Subway Scenes: Kindled Spirits?

While riding home on the subway this evening I saw two people each reading a Kindle. That's the first time I've seen more than on on the same subway car. So the Amazon.com reading device is becoming more common. I can only see having it if I were going on a long trip and didn't want to carry around a bunch of heavy books. This led me to wonder if someday books would become like vinyl LPs are now, collectors' items only conneisseurs would care about or care to own. Would you only be able to buy them online or in little, out of the way, used bookstores in quaint little villages? Would Harry Potter paperbacks go for $50? It could happen. CD stores are folding because of I Tunes. No more Virgin Records.

But then you wouldn't have the physical book to put on your bookcase and refer back to. You'd probably download it to your Kindle and then erase it once you read it so as not to clutter up the hard drive. If you wanted to read it again, you'd have to pay that $10 again, so keeping the book would be less likely.

This would add to the impermenance of our society. Pictures are no longer printed, they're digitized and stored in your laptop. (I even have fallen victim to this trend, I'm so lazy I haven't bothered to have any pictures printed since my trip to Louisville in April, they're all posted on Facebook, so why bother?) There's less and less of your life you can actually hold in your hands. It's all in the cyber-air.

Will ideas and conversation become as fleeting and transitory? Well, maybe I'm worried over nothing. When television came in, they said it would be the death of the movies. But the art of cinema remains vibrant.

What will life be like in 20 years? Will everyone have a Kindle? Will it become mandatory for school and college? No more heavy book bags to tote around.

As the two men were reading their Kindles across from each other on the subway, I read my edition of Wednesday Comics I had just bought at Midtown Comics. The Superman art by Lee Bermejo is dark and beautiful with incredible details in the folds of the costumes and the creases of the wrinkles of the superheroes' faces. One panel is particularly gorgeous with Superman and Batman's capes flapping in the wind as they discuss Superman's alienation atop a skyscraper in a noir-ish Gotham City. Batman is in both his own strip and Superman's this week.

I wonder what the two guys were reading.

Scenes from Country Life--Not to Be Confused with Turgenev

It's Sunday night of a holiday weekend. These are always the hardest ones on which to go back to the city (Don't I sound like Lloyd and Karen Richards in All About Eve?) For me, one of the best things about weekends up here in Stockport, NY, is finding little used bookstores, garage sales, flea markets, and antique stores. Today, on impulse we drove to this house on route 9 that had a sign reading BOOKS. It was two small shacks outside a huge house. The owner was selling hardbacks for a dollar and paperbacks for 50 cents. Jerry found hundreds of used classical LPs, his passion. I had gone through all of the books in both shacks and found four dollars worth--including short stories by Grace Paley and Madison Bell Smart, film criticism by Penelope Gilliatt, a bio of Warren Beatty, and a VCR tape of Mike Leigh's Life Is Sweet--which even Netflix doesn't have--plus a CD of Glenn Miller broadcasting in German during World War II to encourage German soliders to lay down their arms and swing with the Allies, I suppose. Jerry was only through half of the LPs by the time I was done. So I paid my four bucks and started reading the first story by Paley.

Then we stopped and bought sandwiches and gas, came home and I mowed the back of the lawn. Jerry had done the front yesterday. Our friend Lee dropped by on her way home and we had a glass of wine on the porch. While we were sipping our drinks, Deirdre and her child sneaked around the woods at the back. Deirdre is our name for the pesky deer that hang around and eat our flowers--the bastards! Don't get me wrong, I like wildlife as much as the next person, I just don't want it thinking it has a right to hang around my house and potentially spread diseases and take poops wherever it feels like it.

This led to telling Lee about another woodland creature taking up residence ("Hello Acme Pest Control? Well I have a pest I want controlled!"--Elmer Fudd) Yesterday morning Jerry and I saw saw a mama woodchuck and two baby woodchucks scurrying under the stairs leading to the back porch (Cute as hell, but I don't want them living rent free underneath me, making noise and having woodchuck sex while I'm trying to watch Top Chef marathons.) We've had a guy set live traps for previous unwanted tenents but he charges about $60 an animal caught (He releases them unharmed miles away, for any animal lovers out there.)

"Well, there's a way to get them out of your house, but you have to be prepared," Lee told us.

"What is it?"

"You get used cat litter and put it in the hole where they come in and out. They'll stay away. They hate it."

"What do you mean used?" Jerry asked.

"You know, that a cat has done its business in," she explained.

"Where would we get that?" I queried.

"You go to somebody's house that has a cat and get it out of their trash," she proposed.

"Or we could put in an ad," I suggested. "Wanted: cat litter, must be used."

After a few more sips of wine and some laughs, we decided we'll probably call the animal-elimination guy. Such is life in the country.