Rich also adds that making e-books too successful would reduce actual paper books to nothing more than a curiosity for “collectors and aficionados”, thus spelling the end of bookstores — and then she quotes “a consultant to publishers” who I can only hope publishers don’t actually listen to that much:

“If you want bookstores to stay alive, then you want to slow down this movement to e-books,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company . . . “The simplest way to slow down e-books is not to make them too cheap.”

Basically what this boils down is that in order to save an already struggling distribution channel, Shatzkin thinks we should artificially cripple the clear alternative — which makes about as much sense as pounding on your left foot with the cast already on your right. It seems to me that rather than pretending the shift to “books as items for aficionados” can be prevented — and making idiotic business choices to try and do so — the publishing industry should accept that shift and try to nurture the aficionado market at the same time as unrestrainedly growing the e-book one.

There are two ways to do this, that I see. The first is to make the product more desirable, and the music industry provides a good model here: everyone knows that MP3s killed the CD market over the last decade, but in that same period vinyl sales have been soaring. That’s because vinyl albums provide better sound quality, and, with their beautiful cover art and tactile heft, provide a much more satisfying visceral experience than a cheap ‘n’ flimsy jewel case — and aficionados eat that stuff up. So what publishers need to do is spend more time creating a similar experience for books: better cover design, better page design, nicer paper, etc., for a start; but also imbuing books with a much more tangible sense of cool. McSweeney’s has already done just that, and, especially if the success of their recent foray into newspapers is anything to go by, the market for print-as-collector’s-item is ready and waiting. (Penguin’s Designer Classics series is also a step in the right direction.)

The other obvious solution, if aficionados are the only ones buying books anymore, is to create more aficionados. To a certain extent that just means better marketing in general, but I think the most important thing publishers can do is take a page from Philip Morris’s book: the best way to create addicts (read: aficionados) is to start ‘em young. An overwhelming pattern I’ve noticed among people in the MFA program at Emerson is that we were all keen readers as children — and look at us now, all still buying and reading books as if it were going out of style. (Oh, wait.) If publishers want to still be selling books to adults in twenty years, they need to be selling books to kids NOW, and as aggressively as they can.

But what they certainly don’t need to be doing is shooting themselves in the foot by artificially “slowing down” the movement to e-books. Change might be hard, but stasis is suicide.

1. Harvard Museum of Natural History. Free to Massachusetts residents 9am-noon on Sundays (always) and 3pm-5pm on Wednesdays (Sept-May). Otherwise, $7 for students. Ask to see Nabokov’s genitalia cabinet (he collected butterfly private parts–you didn’t expect the guy who wrote “Lolita” to be a tad bit pervy?). The Harvard Art Museum has the same policy for free admissions, however students are only $6 here.

You didn't expect the guy who wrote "Lolita" to be a tad bit pervy?

Light of my life, fire of my…
2. The Boston Public Library. Not a museum, but close to campus, has warm drinks, Sargent murals, and people-watching. Might be better than a museum if you are running out of story material. Consider it a museum of potential characters!

3. USS Constitution Museum. Avast ye! Admission by donation. They have hammocks.

4. The Commonwealth Museum. Always free. Learn about the history of the commonwealth and its peoples.

5. Museum of Fine Arts. Free for Emerson students! (And many other kinds of students.) Details here. Also free on Wednesdays after 4 pm.

6. Museum of African American History. $5 always. A comprehensive study of Boston’s black community and its contributions - often overlooked around these parts On a nice day, you can also walk the Black Heritage Trail.

7. Institute of Contemporary Art. Free on Thursdays 5-9. The view of the waterfront looks really nice!

8. Mary Baker Eddy Library. Students: $4. A monument to feminism… and Christian Science. Check out the Mapparium - a three story, painted glass globe.

9. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Students: $5. Free on your birthday. Always free if your name is Isabella, but you will need to register.

10. MIT Museum. Free 10am-noon on Sundays. Students: $3. Robotics, AI, holography. Dang - it’s like visiting the future!

11. Paul Revere House. Students: $3. Paul Revere advertised as a dentist, but he was not George Washington’s dentist. “Fabricating a full set of dentures was beyond his ability.” (”Paul Revere: A Brief Biography“)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears... cause I'm reading at Porter Square!

Also make sure to mosey down to the Howard Yezerski Gallery, 460 Harrison Avenue, to see a fantastic “Combat Zone” photography exhibition (documenting the Emerson neighborhood’s gritty former life–read Anne Gray Fischer’s brief-but-thorough history here). See the exquisite prints for free until March 16.

After the jump, you’ll find a nice and organized list of events that you’re going to dig, all taking place this month. But first, one more thing, real quick.

If you happen to have $30-55 dollars burning a hole in your pocket (don’t we all in these fair times?), and no plans on April 11, David Sedaris will be sharing his satirical southern charm with Beantown at Boston Symphony Hall. But we suggest you hop on it and get tickets now. People up here can be ruthless.

March 3
Brookline Booksmith, 7pm
DR. LEWIS M. COHEN, No Good Deed
“In 2001, two Massachusetts nurses were investigated for murder when their patient – whom they had been helping with debilitating pain – died. Guggenheim Fellow Dr. Lewis Cohen examines this case as part of a larger ideological debate raging in hospitals everywhere: how should the dying and suffering be treated?”

March 4
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
KATHARINE WEBER, True Confections
“A novel about the daughter of a repressed New England family who tries to mold herself into the model Jewish wife when she marries into the Ziplinskys, owners of Zip’s Candies.”
FREE CANDY AT EVENT!

Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
TED CONOVER, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
“In The Routes of Man, Ted Conover explores six key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America.

“In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS.

“In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides.

“He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh.

“From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity.”

March 6
Brookline Booksmith, 5 pm
New York Times columnist JUDITH WARNER, We’ve Got Issues: Parents and Children in the Age of Medication
“Warner spoke with a cross section of parents, psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, researchers, and therapists over the course of five years to find out how meds are affecting our children. The enlightening result is a wake-up call.”

March 9
Porter Square Books, 7 pm
SUSAN DWORKIN, Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest
ROWAN JACOBSEN, Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis
PETER PRINGLE, Food Inc.

Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
JEROME CHARYN, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

Temple Kehillath Israel, 7:30 pm
Nun and psychology clinician NANCY KEHOE, Wrestling with Our Inner Angels

March 11
Coolidge Corner Theatre, 6 pm
“A discussion with the co-creator of The Spiderwick Chronicles, the person behind The Mortal Instruments and the author of Pretty Monsters? Don’t mind if we do! The Booksmith presents a YA extravaganza to benefit Franciscan Hospital for Children. Email your questions for the authors to hollycassandrakelly@gmail.com.”

Boston Athenæum, 6 p.m.
Panel Discussion: Adult Literacy in the Digital Age

March 17
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
ELIF BATUMAN, The Possessed
“Follow Stanford professor Elif Batuman as she visits Tolstoy’s estate to investigate a possible murder and loses Isaac Babel’s family at the airport. Batuman (Harper’s, The New Yorker, LRB and n+1) has literally walked a mile in the footsteps of her heroes in a sharp, funny, personal literary history that takes us from California to the Caucasus.”

First Parish Church in Cambridge, 6:30 pm
Cambridge Forum radio program: Criticizing Creativity, with literary and cultural critic DANIEL MENDELSOHN and former editor of The New York Times Book Review CHARLES McGRATH, on “the ways in which criticism itself becomes a creative act.”

March 18
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
An Evening with UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE, a nonprofit art and publishing collective celebrating the release of Ten Walks/Two Talks

March 22
Suffolk University’s C. Walsh Theatre, 6 p.m.
Teaching Literacy in Senegal
Founder and Executive Director of Women’s Health Education and Prevention Strategies Alliance, VIOLA M. VAUGHN

March 23
Temple Israel, 7:30 pm
The Great God Debate, in which CHRISTOPHER “Women Aren’t Funny And Neither is God” HITCHENS faces off with RABBI DAVID J. WOLPE.
Moderated by TOM ASHBROOK of NPR’s “On Point.”
Ticketed event.

March 24
Brattle Theater, 6 pm
Celebrated Mystery writer WALTER MOSLEY, Known to Evil
$5

Brookline Booksmith, 7pm
SONYA CHUNG, Long for This World

March 25
First Parish Church Meetinghouse, 7 pm
TIM O’BRIEN celebrates the 20th anniversary of The Things They Carried

March 26
Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
Professor of law and philosophy MARTHA NUSSBAUM “discusses the status of gay rights in the context of constitutional law and her new book”, From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law.

March 28
ICA, 2 p.m.
Reporting War
“Dan Murphy was a reporter for the Bloomberg News Bureau in Jakarta and Far Eastern Economic Review, covering Indonesia/East Timor in the 1990s. In 2000, he joined The Christian Science Monitor as a staff writer, reporting from numerous continents and countries including Southeast Asia and Iraq. Hear about his experience reporting from nations in conflict and addresses the emotions he felt upon his return to the U.S.”

March 29
Brookline Booksmith, 7 pm
DAVID SHIELDS, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Harvard Book Store, 7 pm
NELL IRVIN PAINTER, The History of White People
“In The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is ‘white’ and who is ‘American’ have evolved over time.”

April 8
Boston Athenæum, 6 pm
Panel Discussion: Prison Literacy

April 15
ICA, 7 pm
On Pins & Needles: Tattooing in Massachusetts
“Although tattooing was first introduced to Bostonians in the 1840s, it was just 10 years ago that a Massachusetts ban on tattooing (except by medical physicians) was deemed unconstitutional by a Suffolk Superior Court judge. Helping to overthrow this ban was Sarah Wunsch, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts. Join Wunsch and exhibition curator Pedro Alonzo for a look back at the commonwealth’s long and complicated history with this art form.”
Tickets: $8 members, students and seniors; $10 general admission.

Through June 4
Boston Public Library, Copley Square
Man in the Street: Jules Aarons Photographs Boston, 1947-1976
“Black and white photography of Jules Aarons (1921-2008): The North End, West End, and South Boston neighborhoods from the 1950s and 1960s are on display in photographs of young girls sharing a story, teenagers hanging on a street corner, and women talking to their neighbors. Some are gripping images of Boston’s past like the long-gone penny ferry from East Boston, or sites that remain familiar today like a game of pick-up basketball in the South End.”

Remember to get tickets to David Sedaris. That's not even smoke; it's wit!

I kid, kind of, though anybody who was present at the AWP dance party in Chicago last year will back me up when I say it was a hopelessly messy drunken debacle — and that was an official event.

Anyway, if booze isn’t your thing, you should still consider giving AWP a try: this year the keynote speaker is Michael Chabon (major nerd love); other featured presenters include George Saunders, Sandra Cisneros, and Rick Bass; you can sit in on panels like “Aroused, Parched, and Fevered: The Translation of Sex” (oh my), “Ecopoetics on Colorado’s Front Range: Intersections and Ecotones” (maybe not), and even a roundtable with the contributors to Rose Metal Press’s Field Guide To Writing Flash Fiction, which Brooks raves about below; and, of course, you can stop by and schmooze at the book fair with the hardworking gophers from behind the scenes at Emerson publications Redivider, Ploughshares, and maybe even (gasp) Vernacular. It’s a party not to be missed!

In the preface, editors of Rose Metal Press Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney discuss their hope “that bringing together this collection of essays on flash that is neither purely academic nor purely anecdotal will provide a resource for the reader, student, writer, or teacher of flash fiction.” Masih’s deft introduction traces the history of the form in multiple countries, and touches on many of its early practitioners, including Kafka, Colette, Borges, Hemingway, and Yasunari Kawabata. Luckily, The Field Guide avoids the prescriptive approach. People have written very short fiction for a long time, and have called it different things: parables, vignettes, short short stories, tales, sketches, smoke-long stories, flash, flash fiction, nanofiction, and microfiction. Length is a point of contention as well, though a general guideline places a short short somewhere in the 250-1000 word range.

The Field Guide is the first of its kind, and is invaluable for its examples of the form, its exercises, and its 25 insightful and energizing essays by writers such as Jayne Anne Phillips, Pamela Painter, Michael Martone, Jennifer Pieroni, Randall Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Kim Chinquee, Rusty Barnes, Deb Olin Unferth, and Ron Carlson. Further coverage can be found in Joshua Garstka’s Redivider review and Matt Bell’s in The Critical Flame. The book is available from the Rose Metal Press website, which should also be perused for its impressive catalog, soon to include a Field Guide to Prose Poetry.

How many people did the United States Government kill by tagging industrial alcohol used by bootleggers during Prohibition?

A. None, you leftist twat.  If, however, we let death panels become the law of the land, dontcha know…

B. Millions.  Which paved the way for MKULTRA, and the global conspiracy that Nixon outlined in crayon on the walls of the Oval Office that, if you look at the acrostic on page twelve of the transcript for this year’s live Super Bowl commentary…

C. Only a few, and after the deaths were confirmed, the government decreased the intensity of its efforts to poison its own citizens.

D. 500.

E. 1,000.

…

V. “At least 10,000,” according to Slate:

During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: “Normally, no American government would engage in such business. … It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified.” Others, however, accused lawmakers opposed to the poisoning plan of being in cahoots with criminals and argued that bootleggers and their law-breaking alcoholic customers deserved no sympathy. “Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?” asked Nebraska’s Omaha Bee.

“I will make them obey…even if I have to kill half of them.”

-Genghis Khan, Mongol

[Thanks to Hairee Lee for providing vernacularity.  Get it?]

“I think that students who are not expecting to become professors at the end of the process, who are going there for intellectual reasons, and who are prepared not to be seduced by the idea that academe has a monopoly on the life of the mind…are not going to be beholden to the institution, they can pursue their own best interests, and when they are ready to do something else, they won’t be imprisoned by it, hopefully.  But there is always the danger that students who are in graduate school will become socialized into believing that life outside of academe means failure.”

I’ll show you the life of the mind.

Specifically, I Am Not Sorry I Have A Vagina at HTMLGIANT.

Highlight from the comments: “reading this comment through the lens of masculinity, you and i seem but two apes in an htmlcongo, sparring to see who is alpha.”

Insightful highlight from the comments: “please don’t fuck my poems, leidz.”

Insightful highlight from the comments, this time I’m serious: “Stuff like this gives me headaches. I don’t know anyone personally who uses this kind of language. Maybe it’s why I don’t hang out with many writer-types. A lot of artists, though. And the ladies never define themselves as women as it is quite obvious that they are female. At least biologically. I would never call Barnes or Sexton or Maslowska or Reza (the latter being two of my favorite contemporary writers) ‘women writers’ because it’s just as ridiculous as calling myself a ‘Chicano writer.’”

[The topic of discussion is "Writers, Plain and Simple" by Claire Messud over at Guernica, which you should also read.  Look at me, telling you what you should do like I know.  But there it is.  Go.]

Y’see… J.D. Salinger died.

I’m not a Salinger scholar. I’m not a Salinger historian. I’m just a fan. A silly little fan girl. Apparently a lot of the people I know were aware of it and, when Salinger passed away, I had friends and family telling me I was the first person they thought of, wanted to tell me they were sorry “your boy” was gone,” they knew he was “your favorite author,” R.I.P., all of it. My mother even said, “He’ll be immortalized for your lifetime – at least on your skin.”

This is, hands down, the only kind or positive thing my mother has ever said about any of my various tattoos, but she was referring to two in particular – I have the word “Rye” on my lower back (guess which Salinger book that’s for!) and the number 9 between my shoulder blades (for Nine Stories).

I guess I just liked Salinger’s work enough to tattoo my own mementos of it on my body.

I was 18 when I got the little three-letter word scripted as a tramp stamp on my back. I originally wanted to get the words, “Catch Me,” back there, and today I honestly give thanks for whoever the tattoo artist was in that shop back in Indianapolis who talked me out of it, compared it to the words, “Slippery When Wet,” shook his head at me when I tried to explain what it meant to me. I told him it was for Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, told him about Holden’s day dream about the rye on the edge of the cliff.

I remember asking the tattoo guy if he remembered that scene, the book’s name sake, if he remembered that part where Holden’s in charge of catching the children in the rye from falling over the edge, about how I wished someone was around to do that for me still, that I wasn’t ready to go over the cliff, I wasn’t ready to not be naïve anymore. I wanted someone to catch me (get the tattoo idea?) and I found my hero in Holden, this silver-haired teenager.

In Holden, I saw a boy very nearly feeling what I was at the time, but he was a person who wasn’t willing to fall victim to adulthood or, if he did, he wanted to save the rest of us from it, wanted to save us from the hard, bad stuff that comes with growing up. But Holden turned out to be my underdog after his nervous breakdown in the end, my failed hero.

The tattoo guy told me if I wasn’t ready, I shouldn’t be getting a tattoo. And he was right. I got the Rye a few months later via a different tattoo artist at a different tattoo shop, making up more meaning in my head, that with the word on my back, it was a little bit like being in the Rye, or having the Rye on me, or… Something to that effect.

My number 9 rests in the middle of my back and, I admit, as the years pass, I find myself going back to Nine Stories more than I go back to Catcher. I find myself relating to every character in Nine Stories. I still tear up when I think about Seymour Glass’s suicide in the first story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (no one understood him! Oh, GOD!), and smirking at Teddy predicting his own death in the last story, “Teddy,” (Did the little Buddhist boy get closer to nirvana?) and the whole book arcs from a death steeped in the loss of hope to a death rich with the best of hopes.

Listen – I have my own ideas of what these books are about. I don’t know if this was how Salinger intended for these stories to be interpreted or if there’s some article somewhere that validates my opinion. I’m just a fan girl. I read his work and still have a hard time putting it down or putting it out of my head. His dialogue is fantastic and believable and witty and cool. His characters are heartbreaking, or hilarious, or pathetic, or all of them, or two of them, and they are always – always – relatable.

Maybe these are the two biggest reasons I have loved Salinger’s work – I am in love with all of his characters. In love. All the way. Kablow. I wish I could write characters the way he could, write dialogue that jumps into your ears the second you read it, like you’re actually seeing this person in front of you, can hear dialect and inflection in their voice.

God. GOD. I love his work.

And that’s what I keep reminding myself now. I love his work. I STILL love his work, even when the man who put it on paper isn’t part of this life anymore. But we get to keep on reading. We get to keep these characters and these stories. Because even my tattoos will fade eventually – but those stories will always be there for us.

Then there is William Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, with its beautiful old trees, its smokehouse and stables, and the modest study with walls covered on each side by Faulkner’s hand-scribbled notes.

Don't adjust the pixels on your screen, folks. This Twain is made of LEGOS.

And as it happens, this is quite the year for Mark Twain fanboys to make the trek. The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth (both occasions coincided with the celestial appearance of Haley’s comet), and the 125th anniversary of the book that Ernest Hemingway deemed America’s greatest: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

We arrived at the Twain house on Monday morning and were greeted by an extremely genial/verging-on-sugary tour guide in the lobby, who ushered us into a small auditorium to see the first twenty minutes of Ken Burns’ film on Twain.

The documentary provides us with basic facts: Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, MO (where he said his birth “increased the population of the town by one percent”). Then his family moved to Hannibal, MS, where his boyhood was quite similar to that of Huck and Tom Sawyer. Clemens worked as a journalist, rode around on a steamboat, went prospecting in Nevada: an all-around interesting life, except for the sad truth that he outlived almost everyone in his family.

The house, incidentally right next door to good ole Harriett “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Stowe’s place, is quite lavish. More than one would expect. It was equipped with indoor plumbing, burglar alarms, an “intercom” system, and–oh yeah–it was designed by TIFFANY. As in “Breakfast At–”.

The Twain House

You had chandeliers and little pink sitting stools. Vases filled with ostrich plumes. The dining room table was even set with ornate platters of fake oysters–something the family typically would have served at dinner parties with New England’s intellectual elite.

For sure, Twain made a lot of money from his writing, but a lot of the house’s grandeur was made possible by his wealthy and powerful in-laws, a point which our tour guide said often strained Clemens’ relationship with his humbler, frontier-based family.

What I found touching about the space was all the detail. Someone had obviously spent a lot of time in the painstaking recreation of the house’s interior and atmosphere.

Walking up the MC Escher-like staircase, we arrived at his youngest daughters’ rooms, covered with “Froggie Went A’ Courtin’” wallpaper–a wink, maybe, at Twain’s first book, a collection of short stories, published in 1867, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County.”
The master bedroom features Livy and Samuel Clemens’ Italian “angel bed,” which they would sleep atop backwards so that Samuel could admire the innately carved angel figurines on the headboard and “get his money’s worth.” This bed is also where, years later, their oldest daughter Suzy died at the age of 24.

We discovered from Twain’s study that he was just as easily distracted as any of us, having to position his writing table in the corner so that he could only see the wall while he was working.

Then again, the study’s centerpiece happened to be a billiards table. So one imagines that the pool shark took breaks from such intensive labor once in awhile.

The tour took an hour, often prolonged by one woman who claimed to be a descendant of Twain’s great-great-great grandfather and asked incessantly about each object in every room: “Is this original?”

As we were leaving, I asked the tour guide how he earned his Twain House badge. He said he had sold insurance for most of his life, in Hartford–”I didn’t even go to museums”–but was a huge Twain fan. Then he got laid off. “I was really lucky,” he said. “What if I had been from Philadelphia?”

All photos courtesy of Emerson alumnus Emmett Stone.