Talkin Books with Barack

The first surprise was that Barack Obama opened the door to the Oval Office himself, smiling, inviting us in, shaking hands, asking for names and hometowns.

No, let’s back up a bit. The first surprise was certainly that I was at the White House at all. How I got there starts way back on Herbert Hoover’s first night at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. March 4, 1929. The story is that Hoover’s books had yet to arrive, and as Calvin Coolidge had left no books at all on the White House shelves Hoover had to borrow a book from a night watchman for his bedtime reading. Picking up on this story in the newspaper the next day, the enterprising head of the American Booksellers Association quickly arranged delivery of a selection of current titles, intended as the beginning of a permanent White House library.

Pretty much every year since then, the ABA has made a delivery of books to the White House. During George W. Bush’s eight year term an ABA representative generally just dropped the books off, though on a couple of occasions there were brief meetings with Laura Bush, a former librarian.

So here it was January 2011, and as a member of the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association I was in D.C. for 7 days of meetings. Board meetings, meetings with folks from other kinds of independent business alliances, meetings with other booksellers, publishers, authors. Going in I had no idea I’d also be meeting with the President. But on Tuesday word came down that we’d be doing the annual donation of books on Thursday morning. The whole board would be going, and we each needed to pick a book. We’d be meeting with Obama himself.

Thus it was that about 11:15 in the morning on Thursday January 20th I found myself in the Oval Office with 7 other board members (great booksellers all!), and with Barbara Meade, the co-owner of Politics and Prose bookstore just outside of D.C., and Oren Teicher, the ABA’s CEO. Books in hand, we were standing around with Barack in front of the big Presidential desk. We had been told the appointment would last for only ten minutes, so I expected we would just hand him our books, they’d take some pictures, and we’d be out of there. I know Obama is a reader, but he had just finished hosting the Chinese Premier the night before. He is a very busy man and there was no political capital to be gained by hanging out with the likes of us.

But it was time for me to be surprised again. Obama asked questions about almost every book we gave him. He was especially interested in the books that the two children’s booksellers among us had brought for his daughters. He lamented the fact that he could no longer just walk into a bookstore and browse. Talking about books for his daughters, he said that the best books were ones that really engage them, but that they have to “stretch” for. He related reading aloud “Life of Pi” to his 8 year old. She kept insisting that they continue, even though the book “deals at some points with some pretty serious ideas and theology.” He was immediately drawn to Abraham Verghese’s marvelous novel, “Cutting for Stone,” and a number of us talked about the book’s richness and depth. Obama was clearly enjoying being with us, talking about books and reading.

I was the last person to hand him my book. “I figured somebody had to bring a political book” I said as I handed him a copy of Matt Taibbi’s “Griftopia,” a jaundiced, startling view of the financial meltdown. “Oh I know who Matt Taibbi is,” Obama said. “He sometimes doesn’t have a very high opinion of me.” As if to prove his point, he opened the book to an early page and read aloud the chapter heading, “The Biggest A**hole in the Universe,” a portrait of Alan Greenspan. “He’s not talking about you there,” I joked, giving him a pat on the shoulder.

After a group picture, Obama said that since we had each given him a book, it was only fair that he give each of us a book in return, and he handed out signed copies of “The Audacity of Hope.”

Now it was time to go. We filed out into the hall, and I started to walk toward the door where we had come in. But I stopped when I heard Obama’s voice again. He was standing in the doorway, talking about how hard it was to find good books for his daughters. Maybe we could help him, send him some recommendations? Oh yeah, we could do that, we all agreed.

Then we walked once more past the Marine sentry, who for the second time that morning did not move a muscle and failed to reply when I thanked him for opening the door for us. The better part of 20 minutes had gone by. But who was counting?

My 20 minute take on Barack Obama? For what it’s worth::

He’s young, smart, and handsome. He clearly has a sense of himself, and he has to have a fair amount of ambition or he wouldn’t be where he is today. Yet he also seems to understand that there is always more to learn. In my experience people that think they already know everything aren’t readers—witness our last president. Obama was engaged in talking with us, engaged in talking about books, and he is clearly engaged in the work of being a father. Many politicians become just “operators” who have long forgotten how to relate to people on a basic human level. That’s not Barack Obama.

I’ve certainly had my disappointments with him during his first two years in office. He has seemed surprisingly slow to lead, slow to frame the issues facing the country, and he has let many of the same folks who created the financial mess advise him on how to respond to it. But against this I left his office feeling he was indeed young, smart, open to learning, and still connected to the basics of our shared enterprise of being human together. All of this bodes well.

Maybe folks trying to influence him might try talking to him in a different way? Like:
--Hey Barack, when those girls of yours grow up, are you gonna want them dating people like those sleazy guys from Goldman Sachs?

I’ll bet this would get his attention. And then those sleazy guys at Goldman Sachs would probably get some more critical attention from President Obama as well...
Tom Campbell

A Good Story From the General

Retired General (and North Carolina native) Hugh Shelton told a great story during his appearance at The Regulator back in October. I've been repeating his little vignette ever since, so I thought I'd write it down here.

Shelton was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the end of the Clinton administration and the beginning of Bush's term. His position gave him a seat on the National Security Council, and these events transpired at one of the first meetings of the Security Council that he attended, during the Clinton administration.

The meetings were held around a long table, and Shelton was sitting at one end of the table, next to an (unnamed) cabinet member. During a period when a lot of side conversations were going on, the cabinet member leaned over to Shelton and asked if it were true that U-2 reconnaissance planes were flying over Iraq on a regular basis, and that these planes flew too high for the Iraqis to be able to shoot them down.

Yes, that was true, Shelton replied.

The cabinet member than asked if could be arranged for one of these flights to fly lower, so the Iraqis could shoot it down, giving the U.S. an excuse to "do something about Saddam."

Shelton thought for a moment, and then said that yes, he thought it could probably be arranged.

Really? The cabinet member asked.

Yes, said Shelton. "Just as soon as we teach your sorry a** how to fly one of those planes."


You can read the full version of this story in Shelton's memoir, Without Hesitation; The Odyssey of An American Warrior.

Tom Campbell

What a poem says..

"What a poem says is not what the words of the poem say."

"The very first thing a poem says is that it is a poem."

"The meaning (of a poem) is in the lilt of the words, in the meter, in the rhyme."

--From translator and poet David Slavitt at his marvelous reading last Friday night.

And there was this as well:

"The point of (reading) literature is not to improve yourself. All reading should be pleasurable, engaging, delightful."

The Regulator's"'Twas the Week Before Christmas"

'Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the shop
Keith Richards is rockin’, his book sales won’t stop.

Cleopatra’s in pearls and Bill Bryson’s at home,
While Mark Twain dishes dirt in a weighty old tome.

Bestsellers are placed on the bookshelves with care,
In hopes that our customers soon will be there;

Squirrels meet Chipmunks all snug in their beds
while Crafts for Poor People dance in their heads

There’s Griftopia Grinches and Jon Stewart’s Earth
Franzen’s Freedom, – just see what they’re worth!

With Southern Pies and La Cuisine for the belly,
Keys to Good Cooking with a bowlful of jelly.

A pair of Sedarises can be bought by the half,
we’re settling in for a long winter's laugh.

Then out on 9th Street, there arose such a clatter.
We sprang from the store to see what was the matter.

When what to our wondering eyes should appear,
A Sustain-a-Bull bull and eight tiny reindeer!

And we heard the bull roar, as the team rose ascendant
Happy Christmas to all, and Shop Independent!

We have met the future and it's lost the ability to read and concentrate

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's famous Media Lab, quoted in the New York Times a few weeks back:

I love the iPad,” admits Mr. Negroponte, “but my ability to read any long-form narrative has more or less disappeared, as I am constantly tempted to check e-mail, look up words or click through.”

A few weeks before this, Negroponte was quoted as saying the physical book will be dead withing 5 years, when all reading will be digital.

Or is it deep reading itself--and the concentration that makes it possible--that's going to be dead, as it obviously is already for Mr Negroponte?

But what the heck. The ability to concentrate is SO overrated. With constant access to the net, you can learn to be a doctor, an engineer, a scientist, a computer programmer even, all without ever having to seriously concentrate.

"I never really learned how to read texts," says a character in Gary Shteyngart's prophetic new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, "just to scan them for data."

Of course we can't expect Nicholas Negroponte to have read this. It's 277 pages into a long-form narrative..

Five Things Jeff Bezos Doesn't Want You to Know About the Kindle

1) You read slower on a Kindle. A recent study by digital design guru Jakob Nielsen showed that people reading a short story read more than 10% slower on the Kindle, compared to reading on paper. And that was just for a short story. How much slower might it be reading a whole book? See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/08/print-ipad-kindle-books

2) You almost certainly read stupider on a Kindle. There is a large body of peer-reviewed research which shows that people reading from screens don’t understand as much and don’t remember as much, compared to reading from paper. The differences have been significant. The Kindle’s display is somewhat different from the screens these studies tested, but it is still a screen…(Amazingly, no one has yet to submit the Kindle to these kind of tests. Maybe we should ask Jeff Bezos to fund the research?!). See http://www.ebookskeptic.net

3) The Kindle flunked out of Princeton. Last year, Princeton gave free Kindles to students in three undergraduate courses, pre-loaded with the required reading. The response of the students was pretty much universally negative. “Many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use,” reported the Daily Princetonian. At the end of the semester 2/3 of the students said that if their Kindles broke they wouldn’t replace them. Slower and stupider doesn’t make the grade at Princeton. See http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/09/28/23918/ and http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/02/22/25262/

4) Amazon can play Big Brother with your books. You may think you own the books you buy for your Kindle, but Jeff Bezos has shown that he can-and will-do anything he wants with the text that you’ve loaded on your device. Amazon has already remotely deleted digital editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from the Kindles of readers who had bought them. George Orwell would not be amused—and he would not be a fan of this technology.

5) Governments can play Big Brother with your books. If you’re doing your reading on a Kindle, you’re making it really easy for governments to play Big Brother as well. You can tell a whole lot about a person from what they read. Read on a Kindle, and everything you’ve read is listed in one place on one computer system. As Orwell would tell us, authoritarian governments everywhere are going to love this technology. (Of course government snooping like this would never happen here…)

New R-Book will "leave current e-book technologies in the dust"

The e-book and publishing industries were thrown into turmoil yesterday by a little noticed announcement from an upstart technology company.

Reeve Hobbs, CEO of tiny Kumquat Technologies, unveiled his company’s surprising new “R-Book,” which seems likely to leave current e-book technologies in the dust.

“Unlike the competition,” Hobbs said, “The R-Book is designed to do just one thing--to serve as the best possible platform for reading books. And it quite simply kicks butt at what it does.”

Current e-book technologies, Hobbs pointed out, are forced to make compromises because they are trying to do many things at once--be a reader not only for books, but also for newspapers and magazines; be able to surf the web, send and receive tweets, check blogs, email, facebook, etc., etc. “These devices bring the distraction factor of the internet into what should be the focused activity of reading a book. Who wants to be interrupted by their girlfriend’s tweet about this hot guy she just met, when they are totally absorbed with their own affair with the smokin Mr. Darcy?”

But the ultimate compromise of e-books, according to Hobbs, is in their use of a screen as their reading delivery system. “When it comes to reading, there’s been research available for years that shows that screens are totally lame. You don’t remember as much and you don’t understand as much when you read on a screen. Who wants to invest hours reading a book--and then not remember what they’ve read a few days later?

“It’s pathetic, really. Smart guys like Bezos and Jobs set out to re-invent the book, and all they can come up with is another stupid screen? It looks like that’s all they know anymore. They’ve lost the ability to think outside the screen.

“From day one in designing the R-Book we knew we had to come up with something better than the screen. And we have. The R-Book uses the best display for reading that’s ever been invented. Period. If you’re reading from any other display, you’re reading the dummies version.”

Then, picking up a small, rectangular gift wrapped package, Hobbs announced: “Here it is folks. The R-Book. The best reading device on the planet. Accept no second-rate substitutes.” Unwrapping the package, he placed the R-Book on a small, spot-lit table.

The audience drew in their breath as they got their first look at the future of reading. The R-Book. Printed pages handsomely bound together, creating a small, light object. A Real Book.

Real Books. If it’s worth reading...THINK OUTSIDE THE SCREEN.

--For more on the digital distraction factor see The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Published by W.W. Norton, 2010.

--For more on research into the deficiencies of reading from screens see www.ebookskeptic.net. The pages can be printed for better understanding.

--For help in finding an R-Book that’s right for you, see your local bookseller.