Blue Xmas for book-buyers

December 15, 2004 | Comments Off

Last week, using ZZ Packer as an excuse, I directed readers to BuyBlue.org. The site charts corporations’ political contributions, enabling Democrats to make informed choices about which stores to patronize.

Today Dennis Johnson of Moby Lives synthesizes Buy Blue’s bookstore data for you:

wondering whether to buy books online at Amazon.com or at BarnesandNoble.com? Does it make the decision easier for you to know that 98% of B&N’s corporate political donations went to the Democrats, while 61% of Amazon’s went to the Republicans?

Or maybe you’ll be encouraged to get offline entirely and shop at an old-fashioned brick and mortar store upon hearing the news that Borders gave 100% of its donations to Democrats?. . . .

The Amazon numbers may be the most surprising on the site. . . . As one entry on Buyblue’s blog notes — an entry entitled, “Say it ain’t so, Jeff” — “It seems counterintuitive for a company patronized by so many progressives to turn around and donate their money to causes antithetical to their constituents’ values.”

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Remainders

• "This old white motherfucker and his wife rolls up. He’s like, 'Young man, do you know where the Poe house is?'" The Wire and A.N. Devers on Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore house.

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• The New York Society Library features an exhibition of Shirley Hazzard's (Transit of Venus) manuscripts, photographs, and more, through January 31.

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• Narrative's free app for the iPhone and iPad includes all back issues of the magazine (a couple of which include my writing). I also like to read Electric Lit this way.

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• "[T]o correct a bad sentence satisfactorily is not always possible; it should never have existed, that is all that can be said." -- Fowler

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• At FSG's Work In Progress, Jeffrey Eugenides talks with Jonathan Galassi about the genesis of the "more tightly dramatized, less fanciful" novel he's finishing up.

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• Emma Garman admires Jean-Christophe Valtat's 03, calling the novella "Nabokovian in its outrageously solipsistic stylishness." See also Valtat on the persistence of childhood.

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• Jonathan Franzen says "there isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature" than Sam Pollit of The Man Who Loved Children, which my friend Robb Forman Dew has been urging on me.

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• I'm back in New York, at least for now, but while I catch up you're better off checking my Twitter feed than waiting on the RSS.

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• ThermoPoetics contends that some ideas about nature — and thermodynamics in particular — manifested themselves in literature before being articulated scientifically. (Via.)

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• This month The Paris Review Daily celebrates one of the magazine's longtime contributors, Dr. Strangelove scribe Terry Southern.

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