The Kingle Single

Dwight Garner has a great piece in The New York Times about one of the lesser-known pleasures of owning an Amazon Kindle -- the Kindle Single.

Dwight says it well:

"I recently sat down and read 15 of these boutique minibooks. Most are blah; a few are so subliterate they made my temples ache. But several — like John Hooper’s reportage on the Costa Concordia disaster, Jane Hirshfield on haiku and Jonathan Mahler on Joe Paterno — are so good they awaken you to the promise of what feels almost like a new genre: long enough for genuine complexity, short enough that you don’t need journalistic starches and fillers."

I've read a couple. My favorite up 'til now is Pete Hamill's treatise on illegal immigration. But, having read Garner's article, I'm going to download the JoePa piece tonight when I get home.

Yes, I still adore the brick-and-mortar bookstore. Yes, I still buy paper-bound books. (Although if I bring too many more home my wife is going to kill me.)

But, I love the Kindle. I love it so much I have two. (Thanks, Jenn!) I'm currently reading Thomas Mallon's "Watergate: A Novel" on my Kindle Fire. Trust me, you quickly forget you're reading an electronic device and the e-ink technology of the original Kindle is easy on the eyes and doesn't glare in the sun.

E-readers and the internet are most likely the future of my profession. Heck, we wouldn't be meeting like this were it not for that lovely modern-day cracker barrel known as the weblog (or blog, for short).

So, I said all that to say all this, as Jerry Reed once sang. If you have a Kindle, don't miss out on the Singles. Good stuff. Good stuff, indeed.

Nuggets of New York

I am thinking now of the Italian joint on Restaurant Row, in the city of right angles and tough, damaged people.

I stole that line from Pete Hamill, so you know I'm talking about New York. The City. Manhattan.

We were there on a cold and clear Tuesday in February. The sommelier brought his list, but I knew I wanted Pinot. And ravioli. And garlic.

The service was superb, as it must be, and the food was fine. I can remember the two women, out for the evening perhaps, and the man in the black coat and the child who didn't chatter.

I have forgotten the conversation. But I want to go back. I want to feel the pulse of the pavement, the staccato of the sidewalk, the rhythm of the ride.

I want to see James Earl Jones "Driving Miss Daisy." I want to awaken in Times Square and sip an espresso at the cheesecake factory. I want to buy a Daily News from the guy behind the glass and hope that Denis Hamill has written today about the borough of Brooklyn.

I want to give my regards to Broadway and remember me to Herald Square. I want to hum "Harlem Nocturne" as the sun slumbers. I want to fall asleep in my room at the Milford and dream of the day to come.

I want to do a lot of things, but instead here I sit, in my chair, living vicariously through the poet's pen, dreaming of the Italian joint on Restaurant Row, in Pete Hamill's city of right angles and tough, damaged people.

This one's for the Duke

In honor of the passing of the legendary Duke Snider, here is a 2005 New York Daily News piece by the peerless Pete Hamill on the Boys of Summer and their big finish in '55.

Wasted words

My uncle told me a story once.

He was remembering high school, specifically a day in which he'd missed class, and had asked to borrow the notes of his buddy, Mike.

Mike handed him a half sheet of paper.

"Wow," Jeff said. "This is all your notes?"

"Yeah," Mike said. "I only wrote down what was important."

Jeff was puzzled. Seems he always had to take pages and pages of notes during a normal class period. So, he asked another friend for his notes.

That friend handed him three pages.

It's a wide-ranging lesson, one that is of particular value to a writer. Anybody can blather on for 700 or 800 words, my boss is fond of saying. The real trick is to say what you have to say in 500 words or less.

Truman Capote was a genius at it. Somebody -- Groucho Marx maybe -- said he wouldn't change one word of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." I'd say the same thing of Pete Hamill's peerless memoir "A Drinking Life."

I suppose literature is broad enough to accept both Hemingway's two word sentences and Faulkner's two page sentences. But, I can promise you that one is much easier to read.

Here's a trick if you ever want to while away a rainy afternoon. Write something. Anything. Say everything you want to say.

Then cut it by 100 words. Then read it again and cut it by another 100. It's not as easy as it sounds. But I promise you the final product will be lean, mean and easy to read.

My favorite Bible verse is the shortest. "Jesus wept." Kinda says it all, me thinks.

Don't you wish those jerks on the TV political shows would learn such a lesson? Who knows -- they might actually say something worth hearing if forced to think about it first.

'North River' flows again

Shortly after coming to work for the newspaper seven years ago, my boss recommended I read the book "A Drinking Life."

It was a memoir of newspapering, of growing up in New York; basically it was one heck of a coming of age story by a longtime Big Apple newspaper writer and editor.

Thus began my literary love affair with Pete Hamill.

I wasn't drawn so much to Hamill's world (it was alien -- full of clogged city streets and adventures in Mexico) as to his words. To Hamill, like Hemingway, words are precious. You don't waste them. You choose them carefully, treat them with respect.

Hamill returns to his beloved New York -- specifically 1934 Greenwich Village -- in his satisfying new novel, "North River." Named for the old-school moniker for the Hudson, the book centers around kindly physician Dr. Jim Delaney.

Delaney has visible and hidden scars from the Great War. His wife has disappeared. His estranged daughter has left for Spain to find her husband.

But she leaves a bundle on the doorstep. It turns out to be Delaney's 3-year-old grandson Carlito.

Delaney can't raise the boy by himself. He needs help. Enter Rose, the immigrant who learns English by reading the Daily News.

And as he tends to his patients, and learns how to raise a family, Delaney's broken heart begins to mend.

Hamill calls "North River" a love story for adults. And it is, in its fashion.

But it's also, as is Hamill's best work, a love story about New York. You can feel the city come to life in his words. It grabs you, speaks to you, begs you to hear its stories, implores you to ride on its subways a while.

Every geographical area has its poet. Faulkner was Mississippi's. Larry McMurtry is North Central Texas'. And, above everyone else -- all those famous names -- Pete Hamill is New York's laureate.

"North River" is a good read. It's a heartwarming story, full of life and renewal and all those things readers feel satisfied about when the final page is turned.

You feel fortunate to spend a day or two with such a fine wordsmith. And when the journey's over, you feel alone, yes, but thankful such a talent has allowed you to roam around in his fictional world.