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November 12, 2007
10:22 pm
Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be running too far out in front of the rest of the pack… And, honestly, that doesn’t seem to be that far ahead.
This weekend I received a coupon in my email for an additional 25% off anything at Barnes and Noble, on top of my existing Member discount. Given that Members get 10% off all paperbacks, 20% off all hardcovers, 30% off many new release hardcovers and a whopping 40% off bestseller hardcovers, an additional 25% off is nothing to sneeze at. So tonight I marched into my local B&N, picked out what I wanted, and kept on marching up to the register. Once there I whipped out my iPhone and showed the clerk the code she needed to punch in to give me my discount.
Said clerk shook her head. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I need to have a printout of the coupon.”
My face fell. “But the code you need is right here on my screen. Look. Right there.”
She shook her head again and pointed to an envelope next to the register. “I need to have the physical copy to put in this envelope in order to prove that you used the discount.”
The mind boggles. So, essentially, B&N is saving a decent chunk of change by placing the printing charges onto the shoulders of their customers. Environmentally this makes some sense, since theoretically the only ones printing the things will be people who actually use them, thus saving boatloads of poor, defenseless recycled trees, but still – if you’re going to go digital, then bloody well go digital – legal restrictions be damned!
Any e-coupon system worth the bits it’s built from should be smart enough to not only look up a Member’s code, but then also change the record in the database to mark that the code’s been used – which, incidentally, is an infinitely faster system then stockpiling crumpled, inkjetted printouts. C’mon, people – join the 20th century already!
November 12, 2007
4:55 pm
It’s just a little thing, but it’s a nifty thing nevertheless: the travel website Home and Abroad picked one of my photos to illustrate their Shanghai Art Museum page.
November 12, 2007
11:35 am
To those of you visiting this blog for the first time from things magazine, welcome. Hopefully you will find some observations, projects and other creations that will interest you. By way of introduction, let me refer you to my bio.
For old friends and regulars, hey, look — I was picked up by things magazine!
November 12, 2007
10:25 am
Many of you Gaiman fans in the audience will know Marc Hempel as the artist on the next-to-last book in the Sandman series, The Kindly Ones. Hempel apparently wasn’t quite finished with the character once the series was over – behold the lampoon episode “Insomniac” at Tales of Munden’s Bar…
November 10, 2007
7:52 am
I find it largely depressing that W.B. Yeats was bemoaning the acceleration of culture back in the 19th century:
These folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death has cropped up unchanged for centuries: who have steeped everything in the heart: to whom everything is a symbol. They have the spade over which man has leaned from the beginning. The people of the cities have the machine, which is prose and a parvenu. They have few events. They can turn over the incidents of a long life as they it by the fire. With us nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold. It is said the most eloquent people in the world are the Arabs, who have only the bare earth of the desert and a sky swept bare by the sun. “Wisdom has alighted upon three things,” goes their proverb: “the hand of the Chinese, the brain of the Frank, and the tongue of the Arab.” This, I take it, is the meaning of that simplicity sought for so much in these days by all the poets, and not to be had at any price.
Yeats wrote that in his introduction to his collection Irish Fairy and Folk Tales,published in 1888. Almost 120 years later, I’m still sitting in my chair nodding in agreement. “Nothing has time to gather meaning, and too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.” What would Yeats make of us now?
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Ever should be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent
To blow up King and Parliament.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England’s overthrow;
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys,
Let the bells ring!
Holloa boys, holloa boys,
God save the King!
A penny loaf to feed the Pope,
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him,
A pint o’ beer to rinse it down,
A faggot o’ sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say the Pope is dead.
The kind souls over at Making Light are posting a number of intelligent thoughts, comments and what-have-yous over at this post. For my part, I’m contemplating taking V for Vendetta into work today to put on the big-screen when nobody’s watching.
November 3, 2007
10:58 pm
So the hurricane has come and gone, and it was nowhere near as apocalyptic as the weather reports were making it out to be. I stayed bundled up in the house most of the day, watching Day Watch, reading a good chunk of the excellent Eisner / Miller and another stretch of Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. Late in the evening I ventured out again to return some DVDs that I’d picked up for Laura which, unfortunately, stubbornly refused to work in our DVD player, and swing by the Harvard Bookstore to pick up a copy of Umberto Eco’s On Literature which I’d noticed lurking on their bargain racks last week.
This is one of those times when I’ve bought a book and brought it home, only to suspect that I’d bought this book before. I know I’m on my second or third copy of the Eagleton mentioned above, but I think this is my second copy of On Literature – either that or I’d read through part of it at a bookstore someplace, decided I wanted it for my library, and then abandoned it because it was, at the time, too expensive for my then-budget. God bless the bargain bins; even if it is my second copy of the book, eight bucks is hard to mourn too keenly.
My favorite part of the book so far is an essay about influences, which Eco wrote and presented himself at a conference about Borges’ influences on Eco. (That had to be a somewhat dizzying experience – to attend a conference about your own work. “Yep, no, unh-uh, that’s interesting, they gave you a Ph.D. for that?”) In it, Eco lets slip that as of that writing, his personal library exceeded some forty thousand volumes.
Forty. Thousand.
Heh. I have some catching up to do.
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