Shifting my Associates Allegiance to Indie Bookstores

Normally all associates links to books, films, and television from Sycorax Pine will take you to Amazon, where (should you choose to buy something), I will get a tiny percentage off that purchase to spend on books.

Just today, however, I received news that my affiliate membership at Indiebound.org is good to go.  Indiebound works on the same premise as Amazon, but if you click through on its links, you will be able to purchase books directly from your local independent bookstore, rather than a big national chain. 


I use Amazon pretty extensively, but whenever possible I prefer to channel money into the local bookstore of my youthful devotion (Politics and Prose in Washington, DC) or its brethren in the various cities I have lived and visited.  So this seems like an ideal solution to the dominance that Amazon has had among blogs like this one. 

I am going to try Indiebound out to make sure that it functions as smoothly as Amazon, but I will tentatively set out this plan: from here on out, all associate links to books from this blog will point you towards Indiebound.  All associate links to films, television shows, and other non-bookish materials that I think you might like to get a hold of will still take you to Amazon.

Has anyone else tried out Indiebound yet, as a purchaser or an Associate? What did you think?

Hulk, hookahs, and curses: An Enthusiasm of Links

The Hulk is on Twitter, in many forms.  But did you know he is a feminist?

HULK FIND COMPLICITY BETWEEN ALL SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION. RESULT: HULK HAVE VERY DIVERSE PORTFOLIO OF SMASH.

Not to mention a Buddhist?

HULK GRATEFUL FOR IMPERMANENCE. OTHERWISE IT SAME SMASH EVERY DAY.

You might think that a commitment to smash would be the antithesis of Buddhism, but in fact it is the ultimate expression of detachment from the material world.  Think on't.

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The only thing that tempers my enthusiasm for Benjamin Andrews's Bookah is the knowledge that it only confirms D's worst suspicions about the nature of my book addiction.

If there is a tangible gain from the physicality of a book, then Bookah surely benefits the reader to an unprecedented extent. By concentrating the scent of 31 old books into a confined space, the much-praised aspect of the physical book is exaggerated to embody consumer technology's tendency to fetishize simple pleasures. The fact that you can't already buy the Bookah is really quite surprising. Here knowledge is contained within the sterile white walls of a modern product and powerfully ingested by the user, albeit in a hopelessly ineffective way. 

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Got Medieval has been exploring how medieval bookmakers combated piracy.  With a good book curse.

 For a book curse is essentially the same as that little FBI warning that pops up whenever you try to watch a movie: a toothless text charm included by the media's maker meant to frighten the foolish. The charm only works if you believe that words are special, potent magic.

Here's how they went:

Should anyone by craft of any device whatever abstract this book from this place may his soul suffer, in retribution for what he has done, and may his name be erased from the book of the living and not recorded among the Blessed.

See what they did there? Steal a book, have your name removed from the book.

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My friend Lara (whom I have known since we were four and shared a kindergarten class, as well as birthdays a mere two days apart) is a brilliant photographer, most often of luminous botanical subjects.  She has just opened an Etsy shop: go check it out.  My favorite of her pieces is "Lotus Petal Curve."

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I've been telling everyone I can grab ahold of and mutter to about the Yojimbo influence on Avatar: The Last Airbender. So it seems that the least I can do is link to this recent AV Club overview of the work of the great Akira Kurosawa.

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My bibliophile nature may cause a terrible outbreak of hives every time I hear about unwanted remnants of library sales being left in a dumpster, but in general I am not a fetishizer of the intact book.  I write in my books (although almost always in pencil, ever since I came to rue the plentiful inked exclamations from my college years - "Irony!" was the most common), and I like a book that shows the wear of my ownership at least as well as one that is pristine.  I often buy books used, and although I usually try to buy them as unmarked as possible, I have been known to delight in reading the marginalia of my predecessors, as I did with Jim the Boy.  I recently bought a collection of academic essays at a very reasonable price, only to discover that it had been previously owned by a prominent scholar in my field (the binding falls open naturally to her essay in the volume, but that isn't the only way I identified the book as hers).  She has written hilarious (and intimidating) little judgments on all of the other essays ("Provocative, until the cutesie ending," reads one), and goes so far (post-publication, I have to add) as to copy-edit the phrasing of some of her colleagues' prose.

At any rate, the point is that I love the book as material object almost as much as I love it as a container of knowledge and narrative,  and (rare books aside) I am intrigued by the ways we as readers and users add to and alter the value of the volume as art object or cultural artifact.  So I always enjoy pieces like this one at the New York Times about unusual uses for books.

The Roosters Know What's at the End of the Rope: O'ahu Diary (Days 11 through 13)

Hmm.  I've fallen terribly behind on my O'ahu diary, I'm afraid.  Chock it up to the combination of sun-induced lacksadaisia and a looming article deadline.  OK: casting my mind back to several weeks ago, when I left off.

We had better luck escaping Honolulu on our second attempt, D's next day off.  This time we ventured straight up the windward side (the island's eastern coast) to a beach in the Mormon town of Laie.

After the crowded shores of Waikiki, where the sea is lovely and the smooth sand is obscured by all the bodies lounging, flirting, playing, drinking, smoking on it, the beach around Laie was just how I like it: deserted.

It was also, sad to say, quite dirty - it must be a trick of the tide, but huge swathes of sand were marred by trashy flotsam.  Not, luckily, the section where I camped out in the sun with my books and my tube of SPF 70.

D has been reading too many Hawai'i Five-O scripts at his job, with the unfortunate effect that, where I see sun-bleached beach towns and family picnics, he sees opportunities for police intervention.  When he cautioned me to choose our beach carefully, lest we become embroiled in a local gang war, I knew he needed a day off to swim in the ocean.  And there he is, a tiny speck in the first photo, having his first total submersion in the Pacific ocean on this trip.

The beach, I hasten to tell you, is patrolled not by the 5-0 nor by rival gangs but by a group of extremely territorial roosters.  Chickens seem right at home in the sand, to my surprise.

I continue my evening walks all week along Waikiki beach, tucking a flower behind my ear each evening and seeing how far I get before it flies off into the surf.  Sometimes D is still at work at my preferred sunset hour, but sometimes he comes with, exhausted.

Every once in a while we remember that we are on LOST's terra natalis, usually when we see a rope, half-buried in the sand, leading off God-knows-where. "You know what's at the end of that?" I say to D, "Alison Janney in a toga."

The evening's the most peaceful time, especially around the lagoon outside of our hotel, where the water is somehow colder than the actual ocean fifty feet away.  Every day I see a different bride being led out to have her wedding photograph taken here, and I wonder about the industry of the image - all this endless sameness on what is supposed to be (surely) a unique day.

But it's a hard image to resist, eh?