The New York Times recently ran an article on a Brooklyn street poet named Robert Samuel Snyderman, who spends his days sitting on a white bucket with a powder blue typewriter, offering to channel his muse for a small donation. His hair appears to have exploded. A sign on his chest simply says “Poems.”

Harvesting the inspiration required to write poetry is a tricky business. I can't fathom writing a poem every day, much less doing it immediately, under the looming expectations of someone who has just paid me. How does Brooklyn's poetry entrepreneur manage? Snyderman finds that it helps to ask patrons for sources of inspiration rather than topics. The Times reprinted a poem he wrote for a woman whose friend had outlived a doctor's dire prognosis by 15 years, (for a mere $7). Here's the result:

I came here
to life

Leak well,
human
blood. Leak well.
There is no time.

Snyderman attracts enough interest (and cash) to have lived solely on the written word since May. Not that he's living that well (the typewriter is on loan from a friend).

Brooklyn's plucky street poet reminds me of a great poet of the New York School of poetry, Frank O'Hara, known for plucking poems at will from his city surroundings. Here's an example:

Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on a movie magazine, no it was Fabian's
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in the twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now

John Ashbery described O'Hara's concept of the poem as “the chronicle of the creative act that produces it,” and often saw him “dashing the poems off at odd moments — in his office at the Museum of Modern Art, in the street at lunchtime or even in a room full of people.” O'Hara referred to his poetry as “I do this I do that” poems. At his best, O'Hara's this and that was pretty spectacular, exemplified by “The Day Lady Died” (for Billie Holiday):

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

I expect that Mr. Snyderman could find a little inspiration in O'Hara (if he doesn't already). Here's to the street poet for bringing his city a little closer to the word. May his verses bring him wealth — at least enough to let him purchase his own typewriter.

@Allie @Blah
You must be reading some other news stories about this break up other than here.

Please provide links so the rest of us can figure out where u 2 get these ideas from. What is the source of your hatered ?

Also, thank you for your kind words of concern about the effects of this relationship ending on the custody issues. After all, ME & TLM do have to worry about their c/h/i/l/d/r/e/n, something which your posts addressed so carefully !

Your respect for LGB families deserves special mention !

2  1

Thanks to an update to the service's native Android app, users can now, for example, buy a song using their Android phone and listen to that song on an iPod touch or Logitech Squeezebox within minutes. Similarly, iTunes users can download songs on their PCs and then play the music back on their Android phones or through MP3tunes' web interface. Sadly, Airband, the MP3tunes iOS app, hasn't been updated to take advantage of Apple's new multitasking features yet.

For a closer look at MP3tunes, also see our in-depth review of the service from earlier this year. MP3tunes currently offers all of its users free 2GB music lockers, but the company is in the process of upgrading all of these accounts to 10GB of free storage. For $4.95 per month, users can also expand their lockers to 50GB.

Competitors: Other Music Lockers and Streaming Music Services

Apple is rumored to be launching an online version of iTunes in the near future, though the chances that Apple will offer users the ability to wirelessly sync this music with an Android phone are rather slim. Other MP3tunes competitors include MeCanto, which offers streaming to Android and Symbian phones, and pSonar, which offers unlimited storage but doesn't offer mobile streaming or downloads.

In addition, the growing popularity of streaming music services like MOG and Rdio also poses a number of challenges for music locker services like MP3tunes. Some of these – like Rdio – already scan their users' library for music that is also available on their services and then make these songs easily available on their services without forcing users to upload their complete music library. This was one of the features that made Lala so popular, though it remains to be seen if Apple plans to offer a similar service once it relaunches Lala.

You want to listen to your iTunes music library in your living room and you want a simple solution, well, in that case the Roku player may be a good option to consider. After all, Roku has just announced a partnership with MP3tunes and will now begin offering an MP3tunes channel.

So, Roku and MP3tunes. For those that may not be aware, the Roku player is a small set top box that connects to your home television and features channels of content. As of now the Roku offer goodies such as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Mediafly, MLB.tv and Ultimate Fighting Championship. And for the geekier audience, you can also check out the Revision 3 and TWiT channels. But that aside, you want music in the form of your iTunes music library and that is where MP3tunes comes into play.

MP3tunes is a service which allows the user to create a locker, in which you can upload, store and later access your music files from any internet connected device. In this case, that device is the Roku player, which is done by way of the recently added MP3tunes channel.

Bottom line, this will take a little bit of time to setup as you will have to upload a copy of your music files to your locker. But once ready you will have be able to enjoy your iTunes away from your computer and without earbuds.

Otherwise, the MP3tunes locker is 10GB and comes free for Roku users. And in addition to listening on the Roku, you can also enjoy yur music on an iPhone, iPod touch or Android smartphone as well as other devices such as the Nintendo Wii and Chumby using that same music locker.

And for those wondering, MP3tunes has been around for a while, in fact, they have been around for much longer than it has been cool to store files in the “cloud.”

As I wrote a few days ago, I was informed that alleged Russian spy Mikhail Semenko had my business card. Turns out I had his information as well in my personal lap top and had hoped to meet him before my next trip to China — as his blog on the Chinese economy interested me.

There are rumors that Semenko applied for jobs at both the New America Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I've checked with New America's director of human resources, and there is no application — so I can't confirm that he applied. He may have wanted to; New America is a cool place for youngish policy wonks.

But I met Semenko at a meeting I chaired with global strategic risk guru Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group, who was speaking about his best-selling new book, The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?.

The fundamental thesis of Bremmer's fascinating book is that the biggest, most significant new feature of the global economy is the emergence of “state capitalism”. Bremmer argues that his state capitalism — as manifested in its most potent form in China — threatens both firms and states that practice more traditional laissez-faire market capitalism.

This debate on Chinese vs. American approaches to capitalism is what the handsome alleged Russian agent Mikhail Semenko came to learn about when he visited the New America Foundation on May 27, 2010. Fascinating.

Above is a short clip of my exchange with Ian Bremer on that day — and this is a link to the longer program. It would be interesting to see (I haven't had the chance to check) whether Semenko lodges any questions during the Q&A session.

The Washington Post is reporting that all or most of the alleged Russian spies are going to plead guilty and be deported to Russia as early as tomorrow. I sort of hope that Mikhail Semenko keeps up his blog from Russia — because “agent of influence” or not — his interest in key questions on how the world organizes itself is something we should all be thinking about.

– Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons

@iKid

I hope they don't fade away. They are awesome technology but I have one problem with ereaders.

The companies that produce them don't advertise like they should. They are letting Apple get away with telling consumers that the iPad is able to read book and is therefore an e reader, a bold-faced lie. Countless people believe that the iPad is better for reading books than ereaders because it can produce color and do so much more than read books.

It is near-impossible to argue an absurd contrast ratio, battery life, and free data to someone set on an Apple product, but the like of Amazon and Barnes and Noble had better find a way to do it before e readers go the way of the Kin.

One way that I think that e reader companies could cut major costs is by consolidating their online bookstores. I don't want to turn in to Gartenburg and start screaming about fragmentation, but if say, Amazon and Barnes and Noble became the only two ebook retailers, than there would be an awesome uniformity throughout the market that is missing from it now.

People are confused about buying ebooks and companies are wasting money upkeeping ebook retailers.

You could liken this revolutionized market with the Android Marketplace (Android Marketplace being the actual ebooks) and HTC, Samsung and Motorola (These companies being the OEMs). These companies make varying hardware and compete like crazy for profit and mind-share while still allowing you to buy apps from one place.

Having Barnes and Noble and Amazon in a fierce competition should keep prices down and other companies would be left with producing awesome hardware.

i also think that Barnes and Noble, Amazon and all the OEMs should agree on some sort of commission to pay to each OEM every time that OEM's ereader has been used to buy an ebook off Barnes and Noble or Amazon.

I'm sure this won't happen because many companies are convinced that their is a lot of money in purveying their own online book retailers but I am sure that consumers are hurt in this because selection is hurt, as is uniformity.

Henry Jenkins has a two part interview (one, two) with Marwan Kraidy, author of
Reality Television and Arab Politics. Jenkins asks:

As you note, many of these reality show formats come from the west but get localized in the Arab context. Can you describe this localization process? To what degree is their western origins central to their political impact?

Kraiday answers:

The localization process underpins the book's main argument that the
Arab reality television controversies are best understood as a social
laboratory where various versions of modernity are tested. The formats'
western origins were never directly important. In the early years of
Arab reality television, 2003 and 2004, critics leveled the charge that
the reality television wave was another episode in a western cultural
conquest trying to impose an alien reality on Arabs and Muslims.

Localization occurred in several ways.

One was a gradual take over by conservative forces. Consider the
case of Algeria, where state television initially aired the Lebanese Star Academy.
After opposition from Islamists, the Algerian president himself is said
to have ordered it off the air, replacing it with a locally-made,
ostensibly more conservative version. One season later, and the same
slot was filled by a Qoranic recitation show, reality style–nominees,
fan mobilization, viewer voting.

Two poetry reality shows epitomize another, and to me far more
interesting, process of localization. Poetry enjoys a status in Arab
culture that it is to my knowledge not accorded anywhere else in the
world. Since pre-Islamic times, poetry is at once art form, political
platform and entertainment. Numerous Arab television channels today
have talk-shows dedicated to poetry, and poets show up on all kinds of
talk-shows for women, youth, etc. A well-known poet in the Arab world
is treated like a rock star. So here comes Abu Dhabi Television,
supported by state financing, with the brilliant idea of launching
poetry competitions, reality television style. The two shows, one
dedicated to Arab poetry at large, the other focused on Gulf poetry,
were major hits. Followers of your blog may have read recently the
story of Hissa Helal, the Saudi woman who reached the finale of one of
these shows, with a poem (in the semi-final) that attacked the
reactionary clerics in her country, a gutsy move that was made partly
possible by the venue–a public, popular poetry competition.

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker)

National Post:

Karen Solie was named the Canadian winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize at a gala ceremony in Toronto on Thursday night, eight years after first being nominated for the country's most prestigious award for poetry.

Read the whole story: National Post

Get HuffPost Books On
Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz!

Know something we don't? E-mail us at Books@huffingtonpost.com

These authors, who sell between 10,000 and 20,000 copies of a book, are the workhorses of the industry. They earn enough to make a modest living from their writing, sell enough to keep getting contracts from major publishing houses, and sometimes emerge as best-selling authors.

However, the book-buying habits sustaining their work may become a thing of the past when printed books are swapped for digital ones. As strolling and perusing the aisles of a bookstore is replaced with a mouse and computer screen, the demise of brick-and-mortar retailers will accelerate and critically important links between midlist authors and their readers will be severed.

Consider some of the common ways books by lesser-known authors are sold everyday in a store:

• Examining the history section of a store, a customer is drawn to a book by its eye-catching cover;
• Picking up a book by a popular author from a table, a customer is intrigued by a novel in an adjacent stack;
• Approaching the cash register, a customer decides to get one additional book after reading a sticky note that says “staff favorite,” one of the many ways booksellers “hand-sell” a promising title.

As of yet, there is no digital substitute to this serendipitous manner of bringing readers and writers together. Furthermore an important symbiotic relationship between best-selling authors and their lesser brethren will end. Readers who buy new books by Dan Brown or Kitty Kelley frequently leave the store with another title under their arm. But it is often the invitingly deep and varied inventory of books by midlist authors that lure the reader into the store in the first place.

Digital books create a retailing bypass that diminishes the exposure of midlist books to potential readers. Supermarkets have long understood the importance of this aspect of sales, arranging their stores so shoppers have to pass through aisles filled with tempting items in order to pick up a quart of milk. So while eBooks will offer publishers an easier and more economic means to sell more works by leading authors it will increase the challenge of marketing books by others.

There are, however, industry veterans who welcome the new arrangement. Richard Curtis has been selling traditional books to publishers for years as president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., a New York City literary agency. Now he also publishes his clients' books as e-books through his company E-Reads. Curtis is convinced the digital book age will include new ways for midlist authors to survive. “We are going to see evolve a new model,” Curtis said, “a more viral way of bringing those authors to the attention of the people they are intended to reach.”

Curtis, as well as others, is excited by book blogging, twittering, and customer reviews. “Social networking is going to take the place of the autocratic handful of pundits who tell you what to read,” he said. Pointing to customer reviews as an example of the future, Curtis thinks readers will be guided in their eBook choices as restaurant-goers currently use Zagat ratings.

Unfortunately, if Amazon customer reviews are any indication of the future, it looks pretty grim for midlist writers. The reviews that currently populate the company's website are a mix of commentary written by friends (every author makes sure of that), irrelevant gripping about the price, format, or the publisher, and a large assortment of diatribes by–for lack of a better word–screwballs. Furthermore, the recommendations generated by Amazon analysis of a customer's purchases rarely include a midlist book.

Digital books will also reward specialization an unhealthy trend for midlist authors. “More and more,” Curtis said, “you will see books and publishing ventures aimed at very specific niches.” As with the disappearance of general interest magazines, publishers will push their writers to create books for narrowly defined marketplaces further shrinking the market for today's midlist books.

The strongest glimmer of hope for midlist authors is a growing conviction among publishing executives that printed books do not face a future entirely like that of the music industry where compact disc were replaced by downloads. Books are not the same as songs, according to Mark Suchomel, president of Independent Publishers Group. His company is one of the nation's largest distributors of books by independent presses, consummate publishers of midlist books.

“The way you sell music is by sample,” Suchomel said. “The most interesting thing when judging a book is the cover.” He sees a new world where both print and digital books will survive hand in hand, one version supporting the other.

For instance, Suchomel believes digital books will never substitute in the age-old practice of giving a book. “No one,” he said, “is going to wrap up an electronic file.”

Everyone has a book in them, right? Well Barnes & Noble wants to give you the opportunity to push that book in front of a few million people using their PubIt! service.

The new service allows you to upload a document, convert it to epub, and sell it on their B&N reader system, including on the Nook and iPad. It’s coming this summer and is currently accepting sign-ups.

Interestingly, they’re focusing on independent publishers, which suggests that we won’t see too many scrawled treatises on alien mind control in the Carter cabinet or the how the ghost of Jack Ruby is coming to inappropriately touch an older man in Boca Raton.

There will be a “competitive royalty model” but they’re not announcing specifics right now.

Stuff like this should have old guard publishers making Willa Cather in their pants. If an independent house can get good distribution, albeit electronically, their chance of hitting the “long tail” reader is infinitely higher. Amazon allows for this sort of thing as well – you get an ISBN and sell through their store, often using a print on demand model – and it’s fairly simple to get onto the Kindle store without many hiccups. This doesn’t add much in groundbreaking functionality to B&N but it does put it closer to parity with competitors.

Barnes & Noble Announces PubIt!™,
An Easy-to-Use Digital Publishing and Distribution Platform
for Independent and Self-Publishers

PubIt! Enables Independent Publishers and Self-Published Authors
Access to Sell eBooks and Content to Millions of Readers
on Barnes & Noble’s Online and Digital Platforms

New York, New York – May 19, 2010 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, is extending its deep and longstanding tradition of supporting authors and publishers with PubIt! by Barnes & Noble, an easy and lucrative way for independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally through BN.com and the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. The easy-to-use publishing and distribution platform offers qualified independent publishers and authors of self-published works expanded distribution, visibility and protection that only Barnes & Noble can offer.

The announcement marks Barnes & Noble’s latest move to continue to build one of the world’s largest digital catalogs, spanning eBooks, journals, periodicals and other types of reading material. PubIt! titles will be distributed through BN.com and Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore, which currently offers more than one million digital titles to millions of dedicated customers in-store and online.

Independent publishers and writers will appreciate PubIt!’s simple and competitive royalty model and compensation process, the details of which will be available in the coming weeks. Content owners’ intellectual property will be well-protected with Barnes & Noble’s best-in-class digital rights management technology and offered in the industry standard ePub format that allows publishers’ works to be enjoyed by millions of Barnes & Noble customers on hundreds of the most popular computing, mobile and eBook reading devices.

“As a company that has achieved much of its success by building mutually beneficial relationships with publishers and authors, Barnes & Noble’s new PubIt! service represents an exciting evolution and significant opportunity in the digital content arena,” said Theresa Horner, Director, Digital Products, Barnes & Noble. “Barnes & Noble is uniquely positioned to support writers and publishers and bring their exciting digital works to the broadest audience of readers anywhere.”

Whether online or on-the-go, Barnes & Noble customers will have access to PubIt! titles with the opportunity to browse, sample, buy and download the digital content in seconds to their devices with free BN reader software. Using Barnes & Noble’s breakthrough Read In Store™ technology, NOOK™ customers can also browse the complete contents of PubIt! titles while in Barnes & Noble stores.

PubIt! is a convenient one-stop-shop, allowing publishers to get their content in front of consumers for purchase and reading on the most widely adopted mobile devices and software platforms. By following simple steps to upload their content in an industry standard format for electronic titles, content creators can reach consumers on hundreds of devices including: NOOK by Barnes & Noble, PC, Mac®, iPad™, iPhone®, BlackBerry® and others. For more information on free BN eReader software and apps, please visit www.bn.com/ebooks/download-reader.asp.

More information on PubIt!, which will be available this summer, and the benefits of joining Barnes & Noble’s expansive and trusted digital content catalog can be found at www.bn.com/pubit.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt /
K

Book Reviews |
June 4, 2010 | Comments (13)

There’s something fascinating as well as unsettling about Britain in Edwardian times. It was a short era of radical change in almost every aspect of life, culminating in the unimagined and unimaginable trauma of the First World War. It seems to provide endless possibilities for writers, and Byatt’s latest work tries — and manages — to explore most of them.

Taking as a narrative frame the intertwined lives of four families in Southern England, Byatt lets her protagonists follow different paths, all grounded in the problems and interests of the time. The seven children of the Wellwoods, a free-thinking Fabian couple, are all heavily influenced by their well-know children’s writer mother and her stories. The children’s fairytale childhood and their reactions to it, their different characters as well as their life choices are described in detail, with the help of narrative comments about the diverse cultural and social setting. In addition to the Wellwoods, Byatt also introduces working-class characters, pottery artists and military men, bankers and German puppeteers. The scope of her work is amazing, and with the exception of the younger children, no character feels underdeveloped or one-dimensional. This leads to a sometimes patchy narrative and a wealth of information supplied in just a short paragraph. It took me a while to get into the story, precisely for this reason, but the writing is superb, and the world Byatt is piecing together is irresistible in its diversity.

While the boys and young men struggle with their parents’ carreer choices for them, with ambition and passion, it’s really a story about girls’ and women’s lives around 1900, without moving into a feminist literature corner. Faced with traditional values as well as exciting new developments they are exposed to through their liberal parents’ circles, the Wellwood girls and their friends experience turbulent times. One of them faces years of hard work and the prospect of a lonely private life by choosing to become a doctor, while another one almost loses all hope of a dignified life by falling pregnant after giving in to a writer advocating free love. They all experience the tensions between the social classes, one as an anarchist, another one as an ambitious but poor working-class girl without much choice about her future.

It’s also a novel about the arts. The Edwardian’s near-obsession with childhood and a golden past is reflected in Olive Wellwood’s success as a children’s writer, in the stories she writes for her children, the puppeteer’s success in Germany and Britain alike, and the academic interest shown in folktales at the time. Art is at the heart of the power struggles in the new V&A museum in London, and art fills every minute of the two potter’s lives. Finally and poignantly, art — poetry — is the only way the war is shown to be dealt with by the surviving soldiers.

The book ends in the fragmented way life after 1918 must have felt for everyone. It’s depressing how you always know before opening a book about the time that most characters will have died by the end. The Children’s Book is no exception. The fact that so much story, so many words, were spent on the childhood of the men who are to die, somehow makes it an even sadder, and more real, experience. It’s a novel about the magic of childhood and the agonies of growing up; about betrayal of parents and betrayal by parents; about a time that promised a new beginning and ended with a lost generation. It’s brilliantly written, and it makes a lasting impression. And if you still don’t get my drift: GO READ IT NOW!

This review is part of the Cannonball Read series. For more of K’s reviews, check out … and then I read some more.