Flickr: nitot

So a few weeks ago, when the new generation of Amazon Kindles were announced, I went ahead and made a purchase. Although I’ve wanted an e-reader for a while, I’ve never bought one. For one thing, they’ve been too expensive. There’s no way that any e-reader should cost $200, $300, or $400. That’s just ridiculous. Ultimately, e-readers ought to come down to about $50-$75, especially those readers that don’t do anything else but store books. The new generation of Kindle cost about $140 — still rather high, but low enough to encourage me to buy it.

The other reason why I finally bought one is the new Kindle’s design. I thought that the first two generations of Kindle were not only over-priced, but extremely ugly. They were oddly shaped and looked uncomfortable to hold. My new Kindle is much more aesthetically pleasing. It’s charcoal colored, very thin, rounded at the corners and beveled at the edges.

For as thin as it is, it’s also heavier than you would expect. It weighs about the same as a 300-page high-quality paperback. It’s not outrageously heavy, but I was surprised when I first held it in my hand.

I’m still trying to decide how to use it. I’m tempted to bring it to school and use it while I’m teaching. I won’t, however, for a couple of reasons: first, I already enforce a policy against electronic devices in my classroom, so the students would rightly wonder why I can use an electronic device and they can’t. Second, most of my students can’t afford a luxury like a Kindle, so I feel like I’d be rubbing their faces in their own poverty. That wouldn’t be nice. So I guess I’ll leave my Kindle at home. Someday, e-readers will replace traditional textbooks in schools across America, but that day is still a ways off.

But I like the idea of using this device to read documents that I find and create online so that I can read them wherever I want, not just while I’m sitting in front of my desktop computer. I think, eventually, this device is going to revolutionize how I read books, just as word processors revolutionized how I write and just as mp3s and mp3 players revolutionized how I listen to music.

The worst thing about the Kindle is that it doesn’t support very many e-book and text formats, and the process for putting, say, a Word document on the device is convoluted, to say the least. Amazon needs to work on this, or I need to find a good, fast, online conversion tool.

Flickr: Lab2112

Last weekend I read my last book of the summer. It was a novella titled Miss Lonelyhearts, written by increasingly obscure early 20th century American author Nathanael West.

I actually read the book a few years ago. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. West is a peculiar writer and Miss Lonelyhearts is an odd book. The main character, a male newspaper writer who has been assigned the “Miss Lonelyhearts” column, becomes overwhelmed by the letters seeking his advice and help. The protagonist is so absorbed by his job that he has actually becomes Miss Lonelyhearts — that’s how West refers to him; the protagonist’s real name is never mentioned.

The book also has deep, dark, religious and moral overtones and implications. Miss Lonelyhearts develops a Christ complex. He thinks that it is up to him to somehow save all of the people who write to him, yet he realizes he is inept and powerless to do so. And when he does try to embrace his role and deliver absolution to the poor schleps he encounters, it doesn’t end well.

__________

It’s been a good summer. I ended up reading 15 books. I haven’t read that many in one summer in a long time, and I definitely enjoyed the experience.

What’s disappointing, though, is that I didn’t do as much writing over the summer as I would have liked. I’m very close to finishing the first draft, and I know that once I can get over that hump, then I get into what is for me the more enjoyable part of the writing process: revising! I’d like to think that I’ll continue to write once the new school year starts, but it’s such a busy time that I know it will be challenging.

Flickr: Claudio

The latest book I read is called Parrot in the Oven and it’s by Victor Martinez. It’s intended for YA audiences.

It’s a very well written book. Compared to the two other YA books I read this summer, Bully and Ragged Dick, Parrot in the Oven is easily the best of the three. Martinez is most impressive when he uses his highly imaginative similes — and he has a lot of them in this book. Here’s a sampling:

“My fingers were as rubbery as old carrots”

“The girlish pitch of their voices sliced through the noise like a paper cut”

“Without work, I was empty as a Coke bottle”

They’re very impressive, and it seems like every paragraph has one. The quality of writing is the best part of the book.

But it’s also a confusing book because I’m not sure exactly what it is. The book isn’t quite a novel, it isn’t quite a short story collection, and it isn’t quite a memoir. Instead, it’s all three of these things at once. I suppose one source of my confusion is the blurb on the back cover, which suggests that the book is something that it isn’t. Here’s the blurb:

Fourteen-year-old Manny Hernandez wants to be more than just a penny. He wants to be a vato firme, the kind of guy people respect. But that’s not easy when your father is abusive, your brother can’t hold a job, and your mother scrubs the house as if she can wash her troubles away.

In Manny’s neighborhood, the way to get respect  is to be in a gang. But Manny’s not sure that joining a gang is the solution. Because, after all, it’s his life–and he wants to be one to decide what happens to it.

That sounds interesting, right? Well, the trouble is, that isn’t really what the book is about. Or, to be more precise, the last two chapters of the book deal with the gang subplot, but the first nine chapters of the book have nothing to do with that. At all! It’s like someone’s pulled a bait-and-switch on me.

All of the chapters (except, maybe, for the last two) feel more like short stories rather than parts of a larger, unified story. Manny may be the narrator throughout the book, but he isn’t always the main character. As often as not, one of the other characters takes on the role of the protagonist. The book keeps changing from chapter to chapter, and that left me confused. Just as I was starting to enjoy a story, Martinez changes direction and starts a new story.

Maybe I shouldn’t be expecting unity at all, or maybe Martinez is one of those writers who, after cutting their teeth on short stories, try to write a novel — but just end up writing more short stories.

Flickr: darkmatter

Another one of my books on my summer reading list was Strange Future by Joshua Smith. It’s another science fiction novel (this is my summer of sci-fi, apparently).

It’s sort of a time travel story. The protagonist, Thomas, and two other characters from the early 21st century are cryogenically frozen and wake up 200 years in the future. They struggle to overcome their culture shock and fit in to the brave new world. It’s said that science fiction is always less about the future and more about the present. That’s true here. Smith uses the journey to the future to satirize and critique our contemporary culture.

Although Smith’s novel has little in common with anything I’m writing, I still felt like I was looking into a mirror as I was reading.

Joshua Smith self-published Strange Future. I didn’t want to mention this fact because I know that self-publishing still has a bad reputation, and calling attention to that detail can be the kiss of death for a new self-published author. It doesn’t matter that there are more and more good, quality authors self-publishing good, quality books and stories; “self-publishing” is still haunted by the idea that it is the last refuge of the failed writer. Readers expect to open a self-published novel and find sentences riddled with typos and grammatical errors.

You don’t find those kinds of surface errors in Strange Future. Smith did a very good job proofreading his book. His words are spelled correctly; he understands how to punctuate sentences; his subjects agree with his verbs. Kudos to him!

But . . . (you knew a “but” was coming, didn’t you?) as I read Smith’s novel, I saw a bigger a problem — a problem that’s not quite as obvious as a page full of misspelled words, but a problem that is just as disturbing. It’s disturbing because it was the same problem I faced years and years ago with my first edition of Leah. The problem is that while Strange Future is proofread very well, it does not seem to have been revised.

Some examples:

In one chapter, Thomas and his friends eat lunch at an Indian restaurant in London. Smith does a good job of describing the restaurant, the waiter, the food, and how much the characters enjoy their meal. But nothing happens. The chapter could have been cut from the novel completely and nothing would have been lost. Too many scenes are like this. I feel like half the novel could have been deleted and the story wouldn’t be any different.

Another example: Smith does a pretty good job with dialogue — he gives his characters distinct personalities, and those personalities are reflected in their voices — but he also tends to let conversations run much too long. He allows them to talk about mundane things, like excusing themselves to use the bathroom, or planning a day’s shopping excursion in great (and needless) detail. Instead of sending the characters to the new setting and letting the story pick up from there, I have to sit and read about their odyssey to get out the front door (“Are you ready to go?” “Yes, are you ready?” “Yes, I’m ready. Is she ready?” “I don’t know. Let me ask. Are you ready, too.” “Yeah, I’m ready.” Etc.). The dialogue could have been so much better if it had been tighter.

Back in 2008, when I began revising Leah, I found hundreds and hundreds of sentences in my story that, although they were grammatically correct, they weren’t crafted as well as they could have been. I saw the same problem with Strange Future. Too many of his sentences just didn’t sound right — they didn’t sound finished. I eventually had to spend months rewriting and rewriting, trying to fix as much of those awful sentences as I could. Along the way, I gained an appreciation for the art of revising, and in fact I now believe that the revising stage is the most important stage of the writing process — more important than the first draft, more important than proofreading. It’s too bad that Smith hasn’t learned this lesson yet. Six more months of revising could have made a huge difference in his story.

This lack of revising is a problem I see too often from self-published writers. They spend a lot of time planning and drafting. They take care to proofread and edit, but they spend almost no time revising. Maybe they read through their story two or three times and made some changes, but because the revising stage is such hard work, and they’re anxious to be done with the project and get it published, they don’t spend as much time revising as they should.

I hope Smith revisits his story and revises it. That’s the great thing about self-publishing: a book never has to be “finished.” You can return to it, again and again, and keep improving it.

you’re like every happy song
that makes me laugh and sing
you silence all those ugly songs
i was before I was with you

you’re like that girl in the mirror
i can’t quite remember her name
she used to look so sad and lonely
but now she looks like someone else

you’re like this poem that i wrote
it may not rhyme or sound too nice
but still i wrote it just for you
and its words they speak for me

Flickr: kentclark333

Horatio Alger is one of those authors whose name everyone knows, but nowadays, no one reads. 125 years ago, though, he was the J.K. Rowling of his era. He wrote scores of novels for children and sold millions of copies of them. Unfortunately, all those novels were so formulaic in terms of plot and protagonist, that his name has become a cliche, synonymous with the rags-to-riches tale.

Until this summer, I had never read his work, but lately I’ve wanted to. I have in mind a future writing project which I describe as a sort of twisted, modern day take on the “Horatio Alger” story. I figure that if I’m going to use Alger as a model to mock that I ought to at least read one of his books.

So the other day, at a used book store, I found a 40-year-old paperback that contains two of Alger’s novels. The story I read is called Ragged Dick (an unfortunate title). It’s the story of a shoeshine boy in New York named Richard Hunter (even more unfortunate) who strives to better himself and his station in life.

One thing that became clear to me as I read was that Alger must not have spent a lot of time revising his novels. Indeed, since he probably wrote at least two or three titles a year, he might not have done any revising at all. Ragged Dick isn’t necessarily poorly written, but there were a lot of things that could have been revised or even cut. Take this, for example:

Micky himself had served two terms there; but confinement appeared to have had very little effect in amending his conduct, except, perhaps, in making him a little more cautious about an encounter with the ‘copps,’ as the members of the city police, are, for some unknown reason, styled among the Five-Point boys.

“For some unknown reason“? The etymology of “copp,” or “cop” as we say today, isn’t that mysterious, and a little bit of research could have given Alger the answer. And if he really couldn’t track it down, he should at least have omitted that phrase which doesn’t do him any credit at all as an author.

So there were lots of little things like that in the novel, but there were some good points too. Ragged Dick is a bit of a prankster and a wit, despite his young age, and he’s always ready with a pun. When Dick’s friend begins to teach Dick how to read, we get this silly exchange:

“The exercises generally commence with ringin’ the bell,” said Dick; “but as I ain’t got none, we’ll have to do without.”

“And the teacher is generally provided with a rod,” said Fosdick. “Isn’t there a poker handy, that I can use in case my scholar doesn’t behave well?”

“Tain’t lawful to use fire-arms,” said Dick.

Besides the rough quality of his writing, Alger gets trashed for offering a simplistic view of the world, but Alger was writing for children so I think he can be forgiven. Is it possible to realize your dreams through hard work, education, honesty, thrift, compassion, and a little luck? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But if Alger inspired a generation of boys to go to school, work hard, and save their money, then how can anyone find fault with that?

One thing that I enjoyed about the novel were the glimpses of life in mid-19th century New York. Alger records how much a modest apartment costs, how much a breakfast costs, how much a ferry ride costs. He also offers a short portrait of Central Park which is “under construction” at the time the story is set. Dick and his friend Frank speculate on how nice the park will look when it’s completed. Even if you don’t accept the novel as literature, it’s still a nice glimpse into American history.

Flickr: brentdanley

I take pride in finding just the right pictures to accompany my blog posts. I think they look nice, and apparently, so do other bloggers. I discovered yesterday that another blog has been linking to a few of my pictures in order to add those pictures to her blog.

I don’t own the pictures that I use in my blog, so I’m not upset about the linking. But I thought it might be worth a post to explain where I get my pictures and how I use them.

As you might have noticed from the caption beneath the pictures I use, most of them come from Flickr. However, when I search for a picture, I don’t use Flickr’s search engine. Instead, I visit a website called Compfight. Compfight is a search engine that finds pictures on Flickr — but not just any pictures. It searches for pictures that are licensed through Creative Commons. A Creative Commons license is different from a normal copyright license in that it is a bit more flexible. A CC license allows others to use creative works so long as a set of standards are met. Usually, you must attribute the work to the creator, you may not sell the work without the creator’s permission, and you have to allow other people to borrow it too.

The captions beneath every photo is my way of handling the attribution requirement. The caption simply and succinctly lets the reader know the website where the photo came from (Flickr) and the Flickr user who created the photo (in this case, it’s user “brentdanley”). I don’t make any money from this blog, so the photos aren’t for a direct commercial use. If I wanted to use brentdanley’s photo for the cover of Juvenilia, let’s say, then I would attempt to contact him and negotiate the picture’s use. Finally, the “share alike” requirement of the CC license is covered by my not claiming ownership over the work. I don’t mind bloggers linking to the CC photos that I use, but I just wish they would give the correct attribution.

I decided to try it. First, I pasted the opening chapter of Leah. I clicked “Analyze” and immediately I got my report:

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Yay!

But then I thought, Wait a minute, I don’t write like James Joyce! Even I’m not that delusional. So I decided to try another chunk of text. This time, I pasted the first chapter of The Spring and again clicked “Analyze.” I write like Dan Brown. Nooooooooo!!!

So I tried again, I took the last chapter of The Spring, which is written in a very different voice than the rest of the novel. Click “Analyze.” Now I’m writing like Stephen King!

WTF?

So yeah, I’m not putting a lot of stock in this website, not when it’s giving me so many random responses. There was a news article about the site, which reported some famous authors trying the site and getting weird results too. Apparently, Margaret Atwood tried it and discovered she also writes like Stephen King. What’s funny is that “Margaret Atwood” is one of the possible results of the analysis. So even Margaret Atwood doesn’t write like Margaret Atwood!

Back in high school, I picked up their Loveless album when it was first released. History has since determined that album to be a classic, which means I can claim to have owned their album before most people had ever heard of them (that and 75 cents will get me a candy bar, I suppose). The way the band was ignored by corporate-media-controlled MTV back in 1991 pretty much illustrates my animosity towards all things corporate, especially in the entertainment sphere. The first single, “Only Shallow,” was played once, maybe twice, on MTV (at a few minutes past midnight) and then dropped from the video playlist (this was back when MTV actually aired music videos). Thankfully, the legacy of a band isn’t entirely at the mercy of the corporate taste-makers. Nowadays, of course, one can watch the video all one wants, thanks to the miracle of YouTube. Enjoy:

When we play that old game, “What might have been?” we might imagine an alternative history in which the 1990s were dominated by a My Bloody Valentine vs. Nirvana decade-long battle of the bands, like the Beatles and the Stones in the 60s. Instead, both bands fell silent in the early 1990s, for two different, yet very stupid, reasons. Kevin Shields’ neurotic obsession with musical perfection has prevented a follow-up to 1991′s Loveless from every seeing the light of day. There’s been talk of a new MBV album coming soon, but those rumors have been going around for almost 20 years (has it really been that long?).  The only glimpse of hope was a few reunion gigs a couple years ago, but even at those shows, no new songs were played, just the old favorites, for example:

I think there’s a lesson in Shields’ obsession with perfection. Perfection is something that ought to be aspired to in all forms of art, but because artists are human beings, prone to make mistakes, that perfection can never be achieved. Sometimes, in fact, it’s the mistakes in a work of art that can make it more endearing. Shields was/is a brilliant musician, and his fans will embrace whatever music My Bloody Valentine releases, flaws and all.