Version 6.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

• Amanda French’s creative use of Ada Lovelace Day to discuss Mary Shelley.  I really like her argument that Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.
• Having read a lot of John Barth’s essays in the past year, I found Conversational Reading’s post discussing suggestions for reading his fiction to be quite timely.
• Emily Short on the role of agency in Interactive Fiction.
• Lauren Elkin discusses the new collection of Susan Sontag’s journals in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

This week’s video doesn’t need much explanation. Here is Black Sabbath playing War Pigs in 1970.

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Scott’s post last month about the Kindle’s ability to hold hundreds of books contrasted with most American’s lack of reading got me thinking of how Amazon’s new device could be properly used and/or marketed. Scott writes:

And among the majority of the American reading public (as measured by the NEA), anything over 11 books per year is a lot. It doesn’t really make sense to have an ebook reader that can hold hundreds of titles at once, unless you’re planning on being the one to sell hundreds of books to fill it.

A lot of people I know who own a Kindle note that one of the most pleasurable aspects of it is the ability to have newspaper content sent to them every morning. That is fine, but why can’t someone just get that via an RSS reader? I assume if you’re on the move a lot in the morning it’s useful, but wouldn’t you have a Blackberry or IPhone or Android phone for that?

Which comes to my big concern for all of these devices: All of them only do some of the things that the other might not be able to do. The average reader, if they read at all, is not invested in reading enough to spend hundreds of dollars on a device the way they would be for a high definition television. My coworkers often share books, passing hardcovers back and forth as each reads them. I’d be surprised if many of them even own books in the way that prolific readers do. They are invested in other things. I’m not sure how to market the Kindle to the common reader, but I am interested in seeing what happens next.

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Conversational Reading recently posed the question, can you read with music playing? The article they link to says no, but Scott disagrees:

For one thing, I’ve found that Philip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts makes almost perfect “white noise” for shutting out the sound of virtually anything: ambient sound, crying children, loud-talking neighbors, jackhammering, aircraft landing directly overhead (just make sure to have a good pair of headphones).

But for those times that I’ve actually listened to the music as accompaniment, I’ve also found classical pieces rewarding. Usually this is serendipitous, as in the right stretch of Mahler will just happen to coincide with a perfect moment from Dostoevsky, but certain periods of composition definitely do go with certain periods of literature. I especially like listening to the serialists while enjoying a good modernist novel.

I agree with Scott on this issue. As I noted in my comment, I listen to a lot of jazz while reading in the evening. Whether it is Miles Davis or Albert Ayler or Billie Holiday, my reading and listening flows in whatever direction it sees fit. I don’t try to “sync” the music to the words, I have tried that in the past but just found it distracting. In high school I did that a lot with science fiction and fantasy novels. Maybe I’ll write more about that sometime. Generally, whatever I am listening to in the background serves to accentuate my reading experience.

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(inspiration)

During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

• Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
• Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
• The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
• Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
• Grand Text Auto in general.
• Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
• Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
• Derik Badman’s, who I met on a , writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
• Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.

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• I’ve never been a big fan of John Updike, but anytime we lose a big literary figure like him it is probably worth taking another look.  The Guardian offer their view on the essential works of Updike.
• Conversational Reading has been publishing a series of interviews about publishing during a recession.  One of my favorite presses, New Directions, was recently asked to contribute.
• I’m not a huge fan of the band Half Off, but I have always thought their vocalist Billy Rubin had a lot of interesting things to say.  My friends at Double Cross recently had him write about his time in Half Off.  Hopefully he will write about Haywire, his band after Half Off, soon.

Half Off never had an issue with straight edge. I was straight edge (and I suppose I still am). We had an issue with people that were turning straight edge into a fashion statement or a club/gang. It was disturbing to see something so important being turned into a commodity. That commodity was being used as a wedge to exclude people from the punk/hardcore scene rather than embrace the diversity fostered by the DIY attitude that had made punk rock a force to be reckoned with. It seemed to me that the straight ege thing to do was embrace the people with drug/alcohol problems (not attack them). The other thing that became prevalent in the scene was the “tough guy” image that went along with being “hard”. I still don’t know what that means outside of a description of a penis.

This week’s video is of the excellent band Saccharine Trust.  I am a big fan of their first album, Pagan Icons.  It is a great combination of early hardcore, rock, and some of the free jazz influence a lot of bands on SST Records had at the time.  Here they are playing at the University Of Connecticut in 1984 (with Black Flag by the way):

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• The Quarterly Conversation reviews Jayne Pupek’s Tomato Girl and Conversational Reading on two new Dalkey issued Toussaint novels.

• The Guardian on the trouble with cinematic adaptation of Evelyn Waugh novels.

• Blogging Woolf on Unfinished Dialogues, a ballet about the last day of Virginia Woolf’s life.

• reviews Cory Doctorow’s excellent Little Brother (review coming soon).

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Rejoice! Weekend reading has returned!

• One of my favorite video podcasts is Morgan Webb’s technology news show Webb Alert. Webb was recently interviewed by MTV’s gaming blog about Webb Alert, being a female gamer, and posing for Maxim Magazine.
• The New York Times recently published an article about Borges as “an unlikely candidate for Man Who Discovered The Internet.” I have read articles both in print and online arguing for this before with varying results. Scott over at Conversational Reading has more thoughts.
• The Quarterly Conversation reviews two of Enrique Vila-Matas’ novels in their winter issue.

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