Paper books rool, OK!
One more advantage of paper books. Once upon a time before e-book readers, on an upcountry excursion in Burma, I was smitten with acute diarrhea in a land without toilet paper. But I was equipped with a fat paperback on Chinese history and politics. Over the next few days an assortment of conveyances jounced me along back-country roads as I attempted to learn about China fast enough to stay ahead of immediate needs for paper. I never did get to finish that book, but I sure was glad it was a lengthy bugger. (Though this was in a time before e-book readers, the story presents evidence for one more advantage of paper books over their digital counterparts.)
Artful entertainment at length. At 1,100 pages, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest might appear even more suited to such journeys. But it resists reading at a pace that exceeds Burma Belly in full sprint. For sure it’s no print version of TV, no nicely narcotic diversion from life proper.
Infinite Jest demands attention and real engagement. Dare we say it’s art, rather than mere entertainment? Nevertheless, this book is certainly entertaining; in fact, it’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. It’s also science fiction, of sorts, though it doesn’t fall into any genre I recognize.
Tomorrow, sometime soon, whenever, I’ll use Infinite Jest to kick off a short discourse on “good writing style.” Good blogging style, meanwhile, suggests I should cease and desist for now, properly respectful of contemporary attention spans, besides which distractions of every digital species summon me away to other matters.
Starbucks and the social construction of reality
Sara and I are having breakfast at Starbucks. Being a kee niaow species of curmudgeon, I’m complaining about everything from the prices to the clonish docking of people and their digital devices. Discerning impatience in her manner, I eventually desist.
“Give me a break,” she says, going on to explain that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee; it sells a lifestyle experience, and I should dummy up about it, she’s trying to relax.
Ah, I reply. So we’re banking some sort of lifestyle karma here, and it’s probably cheap at the price.
Sara says I have a talent for turning what should be a simple cup of coffee and a dose of lifestyle experience into a mountain of mumbo-jumbo and a pain in the ass, and I believe she could be right. Nevertheless.
Speeding away on caffeine, I tell her that reality is a social construct. Once people start to recognize this, even only tacitly, then the construction of social reality becomes big business, with advertising, public relations, politicians and special interest groups all packaging and selling their own realities. The mass of the people are consumers, then, of realities. Reality is basically a range of supermarket commodities, and you just stroll along picking glitzy packages off the shelves. Choosing our “lifestyles” and personalities du jour is part of this. (Consumerism-infused New Age thinking is no exception.)
Modular mix and matching rools, OK! I am my iPhone, not to mention my Timberland shoes, Levi's 501 jeans and the Melody Gardot on my iPod. That’s this week. Maybe I’ll let Jack the Hack Shackaway be my lifestyle/personal image mentor next week, and wear a tie, maybe carry a nicely rumpled sports jacket in case I find myself subjected to Bangkok hi-so grade air-conditioning, ducking in to some flash establishment to seek shelter from the rain and not wanting then to die of exposure. Yeah, and that week I’ll be plugged in to Dion singing “St. Jerome the Thunderer” over and over again till I can’t get it out of my head even when I wrench the earphones out and moan and clasp my head with both hands.
“You always know best,” says Sara. “What makes you think you’re better?”
Son of iMac, spawn of the Devil
Some lads my age buy themselves a Harley, or a nice gun-metal Lamborghini. Instead, I’ve recently switched from PC to Apple and bought a secondhand state-of-the-art 27” iMac desktop.
I’ve suffered the transition to a new operating system, familiarized myself with 1,000 new key commands for a bunch of new programs, and learned interesting things such as how you really need a UPS and how incredibly expensive a UPS really is for this particular computer, and that, no matter how mature and savvy and well-versed in the pathology of consumerism and how it relates to the failure of the Western metaphysic and the hard-wired shitheadedness of the average specimen of Homo sapiens, I can still find myself in the position I am now in, with Sara saying I did the right thing, and I should just relax and enjoy it, and there, there, you aren’t really a moron, though I know she secretly believes I am, and delights in this circumstance.
Especially after I found how inconvenient it was to lug the 27” iMac along to the coffee shop with me. That’s right. So I pretty well had to buy a Mac Pro laptop as well, eh?
Hey, but now I’m the dude.
Graphically engaging: The sequel
Has anyone else noticed what's happening with skirts and short-shorts around Bangkok? (Or are writers just unusually perceptive?) Are there such things as benign epidemics?
Haikus are so much easier to write than novels. Of course the commercial prospects, including their chances on the Big Screen, are even more uncertain. Whatever. Here's what I'm going to call a mixed-media haiku.
A spiritual (to be sung with full chorus)
God is there in the hemlines
Ascending, praise be,
Heavenwards. Oh, Lord.
Terminating terminal preposition bloggers
And another stereotype bites the dust. The language mavens are getting feistier, siccing hit squads on people who annoy them, in this case those who post items saying how ending a sentence with a preposition is okay, pace gangs of tsking grammarians from another age roaming our streets. The problem is, say the Language Log hosts, they get the same darned thing, again and again, and they’re sick of it. From now on, in fact, offenders will themselves be terminated with extreme prejudice.
It’s easy to sympathize. But what’s next? Once let slip, these killers might start executing fatwas on grammatically clueless or just careless buggers in general. Maybe sentencing the authors of dangling modifiers, e.g., to dangle by the neck till dead.
Caption. Having dangled that modifier, God as my Maker knows I did not do so with malice aforethought.
I, for one, vote we let the danglers be. Executing them would deny editors the pleasure of encountering the rare howler in an otherwise dreary expanse of defective prose. Here’s another one:
Lying there dead in his pine box, he thought John looked better now than before the Language Log boys got him.
By the way, the following is the world’s favorite response to the opinion that one should never end a sentence with a preposition:
"This is nonsense up with which I shall not put!"
Generally attributed to Winston Churchill, the people behind the Language Log report that “Ben Zimmer definitively refuted that misattribution years ago in a post that Mark and I subsequently included in our book [Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log], and it is enormously annoying to us that still no one is aware of Ben's discovery.”
But such ignorance is not yet a capital offense.
The Language Log is the place to go, if you’ve ever wondered when splitting an infinitive is good form and when it ain’t. Thanks to Bill the Mathematician for pointing me to the assassination posting.
E-readers need serendipity buttons
One burning issue du jour concerns the relative merits of Kindles and iPads. But rarely, now, does discussion swing around to the real advantages of traditional paper books.
If only paper books could perform word searches, eh? How I wished for the missing function when I went looking for a passage I dimly remembered reading somewhere—something to the effect that night air was sweating the fragrance of jasmine. I wanted to use something dangerously similar in a story I was writing, but I didn't want to steal the image.
My first guess was I'd seen something in Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul, a short novel I'd just read that was partly set in the tropics. I skimmed through the book again and again, but couldn't find the image. Then it occurred to me—hey, not that the book title held any clue—to look at Somtow's Jasmine Nights. And, big surprise, there it was.
So, here's an argument for e-books with all their electronic search functions and things, right? Not entirely.
In looking for the image in Naipaul, I learned something important. I've long admired him for his lean prose, but I hadn't realized just how lean it really was. Not only didn't I find the image I was looking for, I didn't find any others either. That's right—Naipaul wrote a whole book, complete with real characters in real dramatic situations in real settings, and he used almost no obviously descriptive language. The prose was barren of adjectives, adverbs and colorful metaphor. It takes an exceptional writer to perform this sort of magic.
But my point is this: if that book had offered a word search function, I would never have learned something quite astonishing about Naipaul and this book. Let's hope that technology doesn't program this sort of serendipity out of our reading and researching experiences.
Can anyone else contribute thoughts on ways modern book technology isn't making our lives better after all--how paper books and traditional libraries might still be superior in some ways?
Sky gravid with precipitate disaster II: The haiku
In the interests of conciseness, a fundamental rule of good writing style, and seeing how much Jack likes my turns of phrase, I've converted much of my lengthy “Licking doorknobs” post of 19 June -- a tribute to investors and financial analysts everywhere -- into a haiku:
Dark skies gravid with
Precipitate disaster.
Bears sail arks of gold.
Hey, it's got 17 syllables. What more do you expect? Maybe Jack or his “nameless scrivener” can tell me if the Wall Street Journal buys haikus.
I've adapted the image, with permission, from a painting by Vernon W. Jones (vernonwjones.co.uk). The “arks of gold” are there, just beneath the waves.
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