Richard Wright
Richard Wright is justly remembered as one of America’s pioneering modern black writers. His novel Native Son and memoir Black Boy paved the way for Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and others to follow. What’s less known: He is among the earliest and best American haiku poets.
It’s amazing the things you don’t learn in school. When I was taught haiku in high school in the early 1970s, it seemed the form had been around forever. It was, in fact, still brand new. American writers had been trying to compose haiku in English only since the 1950s, when the Beats, especially Gary Snyder and Jack Keruoac, experimented with it.
No one took to the simple, arduous Japanese poetry form like Wright, who died in Paris in 1960 at the age of 52. During the last year of his life–disillusioned, health deteriorating — he wrote an astounding 4,000 haiku.
“I am nobody:
A red sinking sun
Took my name away.”
Wright became fascinated with haiku in 1959, when a South African friend lent him R.H. Blyth’s landmark four volume study of Japanese poetry, Haiku. Unlike some English-language haiku poets — Kerouac, for example — Wright almost always adhered to the strict form of three lines totaling 17 syllables, five in the first line, seven in the second, five in the third.
For comparison, here is a poem by the classical Japanese poet Basho, who lived in the 17th century:
“A day of quiet gladness,
Mount Fuji is veiled
In misty rain.”
Wright found haiku, with its Zen-inspired simplicity and clarity, a relief from the griefs and disappointment of life. Baldwin had turned against him. His mother had recently died, and so had Albert Camus, one of his best friends. His health was failing, and an unfinished book about racial tensions on U.S. Army bases had exhausted him.
“Keep straight down this block
Then turn right where you will find
A peach tree blooming.”
Wright also found haiku a new and liberating way to express his characteristic theme — the problem of being black and American in the pre-Civil Rights era. Of course, these themes are by necessity elliptical.
“An Indian summer
Heaps itself in tons of gold
Over Nigger Town.”
The mix of beauty and social oppression in that brief poem still has the power to take your breath away. Even the most despised of society, it suggests, still have access to the grace of the natural world. And yet, an entire history of race hatred and exploitation are contained in the three words of the final line.
“The green cockleburs
Caught in the woolly hair
Of the black boy.”
But Wright also wrote haikus to express simple beauty or pleasure or even humor. This is one of my favorites:
“Coming from the woods
A bull has a sprig of lilac
Dangling from a horn.”
I could share Wright’s haiku with you for the rest of the day, but instead you can find examples and additional information at ahapoetry.com and Terebes Asia Online.
Wright never received his due as a major American poet and haiku master, which of course is both predictable and sadly appropriate, given the racial hardships of his time. A few of Wright’s haiku were published in the early ‘6os, and before he selected the 817 he considered his best before he died.
But these were not collected into a book until 1997, when Arcade published Haiku: This Other World.
I propose we honor Richard Wright, and Black History Month, by writing a few haiku of our own. If you feel up to the challenge, please share your efforts with us here in the comments section.
If not, I urge you to read some of Wright’s own poems. This wounded warrior for art and justice deserves our attention and admiration, half a century after his untimely passing.
Dave Eggers
Since Dave Eggers emerged on the literary scene in 2000, I’ve viewed the wunderkind with grudging admiration. Sure, he’s an enormous talent, but I choked on the smug self-regard and irony that came with it. Today’s news of Timothy McSweeney’s death tips the scale away from grudge and toward admiration.
Who is Timothy McSweeney? I’d always assumed he was another Eggers affectation, a name made up to provide a characteristically cute title for the literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (better known as McSweeney’s), the daily lit and humor website, McSweeny’s Internet Tendency, and the publishing house, McSweeney’s.
Had I read McSweeney’s, as friends urged me to over the years, I might have known that Eggers claimed his various literary enterprizes were named for a real person. More than once, apparently, Eggers told the story of how his mother received odd letters and miscellany from a man named Timothy McSweeney, who claimed to be her brother.
Eggers’ mother dismissed the letters as the work of a disturbed person she did not know, but the boy Dave, fascinated, read them carefully and saved the letters in a drawer.
When Eggers founded a journal in 1998 for stories, poems and essays outside the literary mainstream, he named it for Timothy McSweeney.
“We didn’t know if he was real—if there was a real person named Timothy—but in any case the name Timothy McSweeney came to hold an aura of mystery,” Eggers writes.
It was not until 2000 that Eggers learned the truth behind the letters and the life of the man who had sent them. I strongly suggest you read Eggers’ brief account of the story, but the gist is this: Timothy McSweeney was a promising young artist felled by intractable mental illness. He spent most of his adult life in an institution, where he wrote letters to people sharing his last name (Eggers’ mother’s maiden name was McSweeney).
Timothy McSweeney died on Jan. 24 at the age of 67. His family sent Eggers a touching note, part of which reads: “By encouraging and celebrating self-expression, McSweeney’s, its contributors, and its readers already offer the most fitting tribute possible to Timothy’s life”
Okay, I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night, and my inner reporter forces me to consider this may all be another clever Eggers’ spoof. It’s a good story, charming and sad — perhaps too good. But I don’t think so.
For one thing, the details have the homey ring of truth, like a frayed and stained antimacassar neatly folded in your great-grandmother’s trunk. For another, sometimes you just have to choose against cynicism.
Ayn Rand, tweaking her brains out?
Life magazine has posted a striking slide show, titled Famous Literary Drunks and Addicts, that raises anew questions about the relation of drugs, drink and creativity.
Writers, poets and artists, a fragile lot to begin with, have always been prey to the notion that inspiration can be found in a bottle, or a needle, or an opium bowel. But can it?
Possibly the greatest thing ever said about drugs and alcohol is Lily Tomlin’s remark, “Reality is a crutch for people who can’t deal with drugs.”
And the most glamorous might be Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous lines, “My candle burns at both ends / It will not last the night / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends / It gives a lovely light!” It’s hard to image a more lovely justification for destructive drinking.
As a youth I bought into the prevailing counterculture “truth” that drugs open a “door to perception.” William Blake was widely quoted as justification: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Maybe so, I realized in sober middle age, but the ditches are littered with the corpses of those who didn’t make it.
Life’s terrific collection of pictures is worth visiting if only for the outstanding images. Familiar figures — Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand, John Berryman, Dorothy Parker, James Baldwin, Kingsley Amis, Jack London–are shown in little-known pictures. Others — Baudelaire, Fitzgerald, Poe — are presented in their iconic images. It’s an effective mix.
A few surprises: Ayn Rand was addicted to speed? Louisa May Alcott was an opium addict? Another surprise: Of the 36 writers represented, the overwhelming majority sought inspiration or escape in that least exotic of substances, alcohol.
Some died well before their time (Jack Kerouac, James Agee, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, F. Scott Fitzgerald), while others saw their talents rot under the constant application of drugs and drink (Hemingway, Truman Capote, Kingsley Amis, Hunter S. Thompson).
A surprising number quit drinking or using drugs, either on their own or with help, thereby regaining their artistic powers. Among them: John Cheever, Dashiell Hammett, J.P. Donleavy, Jean Cocteau, Eugene O’Neill.
Inspired by Life’s gallery, I found a couple of websites discussing the pros and cons of alcohol and drug use among writers. Sean French, in a 2000 essay at The New Statesman, examines the issuse with wit and insight. At Talent Development Resources, you can find a wealth of provocative quotes on the subject.
For example: “What I need is clarity. Even not having enough sleep is a problem for me, never mind doing any kind of drugs.” -Film director David Cronenberg.
“Smoking grass eased the strain for me.” — Poet Maya Angelou.
“For Art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indespensable: intoxication.” — Friederich Nietzsche
So what do you think? Do drugs and alcohol aid literary creativity or destroy it?
Wole Soyinka
You might think Islamic terrorists are bred in, say, Afghanistan. Or maybe Pakistan. Yemen? Nobel Prize-winning author and activist Wole Soyinka says the place most likely to produce radicalized Muslims willing to blow themselves up is Britain.
“England is a cesspit,” Soyinka tells The Daily Beast. “England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it.”
Soyinka’s remarks come in response to fellow Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day attempt to bring down a jetliner by lighting a bomb in his underwear.
While most of his criticism is leveled at the U.K., Soyinka condemns the U.S. decision to place Nigeria on the terrorist watch list.
“That was an irrational, knee-jerk reaction by the Americans,” Soyinka said. “The man did not get radicalised in Nigeria. It happened in England, where he went to university.”
Playwright, novelist and poet, Soyinka became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1986). Born in 1934 to a Christian family — his father was a clergyman and headmaster of a school — Soyinka has been a leading Nigerian democratic activist, spending time in prison and in exile.
According to The Guardian, the attempted Christmas Day bombing “has helped to raise fears that some British universities are becoming places in which young Muslims are radicalised.” Abdulmutallab, 23, was engineering student at the University College, London between 2005 and 2008, reports the Nigerian newspaper Punch.
“I doubt you can have the kind of indoctrination schools in America as you do in the UK,” Soyinka says. “Besides, there’s a large body of American Muslims in the US – the Nation of Islam – which has created a kind of mainstream Muslim institution.”
Riazat Butt, the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, attempts to refute Soyinka’s assertions in a blog post, arguing that Britain has laws against the preaching of hate. She questions the claim Abdulmutallab was radicalized in an English university. And she challenges Soyinka’s characterization of the Nation of Islam as an “antidote” to Islamic fundamentalism.
Soyinka laments religious violence in Nigeria, a country evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. “Roaming hordes of killers are entering homes and dragging out people of other faiths and hacking them to death. In my youth, you heard, side-by-side, the church bells ringing and the beautiful, sonorous call to prayer of the muezzin.”
The current phase of world religious violence began in 1989, Soyinka says, when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued the infamous fatwah calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses offended Muslim sensibilites.
“There was an escalation,” Soyinka says. “The assumption of power over life and death then passed to every single inconsequential Muslim in the world—as if someone had given them a new stature.
“Al Qaeda is the descendent of this phenomenon.”
Soyinka’s solution? “Education. And rigorous punishment for those who feel, not ‘I’m right, you’re wrong,’ but ‘I’m right, you’re dead.’”
Coming to a post office near you, the Calvin and Hobbes stamp.
As the world says goodbye to one famous recluse (and starts the feast on his corpse), another pokes his head out of the shadows for a quick “Hi!” Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, tells the Cleveland Plain Dealer he has “no regrets” about ending the beloved comic strip.
“By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I’d come there to say,” says the genius cartoonist, who is often compared to J.D. Salinger.
Can it really be 15 years since Calvin and Hobbes went away? Watterson ended the strip in 1995 at the height of its popularity, syndicated in more then 2,400 newspapers. In a brief note, he cited changing interests, the burden of deadlines and shrinking panels.
As reporter John Campanelli notes in an accompanying story, the demands of fame played a role in Watterson’s decision. He quotes a 1987 interview in which Watterson said he was “shell shocked” by the sudden attention: “The celebrity aspect of the job has taken me aback and I really can’t stand it.”
In another related story, Sun Newspapers executive editor Linda Kinsey remembers Watterson’s earlier career as a brilliant political cartoonist. It includes samples of the work.
Readers devoted to the strip took the loss personally (not me!). For some, the mourning hasn’t ended.
“Still, people come up to me, and they grieve the loss of Calvin and Hobbes,” says Lucy Caswell, curator of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University, where all but about a hundred of Watterson’s more than 3,000 original strips are housed.
Still living in the Cleveland area, Waterson agreed to an email exchange. Campanelli did not actually sit down with the artist for a traditional interview
Watterson’s wit comes through nonetheless. When Campanelli compares his fame to that of a rock star, Watterson replies, “Ah, the life of a newspaper cartoonist — how I miss the groupies, drugs and trashed hotel rooms!”
But Waterson says celebrity has faded, allowing him to go about his business — proud of the strip, grateful for its success, flattered that people still read it. “But I wrote Calvin and Hobbes in my 30s,” he says, “and I’m many miles from there.”
The USPS will issue a Calvin and Hobbes postage stamp later this year. Campanelli asks Watterson how soon he’ll send a letter with one
“Immediately,” Watterson replies. “I’m going to get in my horse and buggy and snail-mail a check for my newspaper subscription.”
If you’re like me, all this does is make you miss Calvin and Hobbes anew. Don’t you hate it when some sober adult puts things in perspective?
“It seems to me that any creative person has the right to decide if they are or they are not going to make their art,” Caswell says. “We on the outside can’t judge whether or not it was the right thing for him.”
Len Deighton -- can a thriller win the Man Booker Prize?
You’d think the English would be adept at all things having to do with books, writing, reading. But news of a decision to award a “Lost Man Booker Prize,” a mere 40 years late, is shaking my Angophiliac faith in British rectitude, propriety and commonsense. Who’s in charge over there — Benny HIll?
I mean, the announcement a Man Booker Prize will finally be given for 1970(!) could signal that justice is being served for the 22 authors stiffed way back then. Or it could mean the Man Booker Prize has become the most gimmicky literary award in the world.
As Sam Jones explains in The Guardian, the Man Booker changed its rules in 1971. Instead of honoring books retrospectively–for the previous years’s work–the prize began recognizing the “best novel in the year of publication.” The date of announcement switched from April to November.
This meant that 1971’s award went to the best novel of 1971 (V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State) leaving the 22 authors on the 1970 long list out in the cold. Among them: Iris Murdoch, David Lodge, Joe Orton, Len Deighton, Brian Aldiss, Ruth Rendell, Melvyn Bragg, Muriel Spark. No short list was announced — things didn’t get that far before the rules change.
Credit for the idea of rectifying the oversight goes to Peter Straus, honorary archivist for the Booker Prize Foundation, who discovered the lapse. Ion Trewin, Man Booker’s literary director, also known as “Captain Obvious,” said, “Recognition for these novels and the eventual winner is long overdue.”
All well and good. 1970 may have been, as Trewin says, a “remarkable year” for fiction. But most of the writers are beyond caring, being, you know, dead.
The short list of six titles will be selected by a panel of three judges — critic Rachel Cooke, newsreader Katie Derham and poet/novelist Tobias Hill — all born “in or around 1970.” Is this delicious or what?
The winner, chosen by public voting at the Man Booker website, will be announced in March.
Drawing fresh attention to these books, all of which are still in print and easily available, is a service to readers, no doubt.
But it’s starting to seem like a new Man Booker Prize is announced every few months. Not quite, but in 2008 a “Best of the Bookers” was awaded to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as the best novel in the first 40 years of the prize. What will they do for the 50th anniversary?
The Guardian’s Sam Jordison anticipates my cynicism, writing that while this all can be seen “as a rather tired publicity wheeze,” the story of the Lost Booker is a good one. It also gives a unique opportunity to award a prize with the benefit of hindsight.
And says Jordison, the best novel of 1970 was Deighton’s Bomber — imagine, a thriller winning Britain’s top literary prize! Let’s hope.
So what do you think — publicity wheeze or remedy for literary injustice?
Fort Lauderdale beach
A friend wrote yesterday to request “a list of books set in hot climates to help warm some of us living too far north.” I’m happy to oblige. Lucy resides in North Carolina — no one’s usual idea of “too far north” — so I can only imagine the meteorological miseries of those poor souls in the Northeast or the Midwest.
I may need some help, though. It’s raining and cool for the second day here in Fort Lauderdale — Sunday passed in a twilight that never quite qualified as daytime. My brain’s a little sluggish (or more sluggish than usual). So please tell me some of your favorite tropical novels.
The first writer who comes to mind is Graham Greene, the British literary novelist and thriller writer who famously wrote of “dark deeds in sunny climes.” Long a fave of mine, Greene set many books in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, but in honor of the recent tragedy in Haiti, I’ll mention one of the very best, The Comedians. Oh, and his comic novel, Our Man in Havana. Excellent, both.
Other hot-clime literary novels to consider: Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s lovely, tragic prequel to Jane Eyre that tells the story of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, a white Jamaican creole. Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, set in Key West, is wildly uneven, but if you only read the “Have-Not” parts it’s a fine book.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ The Yearling, set in pioneering Central Florida, is a novel that can be loved equally by children and grown-ups. Another YA classic is Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, about a racist 11-year-old boy bonding with an elderly West Indian after both are shipwrecked in the Caribbean. A third: E.L. Konigsberg’s The View from Saturday.
Joseph Conrad, a retired sea captain, set many books and stories in the tropics. One of my favorites: Almayer’s Folly, the story of a Dutch trader coming to a bad end in Borneo. Any number of other literary writers have written tropical novels: Peter Matthiessen (At Play in the Fields of the Lord; Shadow Country), Thomas McGuane (92 in the Shade), Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast), Edwidge Danticat (Breath, Eyes, Memory), William Boyd (Brazzaville Beach), Thomas Sanchez (Mile Zero).
Lucy mentions she’s just finished a book by Miami crime novelist James W. Hall, which makes me suspect she’s more interested in good quality entertainments than literary uplift. Of these there is no end. John D. MacDonald virtually invented the Florida thriller, most famously in his Fort Lauderdale-based Travis McGee series. Ian Fleming loved the Caribbean and set all or parts of several James Bond adventures there. In the early 1980s, Elmore Leonard shifted his focus from Detroit to South Florida for an impressive number of first-rate crime novels (Stick, Rum Punch, Out of Sight — just a beginning).
Since then, Florida has come to rival L.A. as a center of cool-hot crime fiction. Just a few writers to consider: Carl Hiassen (Tourist Season), James W. Hall (Under Cover of Daylight), Randy Wayne White (Sanibel Flats), Christine Kling (Bitter End), Dave Barry (Tricky Business), James Grippando (Intent to Kill), Jeff Lindsay (Darkly Dreaming Dexter), the late, great, unsurpassable Charles Willeford (Miami Blues and many others).
I can’t close without mentioning horror maestro Stephen King’s only Florida novel, Duma Key, which is among his best.
I’ve left out many great books and writers. Which ones do you think Lucy should read?
Get off my lawn, you miserable little whippersnapper!
I’m sorry, but I can’t muster much interest in the passing of J.D. Salinger. He may have died yesterday, but he left this world in 1965, when he withdrew into a New Hampshire farmhouse and refused to publish anymore. No interviews, no pictures. The world was not good enough for him, his work too fine for the vulgar likes of us. I say we return the favor: Jerry who?
What’s more, Salinger’s reputation is based on the inexplicable popularity of his weakest piece of writing, The Catcher in the Rye. I know this novel, beloved by adolescents and post-adolescents everywhere, is supposed to be the quintessence of teen alienation and rebellion. Bah, say I.
I submit to you that Catcher isn’t about adolescence at all, but is actually a mid-life crisis novel in teen drag.
Consider: Holden Caulfield, the novel’s hero, may be 16, but he’s six feet two inches tall, with a shock of gray hair. He drinks cocktails in bars. When he runs away from home, he checks into a hotel. He has an unsatisfying experience with a prostitute (impotence, anyone?). He spends three days wallowing in drink and loneliness.
Caulfield wants to be a protector of children. He plans to run away to the West and start a new life. He suffers a nervous breakdown. Doesn’t that sound more like a middle-aged man confronting his failures than a teenager who can’t seem to get started? I couldn’t identify with Caulfield when I was a teenager, and he strikes me as inauthentic now.
Salinger was, I’ll grant, one of the finest short story writers of the post-World War II era. In his stories and novellas, he’s an accomplished stylist whose prose seems effortless, and he displays a true awareness of the emotional and psychological realities and stresses of his time.
But Salinger withdrew from public life with a relatively small body of work published. If he’d died in 1965, instead of noisily going off to his New Hampshire hermitage, he’d be considered a minor but important writer.
Salinger’s disappearance from view, combined with the cultish popularity of Catcher, only heightened the public’s romance and fascination with him. The longer he remained silent, the more we squirmed in anticipation.
Great curiosity developed over the question of whether he had stopped writing, or was scribbling daily, producing great works that he filed in a cabinet.
At this point, I could not care less. Maybe Salinger’s death will be followed by the posthumous publication of novels and stories of genius, work that elevates him to the higher reaches of American literature. If so, then I’ll take all this back.
But I have to say, if Salinger is ethically consistent in his rejection of the world, then even if he did write brilliant books in that long Rip Van Winkle hibernation, he would have been obliged to burn them.
Won’t it be delicious, though, now that he’s dead and no longer able to guard his precious words from the unworthy gaze of the world, if his estate sells rights to the movies? I can see it now: Coming soon, A Catcher in the Rye, starring Robert Pattinson…
Okay, maybe Salinger had a point after all.
Catcher lovers out there, I invite you to explain how I’m wrong.
Kate Chopin: No. 1?
Wondering what to load into your spanking new iPad reading device once it arrives? The good ladies — no offense, I’m assuming they’re ladies — over at More.com (“Celebrating Woman 40+”) polled their editors for a list of 100 novels every woman should read.
Of course, the Luddites among you can always buy these books at a bookstore and read them the old-fashioned way. One page at a time.
Starting with the Classics, More’s editors mostly round up the usual suspects: Jane Eyre, by Emily Bronte; To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf; Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen; Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys; Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott; To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
A conventional list, true, but credit is due for the mix of sexy, profound and downright challenging, in the case of Woolf. The editors get special points for naming The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s proto-modernist, proto-feminist novella as No. i.
The list deserves kudos, too, for including worthwhile books by men — Nabokov’s Lolita, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country. But I think the editors may have missed an opportunity here. A list made up entirely of female authors would have been more provocative, and provided a valuable service.
Apparently only the first 21 books, the Classics, are up on the website so far. I’m pleasantly surprised by a few selections: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin; The Arabian Nights. I’m gratified to see one of my very favorite books, Madame Bovary. Not sure in what universe Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying is a classic, though.
Let’s hope More becomes a little bolder as the editors fill out the rest of the list. Here’s a few I’d suggest: The Women’s Room, by Marilyn French; The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin; Surfacing, by Margaret Atwood; Seven Gothic Tales, by Isak Dinesen; West with the Night, by Beryl Markham; Christy, by Catherine Marshall; Tracks, by Louise Erdrich; Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor; Regeneration, by Pat Barker; A Sport of Nature, by Nadine Gordimer: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark…
I’ll stop. What a great world of books we live in! Tell me what favorites you’d put on a list of books women should read? Just to make it interesting, let’s only name books written by actual female authors — deal?
The real deal. Finally.
Steve Jobs presented the long-awaited Apple e-reader today, as expected. Few thought he’d give it a lame name like the iPad, but still, it’s here. Cost: $499 for a Wifi model; $130 more for a 3G model that accesses the web through AT&T, $29.99 a month for unlimited data.
The thing runs all the apps available at the App Store, and iPad-exlusive apps are in development. The device comes preloaded with a long list of stuff, including Safari, Maps, Yahoo, Video, YouTube, iPhone and much more.
Jobs announced a new iBook Store, already partnered with Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette Book Group. I wonder how nervous Jeff Bezos is today over at Amazon?
Apple has worked out a new format with The New York Times, leading the way to what a lot of people hope will provide a sustainable future for newspapers.
For more details, go to Brainstorm Tech: Washington Post, About.com (which says it “looks like a very large iPhone”); Phones Review (“Slightly disappointed, to tell you the truth”); infosync world (“iPhone on steroids”); MTV (“Everything You Need to Know”).
Will this thing save civilization, specifically the book, the written word, publishing and newspapers? No idea. But I’m pretty sure nothing will be the same once it starts shipping in 60 days.
What do you think?
Chauncey Mabe
