The Kindle Fire is burning up the tablet competition — on the Android side.
Amazon.com Inc.’s tablet computer is catching fire on in a big way, having grabbed 54.4% of the Android tablet market during February, the fourth month it was on the market, according to new data from comScore Inc. That represented almost double of the Fire’s Android market share since December.
But the tablet market leader remains Apple’s iPad, which, according to the market research firm IDC, owned about 55% of the tablet market at the end of 2011. Android tablets accounted for about 45%. This is all great news for Amazon, meaning about 30% of tablets currently shipping are Kindle Fires, making the Fire a close second to the iPad.
Despite efforts by Apple, dismissing the Fire is increasingly difficult to do so. In February, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook dismissed tablets like the Kindle Fire as inferior:
A cheap product might sell some units … But then [consumers] get it home and use it and the joy is gone. And the joy is gone every day that they use it and they wind up not using it anymore.
No one knows for sure how much use the Kinde Fire is getting, but consumers certainly are buying it.
She was the daughter of a Congregational preacher, the sister of five preachers, and the husband of another. She was raised in a family that devoted themselves to Christian purpose, “a kind of moral heaven, replete with moral oxygen — fully charged and with intellectual electricity.” Several members of her family were also famous in their own right. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became an evangelist for reform. Her great-niece was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose grandmother, Mary, was one of Harriet’s sisters. Her sister Catherine was an educator who founded the Hartford Female Seminary.
When Harriet was young, the family moved to Cincinnati, where they found themselves at the border of the North and South, East and West, and at the center of an increasing antislavery sentiment. Here she began to write for literary and evangelical periodicals.
When she was twenty-five she married one of her father’s colleagues at a theological seminary in Ohio, Calvin Stowe; and when he was appointed to the faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, she returned to New England. It was during services at the Brunswick Congregational Church that she was inspired to write her most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which she penned at her kitchen table.
Novelist Harry Crews has died from complications from neuropathy. Crews, who died at his home in Gainesville, Florida, was 76. “He had been very ill,” his ex-wife, Sally Crews, tells the Associated Press in this report. “In a way it was kind of a blessing. He was in a lot of pain.”
The AP report describes Crews as follows: “A wild man and drunken sage in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Hunter Thompson, he wrote bloodied, freakish stories drawn directly from his own experiences, including boxing and karate. Crews sported a tattoo with a line from an E.E. Cummings poem, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death,’ on his right bicep under the tattoo of a skull.” According to a brief earlier write-up in a New York Timesobituary: “Though his books captivated many reviewers (they bewildered others and repelled still others), they attracted a cadre of readers so fiercely devoted that the phrase “cult following” seems inadequate to describe their level of ardor.”
Crews was the son of sharecroppers in Bacon County, Georgia. Growing up was rough, and when his father died when Crews was two, the boy was marked for life. As the AP report details,
His childhood alone tested the imagination. His mother married his father’s brother, a violent drunk. Crews suffered from infantile paralysis and once fell into a vat of boiling water, confining him to his bed for months. Still, he managed to become the first member of his family to graduate from high school, after which he joined the Marine Corps. In the book “Getting Naked with Harry Crews,” he explained to interviewer Hank Nuwer that his military service was crucial.
“If I hadn’t gone in the Marine Corps, I wouldn’t be a professor in the university. I’d be in the state prison because I was a bad actor and a bad boy.”
After a stint in the Marines, Crews began writing, and eventually his publications earned him a spot on the faculty of the University of Florida, where he taught from 1968 through 1997. As recalled by his students, he was mesmerizing on the topic of writing.
He told one interviewer what he told his students; “If you’re gonna write, for God in heaven’s sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you’ve been told.”
This Coyote Canyon Press anthology contains Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a rich and darkly morbid story that showcases Hawthorne’s art at its most sensuous and florid. It is the story of a beautiful young woman in a poisonous garden, and its gorgeous and lethal beauty are wonderfully done. The story is a sinister one in that the growing signs of the deadliness of Beatrice, and inevitably of Giovanni himself, accumulate with a horrid insistence.
Beatrice’s father is Professor Rappaccini of Padua, who raised her from childhood among deadly plants and flowers of his own creation in order to endow her with “marvellous gifts against which no power or strength could avail an enemy.” Giovanni, a young student, unaware of the secrets of the garden, is deeply attracted to her extraordinary beauty and her intimate tending to the beautiful plants. Gradually he becomes aware of the deadliness of the garden, and despite the warnings of Rappaccini’s rival, Baglioni, Giovanni continues to pursue her until he eventually takes on her deadly power. When he finally realizes the extent of his contamination, he urges her to drink with him the antidote prepared by Baglioni. She drinks it first, and “as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was death.” The story ends with Baglioni’s horrified yet triumphant cry: “ ‘Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment?’ ”
Trailer for the German musical “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
At the time of his trial and execution in 399 BC, Socrates had reached the age of seventy. He had lived through the Periclean Age when Athens was at the pinnacle of Imperial power, then through twenty-five years of war with Sparta and Athens’ defeat in 404. He did, however, live to see the restoration of democracy. For most of that time he was a well-known character in the streets of Athens, speaking to anyone who’d listen to his philosophy of life. His mission, which he explains in the Apology, was to expound the idea that man was responsible for his own moral attitudes.
Front cover of Coyote Canyon Press edition To satisfy the need for education in the 5th century BC, there arose numbers of traveling teachers known as the Sophists. They taught rhetoric, a powerful weapon, since all the important decisions were made by the assemblies of adult male citizens. Socrates was often confused with the Sophists, but their differences are vital: the Sophists professed to teach their students how to be successful, whereas, Sophocles claimed nothing of the sort; his dialogues aimed at discovering the truth, the understanding of life and its values that he believed were the basis of philosophy: that is, philosophy as a moral as well as intellectual pursuit. Thus his celebrated paradox: when men do wrong it is because they don’t know any better. This is not to say that Socrates ignored the will. He believed that educated man would choose the right because they cannot choose the wrong.
Benjamin Jowett’s translations in this volume give Plato’s account of Socrates’ trial and death. Euthyphro is a kind of introduction to Plato’s account of Socrates’ speech to the jury in his own defense. Crito gives the account of how Socrates could have escaped into exile but refused. Meno shows Socrates debating Meno on the nature of human virtue and questioning Meno’s slave boy on a question of geometry in order to prove the preexistence of the soul. Phaedo gives the account of Socrates’ last discussions with his friends on the immortality of the soul.
“Realism” is an element of some of Abrose Bierce’s short stories (particularly those concerning the Civil War), but the term is of little value when discussing his often fantastical imagination. In his essay “The Short Story” he writes: ‘Probability? Nothing so improbable as what is true. It is the unexpected that occurs . . . Everything being so unearthly improbable, I wonder that novelists of the Howells school have the audacity to relate anything all.’ ”
Bierce’s stories can be roughly divided into three categories: those about the Civil War, horror and the supernatural, and comic or “tall” tales. Though his plots are mostly contrived, he writes with great economy and vividness, and his stories often have a caustic, almost misanthropic edge to them. The shot story was clearly an ideal medium for him.
His contrivances of plot include reordering of the time scheme such as analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward), exploration of dreams and the surreal, and a preoccupation with the vagaries of perception. Through these techniques, he demonstrates an uncanny ability to record how humans record experience before organizing it conceptually.
In his most horrifying war story, “Chickamauga,” a deaf-mute child witnesses the retreat of the Confederate soldiers after the eponymous battle and wanders out toward the battlefield and encounters men crawling away from battle. The child thinks they are playing a game and tries to ride on the back of one of them, but the soldier flings him to the ground and then
turned upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw — from the upper teeth to the throat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, the fierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsoned in throat and breast by the blood of its quarry.
The child retreats and then drawn by a great fire, leads the men as if into battle with his toy sword. Soon he recognizes the burning building as his own home, his mother lying dead before him, and he utters “a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries — something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey — a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.”
The reversal of physical orientation is complete and serves as an emblem of the reversal of the story: war as a matter of youthful enthusiasm and heroism revealed as bloody horror.
From among his few short stories, William Austin’s fame rests primarily with one, “Peter Rugg, or the Missing Man,” which became immensely popular and a favorite of Hawthorne and Longfellow. Austin incorporates legends of the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman into a New England setting, much as [[Washington Irving]] had done with Knickerbocker materials in “Rip Van Winkle.”
The storytelling method is sophisticated in that Austin recounts Rugg’s situation by means of one narrative nested within another. The frame storyteller is Jonathan Dunwell, who presents events that transpire chiefly during 1820, although there is a distortion of time that heightens the sense of the supernatural.
After spending a stormy night with friends in Concord, Rugg and his young daughter, Jenny, fail to reach Boston and are cursed thereafter to travel continuously in an antiquated carriage (even by 1820 standards) and become precursors of storms (like the older Flying Dutchman).
Originally published on September 10, 1824, in the New England Galaxy in the form of a letter to the editor but carrying the title “Some Account of Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, Late of Boston, New England, in a Letter to Mr. Herman Krauff,” it was signed “Jonathan Dunwell,” about whom nothing was known. For the next seventeen years, the true author, a local attorney named William Austin, concealed his identity.
This collection of great American short stories contains over thirty of the finest ever penned by American writers from Washington Irving to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Three of the essays in this collection (“History,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-soul”) sprang from the 1836 lectures on the philosophy of history Emerson delivered at the Boston Masonic Temple.
“History” really isn’t about history but how to convert the burden of the past into a survival kit for the future. “The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible.” Emerson believed that history could not be ignored, but for it to have currency we must imagine ourselves in it. “We . . . must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten images to some reality in our experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.”
Emerson’s essay on the unalienated human being, “Self-Reliance,” the essay for which he is most remembered, is a synthesis of the self-rule of classical stoicism, the bildung of Goethe, the ideas of Schleiermacher, the knotty musings of Kant — translated into a coherent, accessible English. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” But it is not a mandate for selfishness. It recommends self-reliance as a starting point — not as a goal. A better society will come about only as an association of fulfilled individuals. Whereas “Self-Reliance” emphasizes the individual, “The Over-soul” focuses on the common mind. “Self-Reliance affirms individualism; “The Over-soul affirms “that great nature in which we rest,” a nature variously described as “a common nature,” “the great heart of nature,” “the common heart,” and “the great, universal mind.” The link between these two essays is Emerson’s idea that the power of the individual is the power of our common nature.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Also in this collection is “The Poet,” the finest piece ever penned about literature as a process, a form of expression as fundamental as any basic drive — like sex — but also one of the main purposes of human life. Poetry is not a skill or a trade, but a reflection of the human spirit, the inner fire: “For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch bearers, but children of the fire, made of it.”
The last essay in this collection is “The Divinity School Address,” given July 15, 1838, to the senior class of the Harvard Divinity School. Emerson had not been invited by the officers of the school, but by the senior class. What he delivered that evening was so objectionable to the clergy that nearly thirty years passed before he was invited to speak again at Harvard. Emerson’s address was both an attack on formal historical Christianity and a proposition of a personal religious consciousness, a sort of declaration of the divinity of the human. Emerson ended his talk with advice that asked a lot of the young graduates: “Let me admonish you to go alone; to refuse the good models . . . and to love God without mediator or veil.” The address would be Emerson’s last face-off with organized religion, though he would remain a deeply religious and spiritual man throughout his life.
For “The Dead” James Joyce drew upon an incident in Galway in 1903. There a young man named Michael (“Sonny”) Bodkin was courting Nora Barnacle (Joyce’s eventual wife), but he had tuberculosis and was soon bedridden. When Nora resolved to leave Galway for Dublin, the boy stole out of his sickbed and in the rain under an apple tree sang to Nora . Later, in Dublin, Nora learned that Bodkin was dead. When Nora first met Joyce, as she told her sister, what attracted her to him was his resemblance to “Sonny” Bodkin.
Apparently, Joyce was jealous of the dead suitor and grilled Nora ceaselessly about him. What bothered him was that her heart was still moved by the recollection of the boy’s love for her. This notion of a man in rivalry with a dead boy lying in a cemetery appears to be the genesis of Joyce’s most famous story.
Besides basing his story only on this incident, Joyce borrowed heavily from the ending of a book which is hardly read anymore, George Moore’s Vain Fortune. In that book a young bridal couple learn that a young woman whom the groom jilted has committed suicide. Both are tormented, and the bride asks her husband not to kiss her. She falls off to sleep, their marriage unconsummated, and the husband stares out the window at “the melancholy greyness of the dawn.” In that instant he realizes that his life is a failure and that his wife lacks the passion of the girl who killed herself. He does, however, achieve a sort of redemption through his agony: a resolution to try to make his wife happy. This is clearly the situation from which Joyce adroitly lifted: the dead lover who comes between the living lovers, the husband’s realization of his failure, his acceptance of mediocrity, the resolve to be at least sympathetic — it all came from this other book. Nonetheless, Joyce rarefies the story by having it arise not from the suicide of a former love but from the simple memory of the young love itself.
The defining moment in the life of John Dos Passos came between August 16 and 20, 1917, when he experienced combat firsthand as an ambulance driver in France at the Battle of Verdun. Three days later he wrote to his friend Rumsey Marvin:
The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.
Of all the things in this world a government is the thing least worth fighting for.
None of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about any of the aims of this ridiculous affair.
Before his wartime experiences, Dos Passos had only intellectualized his feelings of rebellion nurtured at Harvard, and later embellished during his bohemian days in Greenwich Village with its political radicals such as John Reed. These were heady days for someone who wanted to work in the arts. Dos Passos saw the Armory Show, which introduced Americans to the work of Picasso and Matisse; he attended performances of the Ballets Russes; and he was deeply affected by the literary radicalism of the poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
He had become a pacifistic, but knew that for a young man hoping to be a writer, he must experience the war firsthand. He volunteered for an ambulance unit and shipped to France on June 20, 1917. Near the end of July he joined a section of drivers headed toward the front. What he saw there was, he wrote in one of his journal entries, “horror . . . so piled up on horror that there can be no more. How damned ridiculous it all is! . . . All the cant and hypocrisy . . . all the vestiges of the old truth now putrid and false infect the air, choke you worse than German gas — the ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men — the heroics about war — my country right or wrong — Oh infinities of them!”
