The Highlight Reel Edition

WED, JAN 7: If you don’t have tickets yet for Amanda Stern’s Happy Ending Series Premiere at Joe’s Pub, you’re out of luck, so while we’re all clicking “refresh, refresh” for the Richard Price re-cap on her post-show blog, see if you can get tix for the next one. Meanwhile, Eric and Eliza Obenauf of Two Dollar Radio are making a rare appearance in New York from their undisclosed Midwestern location for Amy Koppelman’s reading for I Smile Back at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side (Broadway at 82nd). I’ll be there. 7PM, FREE.

THU, JAN 8: Starting this week as part of the Under The Radar Festival, and running through February at the Goethe-Institut New York, next-wave theater provocateurs Rimini Protokoll stage “Call Cutta in a Box”: “You open the door and you find a phone ringing… The story emerges as you realize that the caller and you and your city are at the center of the plot.” Details can be found here. [Full disclosure as always, I am the publicist for this project.]

SUN, JAN 11: At Good World, Rosie Schaap, author of the forthcoming essay collection Drinking With Men, throws a launch party for Jami Attenberg, author of the newly released (in paperback) novel, The Kept Man, joined on the bill by special guest Wendy McClure (I’m Not the New Me). 5PM, FREE.

Looking ahead: next week Alina Simone appears at the Russian Samovar with Sam Lipsyte (thanks to David from Largehearted Boy for the tip!).

Last week the big news coming out of Cooper Square was that the once-venerable Village Voice had let go yet another of its legendary contributors, Nat Hentoff. But the ever-shrinking coffers of its parent company, Village Voice Media Holdings, also claimed a victim far away from downtown Manhattan: the book section at the Nashville Scene.

The Scene’s books section was one of the best in the South, willing to take risks on new reviewers and little-known books — in 2002, Margaret Renkl, the Scene’s literary editor, gave me my first freelance gig. The section lasted a long time, given the rate at which regional outlets for literature and serious criticism are rapidly dying off: Last year the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut its full-time book editor, Teresa Weaver, and it seems every year brings a new, potentially fatal challenge to the Oxford American, now a quarterly run under the stewardship of the University of Central Arkansas. The South, it seems, is one step closer to the “Sahara of the Bozarts,” in Mencken’s famous, caustic phrase.

Which isn’t to say the South is devoid of the literary arts. There are scores of great writers, young and old, working in a self-consciously southern idiom: Beth Anne Fennelly, Joe Formichella, William Gay, Silas House, Ravi Howard, Tito Perdue, Ron Rash, and George Singleton, to name just a handful. Many of them live in clusters, like Fairhope, Ala., and Oxford, Miss., where they support each other and live in symbiosis with musicians, painters, sculptors and filmmakers.
 

But unlike other arts, literature relies heavily on other writing for sustenance and promotion. Enjoying a book requires a serious investment of time, and often money, whereas music streams free over the radio. Readers need critics to point out which books are worth picking up and to help them understand what they’ve read once they’re done. That’s why book sections like the Scene’s are so important: Alt-weeklies, predicated on giving voice to local, under-represented news and activities, shine light on writers overlooked by outlets like the New York Times (likewise, they provide a great avenue for young journalists and critics like myself to get in on the act). Blogs are great, and in some ways better than book sections, but there’s nothing like a book page in a local, general-interest publication to “cross-pollinate” interest among people who might otherwise never come across serious discussions of the printed word.

Novelists will continue writing and publishing without venues like the Scene’s book section. But don’t be surprised if a few give up because even their neighbors have never heard of them.
 

Sorry, nobody’s around to run the joint right now. I’m hanging out with my sister up in snowy Massachusetts, and whatever time I have left over for writing goes into the book or total frivolity.

If you enjoy voting in or second-guessing award contests, take a look at the 2008 Weblog Awards nominees. For the second year running, MaudNewton.com is in the running for best literature blog alongside a number of great sites, some of which are run by friends, and many of which are among my regular stops. Thanks for the nomination, guys. In fairness, I’ve gotta say, a truly representative list would be at least five times that long.

I’ll be back later this week; The Smart Set will probably return before I do.
 

Photo by Maximus Clarke.

This year, instead of a tree, we decorated Max’s beloved pole lamp. He calls the result a “3-way collision between Festivus austerity, Xmas kitsch, and midcentury modernism.”

I call it, “We can take all that down on the 1st, right?”
 

Christmas Day was an intimate and jolly affair. Joseph brought his cornbread-sausage-fennel stuffing and his chocolate bourbon pecan pie. Max made the salad, kept the wine flowing, and struggled against the rising tide of dishes. I tried Hannah Green’s “Ford Maddox Ford’s Garlic Chicken” recipe (from The Great American Writers Cookbook, which also includes Eudora Welty’s eggnog, and Harry Crews’ rattlesnake), although it required some guesswork: oven temperature, size of bird, etc. After our feast, we could barely straggle out to meet a friend for a 7:15 showing of Milk.

I hope your holidays have been merry and bright, however you’ve celebrated them, and that 2009 brings you only good things. I’ll leave you till early January with Green’s recipe (and a few of my own [bracketed] notes).

Ford Maddox Ford’s Garlic Chicken

I call it my garlic chicken, but I sometimes also call it Ford Maddox Ford’s garlic chicken because the idea comes from his Provence. His recipe calls for at least a kilo of garlic — but that may be the result of his grand hyperbole when it comes to anything Provençal. (”Is it any better in heaven, Ford, than you found it in Provence?”) At any rate I’ve modified that kilo down to 3 or 4 whole garlics [I used 4 whole heads], all peeled, so the cloves are placed in the roasting pan in such way as to form a bed on which the chicken is placed to roast. In this way, as Ford points out, the garlic perfumes the chicken, the sauce, (even the whole house where it is being roasted), but only those who want to, need eat the garlic. (Ford, however, mentioned this garlic in a tale set down to prove that if you eat enough garlic, a great deal of garlic, that is, you won’t have garlic breath.) (And whether that is really true or not, I may never know.)

Here are my directions mixed with my inventions:

The whole bottom of the roasting pan should be covered with a thin layer of olive oil, and into the olive oil set the peeled cloves of garlic in a shape more or less like an almond so that the chicken can rest on them and cover them. Rub the chicken with lemon, and salt it, and pepper it. Stuff it with a tomato which should in turn itself be stuffed with a clove or two of garlic and salted and peppered. It should also, if possible, be stuffed with a few sprigs of rosemary and of thyme. (When I first started making this chicken in the winter of 1975, we were staying in a house in Provençe, and part of the cooking of the chicken consisted of running out into the garden at the last moment before the chicken went into the cover with scissors, a flashlight, an umbrella sometimes, often in a long skirt and high heels, to pick a few sprigs of rosemary and of thyme and a leaf or two of sage. [I used three sprigs of rosemary, five of thyme, and one of sage.] The chicken has always been good, but the fragrance never so intoxicating as there in Provençe with the herbs fresh from the night garden.)

Potatoes should be peeled [I did not peel them] and placed around the chicken to roast with it. [I threw a couple sprigs of rosemary and a couple of thyme on top.] I’ve never yet lived in a house with an oven that had a temperature regulator, so one of the secrets of this chicken seems to be a very hot oven, so the chicken gets crispy and brown on the outside. [I preheated my oven to 475°.] It needs constant attention. The potatoes need to be turned so they get brown on all sides [I need to do this next time], and at the same time the chicken should be basted with the hot olive oil it is cooking in, at least 4 or 5 times. Before it goes into the oven a little olive oil should be smeared on top of it, too. [I also put some on the potatoes.] It needs about an hour and 15 minutes, perhaps a little more, depending on the size of the chicken. [Mine was almost 4 pounds, and it took about 90 minutes. It never did get very crispy — maybe I used too much olive oil? — but it was moist & garlicky all the same.]

At the last minute, take out the potatoes and put them in a serving bowl, and throw in a little boiling water, perferably the water of the green vegetable, which should just itself have finished cooking. Asparagus is wonderful if it is in season. But broccoli or green beans or spinach are also good with it. [I wilted some spinach.] If there seem to be too many people for one chicken it is a good idea to make hollandaise sauce for the broccoli or the asparagus.

This makes a fine dinner for 4 people or even six [I wouldn’t say six], but it is also a great dinner for two… Perhaps I should add that the chicken should be served with a red wine. [Red gives me migraines, so we had white.] I supposed that a Chateauneuf du Pape would be the ideal wine, but it also does quite well ith a Chaors, a Medoc, a Chianti. A green salad with oil and vinegar — no spices — should be served after it. [Our salad was dressed with a little lemon, olive oil, salt, and pepper.] The first course should be something light — perhaps watercress soup or sliced tomatoes with parsley, oil, and vinegar. [We had no such course.]

When the chicken is gone, throw the bones into a pot, cover it with water, add a few sprigs of celery leaf and an onion, and boil it for about two hours. Take out the chicken bones, pick off all the chicken, to put back into the soup, add some white beans, another onion, leeks, potatoes, carrots, a bit of cabbage, and a few pieces of pumpkin or melon, and you have a wonderful soup…

Instead here’s an Xmas excerpt from Schaap’s forthcoming Drinking with Men. If you like this, listen to the author telling two stories on This American Life.
 

A Santa Cruz Christmas, 1989

At sunset most evenings, we went to the state beach, with its natural bridges of enormous eroded rocks, fired up a joint, and watched the winter surfers, the students, the drifters who’d long preceded our own drifting to this place, who must have arrived here much as we did, only years before, with no better plan, traveling the same tine in the same forked road, Santa Cruz or San Francisco, Santa Cruz or Humboldt, Santa Cruz or _____, Santa Cruz or_____, Santa Cruz or _____. Santa Cruz instead of anywhere else, especially: instead of wherever they’d come from. Danny and Billy and I lived in the rusty brown Dodge van, parked on Mission Street, in front of the pizzeria where they worked, at least through Christmas, at which point Danny had managed to scrounge together enough money to return home to Jersey for the holidays.

Billy was a Christian, but not a religious one. Still, Christmas was Christmas. And I was one of those half-assed New York Jews who grew up celebrating Easter and Passover — whose family, truth be told, preferred Christmas to Chanukah, because ma really loved chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and overstuffed stockings, and a nice Bûche de Noël and all that, without particularly paying Jesus any mind, though she was firmly of the opinion that he seemed like a totally o.k. guy. So even for me, yes, Christmas was Christmas, and sleeping in a van would not do, nor would eating Domino’s discards.

“We should at least get a room somewhere,” I suggested. Billy quickly agreed, even though we were both close to broke. We checked into the cheapest motel we could find. At a convenience store across the road, for a small fee, we got a loitering grownup to procure a couple six-packs of Anchor Steam for us — the birth of the baby Jesus rated at least a classy regional beer.
 

“Should we get some Jack too?” Billy asked, half-serious. Only a week before, at a motel lounge outside L.A., I’d drunk at least twenty shots of the stuff in one go. I woke up a day later in the van, in Santa Cruz, 350 miles north of where I’d blacked out. Now even the smell of it — sickly-sweet, vanilla and burnt cotton — made me want to retch.

“Nah.” No way.

Billy and I settled into our motel room with our beer and our Cool Ranch Doritos and those cheese-crackers-with-peanut-butter that cost like a dollar for six packets — on account of Billy and me welcoming the occasional junk food splash-out with great enthusiasm, and, above all, on account of Christmas, we could dispense with our usual hippie-health-food-store-totally-organic pieties — and flipped on the TV, each of us claiming our own queen-size bed. Billy and I were friends, but not especially close friends, and, without Danny, we had little to say to each other. We idly watched the local news, then some cartoons, then some videos on MTV. When the clicker landed on the Yule Log, we gave each other a look of faint despair. This was our Christmas, our sad weird Christmas, and a motel room was nearly as shitty a place to be as the van. Doritos and beer were good, sure, but shouldn’t we go out for dinner?

“Shouldn’t we go out for dinner?” I asked. No argument from Billy.

We hit the strip — the pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Cruz — and checked the menus posted outside the restaurants. Every place was way too expensive, or full, or both, or closed. We trudged up Mission Street, past Domino’s. The Saturn Café, known at the time for its activist feminist clientele and vegan-friendly menu, was open. Of course it was open, but it did not do Christmas. No twinkling lights. No tinsel. No Santas or reindeer or candy canes. But there were free tables, and it was better than our stash back at the motel. We ordered salads and lentil soup, and the conversation stayed sparse. I kept my thoughts to myself: I wished I were home, not for good, just at that moment. I missed my family, imperfect as we were. I envied Danny, who at this moment was probably gleefully reneging on his vegetarianism and eating ham or turkey in the company of his relations, young and old, who was probably luxuriating in the flickering light of a Christmas tree, who was in the Northeast, where there was likely snow on the ground and maybe even children sledding, where Christmas was Christmas-y, not like this warm West Coast horseshit. I envied Danny, who was having a real Christmas, so different from Billy’s and mine, surrounded as we were by recalcitrant atheists picking at tempeh and brown rice. What was I doing here? Why had I chosen this? And I imagined that Billy, my reticent, accidental Christmas companion, was thinking much the same.

We walked quickly back to the motel in the cooling California night, past palm trees and strip malls, past so many parked cars and so few people. I glanced into strangers’ houses, through casement windows framing repeated tableaux of families being families at Christmastime, families drinking Egg Nog and, I figured, listening to Bing Crosby crooning “The Christmas Song” and Ella Fitzgerald elevating “Jingle Bells,” wishing one and all — except for me, except for Billy — a swinging Christmas, as they tallied their holiday hauls. We returned to the motel, to our matching queen size beds, to our already diminished six packs. We drank silently, a few feet apart, isolated by our unhappiness. I do not remember if Billy called home but I know I did not. I had elected this estrangement and would ride it out. We resumed our channel-flipping. Fuck the news and its cheerful reports of Christmas near-miracles and charitable acts. Fuck the Yule Log and all its stupid Yule Logness.

“Hey Billy, pass me another Anchor Steam.”

“You got it.”

And there we were. Two depressed kids far from home, far from parents and brothers and sisters, no cards, no calls, no high school diplomas, no home save a crappy brown van, pounding back bottles of beer, lying on dingy, quilted, motel bedspreads, tired but restless.

Flick. On the next channel: The Sound of Music. Beautiful pixie-haired Julie Andrews, Sister Maria — not yet betrothed to the Captain, not yet a Von Trapp — comforting her little Austrian charges with a litany of her favorite things. Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles! I thought of ma back in New York, and her inexhaustible cheerleading for The Great American Musical, her love of all things Rogers and Hammerstein, all things Lerner and Loewe, all things Irving Berlin and George Gershwin and Lorenz Hart. I thought of Sunday evenings when I was even younger, in my grandfather’s little library, listening to The Original Cast Recording of every cast that had ever originally been recorded. I could see something stirring in Billy, too, something possibly warm and good, though I was sure in his case it had nothing to do with show tunes, and I watched as the fear and fretfulness slowly, slowly, started to wash away from his young, unshaven face. And I noticed, for the first time, really, what a fine face he had: both strong and soft, high cheekbones and Elvis-y lips, pretty blue eyes. Was he thinking of his favorite things? Well, God only knew what those were in Billy’s case — but soon, very soon, damn it if we didn’t feel so bad, if we felt, actually, pretty okay. And damn if by the time “Edelweiss” rolled around, small and white and blooming and growing forever, I wasn’t singing along with the brave, elegant (and, let us be honest, pretty fucking hot) Captain von Trapp while he strummed his guitar. And a feeling of freedom returned, a sense that even if I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was doing was fine, then and there, for all its uncertainty. We both cried, and it was good.

“Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Pass me another beer.”

“You got it.”

“Thanks. Hey Billy?”

“Yeah?”

“Merry Christmas, man.”

“Yeah.” He turned his eyes away from the television, looked at me, and nodded. “Merry Christmas.”
 

Recent image of Santa Cruz’s Saturn Café taken from this site.

Terrible holiday story? It was Thanksgiving Day two years ago. I was a year and a half into my marriage, and eight or nine of those months my wife had spent an hour and a half away from me, with her mom and her only sibling, a sister. The sister had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, which is a kind of brain cancer you don’t beat. My wife was staying there to take care of the sister in between surgeries. I’d been called down to lend a hand. So the mood was, well you’d think it was grim, and it was, in a way, but there’s a lot more to it when you’re going down that particular tunnel.

We were staying in a Holiday Inn in Towson, Maryland. I’m pretty sure that people live in Towson, but the town seemed to define itself mostly by strip mall/actual mall density — national chains metastasizing everywhere, six-lane non-Interstates, and crowded developments behind every rise. I did find a respectable diner, a fishmonger with good crabcakes and a couple pit beef shacks, but otherwise, life consisted of a generic motel room, with a limp cable package and slow DSL, and the parking lot and the wooded gully next to it, for walking the little dog, a year-old Boston Terrier. The sister was stationed in the rehab wing of a second-tier hospital after what ended up being her last brain surgery. Johns Hopkins rented out space there, but it was no Johns Hopkins. I watched the little dog while everyone else trucked off to the hospital, and I tried to be good company for my wife.
 

We were usually at Johns Hopkins, because the university had a kick-ass neurology department that pretty much adopted the sister and took her care personal. (Actually, I’m unsure of the relationship between the university and the neurology dept. Unlicensed metonymy? Synecdoche? I forget.) When she was treated there, we stayed in Mount Vernon, a museum and coffee shop neighborhood downtown which was good for killing time, and feeding the troups. There was a big park across the street for walking the dog. The location improved everyone’s spirits. But the recovery from surgery was taking a little long, so the sister was transferred up to Good Samaritan, and we moved up to Towson, to be closer. I had been there for the move, and then went back to New York to work for a few days. I returned for the week of Thanksgiving. It was decided that my wife and her family would spend the entire day at the hospital, and not leave for meals. I would stay at the hotel, with the little dog. All day long.

So, Thanksgiving, normally my favorite holiday: alone (with little dog), in a crappy hotel room, in a town I did not want to be in.
 

It did not start as dreary as all that. I had a friend in Baltimore, a bartender type, who was meeting his pals at 7 a.m. to play a boozy game of touch football. I got up early, left the wife and the little dog sleeping, drove down to Fells Point, had a few beers before the parades started and got back with coffee for the sleepers. That was fun, for what it was. My buddy and his pals were tolerant of the only anecdotes I could muster, which were about oncologists and symptoms and such.

I drove the wife out to the hospital by noon – the rest of the family had already driven themselves there. Me and the little dog watched her walk up the sidewalk to the main entrance of Good Samaritan. We weren’t thinking anything dramatic, like you’d like to embellish. It was a routine, and Thanksgiving was just another footnote.
 

On the way back, the little dog and I cruised. We were tasked with providing Thanksgiving Dinner for the troops at the hospital from available open restaurants, and, even though Indian food had been requested, I thought one of the pit-beef shacks might be able to slip me actual turkey. They could, but were not open – we had some later that weekend, and it was nothing to write about – so we went back, to spend the day in the room.

I could’ve watched football games, I suppose, but I didn’t feel like it. I read (my third reread of Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story”, my journal shows), dozed lightly. Walked the little dog a couple of times. Around five, I called my family and the friends I traditionally spent Thanksgiving Day with. Oddly, that was the heartbreaker. It was one thing to be living a shadow life, and another to pretend like you’re not to your loved ones. I managed to keep it together until I got off the phone.

Did I mention that the hotel bar was closed? Holiday Inn obviously hates stranded holiday travelers.
 

After dark I started calling around for an Indian restaurant that was open. That was a bit of a fright for a second, as the only one I was finding was way down past the Inner Harbor. Finally I found one in Towson proper, placed the order, leashed the little dog and got going. It was surface streets all the way there. I was the only one on the roads, for miles at a time. The little dog stared out the window at the darkened Starbucks and then the next darkened Starbucks.

I got the food, all two and a half bags of it, birddogged my way to the hospital, dropped it off, kissed my wife and headed back to maybe watch a little football.

Around a quarter of ten I realized that not only had I not eaten any turkey, I had not eaten since a donut from 7-11 at the crack of dawn. And all the food was at the hospital. So, I waited for the gang to come back, and hoped that there would be leftovers, which there were.
 

It does seem like it should be about the worst holiday ever, but… there was a serenity on that day that I miss a little bit. A resignation, and also a digging in of the heels. Sometimes you just do what you’re supposed to, and your only reward may be feeling useful, but that’s not so bad as rewards go.

The sister passed away two months and a week later, at the age of twenty-eight, fighting until she stopped. Me, my wife, and our little dog miss her very much.
 

Image of Towson Town Center Mall taken from avi8torfn’s MD collection at Flickr.

A conversation about literary pilgrimages with my favorite Poe fan last week reminded me that I never told you about my visit to the Charles Dickens Museum in London. The delay is fortuitous, I guess, because really, what better time than now to talk about the house of The Man Who Invented Christmas?

Dickens lived at 48 Doughty Street for just two-and-a-half years, from April 1837 to December 1839, while completing The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby.

Although the memorabilia housed there is extensive — it could be, as the museum site contends, “the world’s most important collection of material relating to the great Victorian novelist and social commentator” — the place itself feels incidental. (Image of recreated period drawing-room, with curtains that resemble those that hung in the room in Dickens’ day, above.)

Various items have been assembled, but so far as I could tell none are endemic, and it’s difficult to see how if at all the house affected his work.

There is no equivalent to the cellar fireplace in Poe’s Philly house that crept into “The Black Cat” — or, if there is, it’s not highlighted in the pre-walk-through film or the brochure. Nor, obviously, does the construction reflect Dickens’ own creative vision, as Twain’s Hartford home does his.
 

Yet the Doughty Street residence is the only surviving Dickens home in London. So, apart from the all-kitsch-all-the-time Dickens World, it is now the flagship tourist destination for fans of A Christmas Carol, or even Great Expectations or Bleak House.
 

As I say, all sorts of papers and drawings and knick-knacks are on display there. The image above (please forgive the glare; I swear I wasn’t using a flash) is of the original Oliver Twist manuscript.

There are other drafts, of course, and letters, and posters from Dickens’ theater days. There are also illustrations of scenes from his novels, papers relating to child labor and abuse, portraits of the women Dickens is known to have loved, busts of the man himself (see, e.g., above), a giant golden arm (first image below) with a hammer in its hand that is mentioned in A Tale of Two Cities, and much more. The second image image below is of some of Dickens’ writing talismans, and a quill pen he used in writing the unfinished Edwin Drood.

Despite the ease of stopping by the Dickens Museum as a London tourist, another house, Gad’s Hill Place (now in Rochester), loomed much larger in the author’s imagination. As a boy he dreamed of living there. He later purchased the house, made it his own, and even burned his correspondence behind it.

But of course at Gad’s Hill Place you won’t see things like this grill from the Marshalsea Goal (below), where Dickens’s father, a spendthrift, was imprisoned for three months after he couldn’t pay his debts.

The giant images of Dickens’ parents behind bars are presumably intended to help you imagine how Dickens felt seeing them incarcerated. For some reason, they made me laugh.

The jail-bars display epitomizes the presentation and offerings of Dickens Museum.
 

If you go, and you’re thirsty afterward, by all means stop in at The Lamb (above), once Dickens’ local, for a pint.

The fish and chips are fine — pretty standard — at this pub. But whatever you do, don’t order the potato leek soup. Even if you’re sick, even though it is the only soupy thing on the menu. You might not think someone could screw that up, but you would be wrong.
 

Elsewhere: The museum’s virtual tour is worth taking, and I have some photos, with a little commentary, at Flickr.

The experience would have left many authors furious and devastated, but it got Koppel thinking.

He was convinced that the odd size and and strange format of the volume, which seemed out of place on traditional bookshelves and booksellers’ tables, were part of what sunk it. In fact, he realized, it felt like he’d written a book for a medium that didn’t exist yet.
 

On coming to this conclusion, most aspiring writers would have slunk off to a desk job, pulled out a razor, or at least resolved to write more traditionally. But Koppel’s been experimenting with ways of telling stories by hacking existing media ever since. And when one door has slammed shut, he’s shrugged his shoulders, moved down the hall, and pushed his way through a different one.

On the wall of his office hangs an ancient Newton; on his desk a Google Phone shares space with a Kindle. He is familiar with and conversant in the capabilities of e-paper. But Koppell’s devices of choice, since he hacked the first video-capable iPod, are the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It is for these that ScrollMotion, under the guidance of novelist and partner Calvin Baker, has developed Iceberg. The new reader technology makes each book easy to search and annotate, and allows each title to be sold separately, wrapped in the iTunes DRM. As Wired’s Chris Snyder observes, Iceberg in effect puts Apple directly into the e-book business by allowing the company to pick up a percentage of each sale. “’This is a business model that works on their business model,’” Koppel has said.
 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette are all working with Iceberg to make newer titles available. Scott Westerfeld’s Extras, a favorite of my stepdaughter’s, is scheduled to appear at the Apps store tonight.

All of the Iceberg books maintain the pagination of the print originals, which means they require both scrolling and page-turning, a combination that makes them — at least so far — a little more complicated to use than the ones available for the Classics app.*

But they’re attractive, uncluttered, and surprisingly versatile. The type has grow-and-shrink capability, just like web pages on the iPhone’s Safari browser, and you can read vertically or horizontally. And unlike any other iPhone applications available, each title has full search functionality, a note-taking feature, and a “Book Skim” option that enables you to locate notes visually as well as by page number.

To get some sense of how Book Skim and note-taking work, take a look at the image at the top of this post (larger, cleaner version here). Imagine running your finger along the pages that are pictured at the bottom as if they’re jutting out from a bound book. Right now 12 is selected, but you could as easily select 157 or 285. If you’d made notes on one of those pages, it would appear brown, rather than white or maroon, and you could select it by touch. And when you want to read rather than search, just dismiss the pages-and-binding image, and you’re left with clean text on a page.

Right now I’m testing a novel I’ve already read and loved. After sitting with it on the train and at home tonight, and picking it up again in the morning, I’ll say a little more about Iceberg.
 

Meanwhile, three things. First, the only potential negative I see so far is pricing. Obviously books are expensive to acquire, edit, and publish, but when a title goes electronic, you’d think… well, more on this soon.

Second, if you’re an author who hopes this electronic thing is a fly-by-night trend, or whose publisher isn’t on board with ebooks — isn’t, in fact, selling your book for download in as many formats as possible — consider that Stanza has had more than 600,000 unique users this year alone. Obviously, given these numbers and sales for the Kindle, it’s ridiculous to keep saying that no one reads books anymore. Yet for years we’ve been stuck in a market where 10,000 sales for a literary novel is better than average. Ask yourself if you want this half-million-plus-and-growing pool of readers to have access to your work in what may be their preferred format. And after that, maybe ask your publisher.

Finally, looking for a job? Unlike just about every other company on these shores, except maybe bankruptcy firms, ScrollMotion is hiring.
 

Previously: Book apps for the iPhone keep getting better.

* I’ve nearly finished reading Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel about a sailor who flees a comfortable existence in England and winds up shipwrecked and stripped of all comforts — on the iPhone Classics app. My friend GMB wondered if the irony was intentional. It wasn’t.
 

Update: David Rothman of Teleread argues that the largest potential problem with Iceberg is that it uses iTunes’ proprietary format, thus forcing prices to remain unnaturally high, and making novels a rarified and expensive product not available to all. “[C]onnect the dots,” he urges me.

So, allow me clarify, in case this was not obvious from what I have said previously and in this very post about reading on and making books available electronically. I would like to see titles offered in a variety of formats — for the iPhone (Iceberg, Classics, Stanza, eReader), for the Kindle (although I personally do not want one), for the Wii, and for any other device using any platform that appeals to readers and secures copyrighted materials sufficiently to prevent mass copyright violation. What I like about reader tools for iPhone, Wii, and other handhelds is that they are not expensive book-centric devices, but work on existing multi-purpose machines.

I’m also, for what it’s worth, very much in favor of the Google Books database, which is searchable online, but shows only every few pages of a new text, allowing potential readers to get a taste before deciding to buy. And with its new magazines project, I suspect that Google eventually will be competing with Lexis-Nexis and other paid information aggregators. Whether the company will get directly into eBooks, I don’t know, but with Stanza possibly targeting its Android phone, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Looking for something else last night, I discovered this note, signed “DFW & EM,” on “effete”:

Here’s a word on which some dictionaries and useage authorities haven’t caught up with the realities of literate usage. Yes, the traditional meaning of effete is “depleted of vitality, washed out, exhausted” — and in a college paper for an older prof you’d probably want to use it only that way. But a great many educated people accept effete now also as a pejorative synonym for elite or elitist, one with an added suggestion of effeminancy, over-refinement, pretension, and/or decadence; and in these writers’ opinion it is not a boner to use effete this way, since no other word has quite its connotative flavor. Traditionalists who see this evolved definition as an error often blame Spiro Agnew’s characterization of some liberal group or other as “effete corps of independent snobs,” but there are deeper reasons for this evolution, such as that effete derives from the Latin effetus, which meant “worn out from bearing children” and thus had an obvious feminine connotation. Or that, historically, effete was often used to describe artistic movements that had exhausted their vitality, and one of the main characteristics of a kind of art’s exhaustion was its descent into excessive refinement/foppery/decadence.

Last month the OUP blog looked at a few other DFW notes.

The New Yorker recently made everything — from its very first issue to the latest — available to subscribers online. This means no more waiting until your magazine arrives in the mail to read the piece you hear mentioned on Monday morning.

And more immediately, if you’re a subscriber, you can read Mark Twain’s “The Privilege of the Grave” right now. Although previously unpublished, the essay will be immediately recognizable as Twain’s to anyone who’s had even casual exposure to his nonfiction. Here’s a brief excerpt from the beginning:

Its occupant has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person: free speech. The living man is not really without this privilege — strictly speaking — but as he possesses it merely as an empty formality, and knows better than to make use of it, it cannot be seriously regarded as an actual possession. As an active privilege, it ranks with the privilege of committing murder: we may exercise it if we are willing to take the consequences. Murder is forbidden both in form and in fact; free speech is granted in form but forbidden in fact. By the common estimate both are crimes, and are held in deep odium by civilized peoples.

Toward the end, he says:

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are waste, because I can’t print the result…. It does my weather-beaten soul good to read it, and admire the trouble it would make for my family.

He resolves to leave the inflammatory work behind, and “utter it from the grave,” since nobody bothers to hold a grudge against a dead person.
 

When he wrote this essay, Twain was almost certainly thinking of his Letters from the Earth, an indictment of Christianity so scathing that his wife refused to discuss it with him, and his daughter held up its publication for decades after his death.

Although the book is uneven, the best pieces in it are some of Twain’s strongest work. (And I say this as a Twain fanatic.) They engage with Christianity on its own terms and highlight its illogic without resorting to the supercilious, you-idiots! tone of a Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens. Unlike those men, whose real aim, or at least only real hope, is to galvanize atheists and convert agnostics, Twain is a true satirist whose intended audience is people who are, as he was, raised in the church.

And his rhetoric is a powerful tonic for believers. A good friend’s father, who was a missionary, lost his faith for many years after reading Letters from the Earth. (I’ve said most of this before; I’m so obsessed with the Letters from the Earth that I’ve been posting it line-by-line at Twitter.)
 

“The Privilege of the Grave” is not Twain’s only work that depicts death and the grave as the reward of the longsuffering. One of the best passages of Satan’s tenth letter, which is collected in Letters from the Earth, begins:

In time, the Deity perceived that death was a mistake; a mistake, in that it was insufficient; insufficient, for the reason that while it was an admirable agent for the inflicting of misery upon the survivor, it allowed the dead person himself to escape from all further persecution in the blessed refuge of the grave. This was not satisfactory. A way must be contrived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb.

The Deity pondered this matter during four thousand years unsuccessfully, but as soon as he came down to earth and became a Christian his mind cleared and he knew what to do. He invented hell, and proclaimed it.