The Way the World Works

by Baker, Nicholson

  It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography—and its subheads and callouts and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its website links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

  Sometimes whole articles and op-ed contributions aren’t there. Three pieces from the July 8, 2009, print edition of the Times—Adam Nagourney on Sarah Palin’s resignation, Alessandra Stanley on Michael Jackson’s funeral, and David Johnston on the civil rights of detainees—were missing from the Kindle edition, or at least I haven’t managed to find them (they’re available free on the Times website); the July 9 Kindle issue lacked the print edition’s reporting on interracial college roommates and the infectivity rates of abortion pills. I checked again on July 20 and 21: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s appreciation of Walter Cronkite was absent, as was a long piece on Mongolian shamanism.

  The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them—it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.

  Amazon, with its Listmania Lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 a.m. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don’t want to disturb the person who’s in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth machine and click it on. It’s completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear. After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead. You will roll to a stop. A moment later, you’ll wake and discover that you’re still holding the machine but it has turned itself off. Slide it back under the pillow. Sleep.

  I’ve done this with Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor ($13.80 Kindle, $17.25 paperback) and with Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The iPod screen’s resolution, at 163 pixels per inch, is fairly high. (It could be much higher, though. High pixel density, not a reflective surface, is, I’ve come to believe, what people need when they read electronic prose.) There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace. There’s also the Iceberg Reader, by ScrollMotion, with fixed page numbers, and a very popular app called Stanza. In Stanza, you can choose the colors of the words and of the page, and you can adjust the brightness with a vertical thumb swipe as you read. Stanza takes you to Harlequin Imprints, the Fictionwise Book Store, O’Reilly Ebooks, Feedbooks, and a number of other catalogs. A million people have downloaded Stanza. (In fact, Stanza is so good that Amazon has just bought Lexcycle, which makes the software; meanwhile, Fictionwise has been bought by a worried Barnes & Noble.)

  Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people aren’t reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it’s beautiful, and (b) it’s not imitating anything. It’s not trying to be ink on paper. It serves a night-reading need, which the lightless Kindle doesn’t. And the wasp passage in Do Insects Think? is funny again on the iPod.

  The paperback edition of The Lincoln Lawyer ($7.99 at Sherman’s in Freeport) has a bright-green cover with a blurry photograph of a car on the front. It says “Michael Connelly” in huge metallic purple letters, and it has a purple band on the spine: “#1 New York Times Bestseller.” On the back, it says, “A plot that moves like a shot of Red Bull.” It’s shiny and new and the type is right, and it has the potent pheromonal funk of pulp and glue. When you read the book, its gutter gapes before your eyes, and you feel you’re in it. In print, The Lincoln Lawyer swept me up. At night, I switched over to the e-book version on the iPod ($7.99 from the Kindle Store), so that I could carry on in the dark. I began swiping the tiny iPod pages faster and faster.

  Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks. But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would. I began walking up and down the driveway, reading in the sun. Three distant lawn mowers were going. Someone wearing a salmon-colored shirt was spraying a hose across the street. But I was in the courtroom, listening to the murderer testify. I felt the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out.

  I began pressing the Next Page clicker more and more eagerly, so eagerly that my habit of page-turning, learned from years of reading—which is to reach for the page corner a little early, to prepare for the movement—kicked in unconsciously. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all. I was trying to hurry the Kindle. You mustn’t hurry the Kindle. But, hell, I didn’t care. The progress bar at the bottom said I was 91 percent done. I was at location 7547. I was flying along. Gray is a good color, I thought. Finally, I was on the last bit. It was called “A Postcard from Cuba.” I breathed an immense ragged sigh. I read the acknowledgments and the about-the-author paragraph—Michael Connelly lives in Florida. Good man. The little progress indicator said 99 percent. I clicked the Next Page button. It showed the cover of the book again. I clicked Next Page again, but there was no next page. My first Kindle-delivered novel was at its end.

  (2009)

  Papermakers

  There are two paper mills in the town of Jay, in Maine, on the Androscoggin River. One mill, now owned by Verso Paper Corp., makes the paper for Martha Stewart Living, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines. It’s a big plant, built by International Paper in the sixties. The other mill is older and made of brick and stone. It’s called the Otis Mill, and it was built by Hugh Chisholm, the founder of International Paper, in 1896. Back then it was a prodigy—THE LARGEST PAPER MILL PLANT IN THE WORLD, according to a headline in the Lewiston Weekly Journal, which was exaggerating, but only a little.

  The Otis Mill has produced all sorts of paper over the years—paper for postcards, ornate playing cards, wallpaper, copier paper, inkjet paper, and the shiny, peel-off paper backing for sticky labels. Now, though, the Otis Mill doesn’t make anything. The paper industry is in a slump. The new owner, Wausau Paper, shut down one of Otis’s two paper machines in August 2008. The number of employees dropped from about 250 to 96. Then, this spring, Wausau’s CEO, Thomas J. Howatt, closed the plant altogether. The closure was a difficult decision, he said in a press release, but it was necessary in order to “preserve liquidity and match capacity with demand during a period of severe economic difficulty.” The final reel of paper came off the mill at 6:50 a.m. on June 1, 2009. It was parchment paper, the kind bakers use to bake cookies.

  I drove up to Jay on a fine day in mid-October, thinking as I drove about forests with logging trails, and abou
t 400,000-square-foot Internet data centers going up around the country with cooling towers and 28,000-gallon backup tanks of diesel fuel, and about mountaintop coal removal, and about relative carbon footprints. I’d been talking on the phone to Don Carli, a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication. Carli said that the risk to Maine’s forests—and to forests in Washington and Wisconsin and elsewhere—was not from logging, but from what happens if the logging stops. A thinned or even a completely felled woodland grows back, but when a landowner loses his income from cutting down trees, he has to find another way to make money. Low-density development, with all of its irrevocabilities—paved roads, parking lots, power lines, propane depots, sewage plants, and mini-malls—is one way of getting a return. “Hamburgers and condos kill more trees than printed objects ever will,” Carli told me. “If the marketplace for timber, harvested sustainably from Maine’s forests, collapses because of the propagation of a myth—which some might say is a fraud—that says that using the newspaper is killing trees, then what happens is the landholder can no longer generate the revenue to pay a master logger for sustainable timber harvesting, and can’t pay the taxes. Then a developer offers to buy the land at a steep premium over what it was worth as a forest, and the developer clear cuts the land and turns it into a low-density development. Then it really is deforested.”

  I drove through Auburn and Turner, north on Route 4, past many FOR-LEASE signs, past the Softie Delight (closed), past the White Fawn Trading Post, which once sold deerskin gloves (closed), past the Antique Snowmobile Museum (open) and the apple-processing factory (closed) and Moose Creek log cabin homes (open). The road curves as you come into Jay, and you drive along the railroad track toward the Otis Mill. The tower is made of brick and, oddly, looks a little like the Campanile in Venice. It still says, at the top: INTERNATIONAL PAPER CO. / 1906.

  At a little variety and pizza shop I bought a Coke and three newspapers. The headline on one of the papers, the Franklin Journal, was WAUSAU MILL SOLD, CLOSING. The Lewiston Sun Journal had a big front-page article: OTIS MILL SOLD. A couple from Jay, owners of Howie’s Welding & Fabrication, had bought the mill from Wausau, with financing from a consortium of local towns. They were just figuring out what to do with it, according to the Sun Journal. They wanted to save the building and get some people back to work. As for the machinery, “We’ll be doing a lot of liquidating.”

  I drove through Otis’s plant gate and into one of the parking spaces near the railroad tracks. When I got out, a man was standing near a shiny red pickup truck. I told him I was writing about the paper industry for a newspaper in San Francisco and he said I should talk to Larry, because Larry had been there over thirty years. He himself had only been there for ten, he said. He asked me inside.

  We walked into a low white room with blue trim. Fabric banners announcing yearly corporate safety awards hung from the ceiling. So did the American flag. There were several corkboards for union announcements, but the announcements had all been taken down and the colored pushpins neatly clustered in the cork. There was a bench strewn with flyers for employment retraining and adult-education flyers—also brochures from church groups, job-loss support groups, and workshops on starting a new business. Something from the United Way said: “YOU CAN SURVIVE UNEMPLOYMENT!”

  Larry, a man in his sixties, gestured me upstairs to the darkened, unkempt office suite. Larry’s own office was still well organized, though. It was officially his last day as an employee of Wausau—October 15, 2009. He’d worked at the plant for thirty-three years, first in maintenance and then in engineering. Schematics and electrical diagrams of the mill that he knew better than almost anyone else were neatly ranked in a file caddy, and pictures of his grandchildren were angled on the bookcase behind him. “When I first started here,” he said, “they were making copier-type paper. Then those markets grew so big that we couldn’t compete with bigger mills. We started getting into specialty grades, like release base paper—the paper that you throw away behind a self-sticking stamp or a bumper sticker. We did a lot of that. We did some inkjet early in the inkjet era. Again we got competed out of that. Our niche was specialty grades, small orders.”

  Larry didn’t smile much, except when he talked about taking care of his grandchildren. Everyone knew everyone in the plant, he said, and the closing of the second paper machine came as a shock to the town. “It’s not good news, for sure,” Larry said. “The expectation was that we had a few years left to run the one machine.”

  Could the plant be brought back online by another owner, I asked, if paper markets picked up? No, said Larry: Wausau had sold the plant to the proprieters of Howie’s Welding & Fabrication under the condition that its machines never again be used to make paper in North or South America. “It was sold with a non-compete clause,” he explained. Wausau had not only closed the plant down, it had effectively ended any possibility of its resurrection as a paper mill.

  As he was shaking my hand, Larry told me I should get in touch with Sherry Judd, who was in charge of Maine’s Paper & Heritage Museum.

  I got in the car, sighed, and drove on down the road, trying to figure out where to go next. Passing the Otis Federal Credit Union, I saw an electric sign, which said: “Benefit Spaghetti Supper for PAPER & HERITAGE MUSEUM Saturday October 17th 4:30 to 7PM St. Rose Parish Hall Jay.” I stopped and took a picture of the sign. Then I drove a few miles upriver to the big Verso Paper mill—“Andro,” as the locals call it—where they make the paper for Cosmo and Martha Stewart Living. More than nine hundred employees work there. I parked near a vintage green Jaguar in the parking lot.

  I stood for a while, looking at the sun as it sank behind the two digester towers, with their manelike plumes of steam. Not smoke—steam. The plant was enormous and boxy and clean and, I thought, elegant in its own way. It was heavy industry, but it carried its weight well. There was no sulphurous paper-mill stench. I felt a surge of pride that the paper for many magazines—filled with photographs of food and jungles and expensive New York City interiors and classy brassieres—was being made right here, in Jay, Maine. The biggest building said VERSO in big letters on the side.

  We may not make steel anymore, in our hollowed-out husk of a country, I thought, and we may not make shoes or socks or shirts or china or TVs or telephones or much of anything else except pills and pilotless drones—but we do make very heavy, twenty-four-foot rolls of clean-smelling, smooth-surfaced paper.

  I took some pictures of trucks filled with cut logs queued up in one of the feeder roads. Then I went to the security desk and announced myself and drove home. A few days later I got a call from Sondra Dowdell, one of Verso’s corporate spokespersons. She explained how efficient the Verso plant was—that it used river power, tree bark, and “black liquor,” the lignin-rich waste product of papermaking, as sources of energy. She forwarded me Verso’s sustainability report, “A Climate of Change.” A chart diagrammed the sources of Verso’s energy: more than 50 percent came from recycled biomass—i.e., bark and black liquor—another 1.2 percent came from hydroelectric power. Dowdell had visited one of Verso’s customers, Quad/Graphics, in Wisconsin, which prints many magazine titles. “It is amazing,” she said, “the talent of the graphic artists and the technical savvy of the people who can lay lovely ink on paper. It is just beautiful to watch.”

  That Saturday, my wife and I drove back to Jay to go to the spaghetti fund-raiser. We got there early, so that we could have a tour of Maine’s Paper & Heritage Museum, which is in a mansion on Church Street in Livermore Falls, where mill managers and their families once lived. The front walk is dug up now, because they’re installing a new community walkway and wheelchair ramp.

  Walter Ellingwood and Norman Paradis, whose father and grandfather worked at the Otis Mill, and whose son now works at Andro, gave us the museum tour. Walter showed us the burst tester, and the opacity and absorption tester, and a piece of wood that helped you compute the speed of the paper machine—and the two of them pointed o
ut the old steam whistle from the Otis Mill. Walter said that one night long ago he got lost in the swamp in Chesterville and they blew the steam whistle for him so that he could find his way home. Norm showed us a diagram of Andro, with light-up buttons, and he pointed out the medal that his father had gotten for working for International Paper for forty years. It had four diamonds, one for each decade. “He thought that was really really something from International Paper company. It didn’t take much to make these people say, ‘Jeez, look how nice that is.’” Norm himself also worked for forty years for International Paper, first as a kid in school, and eventually as a supervisor at Andro, with four hundred people under him. “These are some of my buckles that I won,” he said, showing us some metal pieces in a glass case. His grandfather, who came from Quebec, had worked in the Otis Mill barefoot, he said, because the chemicals ruined any shoes you wore.

  We paused in front of an aerial photograph of the Otis Mill in winter. Norm pointed out the town’s skiing hill, just on the other side of the river. The old mill’s hydro plant had always powered the ski lifts; now, Norm said, he didn’t know what would happen. Then he and Walter had to hurry on over to work at the spaghetti event. We went there, too, to the Rose Church Parish Hall.

  There were two other public fund-raisers happening in town that night, but even so, a good crowd came out to have the seven-dollar dinner. Mostly they were retired mill workers, but there were some who had just lost their jobs. Norm greeted everyone—he knew everyone. We sat next to two women who had, long ago, cleaned the offices at the mill. “You can’t be delicate eating spaghetti,” said one of the women—she was about seventy—when I wiped my mouth. There were two sculptures of saints on the walls, each nearly life-size.