At the New York Times, David Pogue has a smart column comparing and contrasting Amazon's Kindle and BN.com's new eBook store. While Amazon wants customers to buy and read everything via its own proprietary channels (built around the Kindle), Barnes & Noble is going the open-format route, making its titles available to be read on everything from PCs to BlackBerries. For the moment, Pogue is giving Amazon the higher grade, despite its recent missteps. But this era we're living through reminds me a hell of a lot of the caged death match epoch of the 1980s when the VHS trounced the Betamax for video recording supremacy. There can be only one!
North Woods for Sale
Over at my day job the environmental writer Robert Kimber has a provocative essay about the changes sweeping through the Maine North Woods: an area larger than the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. Over the past two decades, the paper companies who once controlled these millions of acres (and generally took a custodial approach to them) sold their sizable holdings to investment banks and real estate developers focused on turning short-term profits. Kimber laments what these changes have already meant for a place he calls:
A place of exquisite beauty, complexity, and variety, of headwater streams and mountain vistas, of gray jays and winter wrens, of huge old yellow birches too big for two men to wrap their arms around, of ravens quorking, moose swimming across Attean Pond, of rhodora and Labrador tea, and on and on. If you can’t thrill to this place, you’re dead on your feet. It’s not a “resource,” it’s not “the environment,” it’s a ten-million-acre miracle, one with plenty of nicks, scrapes, and deep wounds in it, but a miracle nonetheless....
Bob's essay is a barbed piece of writing that echoes some of my own preoccupations in The Poacher's Son.
Moose on the Loose
In my monthly column for Down East I once observed that, "Every interesting place in the world seems to exist at a nexus between reality and some Looney Tunes version of itself. So the price you pay for living there — or here — is that outsiders form half-baked ideas about your state that are, alas, not altogether incorrect."
Today was one of those days in Camden.
First Hemingway, Now Carver
I posted last week about the ruckus over the republication of an redacted version of Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. Now comes word of the republication of many of the late Raymond Carver's short stories in significantly different forms. The situations are quite different. From what I've read, Carver always disapproved of many of the cuts forced upon him by his bullying magazine—and later book—editor Gordon Lish. So you can't really blame his wife and executrix Tess Gallagher for wanting to bring out a new volume of Carver's work in their "original" versions. That said, count me in the category of Carver fans who prefer the Lish-pruned What We Talk About When We Talk About Love to Carver's last original collection, the "expansive" and "generous" Cathedral.
And, I'm sorry, Beginners is not a very interesting name for a book of stories, while What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (or WWTAWWTAL, if you're texting) is fookin' brilliant.
Whither the Warden Service?
Over at my day job, conservation journalist Roberta Scruggs makes an impassioned case for a top-to-bottom reform of the Maine Warden Service. A former writer for the Portland Newspapers and independent reporter, Roberta has been writing about the Warden Service for something like two decades, and she's earned more than a few enemies among wardens who didn't appreciate the way she kept pressing awkward questions. She also won many friends among wardens who respected her doggedness. In the process, Roberta uncovered real scandals and performed a true service for the State of Maine, since the whole purpose of having an independent press is to hold public servants accountable to the people who pay their salaries. (In the interest of full disclosure: after I finished writing The Poacher's Son, I submitted a copy to her for feedback, and she helped me correct several errors.) I haven't yet read the George Smith essay she alludes to in the September issue of the Maine Sportsman, but I'll be watching my mailbox as will, I'm sure, more than a few game wardens.