Late on Friday, my book, along with thousands of titles by Macmillan authors, vanished from Amazon. MacMillan titles (Macmillan umbrellas my publisher, Henry Holt, along with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Picador, and multiple other imprints) are now available only through third party sellers, and none of our books are available on the Kindle. This whole mess apparently boils down to a debate about the pricing on Kindle books; Macmillan wants Amazon to charge more, because the 9.99 price point apparently boils down to a loss, so Amazon told them to go f*ck themselves.

Capitalism! Always fun for authors, who typically don’t see a damn dime after their advance.

I’ve blogged before about not being a fan of the Kindle (too expensive for most people, not open source, annoyingly named), have no interest whatsoever in the Nook (seriously, with that name it should come bundled with a cat), and being in the ever-shrinking group of my friends who do not own a smart phone, ebooks just never crossed my radar. I don’t have anything against them in theory, since they’re just another manner of disseminating information, but my own book fell into some sort of contractual loophole when Holt tried to design an interactive ebook version of it for iPhones/iPod touches, which somehow never quite happened. I mean, as far as I know the design happened, but the ebook didn’t. The problem with the Kindle is that it binds you to Amazon as long as you have the device, much like iPhones bind you to AT&T, whose coverage, from what I hear, is pathetic. I guess I’m just not into binding, if that’s not TMI.

I suppose this mess just underscores the same thing I’ve been saying all along. Support independent booksellers. Powell’s has signed copies of my book, IndieBound can track down a copy anywhere in the US, and if you’re lucky to live within range of a brick and mortar store, all the better. Lots of libraries have it in stock. And if your local library doesn’t have it, email me and we’ll work something out.

Edited to add: Following in the path of these other MacMillan authors, I’m removing Amazon links from my site for the time being. I’m not sure anyone who wanted to buy a book about independent culture would do so from Amazon anyway, but if you’re gonna act like a big bully, well, you can suck it.

Please indulge me for a moment while I conduct a little experiment. Apparently, readers are more apt to “feel connected” to writers when we tell personal stories and share photographs of our families and friends. Also, posting videos of our readings on YouTube supposedly helps people to become interested in our books. There are two major issues with this formula as far as I’m concerned: I don’t own a camera, and I don’t like it when people film my readings. Why? Because for some reason I will never comprehend I do not photograph well… at all. Something happens when you point a camera at me and I retract my chin into my neck, and thus I am mostly photographed looking like a constipated turtle. I only have one chin in real life, and not much of one, yet in photos I have a whole stack of them.  So you are spared snapshots of me and my husband and friends doing the boring sort of shit we do: going out to eat, talking, walking around, watching movies, reading books. It’s not like I am out there tearing it up on the weekends much these days; I am a 39 year old introvert, people. Back in March, however, I did go with my friends Stefanie and Bean to see Leonard Cohen at the art deco wondrous Paramount Theater here in Oakland, and I will share one — and only one — image of Sage and myself from that event.

Yes, that’s about how happy I am getting my photo taken. And that’s Leonard Cohen’s tour bus in the background. From my expression, you can tell that I really wanted it to run me over at that moment.

The semester started off on an Old Testament note with hail hammering the windows, lightning strikes illuminating the skies above the Berkeley campus, and hordes of wet and shivering students cramming the hallways. I always begin the semester with the usual syllabus hoo hah and a short assignment, and it got me thinking about the inevitable critiques I’m going to have to write on all of my students’ essays in a couple of weeks, and the fact that I will feel like a dick afterward. Look, I love teaching, the classroom part anyway, and I believe it is a vocation and a calling and all that, but I am unconvinced that anyone in their right mind enjoys writing comments on essays. Maybe I’d feel differently if I taught creative writing, but I suspect not. I always feel terrible after I finish a pile of grading.

Which in turn made me think about internet book reviews and blogs. My students occasionally comment that I am a “harsh grader” but after some of the things people have written about my own books, I can only think, wow, in comparison to the pundits of the blogosphere or internetlandia or whatever we’re calling it these days, my comments on essays are like a freaking Hallmark card. But I do have a sense of humor, and so I thought it might be kind of funny to assemble a few of the meanest, weirdest things people have written about my book. Mostly on Goodreads. I kind of hate Goodreads, and I’m beginning to think the democratization of book reviews via the internet is kind of terrible. But let’s do this anonymously! Wouldn’t want to start any trouble or anything…

Those who have been part of the culture will find the book to be like a late night conversation with that one friend who wants to show her indie cred by talking about what everyone else has done and how she knows all those people from her work and that she is one of the first people to have seen Smoosh play, but now their parents are exploiting them and what’s up with Care Bears on Fire?

I hate hipster academics.

The worst music book written in the last ten years.

Kaya Oakes lacks the literary finesse to execute the history behind indie culture in an engaging and entertaining way for the reader… considering I bought Miss Oake’s [sic] book in a super-sized Barnes and Noble…she might think twice about criticizing the corporate book chains and major publishers that are to thank for her book receiving residuals and royalties. (side note? HAHAHAHA royalties? HAHAHAHA)

A wildly inaccurate account of the notable events of “indie” culture in the past 15-20 years.

I don’t know that I’ll finish this book, the weather changed and the covers curled back to expose the cheap and pulpy inner core.

So, to all of my past, current and future students, now you know: you are getting off so, so easy.

Lest this blog go rusty and unused now that book promotion for S&E has mostly ground to a halt, I thought I’d start using this space to fill you in on some of the stuff I’m doing as I marinate and research the next book project that I’ll hopefully be heading into this year. I started the new year by getting away to read and work on the book proposal — with the spouse and a huge pile of books up the Northern California coast to Gualala, a spot I’ve visited two or three times a year for nearly a decade and hold dear when I need a shot of no email, no phone, and nobody who knows me. Then home again, then off to a three day silent retreat. The only real weirdness about keeping the silence comes during mealtimes. It’s odd, to say the least, to be among 30 odd women eating and not talking, pretty much the opposite of mealtimes in my family with three vocal sisters. I don’t want to reveal exactly where I was, but suffice to say they do treat you very well while you’re meditating, reflecting, and stewing in your thoughts. I’ve become increasingly interested in monasticism over the last couple of years, and this was just a tiny taste of what it’s like to live that way full time. Thomas Merton called living in silence being “in the grip of the present”, and this turns out to be true. When you’re not speaking, you have to turn what would be chatter or the banal commentary we fill our days with into something else, and after the initial frantic feeling that something is wrong, that nobody will hear you, you begin to realize that the chatter in your mind is actually, finally, slowing down, and you’re forced to pay closer attention to what’s going on in the moment. By the time the final day rolled around, my voice came back painfully, like some small creature had been nesting in my throat, and I immediately burst into a rolling monologue of f bombs and s bombs, like I’d been saving them up all along. That’s just how it comes out, sometimes.