This is more about the new Kindle Fire than the iPad, but it's a decent review and brings up a few points of interest I hadn't previously considered.
Amazon has fired a shot at Apple’s with two new Kindle products: the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. This first-look review pits what we know of both Kindle products against Apple’s current iPad offering, along with how they will fare against a cheaper, smaller, iPad mini that Apple is rumoured to be announcing in October.
There's just nothing to write about? Really?
How about taking a look at today's newspaper. For example, in mine today, three stories virtually leaped off the page.
image via iwasbornveryyoung.com
The first two approaches I can think of to meld these "torn from the pages" stories into one of your own would be:
Real life often seems stranger, more evocative, than anything you might have the nerve to invent. So why not begin there? Why not let real life parade its strangeness before you and tempt you into its story?
image via youwantedproof.blogspot.com
See Bob's Web Site here.
The missus surprised me this week with an offer to treat me to an Asheville Tourists game, versus the Charleston Riverdogs, and so off we went tonight, primed for pulled pork sandwiches, steak fries and a tall drink. Oh, and maybe some decent baseball - which doesn't always happen at the high "A" minor league level. But tonight brought another surprise.
image via rockiesanalyst.com
A tall, lanky pitcher, Ben Alsup, recently of LSU (yes, they play something other than football down there) pitched a gem of a game - nine complete innings and only one seventh-inning broken bat single short of a no hitter. What kind of a pitcher is he? Think Tom Glavine or Greg Maddux - - pinpoint pitches (until he tired in the eighth) that led to ground balls and virtually no strikeouts or fly balls. His speeds varied from the high 60s to the low 90s.
image via espn.go.com
But that sort of pitching performance often goes unrewarded - not so tonight. Jordan Ribera, a stocky, cocky 24 year- old from Fresno, California, knocked the hide off the ball and accounted for six of the Tourists' seven runs.
I see both in triple-A ball next year, and the Colorado Rockies the following year. Unless one or both become notorious head cases. But, gee, I hope not. I wanna say I saw them when.
See Bob's Web Site here.
The Girl In the Glass, by Jeffrey Ford
image via clarkesworldbooks.com
Sandra M., who had become interested in a genre novel of mine, began singing the praises of Ford’s novels, and mostly out of politeness, I decided to download this novel of his in e-book form and give it a read. I’m glad I did.
There’s nothing literarily splendid about Ford’s prose, but then I doubt such was intended. Instead, Ford is a spellbinding story teller. His prose, while somewhat generic, flows like molten butter, and you can’t help but turn page after page. There's a wink and a nod to postmodern sensibilities, however, because the principal characters, protagonists and antagonists, have multiple identities.
The main three, Diego, Henry, and Thomas are con men, you see, thriving on that fin de siecle preoccupation of the wealthy: spiritualism. Following a seance, Thomas seems to have seen a girl’s image in a window, and five days later the same girl was reported dead. Our three cons decide to investigate the death - gratis. As you might suspect, the story takes all sorts of turns, but the most surprising element is Ford’s take on the U.S.'s Eugenics movement, which traveled to Germany, preceding Hitler’s persecution of minorities and World War II. The author is hardly ham-handed in bringing this disgraceful element of U.S. history to the fore; instead, it’s worked seamlessly into the plot and characterizations.
And as you might expect, the characters, while engaging, are given short shrift until story’s end. If I were to wish for a single embellishment to the book, it would be to present this end-of-story dwelling on character much earlier, perhaps at the beginning.
This is a fun read, but it informs as easily as it entertains. Ford has clearly mastered his genre.
My rating: 17 of 20 stars
After Friday Night Lights, by Buzz Bissinger
image via hollywoodreporter.com
On a hot afternoon visit to Starbuck’s for a Frappuccino, I picked up one of their Apple gimmes, this time for a free e-book – Bissinger’s.
First: this sort of freebie is a good marketing tool; I picked it up because it’s a book and was free. After reading it, I’ll no doubt read Friday Night Lights, Bissinger’s most famous work, the source of a movie and a TV series. For those in the dark regarding Texas high school football and/or completely indifferent, FNL was something of an expose on the inordinate emphasis football has in the lives of Texans. Consequently it made Bissinger, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, persona non grata for many Texans.
A central part of the story of FNL was a supremely talented black player, Boobie Miles. At one point during Miles’ high school career, he blew out a knee, was discouraged from surgery, and was replaced on the team by another player. Consequently, Boobie’s gridiron dreams fell to ashes. The aftermath of this personal bring-down is Bissinger’s story in After Friday Night Lights.
Written some quarter century after the original, Bissinger resumes an acquaintance with Miles, Miles' post-football life a matrix of problems. Bissinger bails out Boobie where possible, but the ex-football phenom makes life difficult for all around him, including Bissinger.
Bissinger’s writing here is tough, unsparing, yet sympathetic. You get a strong sense of his empathy for Boobie, yet his frustration with him. The e-book is short – hardly more than an overlong short story, but it’s as compelling a piece of journalism as you’ll read.
I’d check it out – even if you have to pay for it – the writing and the story are both worth it.
My rating: 18 of 20 stars
image via fotosearch.com
I'm almost finished writing an historical novel that takes place roughly in the year 1000 AD. During my research, I turned up stories of people (okay, most were superstitious, un-read, unwashed, and unsophisticated, even by our neo-superstitious standards) selling all they had, rending their clothes, and piling into churches for mass on the last eve of 999. What the stories fail to tell me is how these people felt and reacted when, after another day or two, the sun still came up in the east, the birds still sang, and hungry stomachs still growled. Probably a collective "Whew!" and back to the wheat fields and sheep-tending.
Today, street preachers rave about Judgment Day, New Agers stubbornly cling to ideas of an apocalypse (the world as we know it ends in 2012, or haven't you heard? Just ask any Mayan you know about their calendar), even after Y2K failed to produce a computer armageddon and a 2008 world-wide economic meltdown, courtesy of greedy bankers (well, greed all around) and two bankrupting wars that have gone absolutely nowhere, we're still here.
As I peruse books and book reviews I keep coming across a new sub-genre (I'm not sure if it should be called fantasy or not) referred to as post-armageddon. Boy, this is stubbornness in spades.
image via girlsguidetotheapocalypse.blogspot.com
Writers follow trends - some beginning in the real world - but most are following the trends of writers like Cormac McCarthy (read his The Road?) and Stephen King (check out his The Stand). There are others, perhaps less well known, that you can scroll through here.
The sensibility of those novels - at least the ones I've read - is that we were born to screw up, that the earth is a problematic place, anyway. But marbled into these fatalistic tropes is another view of humanity - its persevering spirit, that something good within us prevails at the end of the day. This is our paradox, the paradox of our stories, over and over again, throughout centuries. One inescapable fact looms, since life imitates art, and vice versa: if we're going to have an apocalype, it'll be because we choose to.
Earth is really a pretty cool place. Did I mention the birds tweeting? Rain on the roof? A fun day at the beach? That delectable toast and coffee for breakfast?
I want this manic-depressive sensibility of ours to go away. Really. I do. But then, what would there be to write about?
See Bob's web site here.
image via 9-1-1magazine.com
This post has little to do with my usual blog topics; instead it piggy-backs on a post my good friend and fellow writer David Frauenfelder wrote for his blog, Breakfast With Pandora, two days ago concerning the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado. You can find more about Dave and this post here.
This post of Dave's is so rich in meaning and understanding (something we need truckloads of these days) that I couldn't help but talk it over as we waited for the rain clouds to lift from over the Durham Bulls this weekend (they didn't), and I promised this hopefully complementary post.
After the anger passes at the person who perpetrated this crime (a person I refuse to name), we're going to sit down and wonder what brought about this horrible event.
Toward that end, I largely agree with Dave, and with Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle, who both write that we as a society have all but lost what LaSalle calls the Female Principle, i.e., the ability to internalize experience and to summon values from it. When we simply react to events, this isn't the positive catharsis that comes from internalization (the inward search for meaning and understanding) that allows us not only to move on but to correct those things in the society, so that we can move on. Not just stick our heads in the sand.
It should be clear by now that we have something of a national neurosis, a mental affliction, that can and occasionally does erupt in a single person. What can we say, then, about both such a person and the national psyche?
First, it seems to be part of the human condition that one group of "heroes," if we stick to Frauenfelder's topic of myth, has always been there for us to perhaps commit acts of violence so that the rest of us can live in peace and serenity. As police do. As soldiers do. As Firemen do. As Cory Booker recently did in New Jersey (look it up).
But we've "democratized" violence to the point that it pervades the world stage, leaving none of us untouched. If you don't believe this, think about the computer games, the fascination with weapons, the urge to act violently to everything in our society, even toward others driving on our highways. And such violence is present even in speech- political and artistic - even in conversations on Facebook.
So if some insecure and misguided soul wants to be noticed? He/she can be damned sure that an act of unspeakable violence will do what donations to the poor, helping a fallen elderly person, or sacrificing a given person's wants to the needs of children and family, won't do to get him/her noticed these days.
The second thing is built on the first, really. Our mythic heroes in story and on stage these days must react with commensurate violence, or we'll say this "hero" isn't one at all, but a milquetoast wimp. Think about that, what that says about the rest of us!
And this is a fairly recent position to put our violence-stemming heroes in. To take a pop-culture example (the most obvious example to make here, I suspect), think back to the 1950s and 60s and Andy Griffith. This may seem an asinine comparison, but it's really not. We were all more accommodating and understanding back then (at least superficially), less addicted to the showmanship of violence, which meant Andy could stanch whatever upset his town underwent with a cagey move, a few wise words, or a very gentle, non-violent threat.
This is not to say that we should relish that era, when so many things in the national psyche were repressed or ignored, because we won't - and shouldn't - go back that way again. But we do need to bring a whole lot more civility to the social arena, realize that understanding and accommodation, even in these tumultuous times of ours, are the only things that can make our society easier to live within.
One more thing:
Dave Frauenfelder is a talented writer and reviewer. Seek out his stuff, and urge him to publish that trove of work he's sitting on.
image via dcmcmillen.com
A nice birthday present (a day early) - I've just received notice that the manuscript for my collection of connected short stories, now entitled "Sam's Place," has been edited by the publisher, the cover art is all but done and agreed to, and we're now working on the cover copy.
image via metroparent.com
Tarbaby families, that's what I call it, that's the thing we despise most in life, if we take the time to think about it. They won't let you go, won't let you be who you are, and even when you're older and maybe a little more removed, you still can't let it go. I know one Southern Baptist man who married a Catholic woman and couldn't face converting to her religion until both his parents died.
You can probably ignore the gold rings your kids put through lip and lobe, a stud in the tongue, maybe even have a laugh at their expense, say it's a phase, fashion, it'll pass. And ever wonder at the long vines of tats growing on their arms and legs? It's semaphore, telling you they're imprisoned, read the ink, mom, dad. I gotta go. Escape. Somehow. Let me go.
So let 'em.
Now, if you're one of the allegedly lucky ones who think you've untangled the Gordian knot of family, you have something to write about. With writing you can force it - every bit of it - to make sense, even if it really doesn't.
Just don't make it worse by crying on your keyboard.
Visit Bob's web site here
I'm a writer, a compulsive reader, and whatever else I have time for.
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