in defense of stowing a kindle in one's pocket during an excursion in the jungle, or andrew reveals his insatiable need to respond seriously to facebook comments made in jest

i broke another kindle. my third. this time i was hanging from a jungle vine, and the kindle, which was in the pocket of my brown cargo shorts, must have been crunched between my thigh and the wooden railing beside me.

i posted something to this effect on facebook, lamenting my sudden lack of books for the remainder of my trip--one week in new zealand and more than a day's worth of airline time and sitting in airports, ack! what am i to do? my friends were, understandably, incredulous--how did i manage to so easily destroy yet another kindle? why was I bringing my kindle into the rainforest in the first place? why use a kindle at all? 

and as usual, i couldn’t help but overreact:

before arriving in the rain forest, that lively universe that was the site of my latest kindle’s demise, i first had to take several other types of transportation. i knew from other similar excursions around cairns, that these legs of the journey could involve a lot of staring into space, which i'd rather fill with something more entertaining and constructive, like reading.

as it turned out, i spent much of the travel time playing "i spy with my little eye" with some aussies from melbourne and a man from jamaica. but upon arrival in kurunda, i did relax for awhile in a shady park, reading on my kindle and--pay attention here, you e-reader cynics, this is one place where the kindle, if it didn't have a pansy screen, beats out a pocket-size paperback--finding illusory literary community with friends back home: that is, using the kindle's wireless function, i was able to share some passages from a short story collection I'd been reading with my bazillion closest friends on facebook.

now, no one commented on those quotes or my reflections on those quotes (just as I don't tend to comment on other people's quotes), so perhaps whatever community i felt by posting them was false, and perhaps whatever community is achieved through an online social networking site like facebook, even if it is with real people who you know and love, is already false, but this felt like some step toward not being stranded in my own head, a thousand-plus miles from friends and people who like to talk about books.

i should end there. that sounds about as close to profound as i can get when unnecessarily blathering on about a stupid broken device. that's the true ending. but i also want to mention these two logistical points: (1) the sharing of those quotes on facebook was free, whereas to share them with my iphone, which wasn't on me at the time, would have entailed an international phone service charge; and (2) i'm pretty certain that any other electronic device that i own--my iphone, my (work's) macbook air, my nikon camera--would have survived the bump just fine; these kindles have excellent customer service but their screens are less durable than the spindly stick of a candy cane after it’s been sucked down to a needle-sharp tip, which is to say that, apparently, you can’t take them anywhere.

and i have no idea what candy canes have to do with kindles or rainforests.

what i like about my kindle (samples!) part 2

for the past few years, i've been a bystander in the e-reader revolution. i've read a lot about how e-books are going to destroy the publishing industry and i've read a lot about how e-books will be the salvation of the publishing industry. but, of course, the future of publishing is more nuanced than either of those two perspectives, so i've also read a ton (which is like three a lots) about how e-books will be both the death knell and the salvation of the publishing industry. at the same time.

and so, this fall, when my mother asked me for a christmas list, i asked for (and then received) an e-reader. i figured it was finally time to (potentially) throw my parents' two cents into the ring and develop an opinion based on the real thing. enough theory, i thought, let's touch and feel the thing. let's see what it's like to actually read a book using an e-reader.

i just e-read my first book, big machine by victor lavalle, and the kindle reading experience was neither off-putting nor a mesmerizing delight. like any new experience, there were little boring things that i liked (e.g., the ease of reading while my hands are busy, that is, not having to prop the book open to a page) and didn't like (e.g., the difficulty of making in-text notes that include "advanced" punctuation marks like commas, question marks, and smiley faces), but i'm neither tempted to sell my bookcases nor return the kindle. i don't have much else to add on this point.

however, my learning-through-the-generosity-and-consumerism-of-others approach to understanding the effect that e-readers might have on publishing has been a success.

i mentioned in an earlier post that when in sleep mode the kindle displays some kind of an image, often a portrait of an important literary figure or some ancient-looking text. occasionally, the kindle also displays a silhouetted  image of a person, perhaps a child, reading a book under the cover of a single tree. below this image is a definition for kindle--"light or set fire. arouse or inspire"--followed by some examples of the word's use.

i hadn't thought of the product name kindle except as a nonsense word, like nook (although i suppose that too is connected to its parent word, as if the nook provides some kind of a cozy space for reading and learning). but my exploration of the kindle interface gives me hope that it may indeed kindle readership, and in a way that i hadn't imagined.

what i found most interesting and awesome about the kindle, especially for the future of publishing, is the sample feature. it turns out that every kindle book has a sample. i've been using google books and amazon's preview function for awhile now, so perhaps this shouldn't have been so surprising. but nonetheless, reading something on the internet, whether on my laptop or iphone, is so much less cozy than on my e-reader. and the good news is that the samples are fairly lengthy, long enough anyway to give a good sense of the book.

my kindle really is like a portable bookstore. i can download samples (or purchase books) from anywhere there's a cell signal or wi-fi connection, and i can download (or purchase) as many samples (or books) as i like. this means i'm not bound by a visit to a store. a coworker might mention a book to me on monday, and so i download a sample. and then, while walking to my car on thursday, i might read the sample and decide it looks worth a read.

and so, although i'm probably wrong about this, i'm hopeful that the convenience of this sample function could indeed open readers up to all kinds of things they might not otherwise read. it could make people more likely to pick up a new book. i'm a strange bird, but for me it already has. for whatever reason, i've doubled my reading pace since owning a kindle.  

if nothing else, the immediacy and ease of the purchase function should lead to more sales. and as someone who appreciates good books and great writers, who wants publishers to continue finding and publishing good books and great writers, and who imagines a universe where great writers can make a living pursuing their craft and someone like me can make a living helping them do that, that makes me happy. 

hooray for e-readers! hooray for people who spend money on books! hooray for happiness!

what i like about my kindle (faces!) part 1

when my kindle hasn't been used for awhile, its screen flashes and the text of whatever i was reading is replaced by a black-and-white image. sometimes that image is an ancient-looking scene bound by foreign calligraphy. sometimes it's a portrait of a well-known author--jules verne, jane austen, ralph ellison.

these images sometimes bother me because they remind me of barry moser, the artist who does beautiful black-and-white prints of figures ranging from flannery o'connor and joseph conrad to potiphar's wife and jesus. that's not so bothersome, except that my ex-girlfriend loved barry moser prints, and i sometimes prefer not to think about my ex-girlfriend. or about love. or about my ex-girlfriend loving something or someone else.

however, dicey personal relationships aside, i really like this feature. in fact, i believe it could very possibly change the world for the better. it could even succeed where school, society, and our own misguided preferences have failed us.

since i'm making grandiose statements, here's another one: i believe we are a culture that doesn't like to think. i believe that we don't like to be challenged. we prefer our routines and simple comforts. our lives are hard, and so we take our life lessons and use them to build forty-two-inch tvs. we take that hardness and build sofas and lazy boy recliners.

when i come home from work, i slip past my dirty sink, my messy floor, my unopened mail, my hulking copy of Swann's Way. i pour myself a bowl of cinnamon toast crunch, and i eat my way through an episode of some meaningless drama, perhaps even a meaningful drama. i rarely do the hard thing--i don't invest time and energy into a fine meal, a community need, a new idea. 

and i think our book reading habits are a symptom of this cultural trend. fantasy, children's lit, mysteries, thrillers, sci-fi (excepting hard sci-fi), historical fiction, women's fiction, romance, and occupation-related material all sell relatively well, whereas that segment of publishing which keeps the language alive, which makes a think, which values a word, a phrase, an idea, well, literary fiction is simply managing to survive (see "pimp my novel" for a more thorough autopsy of genre sales). 

it's possible that i'm wrong and the lagging sales of literary fiction tell us nothing about our culture--though i may fight to the death to defend that notion--and it's possible, even likely, that we are not what we read, not entirely. 

but regardless of one's perspective on the relationship between what we read and how we live, i'm encouraged to see the bookselling segment of corporate america fighting back. i'm ecstatic that my kindle doesn't sport portraits of dan brown, stephenie meyer, and jk rowling. and i have hope that by highlighting texts that seems ancient (and therefore, somehow important) or famous figures from literary fiction's past, the kindle could implicitly prod its owners to consider again the classics. those images very well could be the seeds that lead us to supplement our escapist fiction and work-related texts with great literature.

and this sack of lazy bones likes that.

on christmas lists, god, and the seahawks

some people hate christmas lists. they hate to write them and they hate to receive them. these people see the christmas list as a failure of knowledge and intimacy. they rightly point out that the purpose of gift-giving isn't to fulfill some need but to provide one another with meaningful tokens of our love and thanks and friendship.

i'm not one of these people. i suppose i'm a christmas list moderate.

i don't eagerly keep a list all year of the things i'd like for christmas and then postmark that list for the north pole on the fourth friday of november. and honestly, i never really know what to put on said list. but if my mom calls me up and asks what i want for christmas, i'll certainly oblige.

and as a giver, i really do want to light upon the perfect gift, the gift that would never find its way onto a christmas list. i want to give that very thing that will communicate a special bond between us, that will say, this is a gift uniquely from me to you, and it is awesome. because you are awesome. and i am awesome. and yes, we, together, are awesome.

but finding that special gift is hard. it's not something you can force. it comes to you like a poem, a word or phrase nestled in the rubble of otherwise useless dreams. and you may not know this, but most of us are bad poets. we mistake cutesy rhythm and rhyme or archaic verbiage for inspiration. we can't feel the imagery or themes outside the cage of our own skull.

and so, barring the miracle of the true muse or the true poet, the giver who undertakes a listless christmas may be giving just that, a listless christmas.

instead, i like to think of the christmas list as a tool. if you tell me you like bawdy limericks about snails or that red wheelbarrow poem by william carlos williams, i might still write a bad poem, but at least i'll know where to start. at least i won't be groping around in an infinite wasteland of content, imagery, and form.

so why the post-christmas post on christmas lists? well, mostly i wanted to write about my new kindle. but i got sidetracked by memory and discovery.

this year i mostly received gifts that were on my list, and perhaps some part of me, the christmas list antipath, i suspect, felt cheated by the absence of new poetry.

yet there were little surprises--the fingerless gloves were black, not wool; the e-reader was a kindle, not a nook. and both did the trick; both delighted me in the end--the fingerless gloves perfectly allowed me to adjust my temp when running the polar bear 5K on new year's day, and the kindle has pleasantly surprised me with how much i enjoy reading (and browsing) using its interface.

but above all, there was the unsuspected awesomeness of sharing in those gifts with the givers, in reading to my parents from my kindle as we trekked south to eugene, in accompanying my dad to a chilly wild-card playoff game at qwest stadium and high-fiving him ecstatically (while wearing those gloves) when marshawn lynch clicked it into beast mode, breaking eight tackles and stiff-arming his way to a sixty-seven yard run.

because, after all, what's more awesome than a crazy game that makes nfl and underdog history? what's more awesome than sixty thousand people losing their voices in praise of one thing? this is how i imagine heaven--a gift and an unbridled sense of exultation and joy. and no list could have scripted that.