Purchases of the days.

From the February 19 and 20, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

(13 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $11.06)

(11 copies) "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" [Kindle Edition] Susan Cain (Author) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $10.19)

... and 164 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — all of which convey the quiet, contemplative, good-listener message to the blogger that... shhh... shhh... shhh...

Thank you.

Electronic devices on planes are dangerous...

... but not for the reason the FAA seems to want you to believe.

If progress [toward changing the rules] is slow, there will eventually be an episode on a plane in which someone is seriously harmed as a result of a device being on during takeoff. But it won’t be because the device is interfering with the plane’s systems. Instead, it will be because one passenger harms another, believing they are protecting the plane from a Kindle, which produces fewer electromagnetic emissions than a calculator.

The ultimate reason to switch to ebooks.

Bedbugs!!

That's hot news in the NYT, but of course, insects have been enjoying the nourishment of books for a long long time, and book-readers love to use the metaphor of insects-feeding-on-books for themselves. What do you think a bookworm is?

Bookworm is a popular generalization for any insect which supposedly bores through books. Actual book-borers are uncommon....

A major book-feeding insect is the book or paper louse (aka booklouse or paperlouse).... It is not actually a true louse.

Many other insects, like the silverfish (Lepisma saccharina) or cockroach (various Blattodea), will consume these molds and also degraded paper or the starch-based binding pastes – warmth and moisture or high humidity are prerequisites, so damage is more common in the tropics. Modern glues and paper are less attractive to insects....

Even less attractive: iPad, Nook, and Kindle.

"Listen, I like stopping by Althouse, but let's get real. Althouse and Meade are living a high-income, privileged life that many of us can only dream about."

Rants Jeffrey in my "time to stop talking about the election and have our lives be about love and beauty" post.

It takes a day like today to put all of that into focus. Cultivate your garden?! I've seen the photos of where she and Meade live. C'mon. Many of us would love to live surrounded by all those expensive toys and have the summer off to order a pile of books for the Kindle and take a few leisurely vacations.

The class (and income) issue rarely comes up here. I think it's about time we hashed this out.

As others have pointed out above, Ann's cavalier, gather-ye-rosebuds response is predicated on being financially stable for the rest of her life. She has the good life NOW and will have it till the day she dies (or almost).

Let me repeat, though. I generally enjoy Ann's blog, but today seems like a good time for people to discuss this issue.

I'd said "cultivate your garden" in a comment in that thread. It's a reference to Voltaire's advice in "Candide" — damn, I typo'd "candidate"! — where it's not just advice for the comfortably affluent. Here, you can put it in your Kindle — in English — for $0.00 — absolutely free. You can read the greatest books ever written and never run out of reading material — all free. 

And I have the summer off because I choose not to teach during the summer. I choose not to make more money. As for Meade's economic choices, you don't know what they are, and I choose not to invade our privacy by explaining the structure of the economic unit that is our household. But we do, in many ways, choose noncommercial activities over moneymaking things, and we take advantage of the wealth that we have built up in our lives by enjoying our home and the natural beauty of our state and our country. We buy a state park sticker for our car every year and county ski and bike trail passes, and we never run out of incredibly cheap things to do.

If Meade and I were starting our lives together and in our 20s — a topic we've discussed many times — we would put a premium on love and beauty and on maximizing our free time... and our freedom generally. But that isn't where we happened to meet. You may be somewhere else, and if you are, use your brain. Figure out what your values really are and what you should be doing with your life. You are not your job. You are not a slave. Think! Pay attention! Do something with what you have. Don't pester your mind with envy. It's perfectly idiotic to wait for the world to change into a form you like.

That's what Voltaire was talking about when he had his long-suffering character Candide say:

"I know... that we must cultivate our garden."

"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was first placed in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, that he might cultivate it; which shows that man was not born to be idle."

"Let us work," said Martin, "without disputing; it is the only way to render life tolerable."

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts."

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden."

"Marc, Soren and I are at home with candles, kindles and canned food!"

"Any must-read recommendations for waiting out a storm?"

It's Chelsea Clinton, tweeting from the dark zone of New York City. Nice that she's using Kindle. I hope she enters through the Althouse portal. I'm enjoying the new Camille Paglia book. Check that out!  Art, culture, miscellanea. A good distraction, with some glossy pictures.

"Amazon Confirms It Makes No Profit On Kindles."

"We sell the hardware at our cost, so it is break-even on the hardware."

"What we find is that when people buy a Kindle they read four times as much as they did before they bought the Kindle,” said [Jeff] Bezos.... “But they don’t stop buying paper books. Kindle owners read four times as much, but they continue to buy both types of books.”

It's to their advantage, and maybe to your advantage. May I recommend: Kindle Paperwhite.

"A man like me, he gives me the icy mitt, and then he goes to the other extreme and slops all over some old dame..."

Wrote Sinclair Lewis at Kindle Locations 3099-3100 in "Elmer Gantry," which I downloaded yesterday, after David Axelrod, on "Face the Nation," said that poor Obama "was confronted with this kind of Gantry-esque performance" from Romney.

Skimming the book, I happened to see "the icy mitt," and thought it was funny — Sinclair Lewis's humorous reference to a perfunctory handshake (put in the mouth of his Gantry character).

Elmer disposed of Cecil Aylston: "To hell with him! There's a fellow we'll get rid of! A man like me, he gives me the icy mitt, and then he goes to the other extreme and slops all over some old dame that's probably saved already, that you, by golly, couldn't unsave with a carload of gin! That'll do you, my young friend!..." 

Yeah, I know: Doesn't sound the least bit like Romney. But, as I say, it amused me to run across The Icy Mitt. And that piqued my curiosity. Did "mitt" appear elsewhere in the book? This is the careless, intuitive way I have of looking for bloggable material. But Kindle, come on! I do a search for "mitt" in the Kindle app, and I get 74 matches, because Kindle won't look for "mitt" as a separate word, only as a set of 4 letters, so I get every "admitted," "permitted," "omitted, and "committee." It's sometimes interesting to discover the way a word is present within a word. It can give you ideas for jokes in the "putting the X in Y" form — putting the mitt in omitted — but it really undermines the value of having searchable text.

Elmer stopped pumping, glared, rubbed his mittened hands on his thighs, and spoke steadily:

"I've been waiting for this! I'm impulsive  — sure; I make bad mistakes — every red-blooded man does. But what about you? I don't know how far you've gone with your hellish doubts, but I've been listening to the hedging way you answer questions in Sunday School, and I know you're beginning to wabble. Pretty soon you'll be an out-and-out liberal. God! Plotting to weaken the Christian religion, to steal away from weak groping souls their only hope of salvation! The worst murderer that ever lived isn't a criminal like you!" 

Kindle Locations 2449-2460.

"Here is a lesson in creative writing."

That's the heading for a short bit of text by Kurt Vonnegut in "A Man Without a Country," which I just downloaded in Kindle because we were talking about punctuation in the comments to the "phony balance" post and I half-remembered something he said about semi-colons. The short bit under the heading goes like this:

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I’m kidding. For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I’m kidding.

We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I’m kidding.

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Is he kidding?

Here a list of worst college majors for making a living.  All the art ones are in there. You don't have to work.

Here's where we were talking the other day about the teacherspeak word "creative."

And here's last night's reminder that Theodore Sturgeon said "90% of everything is crud," which (I say) teaches respect for bad art — even/especially when it stirs al Qaeda attacks (in reality or in the minds of flag wavers).

And here's something about what dancing is doing to us right now.

Kindle Paperwhite...

... has what I've most wanted (and not yet found) in a Kindle: "Crisp, dark text against a brilliant white background." I haven't seen that yet, but it's enough to make me buy another Kindle... especially considering that Kindles are weirdly cheap, in this case, $119.  Also: "New Time to Read feature uses your reading speed to let you know when you'll finish your chapter." (Note: I get a percentage if you buy yours at that link... or buy anything after you enter Amazon through that link.)

The 200 greatest novels, stories, and poems...

... for $2.99. (The Complete Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, "carefully selected by the world's leading experts on literature and philosophy at Harvard University.")

The complete works of Tolstoy for $1.99.

The complete works of Dickens for $2.99.

And here are the complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau — together at last — for $1.99. 

What a world we live in! You can carry it all with you in a 6-ounce device. (Or something fancier.)

***

Somebody asked recently if I can see what it is you buy when you enter Amazon through my links, and the answer is yes. For example, somebody bought a compressor. Thanks!

ADDED: It's not the complete works of Leo Tolstoy, but — as revealed at the link once you get past the mistranscribed titled — 25+ works by Leo Tolstoy. It's missing some things I like, including "What Is Art?" I'm guessing the omissions have to do with the lack of translations. I'm always wary of these low-priced editions of literature to be read in translation. Personally, I bought all the items linked in this post except the Tolstoy. But note: there are some works in translation in the Harvard Classics collection (e.g., "Old Goriot").

Top 100 political best sellers.

100 that you have to pay for,plus 100 that are free as ebooks. (The #1 free political ebook is "The Communust Manifesto." I just downloaded one of the top free ones, but not that one. If you need a Kindle to read ebooks, you can get one here. Actually, I usually read my ebooks using the Kindle app on my iPad... which is something you can buy here.)

And please buy whatever you want through the official Althouse blog Amazon portal. 

Book reviewer's weapon: the Kindle search.

Chez Amazon, a customer review — voted overwhelmingly "helpful" — complains about bad writing in the form of repetition and proves it via search tool. (The book is the huge lady-porn bestseller "Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One.")

According to my Kindle search function, characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites her lip 35 times, Christian's lips "quirk up" 16 times, Christian "cocks his head to one side" 17 times, characters "purse" their lips 15 times, and characters raise their eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana's anthropomorphic "subconscious" (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58 references to Ana's "inner goddess," and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of "oh crap" (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to "holy crap," "double crap," or the ultimate "triple crap")....

*UPDATE*: Thanks to the many other perturbed readers who have shared their own choices of the most annoyingly overused phrases in this masterpiece. Following up on their suggestions with my ever-useful Kindle search function, I have discovered that Ana says "Jeez" 81 times and "oh my" 72 times. She "blushes" or "flushes" 125 times, including 13 that are "scarlet," 6 that are "crimson," and one that is "stars and stripes red." (I can't even imagine.) Ana "peeks up" at Christian 13 times, and there are 9 references to Christian's "hooded eyes" and 7 to his "long index finger." Christian's "mouth presses into a hard line" 10 times. Characters "murmur" 199 times and "whisper" 195 times (doesn't anyone just talk?), "clamber" on/in/out of things 21 times, and "smirk" 34 times. Finally, in a remarkable bit of symmetry, our hero and heroine exchange 124 "grins" and 124 "frowns"... which, by the way, seems an awful lot of frowning for a woman who experiences "intense," "body-shattering," "delicious," "violent," "all-consuming," "turbulent," "agonizing" and "exhausting" orgasms on just about every page.

I'm exhausted just reading about it. I found the Kindle search tool very useful in examining Obama's "Dreams From My Father" — here and here — in something of a different way, but, thinking about new searches that might prove fruitful, I got distracted by some searches that involved similar "creative writing" tics describing characters. For example, I noticed that people "nodded" 51 times — which is disconcertingly suggestive to those of us — I used to not be one — who nod off while reading.

The 8 ghosts that haunt "Dreams From My Father."

This is the second in a series of posts based on the search for a single word in Barack Obama's memoir "Dreams From My Father." I'm proceeding intuitively, choosing a word, and taking advantage of the searchable Kindle text. In Saturday's post, the word was "faceless," chosen because I'd found it striking that Obama had used that word to describe the white children who'd taunted him and led him to be cruel to a little black girl he called Coretta. I found 2 other occurrences of "faceless," and one involved a poor black woman he called Ruby. She was not the faceless one. What was faceless was an image of white people contained within — "buried deep within" — black people who had developed their own identity around "a very particular experience with hate."

Obama portrayed black people as having an inner white person, and he wondered "whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams." So that inner white person wasn't real. It was a ghost — a ghost that haunted dreams. The book is "Dreams From My Father," so it's quite significant to find the notion of dreams haunted by white people, and white people conceptualized as ghosts.

So I have selected "ghost" as my word for this second post in the series. I consult my Kindle text and discover there are 8 ghosts in "Dreams From My Father." The inner white-person ghost that distorts the identity of black people like Ruby is Ghost #4. I'll tell you about the other 7 ghosts, but first I want to remind you of another memoir in a genre we might call: minority identity in the midst of white people. That book is  "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts," by Maxine Hong Kingston, which that came out in 1975.  I'm rather sure Obama knew this book, because Kingston moved to Hawaii in 1967, where Obama lived from 1961-1962, 1963-1967, and 1971-1979. According to the short bio in the Kindle version of "The Woman Warrior," Kingston has been awarded "rare title of 'Living Treasure of Hawai’i.'"

What were these "ghosts" Kingston wrote about in her memoir? They were the people who were not of her race (which was Chinese). Born in 1940, one year after her mother moved to America, Kingston described her perception of Americans with the ghost metaphor:

But America has been full of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts. Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars. There were Black Ghosts too, but they were open eyed and full of laughter, more distinct than White Ghosts....

If Obama had over-indulged his propensity to call white people ghosts, he might have seemed too much like Maxine Hong Kingston, and he could not have conveyed the thoughtful, hopeful vibe about race that worked so well for him in the 2008 election season. "Ghost" appears in "The Woman Warrior" far more than 100 times. (A Kindle search maxes out at 100.) There are only 8 "ghosts" in "Dreams From My Father." We have seen #4. Let's encounter the rest.

Ghost #1 is Obama himself, in the introduction, imagining how others see him as "the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds":

[S]ome people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down … well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I’m trying to hide from myself.

Is the ghost the white component that he perceives in himself? He doesn't say that. He imagines other people thinking about him. Are those imagined other people seeing his white half as a ghost? He doesn't say that. The ghost is "the tragic mulatto," both black and white, but he disowns that "image." It's in the heads of "people who don’t know me well, black or white," but it's an image that forms — he thinks — when they find out that his mother is white, which is something he admits withholding from people. He withholds — avoids "advertis[ing]" — because he suspects that he is seeking to ingratiate himself with whites. When they find out about the white mother, they see him as a ghost trapped between 2 worlds, but he wants them to know that the tragedy belongs to all Americans — or, that is, he thinks about rambling and ranting about how the tragedy belongs to all Americans and then he brings himself up short with the notion that he sounds like a college-town Communist.

Ghost #2 appears as an adjective — "ghostly" — used to describe the skin of a black man who used skin lightener, whom Obama claims to have seen in a photograph in Life magazine (though I've read that there really was no such photograph in Life). Obama's mother has taken the young boy to the library, where he's come across a collection of old Life magazines.

Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.

He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino — albino—I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.

I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this?

"Ghostly" describes the color achieved by a black man who tried to become white. It's an unpleasant look, the result of delusion and oppression. It's the bad dream of becoming white. A black man imagined he could "pass" as white and that would make him happy, but it didn't work, and he feels regret. He feels regret and Obama feels sick, and Obama wonders whether his white mother understands. She brought him to the safe environs of the library, but he found a clue of the suffering that's out there in the world.

I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.

It seems that he withdrew into whiteness, to walk home quietly with his white mother, into his white life. But the fear was implanted, that his outward life of whiteness was a sickly, ghostly pallor. Understood this way, Ghost #2 is also Obama, as he identifies with the deluded black man who attempted to recolor his skin.

Ghost #3 is Obama's father, as Obama, the young man, experiences disillusionment:

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret....

Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn’t been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. 

The idealized man, the father, didn't really exist. He was nothing more than a ghost. Obama finds that liberating — to be free of the role model. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. There is no great and powerful Oz. The king is overthrown... and the rabble in his head — the revolutionaries — run riot. But then: "The night wore on," and the feeling of liberation faded. He fretted: "Who might protect me from doubt or warn me against all the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul?" So Ghost #3 is not a white person. It is the absence of a father, the father image he had clung to, now dissipated. 

Ghost #5 appears in Kenya, where Obama has traveled to encounter his extended family. Obama is walking in the city with his half-sister Auma:

Auma and I happened to run into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside Barclay’s Bank. I could tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I held out my hand and introduced myself. The man smiled and said, “My, my—you have grown so tall. How’s your mother? And your brother Mark—has he graduated from university yet?” 

At first I was confused. Did I know this person? And then Auma explained in a low voice that no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all sides—the man nodding his head (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) but taking another look at me, as if to make sure what he’d heard was true; Auma trying to appear as if the situation, while sad, was somehow the normal stuff of tragedy; me standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a ghost.

Ghost #5 is David... or Obama himself, appearing to be David, the half-brother he never knew and never could know, the lost family connection.

Ghost #6 rises up in a dream he has in Africa:

I finally fell asleep, and dreamed I was walking along a village road. Children, dressed only in strings of beads, played in front of the round huts, and several old men waved to me as I passed. But as I went farther along, I began to notice that people were looking behind me fearfully, rushing into their huts as I passed. I heard the growl of a leopard and started to run into the forest, tripping over roots and stumps and vines, until at last I couldn’t run any longer and fell to my knees in the middle of a bright clearing. Panting for breath, I turned around to see the day turned night, and a giant figure looming as tall as the trees, wearing only a loincloth and a ghostly mask. The lifeless eyes bored into me, and I heard a thunderous voice saying only that it was time, and my entire body began to shake violently with the sound, as if I were breaking apart …. 

I jerked up in a sweat, hitting my head against the wall lamp that stuck out above the bunk. In the darkness, my heart slowly evened itself, but I couldn’t get back to sleep again.

This ghost seems to embody all of his fears, but perhaps represents his father. We get the description of body heat and visceral disorder as in the library scene, and a lighting fixture plays a supporting role, as in the "emerald curtain" scene. This dream — a literal dream in a book called "Dreams" — seems to express his difficulty finding his place in Africa.

Ghost #7 is a simile used by Obama's great uncle, in this scene that takes place in Kenya:

His hair was snow-white, his skin like parchment. He was motionless, his eyes closed, his fleshless arms propped on the armrests of his chair. I thought perhaps he was asleep, but when Billy stepped forward the old man’s head tilted in our direction, and I saw a mirror image of the face I’d seen yesterday in Alego, in the faded photograph on Granny’s wall. Billy explained who was there, and the old man nodded and began to speak in a low, quaking voice that seemed to rise out of a chamber beneath the floor. “He says that he is glad you have come,” Roy translated. “He was your grandfather’s brother. He wishes you well.” I said that I was happy to see him, and the old man nodded again.

“He says that many young men have been lost to … the white man’s country. He says his own son is in America and has not come home for many years. Such men are like ghosts, he says. When they die, no one will be there to mourn them. No ancestors will be there to welcome them. So … he says it is good that you have returned.” The old man raised his hand and I shook it gently. As we got up to leave, the old man said something else, and Roy nodded his head before closing the door behind us. “He says that if you hear of his son,” Roy explained, “you should tell him that he should come home.”

Here, the ghost is — as the old man tells it — the black man lost to the white man’s country. Obama's great uncle is speaking specifically about his own son, a man who was born in Africa, who needs to come home and to stay connected to his family so he will be mourned when he dies. Despite the reference to death, the condition of being a ghost occurs during life, wandering about in "the white man's country." Does that make Obama a ghost too, since he lives in America, where he was born, and which must be his home? Obama lacks even the definition of being the African man who has on his our relocated to the white man's country and who could come home to the embrace of the African ancestors. He's gone there, to Africa, but is it home for him? Is America not his country?

What happens next in that scene is that everyone drinks a lot of moonshine, and...

Old faces and young faces all glow like jack-o’-lanterns in the shifting lamplight, laughing and shouting, slumped in dark corners or gesticulating wildly for cigarettes or another drink, anger or joy pitching up to a crest, then just as quickly ebbing away, words of Luo and Swahili and English running together in unrecognizable swirls, the voices wheedling for money or shirts or the bottle, the voices laughing and sobbing, the outstretched hands, the faltering angry voices of my own sodden youth, of Harlem and the South Side; the voices of my father.

That's a long sentence! What's going on there? Unrecognizable swirls. Everyone but the brooding Obama seems to dissolve into drunken chaos. No more ghosts, but the people look like jack-o’-lanterns — they become surreal and ghoulish. And yet, he identifies with them, in an alienated way: They are "my own sodden youth."

The final ghost, Ghost #8, is another simile. We're still in Kenya:

On the last weekend of my stay, Auma and I took the train to the coast and stayed at an old beachfront hotel in Mombasa that had once been a favorite of the Old Man’s. It was a modest, clean place, in August filled mostly with German tourists and American sailors on shore leave. We didn’t do much, just read and swam and walked along the beach, watching pale crabs scurry like ghosts into their sandy holes.

Pale crabs, like ghosts, scurry into holes in the beach. Here's a picture of a Mombasa sand crab. Is there any symbolism here? Maybe Obama just walked on the beach one time with Auma. But it's his father's place, and it's a place that sounds as though it's full of white people — Germans and Americans — who presumably went swimming and sunning on that beach. But Auma and Obama looked at the white crabs, who were like ghosts, and they didn't even see the white people, who were, then — one could say — even more ghostly than the ghosts.

"And... that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do."

"All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny."

The Director said sententiously.

A quote, IM'd from Meade, who's been reading my blog this morning. We share a Kindle account, so he can search for "happiness" in the same books on his iPad that I've got on mine.

He sends 2 more from the same book:

1. "You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art."

2. "Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly color. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."

A soft-porn, pulpy romance novel hits #1 on the NYT ebook list...

... and the NYT writes a lifestyle-trends-type article about it.

“Fifty Shades of Grey” and the two other titles in the series were written by a British author named E L James, a former television executive who began the trilogy by posting fan fiction online. The books, which were released in the last year, center on the lives (and affection for whips, chains and handcuffs) of Christian Grey, a rich, handsome tycoon, and Anastasia Steele, an innocent college student, who enter into a dominant-submissive relationship....

Steele. Always Steele. "Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jim Steele."

Recognize that quote? It's on page 123 of "The Catcher in the Rye." Holden Caulfield is introducing himself to a prostitute. He also claims to be 22, which he's not, causing her to say "Like fun you are" and him to observe "It was a funny thing to say. It sounded like a real kid. You'd think a prostitute and all would say 'Like hell you are' or 'Cut the crap' instead of 'Like fun you are.'" So the prostitute is too young and so is he and he felt peculiar. "Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy."

But lots of women today are feeling really sexy and not depressed when they read about the handsome tycoon whipping the innocent girl who has the manly name of Steele. She's Steele, he's Grey. Who really has the power in this S&M relationship? (← Thoroughly conventional intriguing/boring question.)

“It’s relighting a fire under a lot of marriages,” said Lyss Stern, the founder of DivaMoms.com and one of the early fans of the series. “I think it makes you feel sexy again, reading the books.”...

“Women just feel like it’s O.K. to read it,” [said a Long Island woman who didn't want her name printed]. “It’s taboo for women to admit that they watch pornography, but for some reason it’s O.K. to admit that they’re reading this book.”...

“What I found fascinating is that there are all these supermotivated, smart, educated women saying this was like the greatest thing they’ve ever read,” said Meg Lazarus, a 38-year-old former lawyer in Scarsdale, whose friends and acquaintances have been buzzing about the book. “I don’t get it. There’s a lot of violence, and this guy is abhorrent sometimes.”

Buzzing. The vibrator reference also appears in the headline: "Discreetly Digital, Erotic Novel Sets American Women Abuzz."

Anyone remember when the Anais Nin book "Delta of Venus" was a best seller, back in the 1970s? It was the erotic book that all the ladies who thought they were above reading pornography were suddenly able to read. But "Delta of Venus" was considered high-quality literature, and that was a big part of why women — the NYT-reading-type woman — felt okay about reading it. Look at it — very classy literary vibe.

No one is saying "Shades of Grey" is quality literature. They're just saying it's effective as pornography. It's sexually arousing. But isn't that true of endless romance novels with handsome tycoons in them? What made it okay to read? There's a quote in the article: "in the 21st century, women have the ability to read this kind of material without anybody knowing what they’re reading, because they can read them on their iPads and Kindles." But that still doesn't say what made everyone converge on the same porn novel at the same time, making it #1? According to the NYT, it seems to be extremely strong internet word-of-mouth. A Barnes & Noble VP says: "I think this shows very clearly what the blog network can do."

Blogs! They can do everything. They can make ladies in Scarsdale plow through a plodding, stupid novel about a rich man with a riding crop and the innocent little lamb who loves him.

Switching from paper books to ebooks may turn into a transition away from books altogether.

Once you're on the iPad/Kindle Fire, it's so tempting to do other things too — email, Facebook, Googling here and there — that you lose the single-minded concentration that pulls you straight through a book.

Not that everyone reads books that way. You might have piles of paper books around the house that you dip into and keep meaning to finish. The nice thing about ebooks is you don't see them lying around and feel guilty.

Me, I've found a way to read ebooks that gives me that internetty feeling I love. I have hundreds of books in my iPad (where I use the Kindle app, and read books bought on Amazon). I keep my list of books in the order most recently read, and I like to pick something near the bottom of the list, read it until I get itchy for a distraction, then select another book near the bottom.

Why not? Well, the linked article takes the point of view of booksellers. They're worried people will stop reading things in book form. Me, I'm a blogger. It's a market. People will buy what they want. There are other choices that to be trapped in one author's mind for days on end.

"My love of footnotes as art form, as commentary, as the place to embed sneaky and wry asides..."

"... that do not belong in the text, only grew and grew through childhood, until I reached college."

A woman who loves footnotes so much she had "n.b." tattooed... on her foot. The woman, s.e. smith, links to Wikipedia to help people understand "n.b." — nota bene — and Wikipedia just gives us the literal and semi-literal translation: "note well" or "pay attention"/"take notice."

Now, I've listened the the audiobook of David Foster Wallace reading "Consider the Lobster" about a thousand times — n.b. David Foster Wallace gluttonously indulged in footnotes — and he does an aside:

n.b. - which means "nota bene," which the audio commandant wants me to tell you means "note well," but actually really means "by the way"...

Here's a reddit discussion of that Wallace aside. They seem to think he's joking. But what's the joke? Is it that people use "n.b." when there's no reason to pay any more note to the thing after the "n.b." than to anything else in the text? Or is it not a joke, and Wallace is giving the abbreviation the meaning it has genuinely acquired in use over the years, which is to designate an aside?

At this point, you might wonder whether Wallace is a prescriptivist or a descriptivist when it comes to word usage, and the cool thing about that is there's an essay in the "Consider the Lobster" essay collection* — it's not all about lobsters! — that has about a million things to say on that subject, but since it's not one of the essays in the audiobook — which is an abridgment — his resolution of that issue is not lodged in my brain. The essay is "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Key passage:

Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is thus both a collection of information and a piece of Democratic rhetoric.⁴⁹ Its goal is to recast the Prescriptivist's persona: The author presents himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense. And the technocrat is not only a thoroughly modern and palatable image of Authority but also immune to the charges of elitism/classism that have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism.

--------------------------

⁴⁹(meaning literally Democratic — it Wants Your Vote)

Thus, I take it, Wallace wasn't joking. He was seeking votes for assigning the meaning "by the way" to "n.b."

--------------------------

*Even though I have the audiobook of "Consider the Lobster" and the paperback of the unabridged text, I bought the Kindle version just now so I could cut and paste text for blogging purposes. But when I made my first attempt at copying, I got a pop-up window — the first I've ever seen in a Kindle book — "Due to publisher restrictions, copy is not allowed for this title." That was pretty annoying. I found a few key words — hypereducated snoot egghead — Googled and found copyable text here. Feel free to read it free. N.b., it has 52 footnotes [at the free link; 124 footnotes in the Kindle text].

Downloading ebooks.

Here are the top 100 Kindle books — 100 each in the "paid" and "free" categories.

I tend to buy my books in Kindle format and read them in the Kindle app on my iPad. I just finished reading the Steve Jobs biography (which is #14 in the paid category), and the main book I'm reading right now is "Losing It," which is a book about the shrinking brain, which was written by the shrinking brain of William Ian Miller and I'm reading with the shrinking brain of Ann Althouse. Here are a few other Kindle books I bought recently, in case you're wondering what I'm carrying around in my iPad:

Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices
A History of American Law: Third Edition
Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Nat Tate: An American Artist: 1928-1960
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President
Rules for Radicals
The Thing Itself: On the Search for Authenticity
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
The Leftovers
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
In My Time
The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic: A "Walk" in Austin
Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy
Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
The Paradox of Choice
The Feminine Mystique
Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline
The Brethren

Kindle books.

The best books of 2011.

Monthly deals on Kindle books.

I like reading Kindle books with the Kindle app on iPad, but if you want a Kindle-brand device, there's Kindle Fire... Kindle DX ($120 off)... and this $79 Kindle.

"Look, if you put the Internet on the device I am supposed to be using to read, I will never read again."

"Can you blame me? I am only human. I can’t focus. If all these studies about multitasking have taught us anything, it is that we all think we can multitask but no one actually can.... It’s not that people will stop reading. We do vast amounts of reading online every day — the equivalent of a good Hemingway novel. But it’s not deep but broad, not focused but fast."

Oh, now, now... is Hemingway actually deeper than your favorite blog?

***

Show your love for reading and for the Althouse blog by buying your Kindle Fire here.