local branch libraries. The rise of the Evanston Library Friends to save them from a shortsighted city manager and council has been an object lesson in the power of grassroots anger in this liberal community.

* I think I'll get out my G scale garden train set -- a loop of track, a locomotive and two passenger cars -- and lay it out on the basement floor to play with between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Let people laugh at me -- what do I care?

* Even I am a better dancer than Bristol Palin, and I've got a bad knee and a bad back. Let's face it: the fix is in.

* Joy is a big yellow dog who just wants a little loving.

* Consternation is learning that a red squirrel has broken into your summer cabin on Lake Superior, 420 miles away.

* Despair is realizing that May 1 (when we can go back up to the summer cabin) is still five long months away.

Boon for Amtrak?

2010-11-16T12:23:00.006-06:00

"If you touch my junk I'll have you arrested!"

That latest airport catchphrase is unlikely to echo throughout an American railroad station, at least today and maybe forever. Why?

Even though detonating a bomb on a concourse of Chicago Union Station during rush hour could kill hundreds of people, today's terrorists have rarely been interested in going after railroad passengers, notwithstanding a few terrible incidents in Europe.

Disaster aloft is psychologically more devastating than disaster on the ground, and Al Qaeda terrorists want to make the boldest statement possible -- to kill people in the thousands and disrupt air travel. Let's face it: they have done just that last.

For the time being, the average commuter train or Amtrak passenger will rarely if ever see evidence of Homeland Security on the job. From time to time and just for show, agents will spot-check luggage and patrol platforms with dogs, but most TSA efforts on the rails are modest and take place behind the scenes.

This has not gone unnoticed among travelers. It goes almost without saying that the increasing tension and bother of flying commercial is going to be good for Amtrak's numbers. Riders between Chicago and Washington and Chicago and New York, for instance, are going to think about choosing eighteen relaxed hours aboard an overnight train rather than four agitated hours in an airport and aboard a packed airplane.

Aboard a train they can carry what they want (within reason, of course) in their luggage without worrying about setting off X-ray machines, alerting checked baggage searchers or running up overweight charges. They can get up from roomy seats and move around and interact with their fellow passengers rather than submit themselves to full frontal video viewing or the indignity of genital groping.

When they consider the choices, many passengers will very likely choose train time over airplane rage.

There would, however, be a downside to increased popularity: a huge jump in the numbers of railroad passengers is bound to strain Amtrak's limited capabilities. It barely has enough cars and locomotives to handle its present loads. Increased demand for already expensive sleeping car accommodations could well result in sharply higher prices for roomettes and bedrooms. Amtrak may be a government entity, but it follows the laws of supply and demand when setting fares.

Retirees, vacationers, foreign tourists, the obese and/or disabled, those fearful of flying -- all of which make up most of Amtrak's clientele -- might find themselves priced out of a mode of travel that has been both comfortable and affordable.

I hope that doesn't happen but worry that it will.

Overnight to Washington

2010-11-12T07:29:00.006-06:00

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- As Amtrak's Capitol Limited ghosted into Washington Union Station yesterday, it occurred to me that this Chicago-to-Washington overnight train is the perfect one to introduce small children to the joys of traveling in a sleeping car.

The fellow in the next roomette had brought along his seven-year-old lad, who was so wide-eyed with wonder in his compartment, in the dining car and in the lounge car that his behavior was remarkably subdued for his age. The trip is just long enough (17 hours 25 minutes, half of it abed) for a kid to appreciate the newness of sleeper travel without becoming overly antsy.

As regulars to this blog well know, this 70-year-old small boy never gets tired of the train.

My latest trip began Wednesday afternoon in the Metropolitan Lounge for Amtrak sleeper passengers at Chicago Union Station, where I fortified myself with free Pepsi and munchies and caught up on e-mail (the free wi-fi was working, for a change).

The two Amtrak lounge personnel on duty were friendly and efficient and made sure their deaf passenger moved to the departure door without worriedly hovering, as some of them do. On boarding at 6:15 p.m. Cliff, the burly sleeper attendant, was also cheery and after our departure six minutes late told me the dining car was running half an hour late and my 7 p.m. call would be made at 7:30.

In the meantime I took stock of my surroundings. The sleeping car is one of the original Superliners built in the late 1970s that had been very recently rebuilt from the trucks up. Room clean, bathrooms clean, all furnishings in tiptop shape.

My two-person compartment, Roomette 13, lay on the on lower level. I don't mind these ground-level rooms in the two-story cars, because the swaying at speed tends to be much less at a low center of gravity.

The dining car was a newish "Cross-Country Cafe," with the long end serving dinner to passengers and the short end meals to crews. Many rail buffs dislike this kind of diner, but it was fine by me.

My roast chicken arrived 20 minutes after the rest of the meal, because the chef's timing of her needs was a little off. I did not mind, because my dinner companions were interesting conversationalists. Both were Orange County, California, landscape architects. One was from Costa Rica and the other Peru. Their season had ended and they were traveling for a month before returning to spend the winter drawing up designs for the next spring's work.

Once it arrived, the chicken, so often a bit dry, was perfect.

The steward was jolly and apologetic for the delay in the main course, but the South Americans made the time fly. I could not lipread their Spanish-accented English, but we communicated with a pen and notebook that the Costa Rican quickly pulled out when he realized why his speech baffled me.

On my return to the compartment the bed had been made up for the night, as I had asked. For eight solid hours I slept, untroubled by rough track. I probably sleep better in a berth than I do at home.

I awoke to a foggy morning shortly after the train left Connellsville in southwestern Pennsylvania, and after morning ablutions set off to breakfast. Alas, my table partners, a young couple from Milwaukee, were dour and painfully shy, rebuffing my attempts to engage them in conversation. Probably they were just not morning people.

The French toast I had would never be mistaken for the railroad classic, but it was sufficiently tasty and attractively plated, arranged around a cup of blueberry preserves and dusted with powdered sugar. What Amtrak meals have lost in finesse over the years they have gained in American Road Food reliability.

Across the aisle, the seven-year-old lad eagerly scarfed his French toast and bacon while the two elderly ladies on the other side of the table complimented his father on the boy's polite demeanor.

The small dining car crew was, as before, quick, cheery and efficient -- and busy. They had time just for one refill pass with the coffeepot, and they handled demanding diners with aplomb. Reports are that Amtrak has been sending its on-board crews to the railroad's equivalent of charm school, and it shows.

On return to my compartment Cliff had made up the room neatly, and the ubiquitous hotel copy of USA Today was waiting. I much preferred the old tradition of placing a local newspaper under the compartment door; even the fusty right-wing Omaha World-Herald (on the route of the California Zephyr) has more personality than McPaper.

For the rest of the morning I rode in the lounge car while the Capitol followed the historic Baltimore & Ohio line along the Monongahela, Yougiogheny and upper Potomac Rivers to Washington. The hilly West Virginia and Maryland scenery is very pretty, and Harper's Ferry, W. Va., is absolutely picturesque. One expects to spot wild-eyed John Brown tearing on horseback down to the old armory.

The train tied up at Washington Union Station just 20 minutes past the 1:10 p.m. scheduled arrival, close enough to be On Time in my book.

The Capitol Limited has been one of the better long-distance Amtrak trains, if you don't count on-time performance, which can be spotty. It makes a relaxing respite from the TSA-fueled tension of flying between Chicago and Washington.

I'm sure that boy and his dad would agree.

Edward Abbey lives!

2010-11-08T06:26:00.003-06:00

The unhappy results of our latest election, driven in large part by the greed of corporocracy, set me to thinking about war against the forces of lucre. Sadly, I would make a poor bomb-thrower, but there was once a fellow who was a great one: the late Edward Abbey, author (Desert Solitaire) and wild-eyed eco-radical (The Monkey Wrench Gang). This morning I dug out a 20-year-old review of one of his books written for the Chicago Sun-Times. (It is reprinted without permission. Come get me, corporate legal punks. Bring it on.)

By Henry Kisor
Chicago Sun-Times, January 27, 1990

As with movies, sequels to celebrated novels rarely measure up to the originals. Their newness has long since worn off: we've already encountered the premise and met the characters. Anything further the author may have to say about them is likely to be anticlimactic.

The late Edward Abbey's Hayduke Lives! (Little, Brown, $18.95) is no exception to that rule, but it's jolly great fun nonetheless. It's a sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang of 1975, Abbey's wonderfully subversive comic tale about a ragtag bunch of environmental guerrillas. Their mission: Chainsawing down roadside billboards and sugaring the gas tanks of earthmoving machinery, all the while plotting the destruction of Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona.

Edward Abbey

The Monkey Wrench Gang was both extraordinarily funny and extremely angry, and it has never gone out of print, to date selling more than half a million copies. "Monkeywrenching" is now in the permanent lexicon of environmentalism. Some critics even declared the novel the Walden of the movement.

Others likened it to Mein Kampf, but they missed the point: Abbey was indulging in hyperbolic satire in the service of a noble cause. He wasn't necessarily advocating criminal destruction of property - just kicking a few shins in order to focus environmentalist anger on a clear and immediate target.

If you harbor the slightest heartbeat of sympathy for monkeywrenching, you'll enjoy Hayduke Lives!, the further adventures of George Washington Hayduke, ex-Green Beret, ex-Viet Cong medic, lover, brawler, saboteur, all-around troublemaker and spiritual head of the Monkey Wrench Gang. Last seen clinging to a cliff at the end of the first novel as a posse and a helicopter closed in, Hayduke returns from the apparent dead in the new novel, ready for more.

For a new monster in the service of evil against the Earth has appeared: G O L I A T H the G.E.M. of Arizona, 22 stories tall, 120 feet wide, 13,500 tons of giant earthmover from Bucyrus-Erie, the world's largest mobile land machine. With it, Syn-Fuels Limited, a conglomerate of politicians, Mormon moneymen and Bureau of Land Management mountebanks, will carve an uranium strip mine half a mile wide and 400 feet deep out of the gloriously beautiful mile-high tablelands of Lost Eden Canyon near the Utah-Arizona border.

For Hayduke's cause, almost too much time has passed. The rest of the Gang is spiritually moribund, comfortable in its post-protest existence. Doc Sarvis, onetime heart surgeon, is now a contented pediatrician. Bonnie Abbzug, Brooklyn feminist and Hayduke's ex-lover, has become Doc's wife, with one child and one on the way. And Seldom Seen Smith, jack Mormon and triple polygamist, is a dude wrangler and merry womanizer.

Can Hayduke light their fires again? Will they plunge anew into his gallant battle against mechanized greed? Upon that question the novel hangs.

On the way to its resolution the author delivers himself of several splendidly Abbeyian set pieces, Cactus Ed at his finest. In one, much of his scorn is heaped upon his own followers, notably those belonging to Earth First! (a trademarked name). To Abbey, Earth First!ers and other organized environmentalists would rather publicize and speechify than risk their lives and reputations for their cause. ("There was a time when men loved ideas; now they get by with slogans.")

There's a splendid clash, like rutting elk, between two mighty 'dozers (Hayduke astride a Cat D-7), a hilarious disruption of a Syn-Fuels board meeting by a crazed charlady (Hayduke in drag), and a gigantic trashing of a Syn-Fuels computer room (Hayduke with nerd specs and clipboard).

There are bawdy scenes and funny scenes (Bonnie and Hayduke suddenly bare-naked together in a mountain waterhole, against her wishes but not his, and with interesting consequences). There is a mighty climactic battle between the Monkey Wrench Gang and G O L I A T H, with Hayduke in the driver's seat.

As in any Abbey work, there are achingly beautiful stretches of praise for the divine, unspoiled wilderness, prose offered upon a wild altar ad majorem Terra gloriam. And the novel ends on a note of hope, as if Abbey believed there is still time to save the wilderness. Nature can bounce back if we only give it a chance.

But much of Abbey's less attractive side is also here. He was always an excessive writer, flailing a large and knobby cudgel at a host of irrelevant bystanders. He never liked feminism, for instance, believing it led to androgynous horrors. In this new novel he sticks it to an old straw woman of his, yuppie working mothers "with their children abandoned all day five days a week in pink and blue Day-Glo Tee-Vee Jailhouse Kiddie Kare storage centers." That wasn't convincing then and it isn't convincing now.

Nor are his fulminations against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In the main, Mormons are not a pack of inbred, moronic right-wing eco-brutalists, even if (as Abbey complains unnecessarily) they drink rivers of caffeine-laden Pepsi-Cola, coffee being forbidden to them.

Ultimately, too, this novel feels unfinished, unpolished, its loose threads a little too abruptly gathered into a lumpy knot. Presumably Abbey had not completed it before his death at the early age of 62. Whether it would have been a better novel had he lived is impossible to say.

But enough - more than enough - of Abbey's cantankerous old genius remains in this merry eco-caper to show us what we lost when he was laid to rest last March at a secret and unspoiled spot in his beloved Sonoran Desert.

Reconstruction, continued

2010-11-07T08:26:00.002-06:00

In rebuilding my web site, I'm experimenting with variations on the "nameplate" -- the herald at the top of the home page -- and perhaps you will help me settle on a new one.

This is today's:

This was yesterday's:

And this was used the day before:

Of course, there will be a new one tomorrow. Maybe even the next day.

Which of these three do you like best? Please leave a comment with your thoughts. (It's OK, you can be anonymous. No need to register and reveal your identity.)

Thank you.

Reconstruction

2010-11-05T13:56:00.006-05:00

Every so often a web site, like an old house, needs ground-up rebuilding. Links get broken, design ages, code crumbles, dust blankets everything and squirrels take up residence in the attic.

And so I've been working on my web site, trying with inadequate knowledge and limited skills to spiff up the place. It looks better, I think, but has a long way to go before anyone would call it slick and professional.

Tell me what you think.

Thank you.

How to self-publish a novel

2010-10-29T06:19:00.008-05:00

If you want to see a big part of the future of book publishing, go to www.jodymeacham.com.

It's the Web site for Through the Heart of the South, a new self-published coming-of-age novel about a white high school lad buffeted by the civil rights movement, with a background of Dixie railroading.

The author is Jody Meacham, a North Carolina native, onetime Seaboard Coast Line brakeman and recovering California sportswriter. He has a commercially published book -- Skating for Dummies, with Kristi Yamaguchi -- under his belt as well as the skills and smarts to make a private venture work.

The first two chapters of the novel are free on the web site for the downloading, in .pdf format, and their vivid prose impelled me to order a $8 e-book (there is a link to Amazon.com) to read on my Kindle. The novel also comes in ePub format at the same price for the Nook (with a link to barnesandnoble.com) and a $16 print-on-demand trade paperback.

The Web site is attractively designed, with sections offering a Q-and-A with the author and the historical background of the novel.

I learned about this book on railforum.com, a Web site devoted to one of my pastimes, railroads and train travel. There, using the nom de web "Doodlebug," Meacham posted a message about the book. Targeting niche interests on the Internet is potentially an effective way for a self-published novelist to promote his wares, and you will be seeing more of this kind of thing in years to come.

In a week I'm taking Amtrak's Capitol Limited to Washington. Guess what I'll be reading aboard the train?

Big blow on Lake Superior

2010-10-27T07:26:00.004-05:00

Today the National Weather Service issued the following bulletin for western Lake Superior (bolding mine):

LAKE SUPERIOR FROM SAXON HARBOR WI TO UPPER ENTRANCE TO PORTAGE
CANAL MI 5NM OFF SHORE TO THE US/CANADIAN BORDER INCLUDING ISLE
ROYALE NATIONAL PARK-
LAKE SUPERIOR FROM UPPER ENTRANCE TO PORTAGE CANAL TO MANITOU
ISLAND MI 5NM OFF SHORE TO THE US/CANADIAN BORDER-
416 AM EDT WED OCT 27 2010
...STORM WARNING IN EFFECT THROUGH LATE TONIGHT...
.EARLY THIS MORNING...SOUTHWEST STORM FORCE WINDS TO 60 KNOTS.
RAIN SHOWERS. WAVES 20 TO 25 FEET.
.TODAY...SOUTHWEST STORM FORCE WINDS TO 55 KNOTS DIMINISHING TO 50
KNOTS IN THE AFTERNOON. RAIN SHOWERS. WAVES SUBSIDING TO 15 TO 20
FEET.
.TONIGHT...WEST STORM FORCE WINDS TO 50 KNOTS VEERING TO NORTHWEST
GALES TO 45 KNOTS AFTER MIDNIGHT. A CHANCE OF RAIN SHOWERS THROUGH
MIDNIGHT...THEN RAIN SHOWERS LIKELY. WAVES SUBSIDING TO 10 TO 14
FEET.
.THURSDAY...NORTHWEST GALES TO 40 KNOTS. A CHANCE OF RAIN
SHOWERS. WAVES BUILDING TO 12 TO 17 FEET...THEN SUBSIDING TO
10 TO 14 FEET.
.THURSDAY NIGHT...NORTHWEST WINDS 20 TO 30 KNOTS BECOMING WEST
15 TO 25 KNOTS AFTER MIDNIGHT. A SLIGHT CHANCE OF RAIN SHOWERS.
WAVES SUBSIDING TO 6 TO 9 FEET.
.FRIDAY...WEST WINDS 15 TO 25 KNOTS. WAVES SUBSIDING TO 3 TO
5 FEET.
.FRIDAY NIGHT...WEST WINDS 10 TO 20 KNOTS BECOMING NORTHWEST 5 TO
15 KNOTS AFTER MIDNIGHT. WAVES SUBSIDING TO 2 TO 4 FEET.
.SATURDAY...NORTH WINDS 5 TO 15 KNOTS BECOMING NORTHEAST 10 TO
20 KNOTS. WAVES SUBSIDING TO 1 TO 3 FEET.
.SUNDAY...NORTHEAST WINDS 5 TO 15 KNOTS. WAVES SUBSIDING TO CALM
TO 2 FEET...THEN BUILDING TO 1 TO 3 FEET.
$$

Of course the highest waves will be five nautical miles offshore, but the ones inshore will be humdingers, too. Inasmuch as the Writer's Lair, pictured below, lies only 20 feet from the lake, we'll be holding our breaths that it -- and the new rock riprap we had installed between the cabin and the edge of the water last summer -- make it through the storm unscathed.

OCT. 28: Friends who live a little way west of the cabin paid a visit after the storm and reported all was fine except for a red squirrel looking for (and, I hope, failing to find) a way into the cabin. Since the 60-knot wind was out of the southwest, the southern shore of the lake saw only 4- to 6-foot waves while the Slate Islands on the Canadian side were buffeted by 28-foot monsters.

The Writer's Lair

2010-10-26T06:45:00.007-05:00

Even with the first November blow fixing to hit this last week of October, I'd rather be up in our beloved log cabin on the shore of Lake Superior in Upper Michigan rather than down here in Evanston. The Lady Friend calls the place "Far Shore" (her father built it in 1947) and I know it as "The Writer's Lair." This lovely drawing, now hanging on the dining room wall, was her birthday gift from our sons and their spouses.

Teaching again

2010-10-22T16:42:00.003-05:00

Next Thursday I'll be putting my life on the line again, lecturing to a class of college students.

Exactly why this is a sensible idea I can't say. Preparing a 45-minute talk takes about three eight-hour days of work. Otherwise I would just be peddling banalities to the credulous.

Intolerant cranks might think college students nothing more than ignorant simpletons vulnerable to subversive notions, but I've always found them tough audiences with acutely tuned bullshit detectors. (Of course they are ignorant. That's why they're in college. Why else would they be?)

The class in question is "Explore Chicago: Chicago's Disabled Community," a course taught by an old friend, Karen Meyer. She's a WLS-TV (ABC) reporter specializing in news about disabilities, and she's also director of DePaul University's Office on Disabilities as well as a professor.

It's a survey course for freshmen. My book What's That Pig Outdoors: A Memoir of Deafness is required reading, so they'll know all about me. I won't have to explain who I am and why I'm standing in front of them. That's half the battle.

Karen herself is deaf -- we both went through Evanston Township High School -- and so the students will already be accustomed to the way oral deaf people speak. There won't be an awkward period in which the students struggle to get used to my rusty bathtub pipes.

Funny thing, though: I'll be talking to them the way I speak to unfamiliar hearing audiences: with the help of a computer, a digital projector and Keynote (the Mac version of PowerPoint). The hardware will illustrate how I make myself understood to hearing audiences: small pages of text and photographs projected on a screen, with readings from the books by the Lady Friend.

It'll be a demonstration of how a deaf author pitches his books to the general public. Overcoming an obstacle, in short.

There won't, however, be a pop quiz. I'm not that tough.

I'm looking forward to it. Speaking to Karen's students is always gratifying.

OCT. 29: And so it was.

Piddling cop matters

2010-10-15T07:12:00.001-05:00

One of my frequent stops on the Internet circuit is at PoliceLink, a Web site popular with cops that is highly useful for writers of police procedural mysteries.

On it I've learned all about the latest Ford Police Interceptor replacement for the classic Crown Victoria cruiser (it's not getting a very enthusiastic reception), about police careers, about weapons and tactical gear, and half a hundred other items often on a cop's mind.

There are forums on which cops unload their deepest feelings about issues of the day -- for example, whether the Westboro Baptist Church protesters are protected by the U.S. constitution. As with us civilians, cops' opinions on this matter range all over the map.

No concern is too trivial for officers to chew over. Cops are taught never to put their hands in their pockets when on duty, lest a bad guy catch them unguarded at an inopportune moment. But where do they put their hands when off duty? Some of the responses are snarkily hilarious: "Most of the time I carry my daughter on my support side when out in public so my boom stick hand is free to kill zombies."

Each day there's news about incidents involving police officers. Sometimes the headlines can sound right out of the Onion ("Topless Woman, 61, Attacks Officers with Meat Cleaver") but the stories are deadly serious.

Yesterday's home page led with "Bathroom Issues for Law Enforcement." I never knew that a visit to a strange public rest room could be fraught with so many problems for a police officer. Can't turn your back on the door for fear some lunatic will make a grab for your gun. Those stalls don't leave much room for maneuvering with a heavy equipment belt, and the problem is worse for female cops.

For them the article (by a female Naperville, Ill., cop) recommends Quickpants, an extended zipper system for uniform trousers that operates on the same principle as flap-bottom pajamas.

Who knew?

I'll have to write this stuff into my next novel somehow.

Little Brother

2010-10-14T08:37:00.006-05:00

The Brother HL-2140 is an incredible writer's bargain for as little as $49.95.

Away back in 1988, when I was working on What's That Pig Outdoors?, I bought a Hewlett-Packard Laserjet II printer. It cost $1,650. It had been on the market for a year, having appeared at a list price of $2,395.

I loved the thing -- it was built like an Abrams tank, weighed about as much as one, and soldiered on for years and years without breaking. I don't remember exactly when it finally died in the early 2000s, but none of its various replacements (H-Ps and Brothers) lasted half as long.

Last week my latest Brother, a big and heavy HL-1850 bought for about $250 in 2004, finally went belly up. It would have cost about the same to fix, so I junked it.

And now I have a Brother HL-2140 "personal laser printer." It came from a New York online merchant for $65, free shipping, no sales tax. Sixty-five bucks! I could hardly believe it.

It gets better. Last week Staples, the office supply house, was discounting the little Brother for $49.95. (The standard price from most sources is $119.)

Good thing that the tools of a mystery novelist are becoming cheaper, because that profession doesn't pay as well as it used to. Not that it ever paid much.

It's done!

2010-10-09T07:13:00.000-05:00

. . . and was sent off to my agent yesterday for relay to my publisher.

"It" is Hang Fire, the Steve Martinez mystery I had been neglecting since the fall of 2007, working on only sporadically. Last August I suffered an unaccustomed burst of energy and wrote the last third of the manuscript, and all during September rewrote and recast and polished it until it cried for mercy.

I had the good fortune to count among my early critical readers a lawyer, another writer, an artist, the Lady Friend, a retired psychologist, a retired state park ranger and a good friend highly knowledgeable about the milieu of Porcupine County in upper Michigan. I thank them all, while of course acknowledging that any mistakes that do get into print are the fault of the author and the author alone.

Now we will see if the horribly beleaguered publishing world has resources enough to publish the thing.

What's it about? I can tell you that it involves dressing up in frontier duds and serial murder by muzzle-loader. There is sex (and the absence thereof) and there are lies. There is temptation. Alex, Chad, Ginny, Tommy, Sue, Joe Koski and Hogan are all present. There is a shootout in the woods with hunters and a SWAT team. Do Steve and Ginny get back together?

We shall see, if all goes well.

Kindle

2010-10-04T17:12:00.009-05:00

Two days ago a Kindle arrived at my house from Amazon.com. It's the $139 one -- wi-fi is fine for me. Don't need 3G ($189) to get new e-books.

So far so good, with a few niggles.

This new third-generation Kindle is billed as having a contrastier screen than earlier models, and I suppose it does, but it could be a little better. Its "e-ink" text doesn't stand out quite as well from the light gray background as print does from white paper. This means you (or, rather, I; I'm a geezer who don't see so good no more) must use the Kindle in a well-lighted place. It's not good for dim rooms.

But the Kindle's 6-inch screen is much better for reading in sunlight (such as on the beach) than an iPad or iPod Touch's 3-inch screen, on which I've read 34 books since buying it 18 months ago. The backlit screens of the Apples wash out in bright light.

A very nice item is Amazon's "Whispersync" feature, which allows the Kindle and the Kindle app on the iPod Touch to synchronize, putting you on the same page of an e-book in both machines. I'll be able to use the Touch to read in the dark or keep it on my belt for reading where carrying the Kindle might be inconvenient.

Learning the Kindle's ins and outs has not been difficult, but I did have to to unlearn the Apple touch-screen style and pick up the trick of "mousing" the Kindle's cursor around with its tiny four-way rocker switch, and page through the books with pressure switches on the side of the reader. The Apple touch-screen interface is much more elegant and intuitive than the Kindle's.

But that doesn't make me wish I had bought a $499 iPod instead. The Kindle is a superb value.

Frost

2010-09-26T10:39:00.006-05:00

Driving into Ontonagon, Michigan, after a hard overnight frost, I just had to stop on the side of the road and photograph this crystal-bedecked fence, vapor rising in the early morning sunlight. It reminded me that only a handful of days remain before the Lady Friend and I must go into our Illinois winter exile, like urban bears into hibernation.

It also reminded me that a camera often can be a writer's best friend, especially if that writer is a regional mystery novelist. Photographs can foster the descriptive sense of place so important in that genre.

Earlier this summer the Lady Friend and I spent a morning photographing the characters and goings-on at a rendezvous of historical re-enactors of the time of Lewis and Clark (1800-1840). Hang Fire, the novel I'm just finishing, opens at such a gathering, and being able to refer to photographs of participants in full costume living in the manner of early nineteenth century Americans helped me immensely.

In fact, it was shortly after visiting the rendezvous that I became unblocked after months of inactivity on the novel. Taking those pictures somehow spurred the creative juices and caused me to imagine new and precise ways to describe what I was writing about.

Depot

2010-09-19T06:48:00.012-05:00

The other day I drove around little Ontonagon, Michigan, the town that lies six miles east of the Writer's Lair on Lake Superior and serves as a backdrop (called Porcupine City) for my Steve Martinez mysteries, and took this shot of the decrepit old Milwaukee Road depot (built in 1896) downtown.

The depot and tracks now belong to the Escanaba & Lake Superior Railroad, which wants to abandon the historic old line (born in 1882 as the Ontonagon & Brule River Railroad) and tear up the rails now that its only Ontonagon customer, the Smurfit-Stone paper mill, has closed for good.

Earlier in the summer the E&LS pulled all its old boxcars off the mill property and, everyone here thought, said a last good-bye to Ontonagon. Later in the summer, however, the E&LS suddenly filled the four-track yard with scores of mostly rusty and graffiti-laden blue cars, apparently deciding to use the tracks for storage while the abandonment request wends its way through the courts.

The depot is desolate today, but once it was thriving. The picture below, taken from the same perspective by Alan Loftis in about 1920, shows the Ontonagon depot as a Milwaukee Road train arrived, presumably with an important personage who drew a large crowd.

Note how the depot building has been altered over the years. At some point two windows replaced the single one, horizontal siding replaced the vertical, and the top half of the chimney disappeared. But the original "ONTONAGON" sign remains.

Sic transit gloria.

Run on, McPhee, run on!

2010-09-17T05:10:00.006-05:00

Run-on sentences, those loose shambling assemblages of words that lounge and sprawl and put their feet up on the furniture, generally are to be avoided, because understanding them requires a mental toolbox of levels and straightedges and T-squares to measure and survey and cut into lengths of sense, and are hard to read besides.

Still, in the hands of a master craftsman they can glisten as polished creations of beauty. Here is an example from the nonpareil John McPhee, writing on the 2010 British Open in the Sept. 6 New Yorker:

Wars had shut down the championship, and this was actually the hundred-and-thirty-ninth playing of it, the twenty-eighth at St. Andrews, and there was not a lot of dramatic tension in the 2010 Open unless you found it dramatic that a twenty-seven-year-old who had missed three cuts in recent weeks (including the cut at the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach) and ranked fifty-fourth in the world started off as a flash in the pan and then went on flashing and -- on the third and fourth days, when he was supposed to go dark -- flashed brighter and brighter and finished one stroke short of a record set ten years ago by Tiger Woods.

I stand in utter admiration.