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North Korea has amended its constitution. In inimitable North Korean style, the “contents of the revision have not been made public” by its government.
“Miss California USA officials want Carrie Prejean to repay $5,200 they say she borrowed to have her breasts augmented last year.”
But that may not top this: Defective Underwear Causes Penis Pain.
A 29-year-old Virginian man has been charged “with the crime of making coffee in the nude — in his own home.”
Some free legal advice. If you’re looking for an assistant, do not include in the job requirements that “you would be required to have sexual interaction with me and my partner, sometimes together sometimes separate.” And you would think a lawyer wouldn’t need this advice.
If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P.J. O’Rourke, Give War a Chance
If you could ask your favorite author (alive or dead) one question … who would you ask, and what would the question be?
Sorry, but I can’t resist making this like asking the genie from the bottle for more wishes with your one wish. So, I’d say to Kurt Vonnegut, “Why don’t we chat over coffee/lunch/dinner?”
Of course, like the genie, he may well laugh and say no. But I’d sure hope not.
Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
No one is immune from genre-bashing. What’s come to be known as historical fiction is one of those genres at which I tend to look askance. I’m guilty of often considering it little more than a costume drama, where the author simply places characters and situations in a historical setting. But it’s also a genre where books come along that remind us why genre blinders aren’t appropriate.
 Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies is one such novel. It is as intelligently written and highly informative as it is sweeping in scope.
Set in 1838, the center of Ghosh’s tale, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, is a slave-trading ship called the Ibis. Because Great Britain abolished its role in the Atlantic slave trade, the ship finds a new calling. It is purchased by the English-born, Calcutta-based merchant Ben Burnham, whose commercial interests include the opium trade. The ship is brought to Calcutta to be refurbished to export opium to China. Because China is seeking to abolish the opium trade, which will lead to the first of the Opium Wars, upon refurbishing the Ibis is pressed into service to transport girmitiya, indentured laborers, to plantations on the island of Mauritius. Thus, while it no longer carries the chains that bound slaves destined for America, it remains a vehicle for trade in human beings.
The ship ultimately becomes the focal point for a wide variety of characters. Deeti, who lives in a poor inland Indian village dependent upon growing opium, sees the ship in a vision. She will eventually end up on it as one of the girmitiya after her husband dies and a low-caste ox cart driver rescues her from being burned on her husband’s funeral pyre. Zachary Reid is the mulatto freedman son of an American slave-owner but whose color doesn’t overtly reveal his black heritage. Hired on the Ibis as a master carpenter for its rebuilding, he rises to the level of second mate on the voyage to Calcutta and attracts the favorable attention of the new owner. Reid is also looked on favorably by the lascar, natives of the Indian Ocean area who manned the European-owned ships, he ends up commanding on the way to Calcutta. Among the others who find themselves aboard the ship as it leaves India for Mauritius are Neel Rattan, an upper caste raja whose mounting debt ends in criminal indenture; Paulette Lambert, who becomes Burnham’s ward after the death of her liberal French father; Jodu, the son of Paulette’s wet-nurse who was raised alongside her before her father’s death and whom she considers almost a brother; and Baboo Nob Kissin, Burnham’s gomusta, who acts as his accountant and aide-de-camp.
Ghosh brings these and many other characters into the tale during the course of three broad parts, titled Land, River and Sea. These sections detail the background of the characters and the differing paths that bring them to the Ibis. Because Sea of Poppies is the first in a planned trilogy, neither we nor the characters arrive at Mauritius but, rather, are left amidst a storm on “the Black Water” (the Indian Ocean) when the book closes. In fact, to some extent, Sea of Poppies could be classified as a classic epic adventure because many of the characters are engaged in the adventure of a lifetime, whether voluntary or involuntary.
Ghosh’s copious detail makes the reader intimately familiar with the characters and their respective cultures and heritage. Not only is Sea of Poppies highly readable, it is particularly impressive in two other respects. One is the pervasive historicity. Ghosh, who spent nearly four years writing the book, provides not only a political history, but an understanding of culture, religion, diversity, the opium trade, heritage and so much more. Even the history averse will learn plenty and enjoy being immersed in history.
The lascar play a key role in the book’s other extraordinary aspect. The book is replete with the pidgin used by the lascar. Yet Ghosh does not merely provide a glossary for reference. Instead, he creates “The Ibis Chrestomathy”, supposedly compiled by Neel Rattan. The lengthy chrestomathy (more than 40 pages in the recently released trade paper edition) is based on at least two actual reference works and provides not only an understanding of the words, but often their etymology and usages.
Ghosh’s skill and attention to detail make Sea of Poppies an enjoyable historical journey, one which gives insight into cultures and peoples with which few of us are familiar. As such, it is an exemplar of the potential power and effectiveness of historical fiction.
So it was that for Neel, no aspect of his captivity held greater terror than the thought of sharing a shit-hole with dozens of common prisoners.
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
A couple things are luring me over to the dark side — an e-book reader.
If you weren’t under a rock the last 24 hours, you know Barnes & Noble is releasing an e-reader, which Wired immediately said would cause Kindle owners “a giant dose of buyer’s remorse.” Now I’ve struggled over whether to get an e-book reader for quite a while, particulary since the Kindle was released. The momentum though is gaining.
First, the B&N reader will support multiple formats, including PDF and EPUB, and also allow access to the public domain titles in Google Books. I have plenty of PDF works on my laptop and home computer. I just never read them because I don’t like to have to be sitting at a desk or with a computer in my lap to read. Second, it has built in wi-fi access. Third, while it’s the same price as a Kindle — $259 — I have around $100 in B&N gift cards in my wallet or at home, which amounts to a hefty discount.
Now I’ve often said there are tactile aspects to the book reading experience that are important to me. I don’t know if naming the device “Nook” is supposed to encourage that thought or simply annoy and amuse people. B&N also has a great sales advantage. With its retail stores, people can actually go play with a Nook before buying.
That leaves me with another key question. Will the draw of the pre-order become an irresistible force before the immovable object actually holds one in his hands and makes a somewhat less “gotta have the new gadget” decision?
Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
Lawrence Clark Powell, Books in My Baggage
War has broken out in the book retailing world. First, Wal-Mart last week said it would offer preorders of 10 top books to be released in November for $10 each online with free shipping. Amazon, of course, jumped in to match the price. That prompted a retaliatory strike by Wal-Mart, which lowered the price to $9. The battle erupted into a three front war when Target jumped in at $ $8.99 and Wal-Mart has since lowered its price to $8.98.
So what does this spell for the book industry? It depends on who you listen to. Some contend this is just an effort by Wal-Mart, and now by Target, to attempt to drive book purchase traffic to their web sites with the forthcoming holiday season. Others aren’t so sure.
For example, MobyLives, the blog of Melville House Publishing, calls it “capitalism run amok, a race toward an Armageddon[.]” In addition to pointing out that this artificially dictates what a business can charge for its products, Moby makes the astute observation that this mere means a book is “reduced to a thing of no inherent actual quality, just a price.”
That’s a point also made in a NYT article on the subject when Wal-Mart announced the price cuts. “If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s [new novel] for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25?,” Grisham’s agent told the paper. “I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted best sellers take the consumer’s attention away from emerging writers.”
We’re all looking for a deal. I admit I tend to buy as many books online as locally because the price is better. I also tend to buy more from the B&N chain store than local independents because of both the variety of selection and price. These actions unquestionably hurt independent and local bookstores. The impact on publishers may be a bit different because, at least to my understanding, these discounts probably come from the retailer’s share, not what the publisher charges the retailer.
But, to use a cliche, maybe we’re seeing some of the chickens coming home to roost. Like other consumers, readers have apparently shown that price is important. If behemoth big box retailers insist they will sell books at only a certain price point, does their market power allow tremendous influence on what publishers can charge? If so, where does that leave authors, particularly those who aren’t household names?
The 10 books offered by Wal-Mart have “list” prices of $22 to $35 so it’s a helluva discount. Actually, there’s maybe one book out of the 10 I would consider reading and even that one I would most likely wait until it was out in paperback or get from the library. Still, there are plenty of people who are interested in them and best sellers account for a fair share of the market (hence, I suppose, the term “best seller”). But you aren’t going to see the Wal-Marts of the world giving Melville House’s Every Man Dies Alone — one of my favorite books this year — this type of discount. How, then, is quality literature to compete in the marketplace? If it can’t, how can Melville House and other publishers continue to afford to publish these books?
There’s no easy solution. You can’t really blame consumers for looking for the best price, whether it’s books or detergent. But there is far more interchangeability with the latter. If Wal-Mart and Target have a price war over detergent, the societal impact is negligible and there remains a relatively objective basis by which to judge the products. But to reduce the number of books (or movies) or which ones are distributed because of price rather than content runs counter to the core concept of creativity.
The book price wars probably don’t mean the end of book publishing as we know it. Still, it never bodes well to start treating a part of the humanities as just another fungible commodity.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world[.]
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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Disclaimer 
Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
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