Indy and Harry
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We're heavily into many things at our house, as is the case with many
houses. So here are the fruits of many hours spent with Harry Potter and
Indiana Jone...
9 years ago
Many defenders of bookstores countered that by focusing on dollars and cents, I’d missed the whole point of these establishments. Bookstores, it turns out, don’t primarily exist to sell books—instead, they’re more like bars for readers. “Bookstores provide a space to meet friends, cruise for a date, and hide out when you have nothing to do on a Saturday night,” Will Doig wrote at Salon. I suspect that many bookstore lovers agree with Doig, which is exactly why many of these shops are going out of business. Bars can survive because alcohol is an extremely profitable good. Books aren’t—so if you think of your favorite bookstore as a comfortable spot to find well-read potential mates rather than as a place for commerce, you’re not helping its owner.His solution? Brick-and-mortar stores need to embrace smartphone technology (he apparently forgets that while smartphones are ubiquitous, not everyone has one. I don’t; I’m not willing to shell out the cash for a monthly data plan, let alone the cell phone plan the damn things come shackled with). He suggests bookstores create their own apps to help their customers find books through recommendations or simply educate staff on Amazon’s endless pit of reviews to help customers find books they might like to read.
Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. A physical store—whether it’s your favorite indie or the humongous Barnes & Noble at the mall—offers a relatively paltry selection, no customer reviews, no reliable way to find what you’re looking for, and a dubious recommendations engine. Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?He adds:
What rankles me, though, is the hectoring attitude of bookstore cultists like [novelist Richard] Russo, especially when they argue that readers who spurn indies are abandoning some kind of “local” literary culture. There is little that’s “local” about most local bookstores. Unlike a farmers’ market, which connects you with the people who are seasonally and sustainably tending crops within driving distance of your house, an independent bookstore’s shelves don’t have much to do with your community. Sure, every local bookstore promotes local authors, but its bread and butter is the same stuff that Amazon sells—mass-manufactured goods whose intellectual property was produced by one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan. It doesn’t make a difference whether you buy Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs at City Lights, Powell’s, Politics & Prose, or Amazon—it’s the same book everywhere.I don’t buy a book because it’s sold at a twee little shop around the corner, or at a discounted, mailed-to-me-free price from Amazon. I buy a book because it interests me. And I’ve grown so accustomed to sorting through the eclectic detritus of books discarded by local readers (who tend to read a lot of romance novels and Rush Limbaugh and Jan Karon and whatever the latest book was from the community-we’ll-read-a-boring-book month. Sorting through the shelves of the DI looking for a hidden treasure (I’ve got an autographed copy of Ivy Ruckman’s “Melba the Brain,” for which I paid $1; try getting it for that anywhere else) that visiting a bricks-and-mortar store or trolling Amazon just doesn’t attract me.
Urging our community members to spy on us? Paying them to do so? Isn’t it bad enough that in addition to supporting a bricks-and-mortar establishment and being active and actively contributing members of the community, we have trouble competing against Amazon because they don’t have to collect sales tax and we do? This gives them a grossly unfair 10 percent advantage off the top (a practice that we hope our legislators address). Add to this insult the injury of corporate spying and it seems our task is insurmountable.Betsy, people have comparison-price shopped before Amazon put their app out. Other stores have price-matched before Amazon came up with the idea. If I can find a book for a less expensive price at The King’s English, you bet your boots I’ll buy it from you. But you know what? I never will. Because you can’t beat the DI’s prices. Or selection, for that matter.
But here’s where community comes into play. Have our customers come into our store and clicked pictures of our inventory? No. Have strangers? No. Happily, thankfully, we haven’t seen a single person engaged in corporate espionage in The King’s English.
Why? Because of community. Because everyone understands that we all live here together, all contribute together to this city we all love. They understand that engaging in shady corporate tactics to save a buck or two in the long run hurts the place they live.
EREF is a solid project. We received our construction license from the NRC in October. We currently have approval for a conditional loan guarantee. The U.S. enrichment market is strong and is expected to grow. We have contracts in place for a significant amount of the output from this facility. In summary, we have a sound project, a proven technology, an NRC license, and off-take contracts with investment-rated customers. We are confident that capital solutions will be found in a timely manner.
What do we need to move forward? We need the $2 billion loan guarantee from DOE and solutions to reduce our near-term capital expenditures.Also is important to note that the Areva plant is oriented towards the American market, and that events in Japan (and, presumably, Germany) aren’t having in impact on Eagle Rock plans. That’s comforting.
Not much to say, except to warn you not to get too serious about all this, if you want to become a writer of fiction in the future. If you intend becoming a critic, that is a whale of another color. Still, your own opinion, finally, when you have read and re-read is what you must earch for. When I wrote the screenplay of MOBY DICK for John Huston, I asked him if he wanted me to read all the critical studies of Melville. Huston wisely cried “NO! I want YOUR creative re-creation of the Whale! To hell with the critics!!! Pretend you are Melville and write me the Whale into screenplay form!” . . . which is what I did.Also, an interesting tidbit from Ayn Rand, in response to the question “Do you consciously, intentionally plan and place aymbolism in your writing? If both yes and no, according to instances, please give an example of each. If yes, please state your method for doing so”:
Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story. . . humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels, etc., etc. Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing. . . and just as unobtrusive.
Yes – I have no method; there is no method in writing fiction; you don’t seem to understand.I kinda like that approach.
In Seoul ordinary citizens used a communication medium [Internet forums] that neither respects nor enforces silence among The People Formerly Known as the Audience, as my NYU colleague Jay Rosen likes to call us. We are used to the media’s telling us things: the people on TV tell us that the South Korean government has banned US beef because of fears of mad cow disease, or that it’s lifted the ban.With the Internet, with cell phones, and with ubiquitous user-generated content no longer controlled by the gatekeepers, Shirky says, the game has changed. He continues:
The old view of online as a separate space, cyberspace, apart from the real world, was an accident of history. Back when the online population was tiny, most of the people you knew in your daily life weren’t part of that population. Now that computers are increasingly computerlike phones have been broadly adopted, the whole notion of cyberspace is fading. Our social media tools aren’t an alternative to real life, they are part of it.What does this have to do with teaching and, more importantly, with me being a mediocre teacher?
In that same spirit, Wayne Booth in his book, The Vocation of a Teacher, asserts that regardless of whether a teacher lectures or runs discussions, the “teacher has failed if students leave the classroom assuming that the task of thinking through to the next step lies entirely with the teacher.” To this point, Booth adds three more principles that will help teachers and students avoid the Polonius role. Addressing instructors he writes,
1. You gotta get them talking to each other, not just to you or to the air.This is what I need to do more in class to encourage my students to realize that this class isn’t s separate space, but their reality, and that they are a part of it. How can I do that?
2. You gotta get them talking about the subject, not just having a bull session in which nobody really listens to anybody else. This means insisting on at least the following rule in every discussion: Whether I call on you or you speak up spontaneously, please address the previous speaker, or give a reason for changing the subject. 3. You gotta find ways to prevent yourself from relapsing into a badly prepared lecturette, disguised as a discussion. Informal lectures are usually worse than prepared ones.
In Buller's case, his new solar panels (which SunRun paid for entirely) cut his $200-a-month electricity bill by $140, or 70%. Buller gets to keep $50 of the savings and pays the balance to SunRun, which uses it to cover the cost of buying the solar system and hiring a contractor to install and maintain it.. . . I get less excited about the concept. How hard, I wonder, is it to “maintain” a solar panel system? I guess I’d have to find that out.
I know you have them, what are your down and dirty tricks (without cheating) to reach 50k. Last year I wrote out the full names for EVERYTHING.
A persons name. Instead of Dr. Pascal, It would be Doctor Pascal Jonathan Himes
+3 words
I had a company named Shilo but the full name was Shilo Helping Hands Psychiatric Care and Rehabilitation Facility. Ridiculous to write each time, but I did.
+7 words
It got annoying but my main character worked in the hospital so the name was mentioned oftened and he ran into a TON of people so it was + two or three words all the time.No, no, and no. I know the ethic here is “edit later,” but I’m kind of in the Richard Rhodes/”How to Write” camp when it comes to thinking why should I purposely load my writing with crap I know I’ll have to edit out later to meet some artificial word count total when I should instead concentrate on making my writing better, economizing on time in the process?
Over complicate everything: "And he did then, with much gusto, verily grip his fingers around the weisswurst, a german sausage made from the meat of veal, otherwise known as baby cows or calves."This leaps right over John Steinbeck’s desire for occasional hooptedoodle right into the poodle factory where you’ll find yourself concentrating too much on mundane details and forgetting that your reader wants your characters to tell the story – and even tell them what they look like through action rather than description. A good writer gets out of the way of his or her characters. This kind of writing just puts the writer in the way, like my kids in front of the TV when I’m trying to watch.
(This isn't mine, but a firend of mine's) Complain: "I hate so and so. She ticks me off so much. She's always telling me that I have to edit instead of rewriting everthing. I don't want to edit. I want to rewrite it. And who is she to tell me to edit? She's not an editor."
Flower language: make a character that sort of rambles on and on "Her hair was every color imaginable--blue, purple, red, green, black, brown et cetera (always two words--it's proper and boosts your word count), et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, amen."