danielBpatton

Alan Wall’s A Defence of the Book, and especially it’s ongoing comment parade, make for interesting reading. It takes the debate to the summer of ’07 anyway: I tell you this pendulum swings like the stock markets nowadays. (For context, read more about Wall.) While it occurred to me that Wall and several in his audience confused the steps in the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy, a few actually hit the nail on the head:

What is getting under my skin about this post is that it is couched in terms of a high-minded respect for education and intelligence, when it is in fact a confused conflation of information with its medium, and a snobbish and reactionary attack on the democratic dissemination of knowledge.

Wall began his article with an attack on a conference presenter (with “digitally endowed pockets” no less) predicting the end of the book. And while I wasn’t there myself, I feel fairly comfortable in asserting that neither this “Gizmo Gus” nor any other e-vangelists out are announcing the end of literature. By the end of the article, I began to feel bad for this guy. He’s shooting the messenger. In the interest of full transparency, I’ll offer that I only read the first paragraph before printing the article “for closer reading.” My defense, if I may think out loud for a moment, is not that I can’t read closely online—how many web annotating tools and PDF annotating tools and even audio annotating tools are there now, a bazillion?—I’ve just developed over the years a guerrilla approach to screen reading. It’s necessary for the work I do (as I’m sure it is to many) to extract the bullets from large quantities of data so that I may act on it. If I want to read Paradise Lost, surely I’ll read a book. But, having turned its final leaf, is not my contemplation of the work—that rational coming to terms with its effect—simply the minds attempts to bullet-ize? Perhaps then the Web is the great rational plains and books are emotional boats. Until the electronic book truly arrives (I think this is a “when” and not an “if”), we as travelers must let destination dictate vehicle.

The New York Times recently poked its head into the offices of several novelists and discovered—or maybe reaffirmed—that we’ve come a long way since quill and well.

PoemHunter.com includes works by Neruda, Angelou, Hughes, Silverstein, cummings, Bukowski, Northover, Plath, Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Poe, Shakespeare, and hundreds more. Currently, the site claims “106,831 poems from 11,602 poets, 39,210 Songs, 1,323 Artists, 64,870 Quotations.” Something for everybody. Fully searchable by author, title, and theme. Rankings are updated in realtime. Try this with a French accent:

PoemHunter.Com aims to spread the effects of poems in the social and individual life of people, where a continuous change is undergoing with the Internet. PoemHunter.Com without a pause, continues its activities with the active participation of thousands of members.

There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.

Happy birthday, Cormac McCarthy. Today is day 9 of the latest unpleasantness in Lebanon.

Now I’m not a book reviewer by any means. I don’t consider myself particularly well-read, but I’ve got my favorites. I was introduced to Tim O’Brien early in my college career, and have returned to his books periodically. Critics tend to like him — the quiet, elegant Vietnam writer. Walking through his back-catalog, I just finished The Nuclear Age, and I must say that, like Things…, his prose draws absolutely no attention to itself. No fireworks. Sure, Tim’s got background as a journo. Many do. Perhaps the (irony?) of my O’Brien experience is the disconnect between what I read about and from him. His books fly by; I emerge more often with lingering impressions of the man than of his inventions.

Fittingly, Kunkel and others seem to have perfected the formula just as critic circles have written off “lad lit”. I mean sure, every school must deal with 9/11–new sets, new characters to populate them, old themes in new clothes (ref Wolfe, DeLillo, Roth, others)–but is the current wave simply grasping for excuses to rewrite Bright Lights, Big City? I say slack’s here to stay. Death, taxes, and slack.