Old review in a new bottle

Nothing cheers up an aging author like a sudden spotlight on one of his old, out-of-print, almost forgotten books.

Yesterday Eric Smith, a habitue of this blog and the director of the Ontonagon Township Library way up in Steve Martinez Country -- that's Upper Michigan to you outlanders -- picked up the March 15 issue of Kirkus Reviews. On its cover he spotted a lovely notice of my 1997 book Flight of the Gin Fizz, the story of my learning to fly and retracing the transcontinental route of a celebrated early birdman.

The critic Gregory McNamee seems to be writing a regular feature, "Lost in the Stacks," reviving old books he once reviewed and liked. Back in '97 he reviewed the book for Tucson Weekly, and he has dusted it off and updated it a bit for Kirkus.

Kirkus Reviews is not the kind of publication you find in supermarket magazine racks. It has a small circulation aimed at the general book trade -- librarians, publishers, literary and film agents, film and TV producers, booksellers and literary journalists like me. It publishes short reviews of new books two to three months in advance of their official appearances in the stores. Like its brethren, Publishers Weekly and Booklist, it's influential in the trade and often a good review suggests how a book will be received by the press and public.

Not in the case of Gin Fizz, however. That book was ill-starred. It had the bad luck to be published at HarperCollins just as Rupert Murdoch put at its head a bottom-line-oriented publisher who ordered scores of modest but significant book projects killed (mine was about to appear, hence was spared the ax) and the company's focus aimed at popular best sellers instead. Many editors left HarperCollins in protest, including mine -- a talented fellow who had shepherded my two previous books into print.

Gin Fizz was, in the term of the trade, orphaned. With the departure of my editor no one was left to champion it in sales meetings, to push for promotion and advertising dollars. HarperCollins just shoved the book out the door and forgot all about it.

Though Gin Fizz won a few reviews, most of them favorable, sales were dismal and the book was quickly remaindered and went out of print.

It happens to lots of authors. I just went on and became a mystery novelist.

But Gin Fizz is still the favorite of my nonfiction books. Researching it -- learning to fly and buying a little two-seater airplane and flying it from New York Harbor to California -- was a great hairy-chested adventure for a balding middle-aged writer. More than any other book I've done, it gave new dimension to my life.

I don't expect the latter-day Kirkus notice to stir much in the way of industry interest. The book already had its chance twelve years ago.

Still, it's nice to know Gin Fizz hasn't been completely forgotten.

Thanks, McNamee. Thanks, Eric.

'Twas a wonderful life

The patient is not yet dead, but already the elegies have begun.

The Chicago Sun-Times, the newspaper I used to work for, declared bankruptcy the other day. Its owners cheerily forecast revival after reorganization, but everybody knows the paper is moribund.

And so various staff members, present and past, have begun to post their memories of the place, some of them a little less egocentric than the others.

The best of these remembrances is by Roger Ebert, that fellow who long ago won a Pulitzer Prize and just kept getting better instead of coasting on his laurels as so many of the others have.

Roger has said it so well that there is no point in me, or anyone else, adding our voices to the chorus. His is not a dirge but a celebration of a life, the life of a once fine newspaper, and the wonderful, if sometimes self-absorbed, newsroom culture that surrounded it. True, we big-headed newsies tended to think of ourselves as the smartest and wittiest people in the world, but now and then we actually were.

Hats off to Roger. Hats off, too, to the funeral cortege as it passes by, but not just yet.

What's this bird?

Yesterday I took a quick backyard portrait of a bird I didn't recognize. It's bigger than a sparrow and slightly smaller than a robin, with a dark gray back and head and white belly and underbutt. My bird book suggests that it's a Slate-colored Junco, whose range does embrace the Midwest, but I can't tell for sure. Can any birders out there confirm my guess? Click on the photo for a larger version.

The Kindle e-boycott

A new manifestation of aggrieved privilege has erupted over the prices of Amazon.com's Kindle e-books: Some disaffected customers have called for a boycott of all Kindle e-books that cost more than $9.99.

Why?

Some Kindle e-books, the revolutionaries say, are more expensive at $9.99 than the paperback versions at $7.99. Some Kindle e-books are more expensive than the tree-book versions you can get at discount emporiums. It is absurd to pay $18 for an illustrated e-book whose color photos look like hell on a black-and-white Kindle screen.

And when you are finished with a Kindle e-book, you can't pass it along to a friend or your public library or sell it at a used bookstore. You can reread it on your Kindle (or iPhone or iPod Touch), but that is all.

Worst of all, these rebels say, an e-book requires no paper, glue, shipping or printing, so it has "no production costs."

Pardon me, but that last is absolute nonsense.

It costs money for publishers to acquire books, sometimes big money. Authors expect to get paid for their labors, and some of them command hefty advances. Editors and designers must be paid. Promotion personnel must be paid. Insurance and rent must be paid. Stockholders expect a return on their investment.

What's more, Kindle e-books are purchased and downloaded via wireless, saving their consumers considerable time and gas for trips to the bookstore. Convenience has a price, like everything else.

Still don't want to pay more than $9.99 for an e-book you can get in an instant via wireless? Call the library, put in your reservation for a new novel, hear six weeks later that it's finally available, then drive 20 minutes in your gas-guzzling truck to pick it up.

Or drive to Barnes & Noble and buy the tree-book -- at a discount if it's popular.

Or don't buy it at all. Nobody holds a gun to your head and says, "Read this book or I'll waste you."

Big bad Amazon.com doesn't set the prices of the e-books it sells -- the publishers do. The formula is a percentage of the tree-book cover price, usually about three-fifths. Is it surprising that a thick illustrated history that sells for $50 in hardcover will go for $22 as an e-book?

In my opinion, this silly rebellion is part and parcel of the shortsighted selfishness at the heart of the dark side of the Internet: People want things for free, never mind what it costs to produce them. They expect their news for no charge, although gathering and disseminating it is expensive. They rip off writers and photographers without paying a nickel.

The cultural commons of the Internet is a wonderful thing, but we must never forget that it always comes at a price.

Fiction on a spreadsheet

Click on the illustration for a larger, more legible version.

A short storyspreadsheet? Why not?

A blogger and fiction writer named David Nygren has come up with a groundbreaking new literary form, a brief narrative contained entirely within a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It could revolutionize American literature, or at least save it from going under with General Motors.

The spreadsheet of "Under the Table," a one-scene tale of a boozy dinner, with lots of groping, in an Ethiopian restaurant is set up across 8 columns and 30 rows.

The concept is deceptively simple. Column A denotes the number of the "action" point in time. Column B contains the action itself. Column C shows the dialogue among the characters. Columns D through H are filled with the internal thoughts of each character.

The illustration of part of the spreadsheet above will give you an idea, but if you have any Excel skills (all you need to know is how to scroll across and down a spreadsheet) it's better to download the "short spreadsheetstory" from Nygren's blogpost and examine it. (Excel isn't on my Macs, but OpenOffice displayed the piece just fine.)

You can read it in the usual Western European manner, from left to right, then back to Column A and down to Row 2, then from left to right and so on. Or you could adopt the method of Hebrew and Arabic and read from right to left. Another method is to read Column A all the way down, then return to the top and start down again on Column B. Maybe you want the thoughts of the characters before they speak their words and execute the action? You could read the story that way.

A truly innovative literary device is a graph showing "character intensity thought units," which would have delighted Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

It is a deep and profound upheaval of all we were taught in American Literature 101, resonant with meaning and implication. The world will never be the same.

Nygren may have single-handedly saved the U.S. publishing industry. Can you imagine what creative souls might do with the rest of Microsoft Office? We could have brilliant PowerPoint poetry, Access biography, Outlook e-mail mysteries and so on.

With deep thanks to Mediabistro.com.

Blog-of-the-Month Club

Many amusing blogs exist, but few truly addictive ones. A good example of the latter is the unpronounceable xkcd.com, which doesn't stand for anything except the fertile technoanarchic mind of its creator, a physicist named Randall Munroe. His off-the-wall stick-figure cartoons will keep you rapt for hours even though you might not quite understand some (well, in some cases most) of them.

Though I'd never before encountered it (where have I been?), xkcd.com seems to be quite famous. Go thither and have fun. And if you like, you can buy the t-shirt.

A tip of the hat to Pete Selkowe for the heads-up. No pun intended.

Charging ahead on the iPod Touch

About noon today I finished reading the Kindle version of Michael Connelly's 1999 whodunit Angels Flight on my iPod Touch. Yes, I read an entire book on a 3 1/2-inch screen and didn't suffer eyestrain. What's more, I've just recently had cataract surgery -- that has to be the ultimate test for small-scale e-book reading. And, let me tell you, the experience was a satisfying one.

The next thing I did was go to Kindle Books online and download Connelly's most recent cop novel, The Brass Verdict, published late last fall.

Why another cop novel? Why another Connelly? Am I going to pig out on his Harry Bosch novels the way I did on Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels last year until I'd read them all?

Not really. When one works in the same genre, it helps to absorb how other writers -- especially best-selling as well as first-rate ones -- craft their stories. One picks up good tricks that way. (One has to be careful not to steal, just be inspired.)

And when one reads an e-book on a small screen, it helps if the book is simple, direct and linear -- that is, if it doesn't have a convoluted plot that requires the reader to backtrack frequently to refresh his memory of names or events, such as all those Russians and their relationships in War and Peace. A good mystery keeps the reader rolling along effortlessly. Angels Flight did that.

As I become more and more used to this mode of reading, I might try a literary novel or a a heavy-duty biography on the little iPod Touch.

This doesn't mean I've forsaken print on paper. All this time I've also been reading the tree-book of P. D. James' newest literary mystery, The Private Patient -- one chapter a day, savoring each shapely sentence and each profound observation about human behavior. The end is drawing near; Commander Dalgliesh is about to bust the perp -- a colorful American phrase Lady James would never use.