Bookselling

Price Wars Don’t Work When Everyone Fights

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When Amazon, Target, and Walmart sell a book at well below wholesale price, they can’t be making money. So what are they doing? Attempting to hurt every other bookseller in every other city. James Surowiecki writes about the price war for The New Yorker.

The idea is to let your competitors know that you’re not eager to slash prices—but that, if a price war does start, you’ll fight to the bitter end. One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor’s advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It’s the retail version of the doomsday machine.

(via ArtsJournal)

Bookselling

Not without honor in my own city

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Today provided another of those little rewards that make being an author almost worth the trouble. I spoke on the phone to a lady from Ingebretsen‘s Scandinavian store.

If, for some obscure reason, you don’t live in the Minneapolis area, you probably don’t know about Ingebretsen’s. It’s a community institution. It started (if I have the story right) as a neighborhood grocery on Lake Street, catering to Scandinavian immigrants, back in 1921. The neighborhood remains an immigrant center even today, except that the immigrants now tend to be Mexican and Sudanese. But through all the decades, Ingebretsen’s has remained on the old corner, faithful to the neighborhood, dispensing lutefisk, flatbread, goat cheese and herring to a small but grateful public.

Somewhere along the line they expanded to include a Scandinavian gift shop, and they’re the best and most successful brick-and-mortar enterprise of that sort in the metropolitan area. I make a pilgrimage every Christmas season, and it’s usually a long walk from wherever I can find a place to park. Before stepping inside to join the throng, I have to make a conscious effort to abandon all concept of personal space.

I wrote to Ingebretsen’s, along with a couple other midwest dealers in the same sort of line, after West Oversea came out. I enclosed copies of reviews and a free copy of the book. The lady at Ingebretsen’s told me she’d read the book and enjoyed it, and had added it to their winter catalog (which I knew about) and to their web site (which I didn’t).

Don’t mess with me. Among Minneapolis Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns, I now have street cred.

Publishing, Reading

Kindle Under Fire from iPhone Apps

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eReader apps for the iPhone are surging in popularity, according to a marketing research firm. The firm suggests Amazon’s Kindle may become a remainder to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, which has 57,000,000 users.

Religion

Saving Grace

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Greybeard brought up Roman Catholic tradition vs. Scriptural understand in Lars’ post on braving the dark, and I remembered that reference last Sunday when we celebrated communion. It seems easier to hold to a doctrine in which saving grace can be administered to the unrepentant through ritual and the sacraments than to hold to the idea saving grace is the unmerited gift of God for whomever he wishes. I don’t want to offend anyone, but we’re talking about vital truth, aren’t we? This is the road to salvation we’re discussing.

It seems like an institutional idea, a concept developed from a desire to uphold the institution from which it came, to teach that baptism, communion, repetitive prayer, and a priest’s blessing grant bits of salvation to a soul who must act on those bits to merit full salvation. But Luther was set free from that unending cycle of salvific merit when he understood by the Lord’s grace that the righteous shall live by faith. The righteous–mind you, those who have been declared righteous by the one holy God–live by faith in God’s salvation. The same righteousness given to Abraham when he believed (Genesis 15:6) is given to those who believe today without a need for additional labor. Of course, when James says that faith without works is dead, he is dead right. Those who believe will repent of their sins and follow Christ to the best of their ability, but repentance and the fruit of belief are not works, “so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-10).

When we celebrate communion, we celebrate the finished work of Christ. His suffering, death, and resurrection atones for all of the sin of his people, and anyone who understands the judgment he faces if he stands before God alone can repent and be saved. Christ’s work is the only work required. There is no other saving grace. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’— so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” (Galatians 3:13-14).

Religion

Egalitarian gnosticism?

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This will be a short (as short as I can make it) meditation on a subject that deserves a far more comprehensive treatment. Chances are the idea I’ll raise isn’t original to me, and somebody else has already written about it, probably far more sensibly.

I was recently sent .pdfs of a couple open letters from prominent figures in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The first was this letter, written by former presiding bishop Herbert Chilstrom. In it he defends recent ELCA decisions that placed a blessing on the practice of homosexuality. The decisions, he says, are consistent with a Lutheran understanding of the Word of God. He quotes in particular the theologian Carl E. Braaten, writing, “The ultimate authority of Christian dogmatics is not the biblical canon as such, but the gospel of Jesus Christ to which the Scriptures bear witness—the ‘canon within the canon.’”

I was also sent Prof. Braaten’s response, which you can read here. Although Prof. Braaten is not someone I myself have ever looked to as a model in matters of scriptural interpretation, there are some things that can still make even an advocate of the higher criticism gag. Prof. Braaten answers, “You are right that the Word of God can mean one of three things, the incarnate Word, the written Word, or the proclaimed Word. In this case, the context makes it clear that it means the written Word of God, the Bible. I do not believe that the other two meanings of the Word of God diminish by a single iota the authority of the written Word of God.” Continue reading Egalitarian gnosticism? →

Uncategorized

Saved by the Dead Ringer on the Graveyard Shift

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Cemetery with old headstones

Did you know this? I quote from An Authoritative Source. “England is old and small, and they started running out of places to bury people [back in the 1500s]. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a ‘bone-house’ and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, one out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the ‘graveyard shift’) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be ‘saved by the bell’ or was considered a ‘dead ringer.'”

That’s “true,” folks, as true as it gets, in some circles.

But let’s talk about those phrases again, okay? Saved by the bell, dead ringer, and the graveyard shift. Continue reading Saved by the Dead Ringer on the Graveyard Shift →

Authors, Non-fiction

An Interview with Hunter Baker

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To the Source, a weekly email on cultural issues, has interviewed Hunter Baker about his new book, The End of Secularism. Hunter says:

I think Christians should kindly refuse the invitation to take their religious activity and speech private. They should maintain the validity of the faith for their approach to community life and politics. They should point out that secularism provides little guidance for dealing with big political questions and that the values have to come from somewhere. Too often, secularists selectively crib Christian values without acknowledging the source. We didn’t just get here by accident. We don’t appreciate things like liberty, equality, and democracy by sheer accident. Christianity has been a major civilizational force.

Religion

On not being afraid of the dark

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Back in my low-rent Christian singing group days, we met a pastor who ministered in a southern Minnesota town. He was a fascinating fellow, an eccentric dresser, and a great extrovert with many wild stories to tell. He’d been a hippie before his conversion, and he told stories of his adventures with some occultists he’d lived with for a while in California. (Rory Bohannon in Wolf Time is based, in part, on him.)

Thinking back on our acquaintance, I don’t believe he was a fraud. His stories were sometimes spooky, but they lacked the self-aggrandizement of Mike Warnke‘s fabulations. I believe he was seriously trying to convey spiritual truth, and using the stories to draw us in.

And there’s one thing he said that I’ll always remember. “When you talk to people about the occult,” he said, “they almost always respond in the same way. They say, ‘I don’t believe in it—tell me about it.’” Continue reading On not being afraid of the dark →

Uncategorized

Relative Maxims

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I have learned that both of these maxims have been employed over the years:

  • The best defense is a solid offense.
  • The best offense is a strong defense.

Which do you think is true or stronger, if both are true? I usually think of this the first way and in terms of a chess game. Your object in chess and any competitive game is to win, not to avoid losing too badly. I suppose in other conflicts you must be careful to avoid taking too much damage so that any victory would be hollow and sorely won, but even then defeating the opponent quickly will keep him from hurting you.

The page I link to above has a quote from George Washington which I looked up for a bit of context. The first American president and great American general said:

It is unfortunate when men cannot or will not see danger at a distance; or, seeing it, are undetermined as to the means, which are necessary to avert or keep it afar off. I question whether the evil arising from the French getting possession of Louisiana and the Floridas would be generally seen, until felt; and yet no problem in Euclid is more evident, or susceptible of clearer demonstration. Not less difficult is it to make them believe, that offensive operations oftentimes are the surest, if not in some cases the only means of defence.

That’s generally the way I see it. What do you think?

Fiction

The Soul of Frankenstein

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Frankenstein's Castle. Photo by Yvo Geis

Burg Frankenstein in Darmstadt, Germany

This professor was very unlike his colleague. He appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short, but remarkably erect; and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. . . .

“The ancient teachers of this science,” said he, “promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.”

Such were the professor’s words–rather let me say such the words of fate, enounced to destroy me. As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein–more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Book Reviews, Creative Culture