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Miles Davis and John Coltrane – So What

This is a television broadcast from 1959 with the Miles Davis Quintet performing “So What” from the album Kind of Blue—with John Coltrane on sax in place of Cannonball Adderley. This particular clip leaves out all but the last second of an orchestrated introduction by the Gil Evans Orchestra. If I’m not mistaken, that’s Gil Evans himself speaking at the beginning. (Please somebody correct me if I’m wrong about this.)

“So What” is a seminal song in jazz and American music, being the best example of modal jazz (the Dorian mode). As a musician explained to me once, the Dorian mode is like playing all the white notes of a piano.

Apparently the name “So What” comes from the kind of chord used by Bill Evans on piano to give the introduction its distinctive voicing. Legend has it that music theorist Mark Levine called it the “So What” chord. John Coltrane later used the chord for his standard “Impressions.”

Jeff Bezos on Charlie Rose

Here’s a part of what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had to say last night on Charlie Rose. Think this is important in an historic sort of way.

Kindle 3 pre-orders tomorrow

The new Kindle e-reader will come in two iterations: one with Wi-Fi and 3G Internet connections and another with Wi-Fi only.

First we had the markdowns on the Kindle 2, which should have been an early clue because pretty much the same thing happened to the Kindle 1 right before the Kindle 2 was released.

When the Kindle 2 went out of stock on Amazon, industry watchers and the curious alike knew that the next generation Kindle would be coming soon. (All of these events are nicely covered in a Wall Street Journall article. If you want a more in-depth look, Wired has it covered.)

The new Kindle will have the same higher-contrast screen as the new Kindle DX, and will be available in 3G for $189 and wi-fi only for $139, which makes it a good $10 below the wi-fi-less Kobo or the wi-fi-only Nook.

“We developed this device for serious readers. At these price points, it may be much broader than that,” said Jeff Bezos in an interview. “People will buy them for their kids. People won’t share Kindles any more.”

The Journal article does a good job of placing the Kindle in relation to the e-reader market in general:

Mr. Bezos takes pains to distinguish the Kindle from the iPad, saying the company is committed to making a single-purpose piece of consumer electronics. Mr. Bezos said he intentionally left off some potential whiz-bang features from the new Kindle, like color and touch-screen controls, that would have introduced compromises to the reading experience such as glare.<.p>

“For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets,” he said.

Underscoring that, Mr. Bezos said he wasn’t interested in making an Amazon tablet computer. “There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets,” he said. “Why would we want to be 101? I like building a purpose-built reading device. I think that is where we can make a real contribution.”

My own take on the Kindle is that Amazon has left its market position vulnerable to devices like the iPad that show full color and have become the darlings of newspaper and magazine publishers who have clearly shifted their efforts away from the Kindle and towards the iPad.

Orlando Figes settles over fake reviews

Orlando Figes

Historian Orlando Figes has agreed to pay damages to two fellow historians, Rachel Polonsky and Robert Service, after Figes wrote fake negative reviews of their work posted on Amazon.com.uk.

At first, Prof Figes’ wife, Stephanie Palmer, a law lecturer at Cambridge University, claimed responsibility for the reviews. But the accusations continued, specifically that Prof Figes wrote them using the pseudonyms “Historian” and “Orlando-Birkbeck.”

Prof Figes, on sick leave since the scandal broke, made matters worse by threatening legal action against colleagues, literary journals, and newspapers — any persons or organizations Figes claimed might have written the reviews. Eventually it emerged that Prof Figes wrote the reviews himself.

According to a Press Association report,

As part of the settlement agreed on Friday, Prof Figes has circulated an apology and retraction in which he accepts that his denial of responsibility for the reviews was false.

He also withdrew any adverse imputations that an email he sent had conveyed against Dr Polonsky and Prof Service, and apologised for instructing his previous solicitor to write to Prof Service threatening libel proceedings for suggesting that he had written the reviews. Prof Figes and his wife also agreed to pay Dr Polonsky and Prof Service damages, and their legal costs, partly on the indemnity basis – the highest rate.

He also gave an undertaking not to repeat the allegations, not to post pseudonymous reviews of their works, and not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage them in their professional capacity.

Prof Figes admitted in a statement on April 23 that he had written the bad reviews. Dr Polonsky’s book, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, was described as “dense” and “pretentious”, with the reviewer adding that it was “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”. Prof Service’s book, Comrades, was panned as being “awful”.

In his April statement Prof Figes apologised for the distress he caused Dr Polonsky and Prof Service, and to his lawyer for having given him incorrect information.

Covering Stieg Larsson

Early design with original title

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the bright yellow cover of Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” has quickly achieved the status of one of the “iconic” book covers in contemporary publishing in the U.S. But like the thriller, its path has been full of twists and dead ends.

Sonny Mehta, who as chairman and editor-in-chief of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group bought the rights to the novel in 2007 didn’t like the cover designs on the European and Asian editions—with their pictures of sexy women with dragon-shaped tattoos. He found them distasteful and described them as “somewhat redundant” and “cheesy.”

This is where Peter Mendelsund comes in. Mr. Mendelsund is a senior book designer at Knopf. For Larsson’s book, he prepared nearly 50 different designs, all of which were subjected to intense scrutiny. About Mendelsund, Lauren Fador writes in the Jouranl:

Mr. Mendelsund, age 42, graduated from Columbia University in 1990 with a degree in philosophy and worked as a professional musician for more than a decade before embarking on a design career. With no formal graphic design experience, he began drafting CD album covers for an indie label. Less than six months later, a family friend introduced him to Chip Kidd, Knopf’s associate art director. Mr. Mendelsund showed Mr. Kidd his portfolio; he had a full-time job at Vintage Books, a Random House label, within the week. Eight months later he was at Knopf, his home for the last eight years.

The chosen cover

Starting with the book’s early working title, “The Man Who Hated Women,” which was closer to the original Swedish, Mendelsund eventually came up with the cover that today graces bookstores everywhere.

Knopf chairman Mehta’s idea was to design a jacket that would help Knopf avoid what happend in the American market to the books of Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, whose U.S. presentation and book sales were disappointing. Mehta did not want Mr. Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy to face a similar fate in the U.S. ((Since its release, “Dragon Tattoo” has sold 3.8 million copies in the U.S. to date.)

Mehta gave the final approval to Mendelsund’s distinctive design mostly because “he didn’t want the books to be pigeonholed: ‘I was extremely worried that they would be dismissed as crime novels, Scandinavian crime novels, in translation.’”

Mehta is convinced the final jacket design has proven to be one of the keys to the success of the book. However, as the Journal points out:

Not everyone loved the jacket. Mr. Mehta said there was “some pushback” from retailers, as well as members of the publishing house’s sales team, who were looking for a more conventional depiction in lines with other thrillers—something darker, bloodier, “more Scandinavian.”

Yet Mr. Mehta stood by Mr. Mendelsund’s distinctive design. Mr. Mehta said he didn’t want the books to be pigeonholed: “I was extremely worried that they would be dismissed as crime novels, Scandinavian crime novels, in translation.”

Los Angeles Times has new book editor

Jon Thurber

The Los Angeles Times has named a new book editor to replace David Ulin, who ran the section for five years. In yet another terse press release, the paper announced unceremoniously that managing editor Jon Thurber will now be sitting at Ulin’s former desk. Thurber was named managing editor/print in July 2009 and is a 38-year veteran of the paper.

Editor Russ Stanton, who wrote the release, does not provide any details of any literary writing nor any experience Thurber has had working in the book industry. Rather than explaining why Ulin got the job, Stanton spends most of the release bragging about Thurber’s obituary skills: “Jon spent 11 years as obituary editor, building our coverage into some of the best in the country. He also led by example, penning more than 400 obits during his time as editor.”

Readers will surely miss Ulin’s perceptive writing. One of my personal favorites was “The Lost Art of Reading.”

Cigarette man set to control Borders

Bennett LeBow

According to a Publishers Weekly report, a special shareholders meeting set for September 29 should further solidify Bennett LeBow’s leadership of Borders. It’s expected that “shareholders will be asked to approve a proposal to give LeBow’s company, LeBow Gamma Limited, the right to acquire 35.1 million shares of the retailer for $2.25 per share.” LeBow became Borders’ largest shareholder last May when his firm essentially stopped Borders from going bankrupt with a $25 million investment in 11.1 million shares of the company.

Bennett S. LeBow is a corporate raider and Chairman of the Board and CEO of Borders Group and Chairman of the Board of Vector Group, primarily a cigarette manufacturing company. Borders announced Wednesday (in this release) that shareholders will also vote on a second proposal that will require the approval of LeBow Gamma Limited Partnership before the company could begin “appointing, terminating or transferring the Chief Executive Officer or Chief Financial Officer of the company, or any executive officer, or materially changing the terms and conditions of their employment, subject to certain exceptions.”

As Nathan Bomey observest in an report on AnnArbor.com, LeBow is “is positioning himself to gain more control of the Ann Arbor-based book store chain.” This, however, may not augur well for the company, as Bomey notes: “Borders, which is struggling to return to profitability, faces a tenuous long-term future as an independent retailer.”

Library patrons can now check out ebooks

The Wall Street Journal ran an article about how readers can now check out ebooks from their library, all “part of a broader effort to expand borrowing privileges in the Internet Age.”

Joining forces with a group of libraries the Internet Archive, has begun an effort to create a website for checking out e-books, including the books the Internet Archive has already digitized, which is more than a million scanned public domain books, plus a catalog of thousands of contemporary titles.

Now, it’s supposed to be simple. At least Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle would have you believe so. Just log on to the Internet Archive’s Open Library site, check out a book, and have it automatically returned after two weeks. Apparently more than seventy thousand current books are now borrowable, but your library has to subscribe to Overdrive.com’s Digital Library Reserve.

Tom Blake, Digital Projects Manager for the Boston Public Library, sums it all up quote nicely. “As the first American library to lend books, we believe it is only fitting that we extend and upgrade this basic, yet crucial service in the digital age. We hold the third largest research collection in the country, much of which is available at our buildings only during business hours. Digital lending allows us to circulate these rare, precious, and unique holdings into our local neighborhoods and beyond – anytime, anywhere, free to all.”

As for me, maybe I’m a big dummy, butI have my doubts about the whole thing. Case in point, I found a collection of Mark Twain’s Roughing It and wanted to check it out. (I could not find anywhere on the page a link that said “Check Out This Item” or whatever the “check out” link might say.) So I tried to download the book (that seemed to be my only option), but the software sent me to Amazon.com, where I was given the chance to download the Kindle version for a fee. Nice.

The Week in Tweets 2010-06-26

• Amazon dropped the priced of the Kindle from $259 to $199. http://bit.ly/bOr3vU Do I get a refund now on my beloved Kindle 2? #
• From the company that brought you Betamax: Sony predicts e-book sales will outpace print book sales within five years. http://bit.ly/dCEUNs #
• Teachers must refresh themselves during the summer, recharge the battery. What works for me is writing and classical music. #

The Week in Tweets 2010-06-19

• Packing up. When I check out of school Friday it will look like I moved, never to return voluntarily. #
• Reread Robert Frost's "The Sound of the Trees" tonight w/windows open listening to night sounds. It has fed my bruised spirit. #
• Great job, Buena Park High School!! Newsweek's ranked you 742 out of the top 1,623 schools in the country. Very proud to have taught there. #
• I still have no idea where I'm teaching next year. That's why I'm putting everything in boxes. #
• I guess it was inevitable. My district blocked my site. http://www.yourenglishclass.com. Great! So much for using technology for students' benefit. #
• My department chair said, 'We don't care what your MLA book "claims," teach it the way I told you." #
• When I leave the school on Friday, there will be no evidence that I was ever there. Creative visualization. #
• Nice seeing everyone from Buena Park at the luncheon. It helped give me a little distance on where I've been the past year. #
• Teaching assignment for next year: four senior English classes, one sophomore. Not too bad. #
• #booksthatchangedmyworld is worth checking out. People tweeting about books that changed their lives. #
• How many public school teachers can you name who are only in it for the money? http://bit.ly/aFeym8 #
• Good piece on Edgar Allan Poe's "To Helen" http://bit.ly/b2hepr #
• AbeBooks has selected 25 Iconic book covers as worthy of a second look. http://bit.ly/9aiwMS #
• I think one of the best things a teacher can doing during the summer is engage in some heavy reflection on the job. Long walks help. #
• Been playing around with Grooveshark http://bit.ly/chAWtv Not too bad as an online music player. #
• listening to Feeling The Pull by The Swell Season on @Grooveshark: http://tinysong.com/bMgi #nowplaying #