Ha. This amuses me.
“Next I blew my entire Amazon gift card balance on — and this is the delicious part — a Kobo Touch eReader. That’s right. Amazon doesn’t handle these directly, of course, but you can spend gift card balances with Amazon merchants, which is how I was able to buy the Kobo. It should arrive in a week and then, as a reader at least, I’ll be Amazon-free.” — Now that my book has been delisted — thanks to a contractual dispute between Amazon and IPG — I’m kicking the Amazon habit.
“I don’t want to make any heated edicts or promises I can’t keep, but Amazon seems bent on forcing me to reconsider my agnosticism. I note all this, despite the fact that it exposes me as less than ideaologically pure, because I want to warn Amazon how they are alienating content producers — even friendly ones — bit by bit.” — Wherein I get caught in the Amazon fray and am forced to reconsider my agnosticism.
I just finished writing a three-part series about social TV for Fast Company’s new Co.Create site. Here are the three parts:
Sam Spade, The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan. (Suggested by http://exygoddess.tumblr.com )
Brian is feeding descriptions of literary characters into a police-sketch-generator and tumbling the results. This is Sam Spade.
A bunch of stuff going on this week:
A sneak peek at The New Inquiry’s beautiful new digital magazine! Keep your eye out as their re-design and subscription site goes live next week…
As a fan of TNI, I’m looking forward to this.
(via emk-irl)
“If I were to a) believe in a meta-narrative that predicts the inevitable setting of America’s sun beyond the watery horizon of late-capitalist decadence, and b) set out to invent a cultural phenomenon that perfectly exemplified this setting, then c) I’m sure I could do no better than the bucket list. (#72. Write impossibly convoluted lede. CHECK.)” — Today’s column: Against Bucket Lists.
Just a note that I’ll be reading February 8 at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, along with Joyland founders Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis. You might have read Laura Miller’s Salon piece about buying e-books from indie bookstores and this event will be all about that. In fact, if you buy a Joyland e-book from WORD—like, say, mine—you get a free copy of Joyland’s new print anthology, Joyland Retro, at the event. Reverse showrooming/born digital reverse engineering for the win!
You got an e-reader for Christmas? I’ve just got this not-so-subtle hint.
“Although they’re very funny, I can’t stand to watch episodes of The Bob Newhart Show, for example. (The one in Chicago, not Vermont.) Something about the epaulets and the wide collars makes me feel vaguely hopeless — knowing that no matter how we feel now we’re going to look ridiculous in forty years.”
In today’s column, year-end lists and existential crisis.
Nice. Why They Cried gets an honorable mention on this list of favorite book covers of 2011. Not bad for an ebook. All credit to David A. Gee, who designed it.
“I’d been enjoying this great story. It had dozens of compelling characters and exhibited an incredible attention to detail. It was a commentary on society with leitmotifs of greed, desperation, and hope. I took in a few chapters at a time, put it down, then picked it back up later. I was near the end and I was kind of bummed about it. The story was so good, I didn’t want it to end.” — In today’s column: TV shows based on novels might be trending, as Laura Miller suggests, but can the novel really compete with the second golden age of television?
“The original name of the island whereupon the squadron of Communipaw was thus propitiously thrown is a matter of some dispute, and has already undergone considerable vitiation — a melancholy proof of the instability of all sublunary things, and the vanity of all our hopes of lasting fame; for who can expect his name will live to posterity, when even the names of mighty islands are this soon lost in contradiction and uncertainty!” — Washington Irving, A History of New York
Here’s my Storyville short “@M1racleM0m,” stitched together in Storify.