ANOTHER NEW YEAR

z--- I realize that the vast majority of Americans do not live in Manhattan so… (you can skip to fragment U… but)

y--- Anna was talking about David Bowie’s  Berlin Trilogy and not having Station to Station my first impulse was to check Amazon and of course it is there but then I remembered J&R downtown on Park Row which must be one of the very last cd/dvd stores in the country  with a huge selection of all types of music from classical via country to gospel to… and so a subway ride away I was able to go down town and get the CD.  A pleasant smile from the girl at the checkout also looked into the classical selection to see if any new CDs from ECM and then to the basement where I always look through the westerns hoping for one I have never heard of but need to watch… 

x-- I came back  via The Strand where I found the bound galley ($2.00) for David Slavitt’s translations of Petrarch which Harvard is publishing in February. 

w-- The Strand was stuffed with tourists on the main floor mostly looking at displays of new books that are surrounded by  large areas displaying candy, cooking gadgets, t-shirts, shoulder bags, strange spur of the moment purchases… but very few looking at the  secondhand books further back in the store.  One notices that lit criticism has been moved to the basement.  The Strand is now a destination store.  A little like Macy’s for the literate or those who still like to think of themselves as booklovers or who have friends who are booklovers

 v--- I also looked into St Marks Bookshop whose fate is still precarious.  There had been protests and a rent reduction was given to them by their landlord but and more books have been faced out and there are  fewer and fewer individual titles… unless someone gives them a very large chunk of cash so that they can again purchase books directly from publishers their fate is most likely sadly evident…when one starts to see the 20% off everything…and then that number begins to change… one takes no pleasure in this and tonight (3 January 2012) Patti Smith is reading there and there will be many people in attendance and they will all feel good about being there but the store like Patti Smith herself is from another time.  UPDATE, I later walked by the shop and saw that she did have indeed a packed house, complete with people standing around outside the shop hoping for whatever it is when people come to see a celebrity.  Now if rock millionaires like Smith and superrich leftist film makers like Michael Moore, who read recently at the shop, really wanted to put their money where their mouths are always going, they would help a place like St. Marks by arranging credit for the store… but hey…  that is not very likely:  for Smith it has been a long and steady downhill slide from her first so-called hit “Piss Factory.”

u-- The December 25, 2011 New York Times Book Review SHOULD BE PRESERVED.  It is probably the 32 page impending death notice for what we have known as the world of books and bookstores like St. Marks.

Pages  2 and 3--- from The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group:  JUST UNWRAPPED A NEW E-READER?  TIME TO UNWIND WITH A GREAT BOOK.   20 intellectual properties are illustrated and plus one illustrated inside an e-reader.  There is one of those curious designs:  Scan here to read more… 

Page 4 DOWN load a bestseller for your new eReader today!  From Simon and Schuster…

Page 25 Amazon takes a whole page to advertize its Kindle fire

Page 27another full page from Random House advertizing Download ebooks for every reader is your family.

And Page 7 from Zagat which used to publish books of restaurant rating and toilets around the world is now in the wine business :  BEST CELLAR LIST  Enjoy 15 Outstanding Reds Worth $219.99—Jut $69.99

There was another full page ad from Xlibris of 15 titles available in hardcover, paper and electronic form.  None of these books will be reviewed in the New York Times or in any of the few remaining book sections being published in major American newspapers but their individual authors have paid good money to be able to say that their book was published and advertized in The New York Times.  It is unlikey that any of these books will be available from any public library.  Their authors will have received a few copies of the book.  They will give them to close family members and hope and hope

t--Even Anna received a Kindle for Christmas and promptly downloaded a Norwegian mystery by a woman and the how:  she wanted to see the process and what determined the purchase: a mystery, cheapness, Norway, a woman…  she quickly read the e-book and then moved on to a book by a popular Brooklyn writer whose name I won’t mention as he is not worthy of being mentioned… but I think of Anna is the same way that James Joyce thought of Nora… but Anna will one of these days publish a book that will come as a great surprise…

S-- I was talking with Jeremy Davies, an editor at Dalkey Archive (which publishes my own books) about the difference between the sort of books that work on e-readers and those that work best on paper.    I had discovered this by being unable to read the e-reader version of the bound galleys for the second volume of THE CIVIL WAR  written by those who had lived it that the Library of America is publishing.  I had read with great interest the first year and wrote about  it.  I had failed in reading and have had to ask for the actual book when it is available.  I will long think of this experience and very quickly such a description will be read with a condescending smirk by those coming quickly behind me.  I missed in the e-reader the easy of turn from selection to selection, back and forth and with equal ease going to the table of contents to see what to read next… maybe my computer literacy leaves something to be desired.  With the e-reader you can only read A PAGE AT A TIME… and there is implied in the electrification of  the text: move on, wipe your finger across the screen…

R--- But to make it a bit more complex.  A guy at Library of America sent me the e-galleys for the DAVID GOODIS volume and I started to read DARK PASSAGE as I had seen the Bogart movie version.  Boy, my index finger swiped those pages away and I found that it was really easy to read and I decided to save the remaining four novels to read for later in the month as I drive along the southern border of Arizona and New Mexico…

Q—The first person to go on with me about how much she loved her e-reader was my dental hygienist who had a long subway ride morning and evening.  She read mostly best sellers.  Those fat books , brand names really one for every season and…  she mentioned how cheap they were, how easy to carry and you don’t have to figure out what to do with the book after you ave read it…

P- books to most people have become things, those things you want to get rid of…

O--  the guys at Dalkey say that for the most part their readers are not wanting to read the books on e-readers but gradually the books will all be on e-readers…

N---I suspect that eventually there will eventually be books that will remain books and one can safely say the majority of books on   the lists at Dalkey Archive, at New Directions, at Pushkin Press, at Archipelago, at Library of America will remain as books.  The people who read “best sellers”, genre books… as in  a customer walks into a shop and says give me three new mystery books or sci-fi books or crossword puzzle books… the e-reader will be for them…

M—Jeremy mentioned that one of the problems  no very good writer has written a book designed to be read on an e-reader…  maybe that is coming and I have already seen what can be done with T.S Eliot’s THE WASTE LAND…  the app made for my iPad makes really available this poem as it always was the one essential poem of the Twentieth Century and is now the first fully realized poem for the 21^st Century… combining the orginal text which can be read by itself or it can be read silently while listening to two readings by Eliot himself  or then by a professional actor or then by a modern poet or then read and viewed while listening to a staged reading with a woman reading the poem and then there is the edited version by Ezra Pound and then there are complete notes as well as filmed commentaries by the likes of Seamus Heaney… if this was a print book it is the sort of book sentenced to the basement of the Strand…   

L ---Eventually my own books will make the transition but for now they are only in paper.  But if given the chance I think I would like to add to GOING TO PATCHOGUE… and the same would go for THE CORPSE DREAM OF N. PETKOV

k---One of the problems is that the texts available for e-readers are still predicated upon our memory of the printed page...  they do not take advantage of the actual capabilities of the e-reader and this was apparent with an e-galley Dalkey sent me of MATHEMATIQUE: by Jacques Roubaud that expects the reader to move back and forth through different sections of the book.  This is something easily done with the printed book but would only be possible if they programmed the text to respond to a command mimicking that movement… but if in my primitive understanding can state this I am sure we will be seeing at first junk books that will easily be capable of doing this but that is some time away… Farrar Straus published a novel , LUMINOUS AIRPLANES, by Paul LaFarge with a notice on the last page that the reader could go to a website where the novel would be continued…  but it seemed not…  and the same happened when I was reading  WAR & WAR by Laszlo Krasznahorkai. A web address was given and it seems that the site has been turned off due to lack of payment…

LAST WORD for now:  I am reading SATANTANGO by Laszlo Krasznahorkai.  I am continuing to read PARALLEL LIVES by Peter Nadas.  I am reading The AVIGNON QUINTET by Laurence Durrell.  But I am thinking it is time to re-read Gottfried Benn…