Confessions of an iPad User

Dear people of the internet, particularly those who feel to hijack the comments sections of every tech web page with your anti-iPad screeds,

I own an iPad. I admit that I didn’t intend to buy one originally. I wasn’t a scoffer—I’d simply hoped to wait for the second generation. But then I played with them in the stores, and more particularly, got to sit down with one that a friend had bought, and I was hooked. I could easily see how I could fit one into my everyday life and work style.

So yes, I made a reservation and picked up an iPad a week and a half later. And here’s the thing: I really like my iPad. One of the first things I did was to put two-hundred and thirty-six of my favorite books on it, so that I could use it as a reading device. (And I haven’t even begun to score my classic favorites from Project Gutenberg, yet.) Yes, I could read books on my computer. I don’t like doing it though, any more than I enjoy watching movies or television programs on my computer when I could do it on my, you know. Television. Why do I like reading on my iPad so much? Because I can take it to bed. I can turn it sideways and read lying down. It weighs practically nothing. The screen is big. I can adjust the brightness and the typeface and the type size to suit my whims. I can hold it with one hand while I do my business on the john.

I use the iPad as my portable music library. The ForScore app allows me to organize PDF files of piano sheet music and have them all in one lightweight and easily transportable device. One that’s backlit, thank you very much. When I tap the glass, the page flips, and stays flipped. I can annotate and highlight sections. The app came with 1300 pages of sample piano music already installed. My repertoire consists of classical pieces in the public domain, so I’ve easily doubled that just by looking on public score repositories for stuff I already knew.

I’ve got access to all the internet services on my iPad that I really need. And I like the device because it’s slim and portable. I can stick it into its carrying case and take it out on the town without feeling compelled to drag along accessories and power cords and all the little things that my everyday computer would require. The battery lasts me a good dozen hours. I can use it at a table, or sitting in a comfy chair, or while I’m flat on my back. It carries a decent chunk of my music library. I have a word processor on it, so I can carry around copies of my latest manuscripts and work on new ones. It’s easy to type on. Easier still if I flip on my tiny bluetooth keyboard. It’s silent, cool, and suits me perfectly. And I suspect the thing hasn’t even come into its real heyday yet.

So this is what I don’t get, trolls of the internet. If I like a device, and if I find a lot of utility for it, why do you care if I bought it or not? I didn’t, as far as I’m aware, use your money for the purchase. That came out of my own bank account.

You can lecture me all you want about the alternatives. I can’t see myself propping a netbook up on a piano rack to play, much less annotating my score and flipping pages easily. I’m not going to take one into bed to read, either. I’m happy with what I have. Why do you care so much?

It seems to me that though they purport to be higher-minded and smarter than Apple fanboys, the Apple haters are an even more obnoxious breed. They hijack any internet forum they can to disparage Apple products, malign Apple users, and say anything they can to make themselves feel better about their own purchasing choices. Yet their pretense of despising anything ‘trendy’ is trendiness itself; jumping on a brand and its users on the internet isn’t a way of expressing your superior individuality. It’s just anonymous dog-piling, and takes no more thought than farting.

Dudes. Buy what you want. If it’s a Droid or a Windows product, it makes no never-mind to me. I don’t think any the less of you. Say what you want about me, but I honestly don’t believe that one’s computing purchases define me as an individual, any more than I believe wearing a shirt with an Abercrombie and Fitch logo will turn me into a sun-tanned catalog model, or slapping on American Apparel will turn me into an urban hipster. Bashing people for sport doesn’t make you a superior person. I buy what I like, if I like, and I let other people do the same.

Why don’t you?

Just a Friendly Little Cat

Chloe the Ragdoll cat was supposed to be non-clumping. That's how the breeder sold her as, anyway.

Of course, the breeder also said that Ragdolls were friendly and sweet and cuddly lap cats who loved to be with their owners, and in the fourteen years we've had Chloe, she's been crabby and neurotic and would never deign to do anything so lowly as to sit in anyone's lap. She does love to be with her owners, but it's only so she can point out in a whiny voice exactly how they are neglecting and mistreating her.

Perhaps a kitty Freud could cope with the neurosis. The only thing I can tackle is the clumping fur, and that's by giving her a bath regularly.

Which she hates.

Fred watched the whole proceedings with horror, then cringed away, and said, "Dude, WTF?"

To which Chloe glared.



Fred: "Seriously, WTF?!"



Beauty has its costs, though. Chloe's been swanning around the house ever since she dried off, looking glamorous and knowing it.

The Little Stranger

One of my all-time favorite books is Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, a pair of twin tales about the intertwined lives of a Victorian guttersnipe and a privileged, sheltered young lady. I’d already loved Waters for Tipping the Velvet, a literary box of bon-bons with a bold lesbian narrator whose picaresque journey through Victorian London’s music halls, back alleys, bedrooms, lands her in the arms of the organized labor movement. I’d loved the creepy, seductive Affinity, with its world of mediums and apparitions.

But Fingersmith manage to push every pleasure button in my system. Not only was it a ripping good read, but its intricate narrative structure provided twists and turns and double-crosses that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Charles Dickens would’ve been proud. Appalled, and proud.

When I recently finally got my hands on Waters’ latest novel, The Little Stranger, I was a little apprehensive, however. Waters’ post-Fingersmith effort, The Night Watch, was set during and after World War II London, and though it was beautifully-written, it wasn’t exactly exciting. When I saw that The Little Stranger was also set after the war, I was slightly apprehensive. I needn’t have been.

Like The Turn of the Screw, The Little Stranger is a ghost story. Narrated in memoir style, the book is the tale of a physician of limited stature and means who becomes increasingly involved in the madness of a once-proud family of a country squire. Both the family and their rambling estate —which is the kind of architecture to which Mrs. Danvers might have been found, skulking about and mumbling about her precious Rebecca—are falling apart at the seams as the ghost of a lost child toys with its occupants, one by one.

The chills of The Little Stranger are subtle. The ghost manifests itself through the slightest of sounds and shadows, with only the smallest of traces left behind. As the doctor narrator struggles with his own skepticism and the dogma of modern-day science, the ghost eats away at the house’s inhabitants from within, leaving them empty and hollow at the core before doing away with them entirely. It’s a tale of subtle chills and goosebumps, rather than morbid images and shrieks.

In fact, the novel is so subtle that it wasn’t until I was three-quarters of the way through that I wondered to myself where it was going. From a literary standpoint it’s a great homage to Du Maurier, Henry James, Le Fanu, and most especially the very early Agatha Christie, but in reading, it seems very little more than a well-told fireside ghost tale. It wasn’t until I recalled the twisty, devious Waters of Fingersmith and Affliction that I realized exactly what was happening but was left unsaid in her story, and I plowed through the book’s last quarter, eager to see it resolved.

And it wasn’t. The book came to a suitable conclusion, but it was so ambiguous that it left the impression of something being omitted. It was like watching The Sixth Sense without that grand reveal at the end that snaps everything into perspective. There’s no peek behind the magician’s cabinet, to see how it all was done.

Only, of course, the reveal is there all along, for those who are sharp-eyed enough to find it. It’s in the novel’s lush first pages; it’s laid at its barest in its very last sentence. Understanding what’s really afoot in the novel requires reading it fairly closely, though. Judging the reviews from ordinary readers that I browsed through on the Amazon web site, most of which had kind of a um, what was the big deal? kind reaction, that might be a lost art.

For anyone who enjoys the milieu or a well-told tale, however, The Little Stranger is full of shivery, dreadful pleasures.