Book Project - Day 11 - WTF? An Adult Tintin Comic?

After putting up my post on the Tintin comic books series a couple of days go I started to get nostalgic about them, and so I spent some time online looking at some Tintin-related websites and discussion forums. It was through one of the forums that I first heard of Tintin in Thailand.



I was aware that there are Tintin books which I have not read; Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo are 2 of them. When I was a kid those 2 were not part of the series published by Indira, the publisher that held the rights to publish the books in Indonesia. So it was not until I came to the US that I became aware of their existence as well as that of the last Tintin book, Tintin and the Alph-Art (Tintin’s creator, Herge, died before it was finished and it has since been published in its rough form).

But Tintin in Thailand, as it turned out, is most definitely NOT part of a Tintin series! Rather, it is an adult parody of the Tintin comic book – like the Tijuana Bible version of a Tintin comic book. In it, a handful of recognizable characters from the Tintin series turned up in Thailand, indulging in not-so-clean fun times and language.

By all accounts I could find, the book first circulated in Thailand in 1999 with the author listed as “Bud E. Weyser.” In 2001, the Herge Foundation heard of Mr. Weyser’s attempt to market Tintin in Thailand as an unknown Tintin book in Belgium. Following a sting by the Belgian police in Thailand, arrests were made, copies were seized and the book was deemed to be a violation of copyright laws and is therefore illegal to be published. Still, this being the Great Electronic Age, online copies exist, and the Herge Foundation continues the effort to have online copies of the book removed.

I find the author’s attempt to market Tintin in Thailand as an unknown book of the Tintin series to be a laughable long shot. Although the front cover art may be a passable emulation of Herge’s work, the remaining graphics on the inside are all rough-drawn, black-and-white and bear little resemblance to Herge’s clear yet delicate lines. While you can certainly recognize some of the figures to be Tintin characters, I don’t see how a person familiar with the series would ever take this book to be one of Herge’s handiworks.

In case you’re wondering how I know, I did find a copy on pdf. I was curious. Apart from my fondness for Tintin I also have an interest in erotic comics, so I wanted to see how this brazen parody was executed. The effort is there, but the execution – while impressive for its sheer balls – was lacking. Although there aren’t necessarily a lot of depictions of X-rated actions, the book does include corruptions of a few Tintin sacred cows that left me feeling strangely dirty. What a weird footnote to add to the history of this beloved comic icon!

Book Project - Day 11 - Books for Soldiers

Damn, I missed another day yesterday. I was Busy at work and busy when I came home and I didn’t get a chance to write.

Oh well. I decided I won’t beat myself up over it. I’ll just pick up where I left off and keep going.

I have a couple of mail tubs full of books that I would like to remove. These are all books that either have been given to me or ones I have bought, but I either don’t like them or are not interested in them. So I have been looking for different way to get rid of them other than donating them to the library or Goodwill.



Not that I don’t like to support the library - I’m a regular fixture at the Pomona Library’s monthly book sales – I just thought it would be nice to get some of these books directly to someone who might like to read but have limited resources, like prison inmates or some of our service member overseas.

I’ve looked into sending the books to troops. A few years ago it was possible to send letter or care packages simply to “Any Service Member” but apparently due to heightened security the Department of Defense discontinued the practice of receiving unsolicited mails and packages. There are some websites out there that act as a liaison between service member and people interested in sending them books, BooksforSoldiers and OperationPaperback are 2 of them.

I actually did set up an account with OperationPaperback recently. The way it works is the soldiers send their request, noting their preferred genres. You set up an account and you log in to request one or a number of addresses, noting the genres of the books you are donating. The website then provides you with the name and addresses of the service members whose genre preferences match the books you have.

I haven’t sent anything yet – I haven’t got a box yet, will have to make a trip to the Post Office soon. The other unfortunate thing is that apparently I have very few books of the popular variety. The most popular genres are mystery, suspense and action/adventure, and I don’t have a lot of those. If I do they were usually given to me, and I usually turn around and sell them. But I still have a couple so I will send those off. And at least now I know which genre of books to look for for the troops next time I go book hunting.

Book Project - Day 10 - Adventures of Tintin

Last weekend I was rereading my incomplete collection of Tintin comics, which brought me back to my golden childhood days of getting home from school at 1pm and spending the rest of the afternoon reading comics and drinking chocolate milk in my underwear.

If you’re unfamiliar with The Adventures of Tintin, it is a series of comic or graphic novels created by the Belgian artist Herge (Georges Remi). Originally started as a newspaper strip, the comics were then collected into the series’ 24 books, spanning from 1929 to 1976. Although relatively unknown in America, the series were and still is very popular in Europe and Asia.



The books were certainly among the favorites of me and my childhood friends in Indonesia as we grew up in the late 70s and 80s. The first Tintin book I had was Tintin in Tibet. I distinctly remember my dad coming home one day when I was in first grade and giving me that book. The Indonesian publisher of the series at the time was Indira, and their bookshop was just one block away from my dad’s office. Over time Indira also published and introduced us to many more European comics and graphic novels such as Asterix & Obelix (French), The Smurfs , Lucky Luke (both Belgian), and a bunch of others whose names I can’t remember.



In retrospect, though, it appears that the Indonesian edition of Tintin series were translated from the English version (most likely British) rather than from the original French version. Because the characters I knew as a kid had the translated-into-English names (Tintin’s white dog Milou became Snowy, and Tintin’s half-deaf scientist friend Prof. Tryphon Tournesol became Prof. Cuthbert Calculus).

I wasn’t as big into what I then called the American-style comic books at the time (except for DC’s Captain Carrot). No offense to Americans, I was still a big fan of American cartoons – I liked the Walt Disney comics and the cartoons of The New Yorker very much – I just wasn’t a big fan of super hero comics. Here in the US we have the terms “comic books” and “graphic novels”, which confused me for a while. Back in Indonesia, if they were narratives told in a series of illustrated panels, they were “comic books” to us.

I also preferred the graphics of the European comics to those of super hero comics, and this in turn has influenced my drawings both as a kid and now as an adult. In general, my preference tends to lean toward a simpler, more “cartoonish” graphics that’s more similar to comic strips rather than most comic books. Apparently Herge was a pioneer of this drawing style. Called “ligne claire” or “clear lines”, it is distinguished by its use of strong, clean lines and its lack of hatching (tonal or shading effects).

Note the difference here: Those shades that define Captain America’s thigh muscle, that’s an example of hatching.




From Tintin in Tibet


(That is not to say Franco-Belgian comics do not use hatching at all. As you can see, this one, The Adventures of Tanguy and Laverdure, about 2 pilots in the French Air Force, also uses hatching)



To my understanding Indira no longer publishes the Tintin series in Indonesia. The publisher is now Gramedia, the largest publisher in the country. From what I have been able to read online, there are several differences between the old Indira editions and the newer Gramedia editions. Among them is the book size. The old Indira editions were larger, almost quarto size (maybe 9” x 12”?), folio-style (stapled in the middle) and had paperback cover. In contrast, the newer Gramedia editions are smaller in size, bound and printed on glossy paper with hardback covers. They also contain 3 books in one album. I deduct then that the newer Gramedia editions are more like current editions available in the US from Little, Brown & Company, where each book contain 3 complete series with hard covers and a smaller 9 x 6.5 book format. I also read that the Gramedia editions translated the original French names instead of using the English names (the dog Milou becomes Milo now).

Book Project - Day 9 - Working Class Blues

Oops! I missed 2 days of entry. I was hardly home this weekend. So I guess I’ll just pick up where I left off.

Yesterday I attended a get-together for an online meet up group that I joined a couple of months ago. One of the other members who attended was a passionate union organizer and we got to talking about this book: Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs Most Americans Won’t Do by Gabriel Thompson.



I have heard of this book recently and had put it on my wish list, but I have not read it yet. It seems to be similar in concept to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, which I loved. If you are not familiar with it, Nickel and Dimed follows Ehrenreich as she spent several months working a number of minimum wage jobs such as house cleaner, Wal-Mart associate and waiter. Her objective is to document the working and living conditions of our working poor – those of us who holds full time jobs but still do not make enough to rise above poverty level.



In Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson spent a year working and living alongside undocumented workers in some of the most under-appreciated jobs – lettuce picker, restaurant worker, line worker at a chicken-processing factory, etc. So his premise is similar to Ehrenreich, but he focused specifically on undocumented workers and the working conditions and challenges they have to endure as a group who have no voice or recourse to demand justice because they operate in the shadow/margin of American society.

As I mentioned before, I have not read this book yet so I cannot tell you my opinion on the book yet. After last night’s discussion I really want to look for it in the library or find a cheap used copy so I can check it out pretty soon. The subject matter is something on which I have had a long interest.

Especially in our current economic condition, the middle class and the working class of America has been taking a beating with the loss or outsourcing of manufacturing and service jobs, the stagnation of wages, and the changes in workers-employers relationship. Despite the bleakness of our job markets, I disagree with those who blame this on the undocumented workers. I won’t go on too long about it, but for one, the majority of jobs taken by undocumented workers are menial, low-paying jobs that most American workers are reluctant to take. Since even low-paying jobs at large established employers such as McDonalds or Wal-Mart still ask for social security number, the low-paying jobs taken by undocumented workers are also those that exist in the margins (such as day laborer, seasonal farm worker and jobs at smaller, privately owned establishments). As such, these jobs typically offer compensations at or lower than living wages with likely no benefit, and where working condition or work place safety are difficult to regulate. Two, while countless rants and uproars have been raised on the subject of illegal immigrants who came to this country to “take our jobs,” too little objections (in my opinion) have been raised against companies who have outsourced American jobs overseas. In contrast to the marginal jobs taken my undocumented workers, jobs that have been outsourced in recent years include occupations that have been typically filled by American middle and working class workers such as manufacturing, customer and technical services, and creative services like graphic designs. Three, while some may defend the choices of companies to outsource their workers overseas to save money as an economic strategy and as their full right under the free market rule of capitalism, ultimately this very same reason of economic interest is also what motivates workers to come to this country illegally. Unfortunately, the only parties “allowed” to exploit this rule of economic self-interest are corporations.

Book Project - Day 8 - The Woman in the Zoot Suit

New Acquisition: The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism and the Cultural Politics of Memory by Catherine S. Ramirez

I work at a newspaper (not in any illustrious position, mind you) and although we no longer have a book editor or any regularly featured book review column we still receive quite a few books from publishers. Sometimes we also receive other media items such as CDs and even video games. Upon arriving these items are delivered to the editorial dept assistant. These she would either give away immediately or she would leave them at the lunch room table as fair game.

I have taken home quite a few of these free books – sometimes I snagged them from the lunch room and sometimes one of the advertising rep, who is friendly with the editorial assistant and often would receive books directly from her, would end up giving me the books she had received.

Yesterday there was a small pile of books on the lunch room table. Two of them were in Spanish, one was a photo book on dolphins, and there were a few others which I don’t remember. Only one struck my fancy and I took it.

I haven’t started reading it yet, but it seems like a good blend of LA history, subcultural study as well as gender study.



The zoot suit, a snazzy style of suit with baggy pants, was a popular attire among the Mexican pachucos of Los Angeles. Their female pachuca counterparts had their own style, but often wore the baggy pants (as in the book’s cover) or the same style of suit as the men. But while the pachucos have been the subject of studies, books, art and film, not much has been said of the experiences of the female pachucas or their place within the subculture. According to the publisher’s note, this book is the first to attempt to do so.

According to Duke University Press, the publisher:

“Catherine S. Ramírez draws on interviews she conducted with Mexican American women who came of age in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as she recovers the neglected stories of pachucas. Investigating their relative absence in scholarly and artistic works, she argues that both wartime U.S. culture and the Chicano movement rejected pachucas because they threatened traditional gender roles. Ramírez reveals how pachucas challenged dominant notions of Mexican American and Chicano identity, how feminists have reinterpreted la pachuca, and how attention to an overlooked figure can disclose much about history making, nationalism, and resistant identities.”

Like I said – sounds like an interesting book. A glimpse of Los Angeles in the 30s-50s, a look at the zoot suit subculture and the Pachuca women who challenged dominant gender identities, and a study of resistance all around. Can’t wait to crack it. I'll share my opinion when I do.

P.S.:
I hope this doesn’t offend anybody…but flipping through the books and looking at the pictures I noticed a striking similarity between the Pachuca style and the styles sported by the Hispanic girls and cholas I went to high school with. Coming from Indonesia at 15, this was my first glimpse of this style – the extremely curled and crunchy bangs, the super-thin drawn eyebrow, the black-lined lips, the big hair at the crown - and they puzzled me (nobody in high school looked like that in 21 Jump Street). Now I see that it has a long history.

Book Project - Day 7 - Punk Rock & The Ubermensch

I will keep this one short. Today’s topic is about 2 books that I have not read for a while, but they led to a turning point in my life as a young whippersnapper.

By young I meant 20, so not that young. I was a freshman in college, a Philosophy major who felt after not too long that discourses on philosophical theories for the sole purpose of arguing apart from any grounding in context are either insufferably tedious or way over my head (most likely the latter). I always fancied myself the intellectual type – ooh, I read Voltaire & Umberto Eco! – that self-propagated myth was soon dispelled.

In one of my lower level Philosophy class we read this book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. Can’t remember most of the book today, but I remember being intrigue by the discussion on the concept of the Ubermensch.



“Ubermensch” is sometimes translated as “super man.” But “Uber” is closer to “over” or “above” (Germany’s national anthem is “Deutschland Uber Alles” – Germany above all). I don’t think there is one neat consensus on what this concept means, and I hesitate to attempt to explain it in length here. But at the time I interpreted the concept as a person who is above the confining ideas or circumstances surrounding her/him. The concept advocates the creation of new values, and I took that to a more simplistic personal interpretation.

While some of the ideas in the concept relates to Nietzsche’s critical view of Christianity (the character Zarathustra challenges the view of withdrawing from the world in the hopes of other-worldly rewards), some of the ideas also challenges societal and cultural constricts. According to Sy Safransky in Nietzsche: “Nietzsche intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Übermensch to serve as a Machiavellian bogeyman to the modern Western middle class…”

I guess the idea is, in essence, about being a general shit-disturber? But since I was never much for kicking around shit for the sake of spreading stink, I applied the concept more modestly to my own context as a young person who looked eagerly to an existence away from my parents’ loving yet watchful eyes. I could already sense that at this time that I was at a cusp of change – growing out of my old skin – and I didn’t want to put my old skin back on.

The Ubermensch concept of the creation of new values, in my simple interpretation, advocates a forging for one’s own path and identity regardless of familial or societal expectations. For example: don’t be a Christian just because your parents are Christians. In short, your life – your choices, your beliefs, your mistakes, etc – should rests in your own hands. You can’t say you went into Accounting instead of welding because your parents thought it was better for you and now it’s their fault you’re miserable, because you’re ultimately responsible for the life you lead and the person you become.

Around the same time I was getting more into punk rock, this time assisted by Will, who used to copy his CDs into tapes for me. I was also Will who lent me this book, The Philosophy of Punk: More Than Noise by Craig O’Hara.



The book itself (or its origin) is a reflection of punk’s DIY philosophy: written by a D.C. punk, it originally circulated in photocopied & stapled format. As I recall it was not even intended to be a book; it was a term paper or something like that. But reading the book, while feasting on the noise and energy coming out of my bootleg tapes, shifted my world.

The punk ideologies – the DIY ethics and the refusal to trade personal values for wealth or status, among others – struck me as parallels or modern embodiments of the concept of the Ubermensch. The shit-disturber idea certainly fits, although I hate people who think being punk rock is an excuse to be assholes. I guess one can argue that being an asshole is in itself a challenge to societal expectations to be polite, but I’m resent disrespect when I haven’t done anything to warrant such treatment.

The concept of solitary pursuit of truth and meaning and self-construct were very attractive to me, a socially awkward kid who struggled between craving acceptance and not wanting to belong to anything stupid. Drunk on repeated listening of Rancid’s Let's Go album, this idea of constructing own values took root.

If Lars Frederiksen can say “When I heard GBH/I made my decision/punk rock is my religion” I would have to trace my turning point to that fortuitous convergence of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Philosophy of Punk and Rancid that led to my punk rock epiphany.



To those interested, free copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Philosophy of Punk are available online on Goggle Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=p2h1jVM6WJ4C&lpg=PP1&ots=9OLrLwUVTK&dq=thus%20spoke%20zarathustra&pg=PA6#v=onepage&q&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=rrsy2eOyypgC&lpg=PP1&dq=the%20philosophy%20of%20punk&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Book Project - Day 6 - Food Porn

I don’t know what to write today. I just want to go to sleep.
But I’m not going to cop out, so my topic for the day is: Food porn.

When I say that I didn’t mean porn involving food. Rather it’s a written description of food or a visual representation of food that evokes feelings of hunger, desire or craving toward that food. Same concept as X-rated porn except the object, in this case, is food instead of people, and the fantasy is of eating instead of shagging.

Fancy hardcover cookbooks make excellent food porn. Have you seen this one? (Ooh, child!!)



I sometimes like to peruse any of the cookbooks in my collection, my recipe folders or take out menus while I eat. But a Carl’s Jr. circular ad from the mailbox fits the bill too. Some may say this distracts me from enjoying my food, but it’s not like that to me. I like to read while I eat anyway. I can explain that to you but I would be straying from my topic.

While thinking of this topic I surprisingly realize that looking at food porn is something I have been doing since I was a kid. And although I can’t trace my memory back to my first instance I do recall clearly a series of books by a particular author that contain numerous descriptions of foods and has always fired up my fantasy for those foods as a kid. They were The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I’m sure most people are at least somewhat familiar with Wilder’s books of life on the early American frontier. What some reader might also have noticed is the abundance of descriptions of the foods her family ate. For example, in Little House in the Big Woods there are descriptions of how her family butchered a pig and the various foods they made from the wondrous animal – how they smoked the meat, how they made head cheese, how they roasted the curly tail as a snack.



But while most of the foods the Ingalls family ate in their various frontier homesteads were fairly humble, the foods her husband’s family ate in Farmer Boy were positively bacchanalian. A prosperous farmer family from New York, the Wilders nearly always end their meals with a pie of some kind. In one chapter of the book, the Wilder parents went away for a week, leaving their 4 children in charge of the house. They spent the week making and eating taffy, cakes & ice cream. Another chapter described the buffet of foods that the ladies had cooked for the annual fair, right down to the way the skin curled away from steaming boiled potatoes.

I know I’m not the only that derives such pleasures from reading Wilder’s books: Saveur, a food & cooking magazine, mentioned the Little House on the Prairie books in one of their Saveur 100 edition (I can’t remember which year) where each year they pick a list of their favorite 100 food related items/person.

I think the Pomona Public Library, which has a Laura Ingalls Wilder Children’s Room, should include a display of the various foods mentioned in Wilder’s book – similar to those plastic representations of the menu at some Japanese restaurant – perhaps as part of a larger diorama depicting different scenes from the books? Kids like food.

Another good one is this, Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky. As summed up by USA Today in its 2009 article on the book:

“It's based on reports, forgotten for more than 60 years, from the Depression-era Federal Writers Project. Part of the New Deal, it created work for writers, including a few who became famous, such as Welty (The Optimist's Daughter) and Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)...One of its last projects, begun in 1939, was a guidebook to local foods and eating traditions. It was to be called "America Eats," but it was abandoned in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, when federal resources shifted from social to military spending.”



The reports were presented as they are, unedited, and they contained a range of topics from “A Los Angeles Sandwich Called a Taco” to “Georgia Possum and Taters.” I didn’t find myself desiring a lot of the foods, but I did end up wanting a taco.

If you have a favorite book you can recommend do let me know. I’m always up for adding another book to my wish list.

Book Project - Day 5 - My Small Collection of Skinhead Books

George Marshall’s Spirit of 69: A Skinhead Bible

Anybody else have this book?

This is probably the most expensive book I have in my collection. I say that because it is currently out of print and any good copies left floating around are listed online for more than $100. Fortunately my copy is well worn, so even if greed should overcome me (which it hasn’t) I probably can’t sell mine for more that $50-$60. I’d much rather have the book anyway. This is one of my favorite, and in testament to that, it has never endured out-of-sight storage but has always kept an enviable spot in my bookcase.

This book was first published by ST Publishing out of Scotland in 1991. The author, George Marshall, is a skinhead whose endeavors in writing and publishing started from his fanzine Zoot, which he later turned into Skinhead Times. He eventually began publishing under ST Publishing. In addition to Spirit of 69 Mr. Marshall also wrote the book’s follow up Skinhead Nation, The Two Tone Story (which Will has) and Total Madness.

If you interested in the traditional skinhead culture (not racist boneheads), this book is an enjoyable read and a good resource. There are a few skinhead photo books out there, and in the US there are a number of books on skinheads as a gang, mostly focusing on the violent and racist lots. What sets this book apart is that Mr. Marshall wrote it for his fellow skins, “a view from within” as he called it. He covered everything from the history of the movement from the 60’s, its later development, a good coverage on the music from rock steady to Two Tone to Oi!, and an encyclopedia of skinhead fashion, all illustrated with tons of photos. I especially like the cover photos selection – the back cover shows very a sharp looking girl, and I must say an umbrella had never seemed to me so threatening.

I had bought this book at Rhino Record in Claremont in 1995 or 1996. I had wanted to get Skinhead Nation as well but didn’t have the money, and a subsequent effort to order it by mail from ST Publishing didn’t work out as they said they never received my order. I didn’t feel the urgency to get it then. Now I’m kicking myself because I can’t find it for less than $90. *sigh* One day.

I believe this book is currently regarded as one of the most comprehensive and definitive look at skinhead culture. I don’t know what the general opinion of the skinheads out there may be on this book, but to me this is certainly true. If nothing else because most other skinhead books I have come across either focus more on photographs with considerably less background and cultural information or are about boneheads.

I took this book with me when I went on an exchange program to England in the fall of 1996. My intention was to personally delve deeper into the skinhead culture, which didn’t end up happening as I had dreamed it would (the only skin I met at Cheltenham, where I was, was a racist and was visibly hostile to me). But I did get to read Susie Daniel’s The Paint House which they had at the college library, and I wrote my term paper on the influence of Jamaican culture on the British working class. It was essentially about skinhead, and I don’t think it went over too well. Most people to whom I mentioned my interest on skinheads at the time still brought out the National Front.

Other books on skinhead I own include this one, Nick Knight’s Skin:



And this one, Gavin Watson’s Skins:



Out of those two Gavin Watson’s book is the one I like best. While Nick Knight was a photographer who took some pictures of skinheads, Gavin Watson was a skinhead who took pictures of his mates. Mr. Watson continues to pursue photography, has published another book called Skins & Punks, and I still enjoy looking at his pictures.

If anybody else has any suggestion on other skinhead books, hit me up. My collection needs to grow. Are the Richard Allen books any good?

Book Project - Day 4 - Book vs E-Reader

Lesson learned #2: Don’t write blog entry while under the influence.

This is what happened on the last 2 entries when I pissed away the 2 hot days of the weekend when the temp topped over 100 degrees mostly sitting indoors with all the fans in the house working at full speed & getting baked. Needless to say, I spaced out a lot while writing them.

The topic of today is e-reader – whether it’s Kindle, Nook or what have you. I’m guessing most people who love books & reading have been asked at one point if they are getting an e-reader. I certainly have. My answer is “no.” But my rejection of the e-reader has been tempered quite a bit over the last few months; I have gone from a “Hell no!” to more of a “it’s just not for me” response.

While my allegiance still lies with the cumbersome book, I do recognize some advantages to the e-reader. For example, with the proliferation of public domain books and scanned copies on the internet there are a lot of books out there you can read for free. Some of the websites, like Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) has a ton of obscure books I’ve never heard of (Best British Sort Stories of 1922, anyone?) which is part of what makes it pretty cool. I found pdf copies online of 2 Ahmad Tohari novels from Indonesia that I had read as a teen. I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, since after 8 hours of sitting in front of a computer at work I’m not very likely to hop back on the computer at home to read a book. But that’s one case where an e-reader can be useful.

The exception to that is Kindle. I think the newer Kindle DX can read pdf files while the older Kindle 2 cannot unless it’s converted. I actually do have a few bones to pick with Amazon’s Kindle. I’m not sure if these issues are also present with Barnes & Nobles’ Nook, I haven’t looked into that one much yet, but here is my problem with Kindle:

Kindle books aren’t yours. When you buy a Kindle you are buying the device, and when you buy a Kindle book you are licensed to view that book on your device. If Amazon should decide to terminate their licensing agreement it has with a publisher, you also lose access to your book. An instance that illustrate this point happened not too long ago where a dispute arose between Amazon and the publisher who had agreed to license George Orwell’s “1984” as a Kindle version. Somehow the dispute led to the book being removed from Kindle’s catalog and thus, the book was also removed from the Kindle device of those people who had purchased it.
You also can’t lend your books to others, as your purchased book is only licensed to your particular Kindle. For example, if a friend of yours also has a Kindle you can’t transfer books between the 2 devices so you can read each other’s books. You can let them borrow your Kindle – but that’s like letting someone borrow your laptop for a few days. Why would you, and even if you would, for how long?

Kindle books can only be read on Kindle devices. If you have a collection of Kindle books and your reader take a shit, you will need to get another Kindle; you can’t switch to a different reader. If you decide not to then you just lost all those books you bought for it.

Here is my favorite rejection of the Kindle, courtesy of Patrick the Bookish Pinoy. Patrick clearly loves book and I enjoy reading his blogs.
http://www.syaoran.net/thebookishpinoy/2009/08/11-reasons-why-i-dont-like-the-amazon-kindle/

Aside from the above, I think there are valid reasons for getting an e-reader. As I mentioned above, plenty of books area available online for free. Also, books can create a lot of clutter, and this is something I am intimately familiar with. Some people don’t like to see their books take over their living space with joyful abandon. I do – but I also have an attack goose, so clearly my opinion on good housekeeping is worthless.

Which reminds me of a testimonial for the Kindle that I read on Amazon: this woman said she loves her Kindle because she can be assured of its sanitary quality, She said she doesn’t like used or library books because she doesn’t know where they have been.

Really? I guess that’s the opposite spectrum of the housekeeping issue. She probably wipes the bus bench with Purell before sitting down. Actually she probably doesn’t ride the bus anyway.

In the end, I don’t wish to demonize e-readers – although I think it looks douche-y.

Here are just some of the reasons why my loyalty still belongs to the printed book:

1) E-readers are electronic – Meaning it’s not cheap. Meaning it needs power or batteries to work. Meaning I must remember to keep it charged in case I get a sudden urge to read. Meaning it has delicate parts and can break. Meaning for a person like myself who likes books exactly for their easy portability, an e-reader just isn’t very practical. I can’t carry a reader around casually tucked into my pants or on a long bus trip, nor can I throw it at somebody should I get mad at them.

2) I can’t stack e-readers to form a night stand for myself or a fortress for my cat.

3) A book is so much more to me than the story it contains. It is an object, and to those who love it there is no limit to the elements of the object that maybe fixated upon. Just like some people who love cars may note things most others ignore, bibliophiles may note paper quality, binding, smell, etc. To me, in addition to being mental fodder books also provide tactile pleasure – the feel of the binding, the texture of paper. Flipping the pages of a new acquisition or examining the book before diving in evokes in me an expectant, restrained joy – like the week before a vacation trip. Or like foreplay. And some books have gotten stuck in my mind for tactile reason: the best smelling book I have ever read was a somewhat ratty paperback edition of “Madame Bovary” borrowed from the Moreno Valley Public Library. It smelled faintly sweet, almost like rosewater.

4) Books are still cheaper. Not when you’re one of those people who only buy new copies of the latest bestsellers, but if you’re a book freak (as Will called them) you have your spots and your hustle. Second hand stores (selling in person or on the internet), library sales, book-swapping sites – the only reason I pay full book price anymore is when somebody gives me a gift certificate to somewhere. Kindle books are still in the $8-$9 range, and there is no buying used Kindle books. The same titles can likely be found in used copies for much less.

5) Seriously – this is the simplest form of mass media. You don’t need power, you don’t need a screen, you don’t need to navigate through it. All you need are eyes that work. Just pick it up and read it. Why make it complicated?

6) Did I mention you can throw books at somebody when you get mad? With a little practice books make excellent projectiles and can inflict gratifying damage. Even paperbacks. Youtube tutorial to follow later.

7) Book’s obsolescence isn’t coming yet. Oh ye of little faith! You think since everything now exists in electronic form it means we have no more need for books? Think they’re tearing down the Library of Congress pretty soon? Not likely. The only reason we have electronic form of everything is because somewhere, somehow, a hard copy exist. And while no one will likely lament the day when not a single copy of “Bridges of Madison County” remains to exist, books will continue to exist and libraries will continue to exist even if only to serve as storage for our accumulation of printed knowledge and memory.
Your Kindle, on the other hand, will be nothing more than a joint-rolling surface in 5 years. Make it three.

8) Books already make good joint-rolling surfaces anyway. Especially those wide, heavy coffee table ones with lots of pretty pictures in them.

9) Coloring books. Hello? Do they have an e-coloring book yet?

10) Books, like people, have history. This obviously doesn’t apply to people who shun used books because they don’t know where they have been. But I personally love used books exactly because they have a history (which usually makes them cheaper, but not always). I love seeing signatures or book plates in a recently acquired book, finding notes or photos or a receipt or anything else that had been used as a quick bookmark between the pages. I don’t feel that I can reject a book for it having had another owner anymore than I can expect a new lover to have had no partner before me. Unless the book is completely trashed or the new lover comes with a previously contracted VD.

Book Project - Day 3 - What Do You Do With Your Books?

My books are starting to form piles around the house again. This means it's time for a clean up, and shuffling. Some of them will be relegated to the obscurity of the piles and boxes under my bed. Some get to stay on either of my 2 shelves

In a perfect world I would have a library, with lots of windows and a big couch I can nap on. Although not having one hasn't stopped me from getting more books. Most of them indeed occupy the space under my bed. I don't really mind except it's a hassle to look for a particular book when I don't know exactly where they are. Other than that I have the 2 shelves I had mentioned previously, I have some books in my closet and a couple of boxes of books I had lent to my mom at my parents' house.

That sounds excessive. And maybe it is. That will be a good topic of discussion for later. My question of the day is on the matter of storage that also facilitates easy access. So boxes in the basement would not fit the bill; shelves will. But what else can you do other than turn every wall in your house into a wall of books?



Although this one looks intriguing.



Actually I have a bookcase that I bought from the Habitat for Humanity store. I just need to repaint it. Then I can set to work rearranging my collection.

I love when people share pictures of their book arrangements online. I also love looking at bookshelf designs. A lot of them are clever rather than economic (in terms of how many books it can hold), still, I enjoy looking.

Book Project - Day 2 - New Acquisitions

Lesson learned #1: don't pick a broad subject when I don't have a lot of time.

That's what happened to yesterday's post. So today I will keep it brief. Today's post is about my visit to Borders this afternoon, to finally use the $25 gift certificate I received from a co-worker on my birthday. Will went with me, because the temperature topped 100 again and we figured we can milk a couple of hours of air-conditioning out of it. Which didn't happen, by the way. If I was on my own I could have milked 2 hours of the visit, easy. But Will isn't so enamored with book stores as I do, so I refrained from perusing every shelves of every aisles and back again.

My first intention was to look for a guidebook for Melbourne, for our upcoming trip in October. I didn't end up being too impressed with any of the ones on the shelves, although I still walked out with 3 books. So here are my most recent purchase:



"Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink" - David Remnick, ed.

I've always liked the combination of articles and cartoons in The New Yorker. I'm rather indifferent to some of the articles that focused on local happenings (because I can't relate), but some of my favorite articles/stories/cartoons (and one poem I had committed to memory-although I had long since forgotten the author) have come from The New Yorker, and I have a collection of clipped illustrations & articles I had ripped out. This looks like a nice little collection of food and dining articles; I look forward to reading it. I hope this will prove to be much-needed consolation prize after my last acquisition yielded already 3 duds that I could not even endure to finish. This somehow feels less like a sin now than it did when I was younger, when I finished every book I picked-up out of a sense of duty. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Anyway. My second acquisition:



"The Clash" aka The Searing-Pink Clash Book

I had been aware of this book for a while, put it on my Amazon wish list but haven't been in a hurry to get it. Recently 2 friends mentioned that they had found it somewhere for 5 bucks. One of them said Borders. So Will wanted to check and sure enough, Borders had the books there for $5.99. It's written by the remaining members of The Clash and, I read, contains previously unseen materials. I haven't dived into it yet. The choice of color is a bit surprising.

My third acquisition:



"Weird California" - Greg Bishop, et al.

I have "Weird U.S." of the same series. An entertaining enough collection of local legends and curiosities , although sometimes the entries seem redundant. But for the purpose of casual reading it serves well.

This was the last copy on the shelf and the paperback cover was completely detached from the book. Will suggested inquiring about some discount. I did and they gave me 15% off. Not much considering the condition of the book, but better than nothing. I could have put it back but I thought I still got a good deal.

That's my book adventure for the day.

Book Project - Day 1 - Tales from Djakarta

I need some kind of a project.

Mind you, I have lots of project ideas. But they all require time, to plan and to execute. I want something I can do between dinner and bedtime, something I can do at work for a few minutes while things are slow. Researching trip destinations is usually a fun one, and we are heading to Melbourne in October. But I don't want to kill Melbourne yet.

So my idea is to do a 30 consecutive days of blog entry on books - books I've read, books I want, book sales, my experience with book, etc. We'll see if I actually keep it up for 30 days (since I have a nasty habit of not finishing what I started), but that's part of the reason I want to do this.

Hence, my first entry: "Tales from Djakarta" by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (PAT). I am currently re-reading this collection of short stories, set in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, in the 1950s.



Pramoedya is likely Indonesia's most well-known writer, partly (I think) due to his long and unjustified detention & exile at Buru Island, where he conceived his most famous opus: the 4 novels of the Buru Quartet. Originally narrated orally to his fellow prisoners because he was forbidden to write and did not have access to writing supplies, the novels only saw the light of day only after Pram's fellow prisoners began surreptitiously procuring papers for him, and later they smuggled his written works out. This true story of creation and perseverance in the face of total oppression lent Pram a kind of a mythical hero persona, something which drew many people, myself included.

Many of PAT's works are not uplifting. The stories in this collection, subtitled "Caricatures of Circumstances and Their Human Beings," are a bouquet of heartbreaks, dire circumstances, slow death and poverty. The stories were written at a time when Indonesia was experiencing a painful shift from the fiery hopes and idealism of the revolution for independence. People like PAT, who were fervent supporters of the Republic, were frustrated and disappointed with the corruption and backbiting that quickly took hold among the new Indonesian governing bodies and political landscape. After fiercely fighting to throw off the yoke of occupation to reclaim the country for their own people, they proved to be no better at governing and no less corrupt than their oppressors. The people in these stories are no better off under the rule of their fellow Indonesian than they were under the Dutch or the Japanese. Ignorance, illiteracy and poverty plague were their lot as they had been the lot of many other before them, and will likely continue to be the lot of plenty other in the future.


For more on Pramoedya Ananta Toer, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramoedya_Ananta_Toer


Here's an interesting thesis paper by Stephen Miller on PAT's role in Indonesian Politics:
http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/asianlang/indonesian/pdf/pram_pol.pdf