Taking the Kindle leap

I'm now reading a Kindle book -- but not on an actual Kindle, either versions 1 or 2, but on a brand-new Apple iPod Touch.

I bought the Touch yesterday to stay connected to the world with its wireless e-mail and Web browsing capability, and thought I'd experiment with reading the Kindle version of an e-book. So for $6.39 I downloaded Angels Flight, a 1999 novel by Michael Connelly that I hadn't yet read, and have just started the first chapter. (The Kindle reader software, made available just last week, is free.)

The $229 (for 8 gigabytes of memory) iPod Touch is not a $359 Kindle, nor should reading e-books on it be mistaken for reading a real Kindle. So far, however, the experience has been better than I expected.

The backlit 3 1/2 inch screen of an iPod Touch doesn't measure up for restfulness compared to that of the Kindle's higher-tech 6-inch "e-ink" monitor. I suspect the iPod won't be suitable for long hours with a book, although it'll clearly be better than the big K for reading in poor light or in the dark.

The Kindle iPod text, in a pleasant serifed font that looks like Georgia, is remarkably readable. You have a choice of five sizes. I found the middle, about 10 points in height, the most comfortable.

Reading a Kindle e-book on the iPod is simplicity itself. You turn the pages with an easy sweep of the finger. There are no page numbers, but the iPod automatically takes you back to where you left off.

Getting new books is equally uncomplicated. The iPod takes you to the Kindle store, where you have your choice among almost a quarter of a million titles, most of the new offerings costing $9.95, less than half the price of a hardbound. The Kindle store automatically downloads new titles to your iPod.

On the iPod you can't annotate text, as you can on a real Kindle, but that seems a small price to pay for the convenience of a shirt-pocket e-reader.

I'm thinking that the Kindle experience on an iPod Touch (or its close cousin, the iPhone) will be best for short bursts of reading, such as commuting, whiling away empty time on an airplane or train, or waiting for the curtain to rise in the theater.

Kindle isn't the only e-book application for the iPod Touch/iPhone. Some people swear by a similar service called Stanza. I'll be trying out that one in days to come.

Stand by.

Some good stuff . . . and bad

I enjoy reading the Chicago Sun-Times' Neil Steinberg every day, even if half the time I disagree with him. One of the reasons is that he is unafraid to display a cultivated intellect, often with the help of the world's great literature. This guy does not dumb down for dopes.

Today, on Rush Limbaugh's expressed hope for President Obama's failure, Steinberg writes:

"I was reading War and Peace to the teen the other night -- we're about halfway through -- when Tolstoy surprised me by summarizing Limbaugh far better than I could.

"The Russians are fighting Napoleon. One of their allies, a rigid Prussian general, Ernst Pfuel, is aghast that the czar would consider any strategy other than his own. The fact that Pfuel's plan of attack had already led to disaster has shaken his confidence not one bit -- rather the past defeats are, in his eyes, proof that his instructions must not have been followed to the letter.

"'Pfuel was one of those theorists who so love their theory that they forget the purpose of the theory -- its application in practice,' Tolstoy writes. 'He was even glad of failure, because failure, proceeding from departures from theory in practice, only proved to him the correctness of his theory.'"

Another admirable writer is Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal theater critic and biographer of H.L. Mencken.

Last week, however, Teachout stumbled. In an an otherwise pleasant appreciation of a late playwright, he led with not one but two dreary cliches, combining them into a clanging mixaphor:

"Horton Foote died in the saddle, the way every artist worth his salt wants to go."

Argh.

TUESDAY: The New York Times' stylebook chief examines some misbegotten metaphors that recently sneaked into the paper, as well as some good ones.

The 'Inept Blob' vs. the 'Inhuman Turd'

Yesterday, continuing to clean out my old papers, I came across across a yellowed letter written in response to an interview of the novelist Nelson Algren that I did for the Chicago Daily News in 1976.

In the article, Algren unloaded bitterly on his editor, the legendary William Targ of G. P. Putnam's Sons (he edited Mario Puzo's The Godfather), accusing him of not having done his best for Algren's collection The Last Carousel. In a letter to Algren carbon-copied to me, Targ wrote:

"Nelson Algren:

"The Chicago Daily News-Henry Kisor interview reached me this morning.

"As an editor I've found it necessary to take a certain amount of shit from neurotic authors -- part of the job. But I will not take outright lies from anyone, nor public vilification.

"You said 'Nobody outside Chicago reviewed my book.' An outright lie. We have a bulging folder of reviews from all over America and yes, including Playboy. The L.A. Times reviewed it -- that's outside of Chicago. If a few publications failed to review the book, don't lay it on your editor. What do you expect me to do -- come at the reviewers with a gun. They did get books by messenger in New York, and by air mail around the country.

"You say no books were shipped to the West Coast. Wanna bet? Where do you think those 9,000 hardbound copies went? To your racetrack cronies? We have sales records and shipping records to refute your dumb lie.

"For calling me 'an inept blob' -- I must reply: you are an inhuman turd, a piece of excrement. I sweated weekends at home, and in the office, over the unspeakable mess of manuscript you sent to me. I made it all into a decent book. Many or most editors would not have allowed some of the trivia to appear between covers. It's true, there are some fine things in the book, but I preserved everything you wanted included in the book. I was trying to keep you happy.

"Your comments about not writing your next novel are not amusing; they strike me as irresponsible. As for the Carter manuscript [an ill-starred book on the boxer Hurricane Carter], it was submitted to one of our Berkley editors who declined it. I learned about it and called Candida [Candida Donadio, Algren's agent]. She told me you had fired her (what a charming valentine for an old and faithful friend!) and then went back to her. She sent me the ms and two of us read it here and agreed it was not for us. So much for that.

"I've long admired you as a writer; I won't deny your talents. But even if you were Tolstoy I woud say -- and shall do so publicly henceforth -- that you are a liar, an ingrate, a shithead.

"William Targ"

A couple of weeks later the Bergen County Herald News reprinted my interview from the Daily News' wire service, and Targ sent the publisher of that hapless paper a stiff note declaring that "Mr. Algren is a liar and highly mischievous and I intend to secure justice and damages from all concerned. You will hear from my lawyers shortly."

Nothing, so far as I know, ever came of that threat. Perhaps Targ realized that Algren was just too broke to be worth suing. Perhaps he just calmed down. Authors, after all, tend to be as capricious and unreasonable as small children, and often need adult supervision.

Most editor-author relationships are civil and even affectionate, but they can also twang with tension. When a writerly ego clashes with editorial sensibility, the result can be volcanic.

Algren died in 1981, Targ in 1999, and I don't think they ever reconciled.

Letters from Art

We are cleaning out the attic, and I have been plowing through boxes and boxes of clippings and correspondence dating back to the mid-1960s and the beginning of my newspaper career. Some of it is worth saving, especially the letters exchanged with prominent writers of the time. One such is the great syndicated satirist Art Buchwald, who died in 2007. Two letters from him written in 1983 show not only the breadth of his wit but also the depth of his humanity.

The occasion was a review I had written of a book of essays by Calvin Trillin, the New Yorker humorist. I don't recall the exact words, but they were something along the lines of "If I didn't know better, I'd call Trillin the intellectual's Art Buchwald."

Naturally Trillin's publisher wrested out of context the last four words for the New York Times ad that appeared a few days after the review. " 'The intellectual's Art Buchwald' -- Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times."

The following week this letter arrived from Buchwald:

"Dear Henry:

"I was very hurt when you described Calvin Trillin as 'the intellectual's Art Buchwald.' Just because he went to Yale and I went to the University of Southern California is no reason for you to put me down. I didn't have a very good education because my family was poor and I couldn't afford remedial English.

"Sometime early in my newspaper career a voice said to me: 'Intellectuals suck," and I decided to appeal to hard hats and middle America.

"You have hurt my standing with Washington brain trusters. Ever since your review people say, 'Don't talk to Buchwald. He isn't one of our kind.'

"The next time I see Trillin I'm going to punch him in the nose.

"Sincerely,

"Art

"cc: Calvin Trillin"

Of course I hastened to send Buchwald a copy of the review with the quote in proper context, and a few days later this arrived:

"Dear Henry:

"Thanks for your nice note. I'm glad we cleared the matter up. Death to all book advertising people, and a pox on those who misquote book critics. I will let Trillin live, but if it happens on his next book my people will take care of him.

"Hope to see you soon.

"Sincerely,

"Art"

A year or so later I ran into Trillin at a literary party while in the company of Tracy Kidder, who brought up the incident. Trillin not only remembered the ad -- he and Buchwald were good friends -- but thought the whole thing very funny.

Naturally I'm saving that correspondence. It's a treasure.

Books are better than men, she says

"Relationships with books actually have some pretty compelling advantages over relationships with men. With books, it's always your choice if the liaison ends prematurely. You don't have to worry about the awkwardness of trying to avoid your discarded book should you bump into it in the grocery store. You can tell it, 'It's not you, it's me' or even 'You know, it actually IS you' without hurting its feelings. It will also never insist on an exclusive relationship, and no one will think ill of you if you love more than one. You can take one to bed with you the very first night you bring it home without your mother blinking an eye."

So says the impossibly impertinent Kim Kovacs on the BookBrowse blog.

Somehow I can't see a guy posting a male version of this disgusting, dangerous, thoroughly subversive point of view.

On the other hand, it would be easier to dump a book than a woman, wouldn't it?

(A tip of the hat to ShelfAwareness.com.)

To hell in a leaky handbasket

Today's further evidence that Great Depression II is increasing its chokehold on us:

Gourmet magazines are now offering recipes for leftovers. (New York Times)

An Amazon.com supplier abandons its book warehouse, and thousands loot it -- legally. (Daily Mail)

Shoppers at Beijing's colorful Sanyuanli Market have cut back drastically. (BBC News)

Coupon clippers leap onto the Web to stretch their grocery budgets. (Wall Street Journal)

The meltdown has revived racial tensions on Guadeloupe and Martinique. (San Francisco Chronicle)

"The worst economy in a generation" has slowed the plans of T. Boone Pickens's wife to create a wild horse sanctuary. (Associated Press)

All that ice gitches my gumees

Yesterday morning the temperature in Porcupine City (or Ontonagon, as it is known to reality freaks) was 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, reports Steve Sundberg, a regular correspondent from the place. "It doesn't normally get nearly this cold around here, but the western end of Lake Superior has frozen over. That has shut down the lake effect snow machine and ended the normal temperature-moderating influence of the open water."

Steve sent a link to that NOAA satellite photograph, taken Friday. Click it for a slightly larger version.

From its caption: "Areas that are tinted aqua on the lakes indicate ice cover, pure black areas indicate open water, and white areas indicate cloud cover. In this image, note how the ice cover on western Lake Superior has almost prevented the development of any lake effect clouds and snow showers. One lake effect snow band, originating from a small patch of open water between Isle Royale and Thunder Bay, Ontario, can be seen streaming south toward Ironwood. The shrinking open water area over eastern Lake Superior is still sufficiently large to allow numerous bands of lake effect snow showers to develop and to stream into north central Upper Michigan."

The NOAA page with the photo is here.

Um . . . I think maybe I'll wait until there's a heat wave, about 20 degrees above zero F, before I spend any of the winter up there in Steve Martinez country.