Small world

Mary and I exchanged Christmas presents yesterday. Actually, we both kept the one we had bought for the other. We gifted each other (why not make another new verb? It’s all the thing to do) a pair of Kindles, and when we opened them, we found we had to register them if they came as a gift, but they were already registered to the gifter, not the giftee, so we said, well hell, let’s just keep our own.

Not very Christmasy (also written “Christmas-y”),but each year I try to move a little further away from any recognition of Christmas as a special day. Part of this has to do with not being a Christian and resenting this imposed holiday, part is a rejection of the commercialization of Christmas. Part is protecting myself from the melancholy of not being eight-years-old anymore.

But hell, I still want some presents.

I’m very enthused about the Kindle and have wanted one since I read a little about the new features, which include a dictionary that allows instant access to definitions as you read. “Bumptious” is now in my active vocabulary, and pretty soon I’ll be sounding like George Will or the recently departed William F. Buckley even. Also, by searching for a name in the current document, you can almost instantly generate an in-order list of all the references to a single character, which should come in handy when I’m reading mysteries because usually when the bad guy comes back on the stage in the last pages and has our hero at gunpoint in an isolated warehouse, I can’t remember who this bad guy is. Of course, it’s almost always a minor character from page forty-three whom I’ve completely forgotten. So now, I can search and go back to page forty-three and remind myself that he was the doorman that the crime boss whispered to as he was entering the banquet surrounded by bodyguards.

Ah ha!

I’ve already downloaded a couple of books, plus the New Yorker, which is not available here in my little town, and today’s Washington Post just to see what the Kindle version looks like.

This is a very practical tool for us as we prepare to head out on our winter travels to the Southwest:

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?

Damn straight we do, and our Arctic Fox travel trailer and Dodge ¾ ton pickup with the Cummins diesel, and now two Kindles so we’ll have very expanded access to books, newspapers,and magazines as we travel mostly in the backcountry of parks and national monuments. We’ll have cell phone reception much of the time, which allows Kindle shopping and downloads, but few bookstores or WI-FI, where we can get the news online.

So I’m feeling pretty good about my new gadget and our trip coming up when I’m watching Colbert last night, and his guest is author Sherman Alexie. I’ve heard of him. Turns out he’s a Native American from the Spokane area, growing up there about the time Mary and I lived there in the late 70s. Also, the film Smoke Signals, which I’ve admired here in earlier posts, is based on one of his short stories, and he wrote the screen play. Small world, I’m thinking.

I’m pretty interested in the guy by now and ready to cue him up on my Kindle, but it turns out the whole interview is about how much he hates Kindle and how it’s destroying the relationship between authors and their readers, not to mention the independent bookstores (I’ve got some bad news here for Sherman, Kindle or not), and in fact finally destroying the printed word itself. Pretty soon, there won’t be anything left but downloads, which will offer a hugely reduced number of titles mostly falling within the bestseller category.

Again, have I got news, but still.

So Sherman won’t allow his books to be digitized, doesn’t want them getting all digit-y, and I had to go to Amazon and order the hardcopies, and I’m not sure I see such a big difference between which Amazon department I order from.

Actually, I share all these concerns but I don’t think there’s anything we can do to change much. Better maybe to try to find a way to ride the wave. Technology is now a force of nature as powerful as climate change and about as immediate as a massive meteor strike. Goodbye to the daily newspaper, the network news team, and now the local bookstore. I will miss them all if I live long enough, but actually, I think I’m about the perfect age to have enjoyed the best of everything life and human progress have had to offer, and I mostly won’t be around when the bills come due.

Meanwhile, I downloaded Anna Karenina for free to my Kindle. (It’s public domain now, so I might finally get around to reading it. Sorry, Leo.) And I have four more new books on there, plus a couple of magazines.

I’m really killing the publishing industry.