Multitudes of eBook Readers

October 28, 2009 By 3 Comments

How many eBook readers are out there? Do you read eBooks with an eBook reader? I don’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to. I tried loading text files on to my iPod. That was shear misery. I don’t wish that on anyone – well, maybe my worst enemy I would. Reading a text file on an iPod is like a heroin addict sniffing glue. The high is painful at best, and terribly destructive to the eyes and the brain.

Oh eBook, let me list the kinds: Sony Portable Reader, Bookeen Cybook Opus, PocketBook 301, 302, 360, HanLIn eBook V5, Polymer Vision Radius, Hanvon WISE Readers (a whole family), Azbooka WISE Reader, Amazon Kindle, COOL-ER Classic, txtr reader GmbH, NUUTbook Neolux, iriver Story, Barnes and Noble Nook, iTex DR800SG, iLiad, Digital Reader 1000, Astak Mentor Electra, Plastic Logic Que, and many older devices.

And you expect me to make a buying decision on what? Color? Size? Who knows how long these devices are supposed to last? If I buy one now, I already know it will be obsolete by February (probably as soon as I test drive it, it will be obsolete). Some features standout. The Sony Portable reader comes in pretty colors. That’s important. A 5 inch reader fits in my bag easier than a 6 inch reader. But my old eyes can see the screen on a 6 inch reader better than on a 5 inch reader.

  • Weight -  The device can’t be heavy. It has to be light enough for me to lug around, and yet it also has to be sturdy.
  • Touch screen – I like using a stylus on the Nokia N97 phone. So I anticipate that I’ll like a touch screen on a reader.
  • Memory – this is probably the most important feature in my book. I want to store lots and lots of books. I’m always in the middle of reading 2 or 3, sometimes 4.
  • Interface – this is second most important. How am I going to get my eBooks onto the device? If I have to mess around with lots of drivers, forget it.
  • Supported formats – this is right up there with memory. No, I do not want to be limited to Kindle format. Can I get a reader that supports all formats? Don’t think so.
  • Font size – my old eyes need help. This can be a deciding factor if all other factors are equal.
  • Text to Speech – this is not important to me. But, however, wait a minute, as soon as I get one without text to speech I’m sure there will be a great need to have it.

Notice I said nothing about price? They all run in the same range, which is why I have not yet purchased one. Sigh, anyone want to give me an eBook reader to test? I’ll try my best to use it in adverse conditions. I’ll test boundary conditions. Until the time I scrape up the money (or someone takes pity on my poor whining self) I’ll have to be content with drool laden pictures of the latest eBook readers.

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Inbetween, Then on to Bennington College

October 26, 2009 By 2 Comments

(by Joseph Kaufman)

And so in 1975, after two years at the University of Vermont, my close friend transferred to Vassar and I took a year off and flew to Israel. I lived on two kibbutzim, Ein Charod M’euchad and Gevulot, where I drove tractors in orange groves and stamped sun-warmed cotton in big steel-mesh containers in Jordan valley dusks.
I remember warm gin-and tonics at a dusty truck stop, remarkable peanuts-in-the-shell at the Afula bus station, the blue, car-mechanic-like uniforms of the kibbutz volunteers, the simple, starchy food, the freezing winter nights, the Israelis’ barking hospitality, and how one person mooned the entire ulpan class as he spoke to the unawares Hebrew teacher.

Post-kibbutz, I traveled to Greece and then Spain and flew home and spent the summer working as a cook at the now-defunct Grossinger’s. I recall the short Jewish maitre d’ with the grim visage of an executioner, the unflappable Chinese cooks who knew the laws of kashrut, the elegant black waiter, Tony G., who drove a Thunderbird and could carry forty mains stacked on a tray on his fingertips, the late-night, cigarette-and-scotch deluged, high-stakes Puerto Rican poker games, the college waiters and waitresses, the French sou-chefs, the seersucker suit that I wore in my off hours that made me look, in retrospect, like a popsicle salesman. And I can picture the scads of overweight guests—for what did one do in the Borscht Belt in those days except eat?—the bad comedians (the only thing sadder than a bad comedian is two of them), the over-cheerful entertainment aides, the kitschy entertainment director himself who was ‘world famous’ for his comedic rendition of ‘Simon Says.’ As well, there was an every-other-day diving show at the main pool where a girl and boy from the University of Michigan diving team did fancy aerial twists and somersaults. It was impressive to see such athleticism so close-up and I got a crush on the girl, naturally, and in order to meet her I asked the pair of them to teach me how to dive. Which ended up being the scariest thing I’d ever done up until that time.

In the fall of 1976, my brother-in-law of the time and sister drove me to Bennington College, a campus of white clapboard houses set in rural Vermont. The college had gone co-ed only seven years before and there were 450 women and approximately 150 men. There was a strong air of women’s lib washing through the performance halls and dining rooms and louche morals and intense, self-absorbed creativity. The girls were pretty, studiously unimpressed by men, affairs between student and faculty members were encouraged, the food, as they say in Pittsfield, was good enough for government work, and there was a decent pool table in the student café. It was disconcerting at first to share a bathroom with three women, but after so much traveling and working, the prospect of writing with Bernard Malamud in the college’s tranquil but charged atmosphere, not to mention the other fascinating courses and array of talented people, seemed perfect to me. I’d not been around such a community of people, where hard creative work was the air that one breathed. And it was this seriousness about one’s development as an artist which was so enticing, something which I’d never encountered before.

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Early Literary Influences

October 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

(by Joseph Kaufman)

The Pittsfield, Massachusetts of the sixties that I grew up in was a blue-collar enclave of Catholics and Protestants. It was hardly a literary hotbed though Normal Mailer lived for a while in Stockbridge and William Shirer in Lenox. Historically, in the late nineteenth century, Hawthorne and Melville resided collegially in the Berkshires, though Melville, as he was composing Moby Dick about ten minutes from the house where I grew up, scared Mrs. Hawthorne with his wild appearance and energies. Henry James would visit Edith Wharton at her estate, which was called “The Mount”, and Emerson and Thoreau were also known to pass through.

And though Pittsfield in the Woodstock era was hardly anyone’s idea of Brook Farm, I was raised in a literary household—my mother remains well-read and my father had gone for a PhD in literature at the University of Michigan. My mother gave me my first book of Malamud stories, “The Magic Barrel”, when I was about fourteen. I remember reading them as I lay on a short divan in our living room, Verdi on the turntable, my father at the desk behind me paying bills. I read the stories again and again. And then, “The Assistant”. “The Fixer”. “The Natural”. “Idiot’s First”. I branched out into Bellow and Singer and Roth but always came back to Malamud. Bellow’s style was richer, his authorial voice far more urbane.

Singer was more fanciful and exotic; Roth more provocatively sexual; and though Malamud stories were, objectively, grim, they resonated with me as presenting a greater, more transcendent reality than these other writers, texts which were both more deeply felt and morally engaged. For despite these stories’ limited venues—a tenement room, a jail cell, a grocery—there was always present the hint and whiff of Biblical grandeur. And so from early on, I wanted to meet this morally stern and ascetic, monkish Vermont writer.

He taught at Bennington College, a girl’s school gone recently coed, a course in short story reading and writing in the spring. My chance presented itself when a close friend at the University of Vermont transferred to Vassar and the prospect of remaining alone in Burlington, Vermont seized me in chilled alarm. Thus I decided to transfer to Bennington College where I imagined bowing down at Mr. Malamud’s feet and begging him to rework my rock ‘n roll-infected mind into the sensibility of a serious artist’s. Bennington College accepted me for the spring semester, I ended up taking the year off and living in Israel, and began school the following fall. I was to meet the great man for the first time in March, 1976.

I’ll speak about all that next week as well as the existential issues that meeting and befriending such a serious writer raised and continues to raise in my own life.

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How I Didn’t Go To Woodstock

October 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

(From Joseph Kaufman)
The roots of The Legend of Cosmo & the Archangel took place in August, 1969. I was 13 and a junior counselor at a day camp for boys called Camp Sumner, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Sumner was an old camp, my father as a boy had gone there before me, and it was located on Lake Pontoosuc, originally home of the Pontoosuc Indians. It was a Friday afternoon, the boys were all driven home on their yellow buses, and dust from all the tires still hung in the air. My senior counselor, an 18 year old fellow named David Weeks, asked me if I wanted to go to Woodstock.

I asked, “What’s Woodstock?”

He said, “A music festival.”

I asked, “Where is it?”

He said, “In upstate New York, about 3 hours from here.”

I asked, “Who’s playing?”

He said, “Santana, Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, Crosby Stills Nash and Young.”

I said, “Sounds great.”

He asked, “So, you want to go?”

I asked, “When are you going?”

He said, “Right now.”

I asked, ‘Right now?”

He said, “Right now. Do you want to come?”

I said, “I have to ask my mother first.”

And he wagged his hand dismissively at me, “Ah, you little Momma’s boy, get out of here.”

And that’s how I didn’t go to Woodstock. And, still, I didn’t remember the incident until many, many years later when I was driving home from shul and heard on the radio the Crosby Stills Nash and Young song about going to Woodstock. And as I drove and sang along with the radio—how many times had I heard the song?—for the first time the music evoked in me a jealousy that I hadn’t been born five-or-so years earlier. For, five years of age difference in 1969 was a difference of a generation: eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids had to deal with the Viet Nam war and the draft as well as all of the country’s wrenching politics and radical cultural shifts—the music, the dress, the sexual revolution, women’s lib. And it produced a maturity in those older baby boomers that us younger ones never quite got. And I was envious of their exposure, their opportunity, their maturity, this great chance at life. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up ball ever since. And that was compelling to me and I wanted to write about that—about them.

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Joseph Kaufman “Roots”

October 7, 2009 By 3 Comments

My sisters would wear their best dress coats and I would brush my hair and wear a tie when my mother’s parents, wealthy Jews from the City, neighbors of Marlene Dietrich on east 52nd street, sent a limousine to Pittsfield to gather us up. We were the country bumpkins of the family, exiled to the Berkshires after my mother married the son of a toy salesman who was, in this stern grandfather’s pronouncement, “swarthy, with a prominent nose.” These grandparents’ apartment smelled like baked potatoes, the Little Rascals were on black-and-white TV, and there was a forbidding height down to the street where, when no was looking, I spit. We were taken to museums, parks, Broadway shows, other places of betterment, expected to dress for dinner – no elbows allowed on tabletops – and often taken to the best restaurants of New York and expected to remember what the French or Spanish on the menus meant.

Such sophistication only reinforced my sense of us as a segment of family exiled from “True Life”, relegated to the hillocks, lakes, woods, insects, and other infestations of rural Massachusetts. It took many years to appreciate the emotional health that was bestowed by being raised in what felt like a blue collar isolation tank and the simple activities of rural life: shimmying up trees, trout fishing, good country hardball, sandlot tackle football, skiing, sledding down the hermit’s driveway, ice skating in the city square, country fairs, spaghetti dinners at The Busy Bee, steak sandwiches at The Rainbow. But, of course, there were the learned pleasures of country living, too: Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony and, one time, Duke Ellington, Melville’s Arrowhead, Hawthorne’s house in Lenox, the Berkshire Museum, the greater oddities of Alice’s Restaurant, Mundy’s bar, Officer Obie, Bonnie Raitt and Leo Kotke concerts at the Music Inn.

Like my father before me, I was born and raised in in this GE town of 40,000 where Jack Welch started out, located one hour west of Springfield and one hour east of Albany. I attended the same summer camp and high school as my father. My grandparents raised their children in Pittsfield and my great grandparents lived there as well. All of us so far – great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins – are buried in the Pittsfield Cemetery. We have been living in the Berkshires for over 100 years, a rare statement for any Jew to be able to make. Pittsfield remains an amalgam of Irish, Polish, Italian, WASP, and Jew. There remain the Elks, the Masons, the war veterans, and Pittsfield people are still very nice.

My father’s mother, who lived near us in Pittsfield, was a Yankee, a short woman of great stature who would not allow liquor into her house and refused to listen to a bad word about anyone, while my father, the son of this Jewish woman, is a retired, Calvinist-work-ethic businessman. I inherited this work ethic if not that ban on alcohol, both of which served me well during the many-year writing of “The Legend of Cosmo and the Archangel”. The hours, the revisions, the heartache of rejections, the attempt to develop a style that could speak about many things in a deeper way – it all came partly from the experience of Bennington College and the tutelage of Bernard Malamud, the Peace Corps in Africa, yeshiva in Israel, the years working for my father at Kay Bee Toys. But even more than my post-Pittsfield life, the development of style is, in large part, the temperament that was forged from the pine and elm and barbecues of long-ago childhood, the lifelong sense of trying to punch my way out of Paradise.

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