“Learning not to dislike Hemingway.”

That was the title an editor gave to a piece in today’s LA Times by book critic David Ulin. (Here it is; points go to the print edition’s copy editor — online it’s tagged “Under the influence of Hemingway,” a headline so weak that it seems a subtle jab at Hemingway’s manly writing style.) I read this piece with great interest because I’ve always read all of Hemingway with great interest since first coming across his short stories in high school, when one of those stories taught me the word “milt,” as Nick Adams strips clean a fish he’s caught. Almost 35 years later, this word has stayed with me. Indeed, I used it in my play “He Said She Said,” written two years ago and produced in LA and, recently, Omaha at the Great Plains Theatre Conference. The play concerns a vacationing PTA mom reading bad erotic poetry she’s written, and that setup flashed me back to the oddly sensual description of Nick Adams cleaning that fish. Here’s the comically bad poem from my play:

                        AMANDA

This is called Deep Sea Diving. Except the “Sea” is spelled “s-e-e.”

Deep see diving.

I can see you down here with me.

The shellfish scuttle out of the way

Forming a cloud of ocean dust around you.

There you are.

Don’t hide.

I can see you.

Peering at me from beneath your coral

Thinking that you’re safe and protected

I reach for you and pull you out

And take you above and slit you open

And run my tongue down the length

Of your milty flesh

Careful not to get your bones

Stuck in my throat.

Hemingway finds the right sensual word — “milt,” the sperm-containing secretion of the testes of fishes — and then in my play Amanda adulterates it into “milty.” Even as a teenage writer, I could see that Hemingway had the knack of finding the right word, something I struggled then and now with.

I picked up other tricks from Hemingway, purposely or accidentally. Here Ulin quotes Hemingway in “Death in the Afternoon”: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things strongly as though the writer had stated them.” Note the circular reductionism, as Hemingway returns again and again to the baseline words:  writer/writing; about; enough. There’s a rhythm to this that just pulls you into it; it’s practically Biblical. This element of style infected my writing early on, and that’s fine; I got it from Hemingway, and Hemingway got it from Gertrude Stein, just as Shakespeare got Troilus and Cressida from Chaucer, and Chaucer got it from Boccaccio. All of which means that whether or not I admire Hemingway’s work (and I do), I certainly have been influenced by it.

(Who else was I influenced by? My friend Joe Stafford likes to point out that many of my plays contain what Joe calls “a laundry list” monologue in which someone complains about a host of items or events. In retrospect, the inspiration for this is obvious:  Harold Pinter,  and The Caretaker specifically.)

So here I am, filled with admiration for Hemingway, and somewhat put out by the Times’ book critic writing a piece bearing the headline “Learning not to dislike Hemingway.” To add insult to injury, Ulin goes on to say:

“The one who most spoke to me was Faulkner, with his flowing sea of language, his sense of of the past, of history, as a living thing. Next to him, Hemingway seemed flat, two-dimensional.”

Oh, William Faulkner. You  mean the famous writer I cannot read. The irony here is that, much as Ulin doesn’t care for Hemingway, I can’t abide Faulkner at all. Ever since I posted Doug’s Reading List six years ago, I’ve received many emails and personal comments that the entire list should be held suspect because Faulkner isn’t on it. But I can’t imagine a reason to put him on; I remain unclear what his impact is (on writers in general, or certainly on me). And oh, I have tried reading him, most notably Absalom, Absalom! (three attempts) and, just recently, Light in August again, this time getting to page 152 before bailing out. Here’s an excerpt prototypical paragraph:

He was standing still now, breathing quite hard, glaring this way and that. About him the cabins were shaped blackly out of blackness by the faint, sultry glow of kerosene lamps. On all sides, even within him, the bodiless fecundmellow voices of Negro women murmured. It was as though he and all other manshaped life about him had been returned to the lightless hot wet primogenitive Female….

What are “fecundmellow” voices? Like “milt,” the word aims to be erotic, but Faulkner’s neologism subtracts more than it adds, as do “manshaped” and “primogenitive.” To Ulin, Hemingway may seem “flat” by comparison, but I would respond that he doesn’t yank you out of the milieu with awkward showiness.

While I disagree with the Times’ book critic, I respect him for coming out with his opinion about Hemingway. I’ve been out about my dislike for Faulkner for six years, and I’ve suffered the slings and arrows of lit-snob derision — and I’m not the book critic of a major newspaper. I’m sure Ulin is in for a pasting from readers (and I’m betting he’ll be delighted to get a reminder that people are reading him). Ulin notes Hemingway’s influence — on Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Russell Banks, Tobias Wolff, Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson (I would add Charles Bukowski) — but he doesn’t care for what Faulkner would call the primogenitive Writer.

All of this reminds me of something that happened last night, after the latest round of readings from my “Words That Speak” playwriting workshop. A couple of weeks ago, some of us in the workshop had plays performed in Moving Arts’ “The Car Plays,” and another playwright and I spent a few minutes last night discussing some of the plays we’d seen (of 26 different car plays, I’d seen 10). We came to the subject of one that neither of us particularly liked;  “It just doesn’t go anywhere,” I said, and my friend agreed. Then he said, “But I saw some people come out of that car wiping tears away.” We think it’s a bad play; others were emotionally swept away; and neither one of us could figure it out.  Just as I still can’t figure out the appeal of William Faulkner.

I just found out that while I was out of town, the bookstore where my daughter and our friend Steve and I have done Christmas wrapping for the past four years to raise money for Moving Arts… went out of business. I’ve grown to expect bookstores to close; I didn’t realize the trend was going to take our holiday traditions with it. Feels lousy.

Scouring our bookshelves for a novel to read with my soon-to-be-nine-year-old son Dietrich, I landed the other night upon The Mote in God’s Eye, a first-contact science fiction novel by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle that I’d read in 1976 when I was 13. I wondered if it was too advanced for him — and his almost-13-year-old sister flat-out said it was, even though she’s never read it — but I figured that it’s got lots of space battles, and aliens, and that ultimately we’d make our way through it as successfully as his older brother and I had done with Journey to the Center of the Earth when he was the same age. So we started reading it the other night.

When you’re reading old science fiction, you’re reading what I’ll call projected alternate futures, the sort of things that make up storylines on “Fringe.” The book is set in 3017, but it’s important to remember that in a way that isn’t just over a thousand years in the future — it’s more properly one thousand forty-three years since its writing. So the authors, writing four years before the introduction of the home computer,  and 11 years before the release of the first PDA, are commendably prescient when they write, “Rod Blaine scowled at the words flowing across the screen of his pocket computer” — although one could say that if we’ve got “pocket computers” already, a millennium before the setting of their novel, it follows that we’ll have something far more advanced in the far future. (Unless, paraphrasing Einstein, we’re fighting World War IV with rocks.) At the same time, if  Niven and Pournelle are thoughtful about technology (and weaponry and the military), here’s something they weren’t thinking through in 1974:

“Blaine was rushed down the elevator to the Governor General’s floor. There wasn’t a woman in the building, although Imperial government offices usually bristled with them, and Rod missed the girls. He’d been in space a long time.”

So, somehow, in the future the military returns to all-male service, despite 4,000 years, to date, of  women serving in various military capacities; or the current military service seen in Israel, the U.S., Russia and, I believe, most industrialized or post-industrialized nations; or the projected futures depicted in artifacts of popular culture such as the Halo and Mass Effect games and seemingly every James Cameron movie.  Acceptance is often driven by pop culture (by way of example, see:  interracial relationships, homosexuality, etc.). That very anachronistic point of view seems far more 1974 than 3017.

But then, the best perspective on the skewed time-reality of the book came from  Dietrich himself, who, when I told him that I’d read this book “in the 1970’s,” tittered and said, “The 1970’s? That’s like 300 years ago!”

Here’s a brief commercial for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, coming to USC the last weekend of this month. (I will be in Sacramento and unable to attend.)

Watching this spot, it isn’t hard to understand why some people will never grant that LA is a literary town. Because here are the authors promoted in the video: Ted Danson, Rainn Wilson and Patti Smith. I guess Snookie is doing a reading at Harvard that day.

Last month, The New Yorker ran a profile of Guillermo del Toro, director of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” films. I read that piece, and recently got a distressed email from my friend Rich Roesberg back in New Jersey that he’d meant to pick up that issue of The New Yorker but now had missed it. I promised to send it to him — but then figured it was probably available online for free. And, indeed, here it is.

I was going to recommend to Rich that he get a subscription to The New Yorker, because it’s a great magazine and it doesn’t cost that much. But hey, free costs even less. Which, again, illuminates the reason that newspapers and periodicals are dying —  their economic model — and why the United States Postal Service that formerly delivered so much mail of this sort, plus first class, is so deeply in the red. (And, some speculate, will go bankrupt.)

I spent part of my day of doing essentially nothing (thank you, Grover Cleveland) rearranging the reading pile next to my bed. Why haven’t I yet bought Jonathan Franzen’s new novel even though I hunger and thirst for it? Because I’ve got this enormous reading pile to get through. I’m trying to read through it, not add to it. Which means that before I get to Franzen I should finish:

Non-fiction:

•  “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan
• “Poor People” by William T. Vollmann
• “The Third Reich in Power” by Richard J. Evans
• “The Fall of the Roman Empire” by Peter Heather
• “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running” by Haruki Murakami (I’m almost finished with this one)
• “The Element” by Sir Ken Robinson (and with this one as well)

Business:

• “The Advertising Agency Business” by Eugene J. Hameroff (I’ve read this; I’m now rereading it)
• “Pricing with Confidence” by Reed K. Holden and Mark R. Burton (read this one too; now rereading it)
• “Priceless” by William Poundstone (almost finished)
• “Trust Agents” by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Comics and graphic novels:

• “Death: The Time of Your Life” by Neil Gaiman, Chris Bachalo, and Mark Buckingham
• “The New Jack Kirby Collector,” volume 31
• “Concrete: Depths,” by Paul Chadwick
• “The Playwright” by Eddie Campbell and Darren White
• a stack of about three dozen recent comics (S.H.I.E.L.D., Doc Savage, Astonishing X-Men, Black Widow, Jonah Hex, B.P.R.D., Secret Warriors, Hercules, Hellblazer, Unknown Soldier, Hulk, Doctor Strange, and a few other things)

Unsolicited plays

• In other words, plays given to me unrequested by friends who wrote them. (And no, please do not send me any.) I’ll read the top two because they’re friends I work with creatively and because fair is fair.

What’s missing? Two things:  magazines and novels. (Or short-story collections.) My rule of thumb with magazines is this:  Be devastatingly quick about it. Get it, read it, recycle it. It’s the only way to get through them. Why no novels? Because I’ve read all the ones that were in my queue. (Not my long-term queue — which consists of one book I think about often but haven’t gotten to yet:  “The Brothers Karamazov.”) I go through binges of reading either a lot of biographies/histories or a lot of novels; I recently ended one of those novel-reading binges. Hence my desire for the new Franzen, “Freedom.” No, I don’t plan to get it right now. But I am leaving for Las Vegas on Thursday…. Watch me pick it up at the airport.

On Saturday night, after seeing a friend’s play (which we thoroughly enjoyed), my compatriot Trey Nichols and I headed to the Apple Store down the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica to check out the new iPad, which debuted that day.

Some photos documenting that historic occasion:

That’s me, considering all the cool things I’ll be able to do with it when I get one (second — or third — generation).  By the way, these photos are taken with my iPhone (third generation; see the pattern?) by iMyself or iFriend. The only thing not i in these images is the clutch of i-worshipers in the background, and they’re pretty i-dolatrous themselves. Side note to good friends Terence Anthony and Steve Lozier:  Please note which site I’m checking out. No, the image wasn’t blurry — that was Trey’s hands shaking in anticipation of getting to touch the iPad.

And here’s Trey, actual iPad in hand. But now he looks, well, somewhat… skeptical.

This is before we visited a cigar shop around the corner where the UCLA student working the counter rhapsodized about the iPad and how eagerly he was awaiting his own. While we didn’t plunk down the 600 bucks for the latest buzzy techno device, we did each plunk down six bucks for a Punch cigar.

Even though both of us are still sentimentally attached to paper and the things that come on it (books, magazines, newspapers, comic books), we were also drawn to the novelty of the unit and enjoyed its sleek interface. We also noted its limitations — no camera, no 3G/4G.  In the meantime, Amazon, in an attempt at a marketing pushback, sent out an email today to various and sundry announcing that Kindle books are readable on — the iPhone. So I downloaded the Kindle app and am now reading three books on the iPhone (starting with a short story collection by the ever-reliably good Mr. Anton Chekhov, and Ulysses S. Grant’s memoir, and a compendium of 19th century American fiction) — all of them free, just as the app was. One sort of calculus would have it that I just got the e-reader and saved $600.

But here’s one question Trey and I didn’t think to wonder about the iPad:

Will it blend?

I put Stephen King’s latest novel, “Under the Dome” on my Christmas list because the premise of a town getting cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious invisible dome sounded like fun, and because although it had been a long time since I’d read one of his books, I had enjoyed every one I’d read. I say this by way of saying that it is with a heavy heart that I come not to praise Stephen King, but to bury him.

Admittedly, no one expects Stephen King to be a prose stylist. If you want, say, Henry James, you know where to turn. But we do expect Stephen King to be a master storyteller; that is his métier. It is also his reputation. Google “ ‘Stephen King’ ‘master storyteller’ ” and you’ll get 11,000 citings. Go ahead, try it.

And yet, “Under the Dome” is not a story masterfully told. It isn’t even well-told. In fact, it’s very badly told, in the plotting, in the characters, and yes, in the truly awful prose. Perhaps worst of all, a wonderful premise rife with possibility is squandered on one-dimensional characters and a truly deus ex machina ending.

First, the prose. Again, I didn’t go into this book looking for literary prose. But it’s fair to expect more than what’s here from someone who has been behind the typewriter for 35 years, who has written 70 books, and who is the 18^th best-selling fiction writer in history. It’s not that the writing in “Under the Dome” isn’t gifted; it’s that it’s truly terrible.

Some samples drawn from the book:

1.

Like Piper, Lester mentioned the testing concept – an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history – but his major theme had to do with the infection of sin, and how God dealt with such infections, which seemed to be squeezing them with His Fingers the way a man might squeeze a troublesome pimple until the pus squirted out like holy Colgate.

Evidently, God squeezes the infection of sin the way man might squeeze a pimple filled with holy toothpaste.

I didn’t know God was concerned with infections.

If he is, I’m not sure he squeezes them. How does one squeeze an infection?

I’m not sure sin is an infection.

Pimples contain pus, but pus isn’t like toothpaste.

Pus erupts from pimples; toothpaste flows from tubes, it doesn’t erupt.

How is toothpaste holy? Or is it only Colgate?

Setting aside the metaphor of infected holy toothpaste of sin, exactly what does the aside (“an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history”) add to our understanding of this sentence? Nothing. The book is filled with roadway disasters like this that pull our eye away from the cars in front of us.

2.

A young mother has just fallen over unconscious on the side of a road, her baby strapped onto her back. The baby strikes his head and begins to bleed. Here’s how King depicts this:

A fly settled on his forehead, sampled the blood oozing through the cartoon images of SpongeBob and Patrick, then flew off. Possibly to report this taste-treat at Fly HQ and summon reinforcements.

Rather than arousing our sympathy for the baby (or his mother), we’re asked to speculate about the motivations and movements of a fly. That is, when we’re not cheerily dwelling on the cartoon bandage. The point of view – that of the author, thinking about the fly! – provides a clue into something else that’s so completely wrong with this book:  its utter lack of empathy for the characters. The author doesn’t invest in their plight because he doesn’t believe they’re real, and so neither do we.

3.

He was as happy as a maggot in dog-puke.

We don’t normally associate maggots with dog puke. (Or “dog-puke.” Why this is hyphenated, I don’t know. It’s not a compound adjective. “Dog” is an adjective modifying the noun “puke.” Like most of the book, this error leaves me feeling that the book is simply unedited.) I don’t know if maggots in “dog-puke” are happy, so it’s difficult to gauge how happy “he” is. Here’s what I suspect:  King was going to write “as happy as a fly in shit” – a cliché we all know – but then thought that precisely because it was a cliché, he’d better make it new. And so he turned it into something that isn’t so much new as a second cousin, and one that doesn’t quite make sense. Dog shit hangs around – I’m sure you’ve seen it near sidewalks everywhere. But how often have you seen “dog-puke” out in society? And how long does it last? There’s no way to associate it with maggots.

4.

The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for hands (bad old clutchy-grabbing hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it.

Kids can write better than this. And doesn’t it sound like an adolescent wrote it? Note the slack verbs – “was,” “were,” “was,” “had” – three instances of “to be” and one of “to have,” leaving me wondering if King was the one writer who somehow missed out on reading Hemingway. Action verbs propel a sentence; one would think that a horror/fantasy writer would know this, and part of me believes that at one time King did know this, and has just forgotten. The subject of the third sentence, “It,” seems to refer to “The hat” in the previous sentence, meaning that it’s the hat that “had garden trowels for hands,” but that’s not his intention. He means the overall scarecrow. Finally, the lack of specificity points up the falseness of the entire description:  the thing has a shirt with “something” written on it. Oh. That explains it.

5.

“The Bushey girl,” Big Jim said. “How was she? Was she good?”

Carter hesitated, then said: “A little dry at first, but she oiled up a-country fair.”

Big Jim laughed. The sound was metallic, like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.

Lately, as a party game of my own devising, I’ve been asking friends to duplicate a laugh that sounds metallic, “like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.” So far, no one has been able to do it. Actually, no one has been able to understand what it would sound like. One writer friend visibly winced when I read the line, and looked confused when I asked him to laugh that way. When he asks us to imagine this laugh, I have no idea what Stephen King is asking for, and neither does anyone else I know. Leaving aside a “metallic” laugh, which I suppose would be grating in the way of a rusty hinge and which might be duplicable, I think about the sound of those coins, as replicated by a human throat, and wonder why King didn’t go for the full monty and throw in the sound of the jackpot alarm that summons security guards and onlookers. No, no one can laugh that way – but they can’t do the rest of it either.

6.

She pulled his arm tighter around her, although it wasn’t cold.

This is another example of a pronoun-antecedent disagreement. What he means to say is that even though it (the temperature) wasn’t cold out, she pulled his arm tighter around her. But because of the way he’s constructed the sentence, it would seem that even though his arm isn’t cold, she pulled it tighter around her. This, again, seems the sort of thing an editor should catch.

7.

A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. “Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I’ve kind of forgotten how this thing goes.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Barbie said.

Turned out he was right.

This is another example of tonal mismatch. Read it out loud and cringe. Given the context, I think we’re supposed to feel glad for these characters that they’ve gotten together. But it’s written like low comedy, or an entry for one of those contests of bad writing.

8.

One overweight woman (Mabel Alston; she also suffers from what she calls the dia-betties) sprains her ankle and lies there hollering until a couple of men come over and get her on [sic] remaining good foot. Lennie Meechum, the town postmaster (at least until this week, when delivery of the U.S. mail was canceled for the foreseeable future), borrows a cane for her. Then he tells Henry that Mabel needs a ride back to town. Henry says he can’t spare a car. She’ll have to rest in the shade, he says.

This is not storytelling. These are notes for storytelling. The paragraph reads like an index card plucked off the plotting board, transcribed, and filed away. The parentheticals are in the way and add nothing. And the typo, of eliding the word “her,” which is precisely the sort of error that crops up more frequently as the book moves past page 700, contributes to my sense that the book isn’t properly edited.

The writing is bad. It’s also reflective of what is a very bad novel.

The book shifts verb tenses many times, from past tense to present. At first I thought this was because sections of the story were being told in past tense by a survivor. But no, it appears to be a mistake.

The author constantly interrupts the narrative with asides and judgments that are distracting and wearisome.

The characters are thinly drawn. Jim Rennie, one of the town selectmen, is so transparently bad that every voter in town must be either a reprobate or a fool. Both church pastors are cartoons – one is a hypocritical porn hound who’s been involved in crime; the other is a liberal female do-gooder with a soft touch on God. The heightened fantasy of every character’s situation highlights their innate falseness. Rennie doesn’t just operate a meth lab; no, he’s operating the world’s biggest meth lab with a network extending across the nation. The unbelievability of the situations harms the believability of the characters, which wasn’t strong to begin with.

As for suspense, on which King’s reputation rests, there is little. The mysterious dome that cuts off the small town in rural Maine from the rest of civilization, it transpires, has been put there by alien space children toying with humans for their amusement. No, I am not kidding you. How, then, is the book resolved? One of the townspeople gets to the transmitter and begs a little alien girl to let them go, and the dome magically vanishes into the atmosphere. This is so shameless a deus ex machina I’m surprised the author isn’t embarrassed by it. And what is the role of our hero in the climax of the story? None. He’s not the one who makes the effort to beg the alien girl.

Why, given all this, did I read every word on the 1100 pages of this book?

Part of it was shock. I couldn’t quite believe how had this was. Some years ago, I had read several books by this same author and enjoyed them. This wasn’t just a bad book, this was a very bad book, a book seemingly written by someone who patently couldn’t write. Surely, I thought, this is a hoax of some sort; there is a twist awaiting me past page 1000 that reveals that the story has been narrated badly by some character for a reason.

Another part was that I like to end things I finish. When I shared this with my son, he shared his opinion of that:  “That’s stupid.” In retrospect, he may have been right.

A final part was that there are lessons to be learned here. Words mean things. Writing is important. Good writing makes an impact that bad writing cannot. It’s important to know this and to practice it. Put this way, reading “Under the Dome” was like performing an autopsy to learn how the patient could have survived.

As I got further and further into the book and my shock at its awfulness mounted, as I scribbled notes and stuck markers in pages that were especially bad, my wife finally said, “Yeah, I know, it’s terrible.” This was surprising. Not that she had read my Christmas gift before giving it to me, which was fine, but because she plows through genre novels with a gleeful abandon, and she hated this one. “Wait ‘til you get to the end,” she said. “It gets even worse.”

True. Because when I finished the book I was left to wonder this:  Did Stephen King’s editor, whom he thanks in the afterword, think this was acceptable (or even good) writing? Or was she sufficiently cowed by his reputation to let it all go? And which of these two alternatives is worse? That’s what I’ve been thinking about since.

Yes, I am working on that piece about Stephen King’s book “Under the Dome,” and why you shouldn’t read it. It’s not my intention to write a magnum opus — but I am at 835 words, and counting. The book is so bad, I’m not sure where to stop. In the meantime, please bear with me,  and don’t read the book.

I have a MacBook Pro laptop. I have a desktop iMac. I have an iPhone. I don’t need an iPad, but I have to say, this video made me want one.

I’m not ready to leave behind my tactile relationship with books. I am very ready to leave behind my relationship with newspapers and magazines, however. While we preserve books (keeping them, or lending them, or donating them), periodicals are conceived in impermanence (hence their disposability). Although I have been emotionally unable to cancel my daily newspaper subscription, as regular readers of this blog know, I could easily do so with my subscriptions to Inc. and Fast Company and the Los Angeles Business Journal and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal and the New Yorker and Entrepreneur and the Dramatist, because the key feature — portability — would be supplemented by new benefits: reduction in paper and clickability to related material.

Why haven’t I, then, gotten a Kindle? Because the Kindle is solely a reader (and, to a degree, a browser). The iPad is a Kindle with netbook benefits, including email, video, apps, and more. Why carry a single-blade pocketknife when you can have a multi-tool that takes up less space?

Will I get an iPad? Looking ahead, yes — at some point. We all know full well that iPad 2.0 will be released within 12 months — if not sooner. We know this from experience with the iPod and the iPhone. iPad 2.0 will feature 4G. Count on it. That’s worth waiting for. The other thing worth waiting for is the related price drop on the current offering — although I have to say, I was astonished by how low-priced the base model is. Everyone was anticipating Apple to bring out a tablet for under a thousand bucks. I don’t think anyone was expecting the base model to run less than five hundred bucks. As a colleague said today on a conference call, “That’s the end of the Kindle.”