Sure, we’ve bitched about Flash for years, but there was a time when we here at The Egatz Epitaph praised it as a comprehensive animation tool in the mid- to late-nineties. Back then, if you wanted animation, you could either learn to program in Java or wave your fingers in front of someone’s monitor in pantomime. Javascript was another option. Anyone else remember Director and Shockwave files? The field was limited for mortals and/or professionals interested in other things to deploy on the Web, like writing and designing.

I remember sitting at a MacWorld convention in Boston and some corporate tool was showing Flash animation running in real time. It looked great for vector-based animation, and the development was easy. No programming. It was like the difference between choosing a Mac in 1984 or opting to use MS-DOS and its command-line interface. You needed your head examined to stick with Microsoft and the green all-caps text on black. Adobe, you saved us!

Those years are long gone. Flash was the the main horse Adobe bet on to deliver rich content via the Internet for many years. Far too many years. Flash is so processor-intensive there’s no practical use for it on a mobile device, especially if you care about battery life or burning your hand.

In their mea culpa, Adobe wrote to ZDnet:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

We can’t get too crazy on Adobe for backing the wrong horse, or, more accurately, a good horse for far too long. We all do this now and then. They inherited Flash from Macromedia, and it was one of the few things of value they got when they gobbled up their only competitor.

The lesson to learn here is being able to learn from bad decisions. It’s like knowing when you should’ve stepped away from a relationship when all you were hanging on to was your own desperation. The fine engineers at Adobe—and not the multitude of managers—will hopefully now turn toward HTLM5 and make something incredible. That is, if management will let them.

It’ll be particularly interesting to see what happens to video development on the Web via HTML5 now that people won’t be tempted to jam their video into some Flash-wrapped delivery mechanism—a Rube Goldberg-type arrangement Flash was never intended to do.

Although the future is ripe with possibilities, things are not great at Adobe. With stock prices still in the toilet not helped by throwing 750 people out of work, let’s hope the company gets innovative again, creating tools, clients, and browser plug-ins worthy of their corporate origins, such as the days when PostScript technology helped spark the desktop publishing revolution of the late-eighties. Let’s hope they kill desktop Flash quickly, and offer us new development tools to get excited about again.

For the past decade, or so, I’ve rarely submitted unsolicited writing to publications of any kind. I feel pretty fortunate some editors seek me out. The ones who do are the ones who’ve published me better than 90% of the time for the past ten years, or so.

As the poet Thomas Lux said to me, “Ronnie, editors are not going to come into your home and open your desk drawer to search for poems.” Even spending an hour a week getting your submissions in the mail is critical (if you’re ready to be published), but my track record proves I’m incapable of even that.

Something broke in me somewhere along the way. It was hard enough to get the writing down all those late nights when narratives and how I built each one was all that mattered. I don’t make a good secretary, and I never employed one to keep track of submissions. I know several writers who have wives, girlfriends, and interns who do this for them. For me, the creation was enough. Then more people invited me to read, and things, as the cliché goes, began to snowball.

All this by way of saying I recently was surprised to receive in the mail an envelope with not only my handwriting on it, but it was from the past. Four years in the past, apparently. Forwarded twice from a place my wife and I lived three addresses ago, my handwriting was undeniable, but there it was: my old address written in my hand with the black ink I prefer. There was no return address, which didn’t surprise me, as whenever sending a return SASE, unsolicited or not, I don’t write the name and address of the publication.

This envelope, apparently, came from The Chattahoochee Review. It’s been a huge amount of time since I shipped that submission off to Tennessee. The SASE came back to me with just one of four poems I submitted. There was no mention of why they weren’t returned. There was no mention where those four years went. There was no mention of anything.

This is what writers—ready or not—do. We ship our words off in hope someone’s interested in them. Poetry, short stories, and novels are just about the hardest types of writing to get published, but that’s what I’m largely interested in. That’s what I read instead of watching reality television. My wife and I are working together on some exciting nonfiction projects, but there’s nothing like seeing characters develop, situations arise, or just feeling the emotion of a well-built lyric-narrative poem. Although we’re working on nonfiction together, we read fiction aloud before falling asleep. It’s a cozy thing, and better than television.

Editors have their own thing going on, of course, and presumably, they are doing what they do because they love literature. Hopefully, writers send their work to a publisher after checking if their work has similarities to what the agent handles or what the magazine or publisher puts out into the world.

Running a literary magazine or small press is a rough ride. It’s essentially an unpaid job, but that’s okay because no one does it for the money. Magazines run out of universities rely on unpaid student labor which changes from year to year, sometimes from semester to semester. Things get lost in the shuffle. I understand.

The romantic in me is prone to fantasize someone at The Chattahoochee Review loved my work and was unable to part with it, despite the fact a senior editor hated it. The realist in me knows my submission was just waylaid until some new volunteer found part of it and threw it in the SASE and sent it off.

My wife and I recently had dinner with a brilliant couple whom I’ll keep anonymous. She is a painter, and he is a multi-disciplinary scientist and professor who has dabbled in poetry his entire life. They surprised us by revealing they bought two copies of Beneath Stars Long Extinct, one for each of their homes. We spoke briefly about the book, and I felt both fortunate and a little embarrassed. I didn’t really have much to say about my book, but it was a great night. One of the things we touched upon was which poems in the book may be both nonfiction and about my wife. Jenny gave that wry smile I’ve loved for so many years.

For a long time I felt writing was more important than anything else. As the poet Dick Allen likes to quote Rilke, we either choose the art or the life. I put my life on hold for decades while working on the art. My wife likes the balance we’ve found between what we create individually and together. It feels pretty good, I must agree.

It’s amazing when you find someone who cares about the words you put down on a piece of paper. To be asked for an autograph after a reading still astounds me. Those things are icing on the cake, and very sweet but humbling icing, at that.

Strangely enough, the harder part seems more gratifying. The discovery and journey of writing and rewriting good poems always meant more to me than getting published. It’s the secretarial stuff I can do without. The student editors at The Chattahoochee Review probably feel the same way.

Out in the real world, much has happened in the technology and book vending industries since I last posted. As chronicled on this site, Borders has finally completed its long march into the history books. After a seemingly endless series of executive and managerial missteps, the 40 year old company collapsed, leaving many vendors in red ink, and 10,700 people without jobs.

My wife Jenny and I did our part, though. With many publishers and authors still sending me books to review, we keep our book purchases to a minimum. We are, after all, running out of room for books. Hello, iBooks, but I digress. We visited our local Borders, but the garage sale atmosphere was just too depressing. It felt like people were picking over the carcass of an old friend.

Somewhat hypocritically, instead of walking away with books at fire sale prices where publishers, hence authors, were never going to get what was coming to them, it somehow felt cleaner to pick over other bones. Jenny and I were able to get four huge leather chairs from the café area. We didn’t get an incredible deal on them, but they’re big, comfy, and our friends and family love them.

You can learn a lot about humanity from what comes out of a chair where many people sat, drank caffeine, and read. We seared tuna over a fire fueled by all the blow-in cards pulled from underneath the cushions. We also helped keep Camber Press going with all the money we found inside those four chairs. Coins still fall out when we move them to vacuum.

I’d rather not have the chairs, as much as we like and use them. I’d rather Borders be around, and there would still be some nationwide competition in the book superstore business. Then again, I felt that way over the past 25 years as I watched my favorite independent booksellers driven to oblivion. Technology marched on, right over Borders. Jenny and I sit in our chairs, read, and look up at each other over cappuccinos, knowing some things we can control and some things will be all right.

Regarding other things beyond our control, it isn’t breaking news the Great and Powerful Steven P. Jobs has passed away at least twenty years too soon. Jobs, a personal hero of mine since 1984, was all about quality. This is something I don’t see written about, with most pundits talking about his massive contributions to technology and design. They write about him as a visionary. Jobs himself talked many times about his visit to Xerox PARC and how he saw the future when he was shown object oriented programming, a fully networked office environment (with email, networked printers, etc.), and an early GUI. Remember, this was before 1983. Before the Mac. Before the Lisa.

This didn’t make him a visionary. It made him an observant individual who knew great, if not fully realized, technology. In other words, quality.

The inherent value of good design is quality. What is a good feature or a bad feature? What is necessary and what can be omitted? Does the design of a product or service produce an experience of quality?

Jobs could smell the level of quality in almost anything. Sure, he was a pain the ass at times, but what creative force isn’t? What human isn’t? Jobs will be missed because he knew what was quality and what wasn’t, and he demanded quality from his workforce. Apple will be innovative for a long time without him, but the world has lost a visionary, and will be poorer for it.

The other thing that happened in the past six months is Amazon released some new Kindles. Okay. And you still can’t read an ePub book on them.

Thanks again for your support. Feel free to keep the emails, cards, and letters (yep, real paper letters!) coming. Like buying chairs from a dying behemoth, every stamp you purchase helps keep the institution Benjamin Franklin started in Philadelphia circa 1775 around a little longer.

Art by Sean Armenta. Mounting by artofframing.net.

Our favorite of the rapidly-thinning herd of massive chain bookstores, Borders, is still on the ropes, and barely able to protect itself from body blows raining down on it.

One month ago, the former CEO of Borders U.K., Philip Downer, published a point by point dissection of how management ran Borders into the ground. His three charge indictment:

1. Regarding the Internet, Borders let the cluetrain leave the station without hopping aboard.
2. The internal hardware and software Borders used for tracking inventory was antiquated. Penny wise, pound foolish.
3. Excessively rapid expansion. Too fast in too many countries.

Downer’s blog is worth following, but it appears too late for the management of Borders to learn the lessons he offers. Bankruptcy was declared February 16th, and BusinessWeek just pointed out Borders will be closing 25 stores in 14 states. Other sources claim 28 stores. The bankruptcy paperwork claims assets of $1.275 billion, liabilities of $1.293 billion. They owe $302 million on inventory. That’s a lot of books waiting to be paid for, not to mention authors waiting for checks. Those pesky authors—always looking to get money, always the last in line waiting for the trickle-down.

With 200 stores already liquidating by the end of April, 28 more on the way, and the Ann Arbor headquarters up for grabs, things are bleak for the monster from Michigan.

Peter Osnos, writing in The Atlantic, claims the real trouble with Borders began in 1991, when Tom and Louis Borders cashed out to Kmart for $125 million. As we’ve documented here before, Borders has suffered a series of management shuffles, which is rarely a good thing. Osnos claims executives were brought in “from supermarkets and department stores.” This isn’t unlikely, and again, isn’t a good move. Widgets are not widgets, particularly in the red herring industry known as publishing. This fact is something countless beancounters at multinationals have been unable to balance both on spreadsheets and in their own minds after their parent corporation has gobbled up a publishing company.

Meanwhile, on the other side of chain bookstore saga, embattled Len Riggio and his team have been unable to find a buyer for Barnes & Noble. The vultures are circling, but the price is still to high to start nibbling. Even Ron Burkle, minority shareholder and ever-present millstone around Riggio’s neck, isn’t buying more shares, according to sources. With the Nook e-Reader claiming 22 percent of the e-Reader market, the hopeful are praying the device will save Barnes & Noble from collapse.

The end is not in sight for book buyers just yet. Sure, it looks like the big chains will, sooner or later, go by way of Tower Records, but there may still be hope for the long-suffering independent bookstores. You remember those? The ones where the clerks cared about what they sold, and knew their regular customers’ reading habits? Check out Edward McClelland’s insightful piece on the matter at Salon. Like the moon and tide, these things return. We can only hope so.

I was helping my wife Jenny with a gourmet craft services gig at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Although she works in the industry as a wardrobe stylist, her original cooking is to die for, and it’s something I’ve encouraged her to share with the world long before we were married. On this particular gig she had four huge travel bins full of gear, two coolers, and assorted boxes of stuff which we had to get back to the loft after a fashion shoot. The loft is about 38 miles away in northern Westchester County.

It would interest readers to know more about the client, or what went on at the shoot, or what minor celebrities were milling about, but we each signed legal documents which promised men in long coats would come to our loft late at night and do bad things to us if we revealed any details whatsoever.

Locked in the studio for the job, we knew it was snowing all day, although the only white we saw in the windowless studio was the expansive cyc. They asked us to work until the wrap, and it was no big deal. After a certain point, the mental difference between 16 hours and 18 hours is negligible. Jenn’s food, as always, was incredible, and no one wanted to see her close up shop. We were tired, but I kept making the crew espressos and cappuccinos with our awesome Nespresso machine, even sending a production assistant to one of their only retail locations to get more crack pods. When they finally wrapped, we began to break down our gear, wash everything, give away leftovers, and pack. With the help of some P.A.s, we got the Civic loaded, and headed out of the garage.

Pulling out onto 12th Avenue, it was obvious we were in for an adventure. I asked Jenn to call relatives in Hell’s Kitchen so we could crash close by, but she was sure they were sleeping. This combined with the thought of unloading the car and climbing stairs with all the gear was highly unappealing to me. “Fuck it. Let’s try to make it,” I told her.

During the first serious snow of the season a few weeks earlier, the New York City Department of Transportation decided keeping the roads clear was not a priority. Some tertiary roads were not plowed for a week, and the Bloomberg administration slid in the polls faster than cars were sliding into each other. I’ll stop here, before I get to the conspiracy theory.

Things hadn’t changed much at the Department of Transportation, apparently, despite massive reassurances from all official channels. Nine inches of snow sat on 12th Avenue, otherwise known as the West Side Highway with traffic lights, and cars were ignoring traffic lights once they got momentum and were no longer fishtailing. Plows were nowhere to be seen, and drivers had that “save myself first” mentality as they swerved around each other, locked brakes in the middle of intersections, and cursed as they used gloved hands to clear windshields both inside and out.

Jenn is from Los Angeles. Accordingly, she isn’t comfortable driving in snow. She was exhausted from the gig and suffering the early stages of the flu, but she was unable to sleep. The drive was going to be harrowing, and she was amped up on cappuccinos, as was I. She worked the environmental controls and kept our windows clear. I felt both lucky to have her and concerned about getting her home as quickly as possible so she could get some meds and sleep.

At the risk of oversimplifying, there are two kinds drivers in winter conditions: those who perform confidently and everyone else. Unfortunately, most drivers fall into the latter category. Just north of Dewitt Clinton Park, this fact came back to me in a hurry.

We were screwed as soon as we got on the ramp where 12th Avenue transitions into the West Side Highway proper. For those readers not familiar with this area, all it really means is the traffic lights stop and the highway begins. The problem with unplowed snow on this stretch of road is the ramp which begins elevates the highway is steep in this kind of weather. The snow was coming down wholesale, and cars began to crawl for no sane reason. Fear had gripped most drivers, and as they slowed down, so too did their traction.

American cars fared the worst, of course, with rear-wheel drive vehicles essentially damning them to become roadblocks. Taxi drivers, who are supposed to be professionals, displayed laughable competence, sliding back down the ramp at crazy angles, their paying passengers wide-eyed with terror as fare meters ticked on.

Jenn competently kept the windows clear and often looked back to her right, saying, “It’s clear! Go!” At any opportunity, I scooted past disabled vehicles, passing on the right, even in the breakdown lane. “Maybe there’s no snow where these cabbies come from,” Jenn said. A simple statement which must be true. There’s no other excuse for such a bad professional showing. Doesn’t the TLC have any type of training for this kind of thing? It appears not.

What drivers that night failed to realize was the Ninth Egatz Law of the Road:

In snow conditions with poorly plowed surfaces, the goal is perpetual motion. Torque is your friend. A moving car doesn’t get stuck.

Forward motion wins, particularly if you’re able to keep it under control by not fishtailing. When you have drivers living where snow is a rarity telling you to slow down, you have drivers who shouldn’t be on the roads. Sure, a sane speed is smart, but when you slow down too much, you run the risk of not being able to overtake hills. When you can’t make it up a hill, there’s a good chance you’re going to spin your wheels until you’re stuck.

Once we got past the first bottleneck, we did pretty well making our way to the Henry Hudson Bridge. The road looked like some bad disaster movie, with small groups of disabled cars stuck—occasionally right in the middle of the highway. Cabbies were standing in the snow, yelling at each other, civilians were crouched down to heave against rear bumpers, and police were nowhere to be seen.

Approaching the hill at the Riverside Drive exits just south of the George Washington Bridge we came to another clusterfuck of cars and cabs sliding back toward us, all piloted by drivers who had ignored the golden rule of maintaining forward momentum. We almost had to come to a complete halt, which probably would’ve forced us to be stuck like them, but squeezed through and passed them on the right, on the left, and in the middle, until we got a momentary reprieve from the snow when passing under the bridge.

Passing the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park, we saw more disabled cars on the approach to the Henry Hudson Bridge. Rolling up almost silently to the tollbooth, the attendant stared at our snow-covered car in disbelief. “Where you headed in this?” he asked.

“All the way,” I said, and we pushed off again, four dollars lighter. The Saw Mill River Parkway was plowed slightly better than the West Side Highway, but we had our worst sliding on it. Perhaps I was pushing it too hard. My mind was racing faster than we were traveling. I was visualizing the route ahead, and how far we could take it back to the loft. Would they be plowing in Westchester? Which hills would be impassable? What would traffic be like?

Along with the Ninth, the Tenth Egatz Law of the Road came to mind:

Other vehicles traveling on the same side of the road as you are in snow conditions should be avoided at all costs.

Other cars slowed down and paid for it. We saw them sitting all over the road, their occupants trying to dig out tires by kicking with futility under their cars. Others merely waited for help to arrive while hoping their gasoline—hence their heaters—wouldn’t run out. Being found frozen like a popsicle in your own car the next morning isn’t a good way to be remembered. It’s like being a Darwin Award winner, to my mind: cause of death? Too stupid to drive in snow. It was madness. We didn’t want to be near any other cars. They’d slow, get stuck, and we’d be behind them, or run into them. Remember, kids: avoid other vehicles, even if it means passing them in the snow.

Not only was I working on avoiding drivers who drove like they were lifelong Floridian senior citizens with myopia, but I was trying to keep us from being stuck or winding up in the trees. On top of that, I was mentally playing out the entire route home. How long could we make it on the Saw Mill River Parkway, a road which is often shut down when it rains due to poorly engineered flood zones? What would be plowed? What about the increasing hills as we got further north? Alternate routes?

Jenn said, “I don’t think the Saw Mill is gonna be cleared all the way up.” She was right. It wasn’t likely. If New York’s Finest weren’t even out to rescue people on the West Side Highway, what hope did we have for the wilds of Westchester? “Let’s try the Sprain.”

Again, she seemed right. The Sprain Brook Parkway has three lanes on a side—a larger highway than the Saw Mill. Surely it would be plowed more thoroughly than the winding, hilly, two-lanes-on-a-side Saw Mill. It was decided.

We rolled up on the Cross County Parkway and eased our way down the ramp for the eastbound side. At the bottom of the ramp was what we feared. Two cars backed up, unable to get through the wall of snow plows had deposited when they were working the Cross County. I stopped behind the second car, and we talked about options. Soon there was a line of cars behind us. The first car, and SUV, eventually blasted through the wall, which was at least two feet high. The second car was an American sedan and unable to make it. An elderly gentleman was soon standing at my window, and I got out. The driver of car number two got out and said he couldn’t make it. We decided to put a little muscle on the trunk. There was no other way we could get out.

Obscenely large flakes soon covered us, but we dug in, and eventually the driver broke free and was underway. I got back in the car. “Good job,” said Jenn. She grabbed my hand and together we put the Civic into Drive. There was some fishtailing, some tire-spinning, but we got out, and blasted through the remains of the wall. Another small victory.

The Cross County was barely plowed, particularly in the lanes on the right. We went up and over the huge hill in Yonkers just west of the Major Deegan. Sure enough, the exit ramp hadn’t been touched, and there was a solid wall of snow plowed up over two feet high. There was no way we’d make it through there. Jenn was thinking out loud. “Maybe the Hutch is clear,” she said.

Although it was just about as far out of our way as we could go before hitting the Long Island Sound, we didn’t see an alternative. After the Cross County made the perverse swing north where its name changed to the Hutchinson River Parkway, the road conditions got worse. The exit ramps seemed plowed a little better than the Cross County, but what would happen on all those local roads? We had the all-important forward momentum, and getting off the highway seemed like suicide.

Dodging slow moving cars, we shamelessly passed them on the left and right. At one point we barreled past a cop on the right side of the road dealing with a disabled vehicle. Huge flakes of snow were bouncing off the windshield. We fishtailed once, but it was nothing major. “I don’t know how you’re doing this, but don’t stop,” Jenn said. She wasn’t feeling well, and I wanted to get her home to our bed and whatever over-the-counter meds we had.

Just past Mamaroneck Avenue, we lucked into coming up on a plow which was also spreading salt. “This guy is plowing in New York. He isn’t going to drive up the Merritt Parkway into Connecticut,” I told Jenn. “If we’re lucky, he’ll stay in the county by going onto 287 heading west.”

The plow approached the clover where the Hutch and I-287 met. He slowed, and we held our breath, hoping he wouldn’t go east. A small cheer erupted in our car as he rolled past the eastbound ramp, and got on Westchester Avenue heading west. We followed.

I didn’t want to stay with him on Westchester Avenue. Who knew how slow he’d go, or where he’d turn off, leaving us on a barely plowed county road with no way to get back onto the highway? We broke left and got onto 287. Jenn checked her iPhone for hotels in White Plains, saying maybe we’d never make it home. 287 had about six or seven inches of snow, and fewer cars than even the Hutch.It just kept coming down.

The exit ramps around White Plains didn’t seem impassable. I knew there were hotels in Tarrytown, and thought we should push it to get as close to home as possible. Soon, we were rolling up on the Sprain Brook Parkway again, after having lost another hour. I asked Jenn to check the ramp and let me know the condition as soon as she could. Suddenly she shouted, “It’s not bad. Take it! Take it, baby!”

We got up the ramp and onto the Sprain headed north in total silence. It was virtually unplowed. We could make out another car about a kilometer ahead, blazing a trail right up the middle of the highway. I tried to get into his tracks and was hoping we could push it all the way. I told Jenn the hospital at Valhalla was a possibility. We were close, and if we got stuck, we could try to walk there and wait out the storm in the Emergency Room if we didn’t want to sit in the car. Walking in that deep snow probably would’ve been a stupid move, but the promise of mobility—of not being stranded on the side of the road, slowly turning into a popsicle—was seemingly all-important. We had phones, and the County Police station wasn’t far. In keeping with our never-ending mantra, we kept the car in motion above everything else.

At one point, on the other side of the highway, we saw a car stopped dead in the middle of three lanes, headlights burning, the driver digging out in front of the car. The oddest thing about this was he had miles of unplowed road to shovel. It was like the driveway from hell. Where he was shoveling out to, we didn’t know. It was an insane scene I’ll never forget: his lonely dark jacket moving in the headlights, snow flying everywhere, not another car anywhere to be seen on his side of the highway. I hope he made it somewhere before dying of a heart attack, which is how a lot of people die when shoveling snow.

Soon, we were upon the exit for Route 9A. Jenn and I both got crazy. It was scary because this would mean local roads up to the loft. We didn’t know how much worse they could be. I was pushing it hard, but it somehow seemed easy. I was in my element, one of the few things I do really well without trying hard. In a way, it was art. Neal Cassady was smiling upon me.

“I want you to know there’s no one else I’d rather be doing this with,” Jenn said to me. “Thank you for getting us home.” She took my hand in hers. It was warm, and I could tell she wasn’t feeling well. I took my eyes off the road and looked at the woman I loved, the woman I asked to spend the rest of my life with. She was definitely fighting the flu, but her eyes were as sincere as I’d ever seen in anyone at any point in my life. It takes a lot for her to open up, and I felt connected to her in a way I hadn’t in a long time. It had been that kind of year.

In the car, approaching our last chance ramp, I loved her like I never had before. I’d get us home safely, I knew then. I’d get her into our warm bed and nurse her and make sure nothing bad would happen. The snow seemed trivial. The people stuck on the sides of all the major highways we’d been on for two and a half hours seemed like extras in a commercial she was working on. Nothing seemed real. The only thing that mattered was her hands on mine, her words of trust and love, and the groove the car was in. There would be no more fishtailing. We were safe and we’d make it home easily. I just knew it after she said those words.

I hit the ramp as fast as I dared. It wasn’t plowed much at all; even in worse shape than the Sprain itself. We made it through the long S-curve of the ramp and came down toward Route 9A. “Oh shit, baby!” Jenn shouted. The bottom of the ramp had been plowed in by trucks clearing 9A. There was a wall at the bottom. I hit the gas and didn’t think about consequences. We needed to get through and onto the other side.

When the front end of the Civic hit the wall there was a huge explosion. For a few moments, it looked like the snow was falling both down and up. We were in a whiteout for seconds which lasted far too long. After only the normal snow coming downward resumed, we were off the ramp and flying up 9A. It was almost completely clear—we couldn’t believe it. We must’ve been just five or ten minutes behind the plows which had just cleared it.

Soon, I was actually traveling above the speed limit. It seemed like the thing to do after the endless delays; the Ninth Egatz Law of the Road, indeed. The snow was still pouring down, but the road was in great shape. At almost three in the morning, there were no cars to be seen anywhere. We were laughing aloud and squeezing each other’s hand as we hurtled all the way up to the Briarcliff-Peekskill Parkway.

When we got to Croton, it was somehow reinforced that everything would again be fine. The county road-type feeling of 9A gave way to the parkway, and it, too, was completely clear. The snow was unrelenting, but I was able to push it hard and get us to our exit with no problem. The exit itself was not plowed too well, but it was nothing compared to the West Side Highway and almost every other road we had travelled.

Cruising up the long hill away from the Hudson River and right up to our loft, we couldn’t believe the local road department was infinitely more competent than the New York City Department of Transportation. Even the co-op board had it together, and our driveway was well-plowed. We had made it after just over three hours of driving to get less than forty miles.

We sat in our parking spot, and looked at each other in disbelief. The snow ironically decided to almost stop at that point, and we were exhausted, but not finished. The car needed to be unloaded. Jenn carried a few bags inside. I made trips until all the heavy containers were in our home. Our cat, a new addition to the family, looked at all the gear I brought in and wondered where the hell we had been and, more importantly, why we didn’t feed her already. My wife was a trooper and helped me get the perishables into the refrigerator while I continued to make trips to and from the car. Feeling miserable, she eventually went upstairs and crawled into bed.

Undressing, wet and cold from all my trips back and forth to the car, I thought of how our lives are made up of choices. Small and large decisions we think will lead us to some end goal are made each day, but we’re almost always wrong. Reality rarely matches the ideal we painted for ourselves years earlier. The unseeable future is always influenced by forces we can’t control, people we choose to trust and love, and our own plans and dreams. Sometimes we choose right, as I had that night: to push the odds at all costs, to pass everyone on our way to our warm home, fear be damned. Other times, our trepidations cause our failure, like every individual who crawled through the unplowed streets and highways until they were disabled on the side of the road.

We choose lovers who are good for us and help us grow; we choose lovers who we must carry like a large consumer electronic appliance strapped to our backs. We choose jobs which make our hearts sing with joy and never feel like work, and we choose careers which speed our trip to the grave. There are mistakes and bad tattoos and oppressive bureaucracy and snowstorms and mates who provide temporary escape. There are wins and preventative maintenance and fine institutions and sun-filled days and unconditional love. The hardest daily decisions in life are choosing well without fully realizing which are which before the benefit of hindsight.

I held my wife that night long after we fell asleep. I drifted off thinking of all the craziness people put themselves and their loved ones through. It’s been like that since before recorded time. You know that more than a few ancient Mayas were caught cheating on their mates. You know more than a few Neanderthals shared some extra meat with someone they shouldn’t have, and in a flirtatious way. You know too many ancient Greeks and Romans and guys from Ames, Iowa were forced to get up pre-dawn and thought long and hard before going to post bail for their idiot, drunk brother-in-law.

Human history is full of pogroms, inbreeding, forced rides in boxcars, fratricide, rageaholics, and men in long coats knocking on doors in the middle of the night. Before humans, there were forest fires, meteor bombardments, ice ages, tsunamis, geomagnetic reversals, and countless extinctions. There were also snow storms. Somehow, love made it through all.

My tracks in front of the loft are about a foot deep. The berm of plowed snow was almost four. It had just stopped falling.

The Association of American Publishers has reported e-book sales are up 192.2% this year to date, according to Lauren Indvik at Mashable. The strong of stomach can read the rest of her summary here. Aside from e-book growth, the AAP also reported largely dismal numbers for September book sales.

Champion of all things digital, Nicholas Negroponte is predicting the book as we know it will be dead in five years. Predictions have always been a risky venture in the technology industry, with the vast majority of pundits getting it wrong. This is one time we hope Negroponte is not on the money, although for the sake of the the environment, an unselfish part of us hope he’s correct.

The news for dead tree editions isn’t all horrible, though. Printed books seem to be making nominal gains in selected categories. Educational titles, for instance, are up, barely breaking the double-digit mark, but they’re still up. Perhaps this is because students are smart enough to realize they don’t want to spend money on educational e-book titles which will be deleted from their eReaders at the end of the semester.

At year’s end, the shakeup in the computer business seems to also continue unabated, just like the publishing industry. With even Ray Ozzie—executive at a company not known for innovation—predicting a period of “post-PCs,” multi-function eReaders are the wave of the immediate future. Pundits on all sides of both industries are pointing to reasons why laptops are being shunned for tablets, with compelling evidence, for example, you never need to take your laptop on vacation again.

At less than a year old, the iPad is still the favored tablet if you want a device which can do more than just display e-books. With Amazon continually improving their Kindle software for the Mac, Team Bezos is trying to cover all bets, even though their Kindle is hemorrhaging sales to the beast from Cupertino. Apple’s iPad is shaking things up everywhere, including for hard drive manufacturers, who clearly see themselves being phased out of existence. With less demand for laptops and desktop computers, you don’t need a time machine to start betting on alternative data storage solutions.

As 2010 heads for the history books, we can only hope the sales of physical books don’t completely disappear, but I’m sure a lot of people felt that way about witty telegrams, beloved horses used for transportation, and the handsome ice man. With John James Audubon’s Birds of America selling for $11,567,575 at auction this year, it would be nice to have some reassurance books will not only belong to the wealthy in the future.

Newspapers, on the other hand, are clearly in trouble, and have been since the era of deregulation began. In a wave which may predict what will happen to physical books, the shrinking audience for newspapers will force them to become specialty publications being sold for correspondingly higher prices, even if they go digital and plan to pay their reporters, editors, and designers for content.

On a more positive note, perhaps the chaos in these industries we track gives us a moment of pause. While both manmade and natural disasters have rocked 2010, and publishing industry darlings have grappled to hang on to power, this has been far from the best year on record. It’s a good time to look to those we love and those we work with to find more important goals than merely keeping shareholders placated each quarter. Here at the Egatz Epitaph, for instance, we’ve renewed personal relationships and are working again on some new books we’ve been neglecting. We’ve also cleaned house on some relationships which weren’t so good for us. It’s a time of peace and forbearance. It’s a time of forgiveness and high hopes for the future. It’s a time for enacting new plans and resurrecting the best of old plans. Ultimately, for us, it’s about art and love and fulfillment. We hope it is for you, too.

The new century has witnessed many of the larger independent bookstores going away forever, let alone the smaller bookshops. Larger indie retailers in New York City such as Gotham Book Mart and Coliseum Books are no more, but New York is not alone. Most major American cities have seen their long-established independent stores go the way of the dinosaurs. Cody’s in Berkeley, Midnight Special in Santa Monica, and A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco have disappeared on the West Coast, leaving California particularly hard hit. You know a current event has passed into the realm of common knowledge when Hollywood acknowledges it, such as it did with the film You’ve Got Mail in 1998.

Throughout this decimation, one of the rare establishments to defy the conventional wisdom that independent bookstores can no longer thrive is Powell’s Books in Portland. Powell’s is the blueprint for any smaller independent bookstore to follow if they want to not only stand against the generic sterility of a Barnes & Noble or Borders chain store, but surpass them in every way. What follows are a few reasons it seems the staff and management at Powell’s knows what they’re doing, and they continue to do it well.

Powell’s is clean. Don’t laugh, and don’t dismiss this. Ernie Hemingway might have called it clean and well-lighted, unlike the dark and grimy-feeling landmark The Strand, the last of New York’s big indies. Not only is it clean, but Portland is known for rain. It was amazing how, during this visit (in the rainy season), the floors were barely wet near the entrance, despite constant drizzle outside. Deeper into the store, you’d think you were in a store in perpetually-dry Phoenix.

Powell’s has a color-coded system to help new customers find the sections they’re looking for. Again, don’t laugh. Having a clerk tell you “blue room,” as opposed to “keep going this way until you find the biography section, then turn left,” is a more efficient and less confusing response. There is signage everywhere, explaining, for example, one room lies beyond the next one you’re about to enter. A huge board greets you near the front of the store with subject matter listed in alphabetical order, followed by the color of the room it’s in. Not complicated, a little hokey, but it completely works. As a newbie, I was able to find what I wanted without having to ask anyone. Listen up, chains.

Powell’s has books. I mean books. Along with all the usually-hyped swill we are bombarded with at any chain bookstore, Powell’s is more like a library. Their selections in each section are deep and wide. They had shelves of books specifically on appetizers and finger foods, let alone all the usual cookbooks. The woman I run with was very happy, as some of her finds gave her ideas for a new cooking business she’s contemplating getting off the ground. We left laden.

Powell’s discounts on current best sellers were better than Amazon, and that says a lot. Is there any other excuse you can think of to not stop there next time you’re in Portland?

Selection is king. There are sections of books at Powell’s you won’t find in many chain bookstores, and if the chains do have them, they’ll be tiny. For instance, Powell’s sports an erotica selection, and it’s far from small. I’m talking big. I can’t even remember the last time I saw anything like it. Ditto their graphic novel section located near the coffee bar. A book on shipwrecks, no problem: they’ve got shelves of them. Baking French bread? Same thing: many to choose from. Gardening, biography, test prep? Powell’s has serious shelf-space for all of them, and more.

Finally, Powell’s has the best poetry section I’ve seen in a brick and mortar store in the last twenty years. If you’re in town, run there for your copy of Beneath Stars Long Extinct. I’ve been told it’s a pretty good read.

As with all cycles, things come to an end. The massive chain book superstores are being slowly phased out by eBooks. It’s my hope there will still be a physical store here and there worth going to in order to browse analog versions of books with two hands. Powell’s is the model I hope other independent retailers of the future will follow. It’s the best book retail experience I’ve had in years.

Your first order of business should be to get your own Internet domain. There’s little excuse these days to not have one. If someone goes to your site and you have an address like http://www.somehost.com/yourname/index.html or, worse, http://www.facebook.com/yourname/, it simply isn’t professional. Ideally, you can secure a domain such as yourname.com. If not, try to go with something which won’t mark you as an amateur. For example, seeing a URL like www.nimbusbutterflypoet.com makes most seasoned readers think this will be a site of bad, amorphous, new age-type poetry. Likewise www.darklordscreeds.com will foretell a site of bad gothic rants against gun control and abusive mothers. These may be unfair, but they are generalizations and associative leaps people will make before they visit your site. You can curtail this loss of traffic before it happens by having a reasonably sober Internet domain.

The next thing to do is find a good Internet Service Provider to host your domain. There are countless ISP businesses willing to take your money every month to host your domain, and all the criteria choosing one is beyond the scope of this article, although I might address it in the future. Do your comparison shopping on the Internet. Beware of cost overages and surcharges if you should be fortunate enough to generate a lot of traffic to your site. Find out these costs above and beyond standard monthly fees. Beware of punitive contracts locking you in for more than a month at a time. Most critically, do they have 24-hour technical support? Vote with your dollars, and move accordingly.

Thanks to blogging engines such as WordPress, it’s quite easy to get your own blog component of your site up and running with a minimum of hassle. If your ISP doesn’t support something like WordPress, it’s time to find a new ISP.

A blog regularly updated on your site will keep your old fans coming back, and generate links so new ones can discover you. If the reason for your site to exist is to get people interested in your writing, keep your blog entries relevant. This should not be the blog where you detail your laundry schedule, or what you did with your best friend over the weekend, or how your spouse cheated on you. You can grab another domain for that kind of public diary writing because, frankly, it’s just not that interesting, especially to people who want information about your new book of poetry or your about-to-be published memoir.

It’s best to keep your blog focused on your writing career and the books you’re promoting. Announcing readings, discussing a recent review you got, and publicly answering reader questions are all legitimate blog posts for a writer’s Web site. Ideally, your blog should support both your book(s) and the topics you write about. For instance, if you’ve published a book about a rock band, a music review of their latest release is a good idea. If your book has nothing to do with music and you feel compelled to write a review of new CD you got, you should try to sell that review to an appropriate publication, and not diffuse the energy and confuse readers of your site. As politicians are fond of saying, stay on target.

I’ve previously written about the dangers of Flash-based sites, and I’m still committed to avoiding it at all costs. One thing I didn’t address in the article “Flash Fatigue” (which you should read if you’re thinking of using a Flash-based site), is how Flash was not developed with mobile computing devices in mind. Flash files are insanely computationally-intensive, and suck up a tremendous amount of clock cycles to run. Did you ever visit a Flash site on your laptop and hear your computer’s internal fans spin-up? The reason that’s happening is because the CPU is working overtime, and it needs to be cooled down. Both of those events require energy in the form of battery power. The limited technology of today’s battery power is the only thing which has kept mobile computing from becoming even more obliquitous in our daily lives. The way Flash sucks battery power is the largest and unspoken reason why Apple has rejected Flash support in iOS devices such as the iPad and the iPhone. Again, if you need more reasons, read “Flash Fatigue.”

Essentials a writer’s site should contain include the following information, each broken out on a separate page:

1. A brief biography, including awards and other relevant information.
2. A publications page, listing your books, and where readers can get them.
3. An events page, listing in chronological order where you’ll be reading publicly.
4. A contact page, with your email address, at the very minimum.
5. A media page, including links to reviews of your work, articles you’ve published on other sites, and video of you reading or lecturing.

Regarding the design of your site, remember you’re trying to attract readers, not alienate them. Clean design is the way to go. With increasing numbers of Internet users on laptops, iPads, phones, and postage stamp-size monitors, this is more critical than ever. Nothing annoys readers more than overly-wide Web pages. Horizontal scrolling is akin to death in usability practices. Keep your pages to 1000 pixels wide or less.

Confusing background images or textures just make things difficult for readers, like oblique, impenetrable poetry. There’s no reason for this type of design. Avoid textures and too many colors as you would avoid bad writing in what you’re trying to sell.

Lastly, a critical thing to avoid is unconventional navigation. You see this most often in Flash-based sites, but it can be found in HTML, PHP, or other more conventionally-built sites. Scroll bars for windows built within pages are not only a pain to navigate, but they’re ugly and confusing. If you’ve got a blog component, make sure it’s easy to navigate to previous posts. Clarity in your terms for navigation are critical. A link called “About,” should go where readers would think it would: to a bio of the writer, and not to a page about the site.

Common sense, clarity, and brevity are watchwords you need to guide you through constructing your own site. Hit the search engines and examine sites belonging to other writers before you start building your own. Make a list of features you like, and do what you best: write your content before you begin coding or hiring a programmer/designer to do it for you. It will save you countless amounts of revision, and that’s time you should be spending on your real writing.

After betting on quick turnaround deals on mortgages by selling homes with punitive loan terms to unqualified buyers, which began a boom of hyper-inflated home pricing, which eventually triggered a global economic meltdown, which resulted in massive corporate layoffs, now Wall Street is blaming homeowners themselves for the foreclosure waves hitting month after month. With the average home worth half of what it was before the Second Great Depression, residential real estate has been a bargain hunter’s dream if you’ve got cash reserves and don’t plan on looking for financial credit.

The upshot of all this? If you’re seeking a place larger than the average-size American home, we know where you can pick up a real bargain. The only caveat is it’s in Michigan, which we here at The Egatz Epitaph have first-hand experience in, but that’s another story. Does 460,000 square feet sound like enough elbow room?

©Borders Inc.

Yep, that’s right. The corporate headquarters of Borders Inc. is up for grabs in Ann Arbor. The asking price is $18.349 million. At only $40 a square foot, you can’t go wrong. In fact, this is Michigan, so the mere promise of bringing more than five jobs into the local economy means you can probably strong-arm local officials into giving you a healthy tax abatement for the next few decades, at least.

Although we here at The Epitaph like to point out bad business decisions, we feel pretty terrible about this. It’s not good news. Borders was once the recipient of at least $300 a month when they acted as the sole dealer feeding our serious book addiction. If they hadn’t pulled our corporate discount, we’d still be helping them make their monthly nut on that 460,000 square foot location.

As it becomes more and more evident book superstores are going the way of CD retail chains, this is just another unhappy reminder of the state of the publishing industry. With even that old cash cow children’s picture books pulling dismal sales figures, things are not well in a nation which once prided itself on a broad-based educational system which created a highly-literate populace capable of becoming a skilled labor force.

With historically overpriced college textbooks migrating to iPad, even naysayers of that eReader are reconsidering it as a valuable way to consume the written word. Besides that, forests are being saved, and electronic editions are a lot easier to carry around than the dead tree editions, not to mention they’re easier for publishers to update.

We wish Borders, and, more importantly, Borders-employees, our good thoughts. The Kobo leaves a lot to be desired, but here’s hoping you figure out a strategy to save your jobs, your homes, and maybe even that big place at 100 Phoenix Drive. You know what they say about a phoenix. Here’s hoping.

A recent report from Nielsen has the iPad as tracking heavily with younger male users, and Kindle users being more wealthy. This is interesting, considering Kindles are less expensive than iPads. Since younger generations historically have embraced technology more quickly than older, wealthier invididuals, it’s not hard to see where this one is going to go.

©Apple, Inc.

Apple has long been a champion of open standards since at least OS X was introduced. They’ve done this again with both FaceTime, which they’ve established as an open standard video chat protocol, and they’ve done it with their eBooks, by making the iPad support the .epub format.

If Nielsen is correct, Amazon may temporarily be enjoying a wealthier demographic for the Kindle, but the young are swarming to the iPad because they can do a lot more on it than read public domain copies of Jack London. As Jim Morrison once monotoned, “they got the guns, but we got the numbers.”

Recently I was spammed with offers of refurbished Kindles from Amazon. Why anyone would want to buy a repaired plastic eReader that broke on someone else is beyond me, but there it is. The technology and prices are trickling down faster than any disillusioned back room architect of Reaganomics ever dreamed.

With colleges and universities embracing iPads for their students’ computing needs, plus the easy authoring environment of the .epub format, Bezos has reason to turn the propaganda hose on full between now and the second generation iPad’s release.

Even Amazon.com itself is riding the iPad wave by selling the device along side the Kindle. Things could be stranger in Amazon’s pursuit of dollars, and they are. The New York Times recently documented a bizarre alternative universe where Amazon was charging more for the eBook version of Fall of Giants by Ken Follett than they were for the hardcover edition. Retribution and negative press was swift and righteous, with Bezos being called a bait and switch artist, among other things. If anyone needed evidence American consumers not only see emperor’s new clothes, but are willing to pay more for it, there it is.

As Amazon continues to try to figure out eBook pricing and Kindle technology which stands a hope in hell of being as good as Apple’s, they have something else to worry about coming out of Cupertino. Now that Apple has proven the success of iOS 4, there’s more rumors of iPad technology being deployed in a smaller form factor. A seven-inch iPad would be a serious threat to smaller Kindles, and would appeal directly to people wanting to use the iPad primarily as an eBook reader, as opposed to everything else it can do.

In the final analysis, Apple is a technology company and Amazon.com is a retailer—a retailer with very deep pockets, able to throw considerable resources at creating an eReader of quality, but so far, they haven’t shown much for their efforts. Apple, however, as been in the game for a long time, and frankly, there wouldn’t be an Amazon.com if it wasn’t for Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and their desire to change the world in 1970s by building the first computer mortals could purchase and use in their own home. Speculation on whatever else Apple will unleash is speculation, but as they continue to ramp up on many fronts, the possibilities are deep and wide.

For Team Kindle, there is Trouble massing in the South. On Tuesday, Barclays Capital jacked up their Apple target to $385 a share. Their other numbers are no less daunting. As AppleInsider points out, Barclays expects to see Apple sell “40 million FaceTime-compatible iPhones in fiscal 2011, 15 million FaceTime-compatible iPods, and 8 million FaceTime-compatible iPads totaling a crazy 63 million FaceTime devices by the end of the fiscal year.” For 2012, they’re expecting a total of “over 150 million FaceTime enabled devices, which could prove conservative if FaceTime is put in all iPads and all Macs.” The future of live video phone calls they promised us since before the original Star Trek is here.

If Jeff Bezos needed another reason to both fear Apple’s iPad and begin drinking heavily, the announcement Walmart will start selling the Kindle-killer on 15 October should do it. They got the guns, but we got the numbers, indeed.