fredbubbers.com

The Reader is Horizontal

As I wrote yesterday, this week is “Read an eBook Week.”  While the printed book is in no danger of extinction, technological innovations, as well as business model innovations, make it clear that the way books are produced, distributed and bought is rapidly changing.

It’s new, it’s green, it’s hot.

Sorry, that sounded a little too much like blowhard Tom Friedman.  Let me start over.

Last fall, when I was in San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador, researching my next book, The World is Green, Sweaty, and Concave, I had a conversation with the cab driver who drove me to the airport about the International Monetary Fund’s Latin American policy and its impact on the  nanotechnology research incubators being established in the former rustbelt of the United States.  When he’s not driving his cab, Pepe is a student at the local university and heads an internet social-media startup…

Sorry, I did it again. One more time, I promise to be good.

EBooks, I was talking about eBooks and the coming revolution…

Last fall, I was talking to some acquaintances, ordinary writers with families and boring day jobs, not high-tech entrepreneurial cabbies from exotic countries, about the changes in publishing, and in particular POD publishing technology and eBooks.  For very little cost, it’s now possible for any writer to publish a book, in digital or print form, and sell it on the internet.  Whether or not it gets any attention at all and sells beyond the small circle of the writer’s friends is another question.  I’m still old-fashioned enough to be skeptical about self-publishing and aside from this blog, I’m still going at it the old fashioned way: trying to convince someone else to publish me.

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An epilogue to the previous post, “Gifts.”

John J. Bubbers (1897-1980)

On Christmas Day of 1979, my parents, my sisters, and I drove out to Stony Brook to visit with Oma and Opa.  Opa was in the terminal stage of the cancer that would take his life the following March.  Christmas was very, very different that year.  Oma’s advanced age and Opa’s severely weakened condition made living in the four floor walk-up next-door to us in Queens impractical, so they had settled into the Stony Brook cottage.  Our Christmas Eve tradition of have a supper of German cold-cuts and salads up in their apartment before coming down to our house to open presents was suspended for the first time in my lifetime.

My father was spending as much time with them as he could while still running his drugstore full-time, and they were blessed with caring neighbors who helped out as well.  Much of all this activity I had missed because I was in my sophomore year at college and I was up in Albany.

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Part 1:

This essay was originally published three years ago in Seeker Magazine.  When I began writing it, my only intent was to document a family story that was going to be forever lost due to the passage of time.  As what sometimes happens when writing personal essays, they start out about one thing, but in the process of writing them, they turn out to be about something else.  In this case, I discovered, over twenty years after they were gone, the impact my grandparents had on the person I became.

Tomorrow, Christmas Day, 2009, a new epilogue to this essay.

My grandparents, John and Frieda Bubbers, or “Oma” and “Opa,” came to America some time after World War I. Opa had been a soldier during the war and for a brief period after the war was over, during the social and economic chaos that was Germany during that time, he had been a police officer. He never spoke much about those experiences, but when he was in Astoria General, near the end of his life, he struggled and had to be restrained when the nurses attempted to place an oxygen mask over his face. He was having flashbacks of trenches and gas masks.

The young couple settled in a small German community in Lawrence, Massachusetts, probably around 1920 or 1921. He never told me what he did for a living, but I imagine that he worked in the textile mills that were still operating all over the northeast at the time. During my time with Computer Associates, a software company based on Long Island, I traveled quite frequently to our office in Andover, just a few miles from Lawrence. I took several trips to Lawrence and saw a poverty stricken area that didn’t seem to have ever recovered from the great depression; the mills still standing like red brick carcasses, crumbling, abandoned and overgrown for over fifty years.

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The price war that erupted this week among Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, and Barnes & Noble has authors, publishers, and independent booksellers nervously speculating about what the future holds for them.  Ironically, Barnes & Noble, whose sheer size gave it pricing leverage with publishers and threatened to drive independent booksellers out of business, is now finding itself threatened by the even more predatory pricing practices of Amazon, Target, and the notorious Wal-Mart.  B&N is fighting back with its own eBook reader and it looks like a serious threat to Amazon’s Kindle.  Unfortunately,  as discussed in this Slate article, no matter how successful the device is, B&N’s brick and mortar business is likely to shrink.  While B&N may be able to take some business away from Amazon in eBooks, pricing pressure from its brick and mortar competitors on physical books will lower their margins.  Target and Wal-Mart can sell books as loss leaders to get people in their stores where they are likely to buy more than just books.  Bookstores, no matter how big they are, can’t do that.  One can hope that the book departments in Target and Wal-Mart will be just as crappy as their other departments and offer a pitiful selection of popular dreck and the value of true bookstores will not be lost.

These current-day price wars conducted by giant retailers remind me the the transformation of the business my father was in for forty years.  He was, by profession, a pharmacist.  He was also a businessman.  He owned the neighborhood drugstore in our section of Elmhurst, Queens.  After working his way through pharmacy school, serving in the Army during the Korean war, and then working in other people’s stores for a couple of years, managed to buy the neglected and rundown business in his own neighborhood.  From the time he bought the business in the early fifties until he modernized it in the early sixties, the store looked very much like the one in Edward Hopper’s painting.  Hopper is perhaps best known for his handling of light and the thing that strikes me about this painting is the light streaming out of the store into the darkened street.  It’s 10 PM and everything is closed but the drugstore.  The doorway in the shadow next to the store leads to the stairway up to the second floor where the druggist’s children are sleeping and his wife is waiting for him to close the store and come home.

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I have always been envious of writers who are able to effectively render the natural world.  I grew up in the city so in some sense, nature is a foreign land to me.  It is, however, a foreign land in which I have traveled.  As a boy, I was a member of Boy Scout Troop 17 in Elmhurst, Queens.  There were camping trips every month throughout the year, two weeks of summer camp in July, and a special “long trip” in August where each year we went on an extended cross-country road trip.  In August of 1972, I hiked Mount Washington in New Hampshire, navigated the rapids of the Penobscot River in Maine, hiked along the rocky shores in Acadia National Park, and did traditional New England style Cod fishing in Nova Scotia (making Captains Courageous, a very enjoyable read in school the following fall). 1973 was a grand tour of the west including a backpacking trip through the Grand Canyon, mountain climbing in The Grand Tetons, and canoeing in Missouri.  1974 was a trip to Arkansas for a multi-day canoeing the beautiful Buffalo River.  Years later when the Clinton Whitewater scandal erupted, I actually knew where the place was.

These experiences stimulated all my city-boy senses senses and whenever I read a piece of writing that effectively captures them, I am transported back to those places in my memory.  Some of these places have shown up in my writing.  My young couple in “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” spend a night camping in Acadia National Park. Another couple hike up to Indian Cliffs in Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camp, near Narrowsburg, New York in my story “Indian Summer.”  How I end up mixing fictional couples with boy scout memories in stories with romantic themes is perhaps a topic for psycho-analysis.  As my late father might have said, “Boy Scout camp was never like this!”

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I recently found these videos on YouTube of my favorite bar band of all time, Fear of Strangers.  Back in the late seventies and early eighties there was a very vibrant arts scene in Albany on and around Lark Street, within walking distance of the State Capitol.  Fear of Strangers was a huge part of it.  The other Albany band at the top of the heap was Blotto, who had a national hit with “I Want to be a Lifeguard.”  I enjoyed Blotto, but I could never take them seriously. Fear of Strangers had it all: excellent musicians, great original songs, and an interesting blend of rock, pop, country, punk, and new wave sounds.  The tunes were catchy and the lyrics were quirky and original. At the center of it was singer-songwriter Val Haynes.

These live videos are of the quality you’d expect from that era. They also appear to be from before the release of their only album since I can hear guitarist/keyboardist Doug White playing in the darkness. Doug left the band just as the album was coming out and musically, they continued as a trio afterwards. Val’s also really playing up the little schoolgirl act (twenty years before Britney Spears, and with a hundred times more musical talent). I remember her toning that part of her act down as the band progressed and acquired a growing, loyal fan base.

Maybe you had to be there in the dark, on the hot sweaty dance floor, nervous about the new wave of conservatism and general uptightness that was sweeping the nation at the time, to truly appreciate them. Maybe they are best left as fond memories. But the music that stays with us is the music that evokes a time and place and makes us remember who we once were, wistfully thinking about what might have been.  And to reafirm the things that once mattered so desperately to us.

Thank you Al, Todd, Steve, Doug, and especially, Val.  You’re all on my iPod.

Shotgun (cover of a Motown classic)

I Need to be Told (Fear of Strangers Original)

“You have to actually say the words.”