Literature
The email I received from Amazon.com this morning really tried to make me feel like I was missing out on something. As someone who "enjoys purchasing books from Amazon," they just thought I'd like to know that "there are now over 260,000 books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs"...this implied that said texts are available for the Amazon Kindle, which is always connected through 3G wireless so that one can download "anytime, anywhere." With objects like these, who needs imagination?
I am curious but hesitant about the Kindle. I have thought seriously about the potential advantages of these devices in the literature classroom. There would be almost no excuse for students not having their texts with them. Maybe reading would be fun for all. And look how easy it is to hold a Kindle:
Yet if you did not know what to look for, this image would be a cipher: is she gazing at a mystic tablet...or at her hands...or at a mirror (i.e. herself)? It is almost as if 'it' isn't there at all. Such minimalism certainly could uplift the spirits of college students who are used to schlepping around five-pound Norton anthologies. What would such a class feel like, in which everyone had the same slick little machine for reading? (Furthermore, could we get some of those couches and throw pillows for the classroom? Those unergonomic chairs are not helping the situation.)
The picture in my email was slightly more instructive, if also eerily vacant:
What bothers me about this image, though, is the white border around the device, not to mention the disembodied white hand; these make the Kindle look hermetically sealed in a world of its own, as if one can so easily achieve the uninterrupted time and empty space for reading that the cover page alone would evoke a sort of rapture. Amazon notes that the battery can last so long that one can "read for days without recharging." Could Kindles really guarantee a new era of learning, a promised land of literature students seduced into slow reading via fast connections? Practically speaking, does the energy required to build and power Kindles offset the energy required to produce (and transport) paper books? Is white the new (same old) green?
- Rey Chow On New Media
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest...
- Attention, Focus
I am starting to glimpse a constellation. A recent Wall Street Journal article on Kindle e-book reading argues: ...an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not...
- Posts Instead Of Papers
When I consider using blogs to teaching literature/writing, I am not simply talking about transposing the forms (and formalities) of syllabi, essays, rubrics, etc. onto an electronic medium. No, I am talking about rethinking what it means to write?what...
- Moving Rocks
Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. ?Gary Snyder, "Riprap" These lines are from a classic Gary Snyder poem that I thought of as I was making a rock pathway today outside the cottage I rent in Davis. Some of Snyder's more recent...
- E-readers + Friday Memes
My new bookshelf fits in the palm of my hands.I'd like to take this opportunity to make a confession: I finally caved in and bought myself an E-Reader: a Kindle to be precise. This might not seem particularly shocking but I do feel like a hypocrite...
Literature
To Be or Not To Be Kindled
The email I received from Amazon.com this morning really tried to make me feel like I was missing out on something. As someone who "enjoys purchasing books from Amazon," they just thought I'd like to know that "there are now over 260,000 books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs"...this implied that said texts are available for the Amazon Kindle, which is always connected through 3G wireless so that one can download "anytime, anywhere." With objects like these, who needs imagination?
I am curious but hesitant about the Kindle. I have thought seriously about the potential advantages of these devices in the literature classroom. There would be almost no excuse for students not having their texts with them. Maybe reading would be fun for all. And look how easy it is to hold a Kindle:
Yet if you did not know what to look for, this image would be a cipher: is she gazing at a mystic tablet...or at her hands...or at a mirror (i.e. herself)? It is almost as if 'it' isn't there at all. Such minimalism certainly could uplift the spirits of college students who are used to schlepping around five-pound Norton anthologies. What would such a class feel like, in which everyone had the same slick little machine for reading? (Furthermore, could we get some of those couches and throw pillows for the classroom? Those unergonomic chairs are not helping the situation.)
The picture in my email was slightly more instructive, if also eerily vacant:
What bothers me about this image, though, is the white border around the device, not to mention the disembodied white hand; these make the Kindle look hermetically sealed in a world of its own, as if one can so easily achieve the uninterrupted time and empty space for reading that the cover page alone would evoke a sort of rapture. Amazon notes that the battery can last so long that one can "read for days without recharging." Could Kindles really guarantee a new era of learning, a promised land of literature students seduced into slow reading via fast connections? Practically speaking, does the energy required to build and power Kindles offset the energy required to produce (and transport) paper books? Is white the new (same old) green?
- Rey Chow On New Media
Recently I attended a talk by Rey Chow, who gave a provocative talk called "Postcolonial Visibilities: Foucault, Deleuze, and the New Media Technologies." Among other things, Chow discussed the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon by which images of the lowest...
- Attention, Focus
I am starting to glimpse a constellation. A recent Wall Street Journal article on Kindle e-book reading argues: ...an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not...
- Posts Instead Of Papers
When I consider using blogs to teaching literature/writing, I am not simply talking about transposing the forms (and formalities) of syllabi, essays, rubrics, etc. onto an electronic medium. No, I am talking about rethinking what it means to write?what...
- Moving Rocks
Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. ?Gary Snyder, "Riprap" These lines are from a classic Gary Snyder poem that I thought of as I was making a rock pathway today outside the cottage I rent in Davis. Some of Snyder's more recent...
- E-readers + Friday Memes
My new bookshelf fits in the palm of my hands.I'd like to take this opportunity to make a confession: I finally caved in and bought myself an E-Reader: a Kindle to be precise. This might not seem particularly shocking but I do feel like a hypocrite...