Burn the Kindle

Amazon calls their successful e-reader the Kindle. Indeed, it is the kindling in an electronic fire that is destroying our books, bookstores, and libraries. Their newest gadget, released yesterday, is the Kindle Fire.


Fireman Bezos

I'd love to see a real Kindle fire, piles and piles of Kindles set ablaze. Would anything be more delicious?

But, you say, it's the words that matter, not the physical object that carries them. Sure, the words are on those screens now, but how much of a leap will it be to just erase them? Amazon has already done it more than once. When they recalled 1984 (of all titles) in 2009, they simply sucked it back out of the devices like magic.

When it's time to take all the books away, there will be no need for lighter fluid and blowtorches. Big Brother will just press a button.



When it's time to take all the books away, people will give them up willingly. They already are.

Listen to the book-hating venom in the voices of people in fetishistic love with their Kindles and Apples. You can hear it everywhere. Destroy the dusty old tomes! Onward with the gleaming future! Even the Pulitzer Prize-winning authors among us have sucked down that toxic Kool-Aid with a smile.

The analgesic tyranny of the screen has all of us drugged and brainwashed to some extent. This is what Ray Bradbury was writing about in Fahrenheit 451. "I wasn't worried about freedom," he said. "I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV... Fahrenheit's not about censorship, it's about...the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids."



In the late 1950s, Bradbury wrote about a prophetic scene:

"In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction."

In the novel, he wrote about the first iPod, a device for conveying propaganda and keeping people subdued:

"His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty."



But most people don't worry about the devices and the screens and all the strange things they're doing to us, whether it's watering down our brains or stealing our privacy, turning us into zombies, eager to hand over our humanity.

Your Kindle is watching you. It keeps track of the books you read, how often you read them, how quickly you turn the pages, even the personal notes you make in the margins. And the new Kindle Fire is even better at it. It can track, bundle, and sell you in seconds. Said Representative Edward Markey last month, “Consumers may buy the new Kindle Fire to read ‘1984,’ but they may not realize that the tablet’s ‘Big Browser’ may be watching their every keystroke.”


Burning comic books in Binghamton, NY

There is a hatred and fear of books inside human beings. Our lust for and allegiance to the Almighty Screen is its latest expression.

It's time to revolt. Burn those Kindles. Say no to Amazon. Stand up for real books. Before it's too late.


World War II poster

New York Dick

One thing that isn't vanishing from the city is penis graffiti. It's been around for a long time, since the Paleolithic days, and is still going strong. A connoisseur and documentarian of the genre, Galen Smith, has published New York Dick, a collection of such defacements featured on subway advertisements. I asked Smith some questions about his quest.



Q: I'm impressed by the sheer abundance of graffitied penises you were able to gather with your camera. For how long have you been an observer of New York dicks, and what inspired you to put them together in a book?

A: I've been shooting subway poster defacements of all kinds for about four years. Among the most common and weirdly powerful of the defacements were the ad-violating penis drawings.

Whenever I mentioned seeing a notable example of a schlong attacking a superstar, whoever I was talking to would join in and recount their favorite examples of pricks on posters, the weird details of the drawing style, the pop personality involved, and where the thing was sticking, or growing. I started to realize that these dumb defacements really make an impression.

I began to get a feel for the crazy conflict/dialog that was occurring. A pushy statement is made by the voice in charge of the situation (the ad), but at the very moment that I'm supposed to be won over by the ad, these rude graphics bust in and make clear how strange, fake, and self-absorbed the whole situation is. This upsetting of the expected is what made the dirty doodles funny, and not just lewd or hateful. The statement of disrespect was a fair one, and one we all understood.



Q: Has anyone ever reacted negatively--or positively--when catching you in the act of snapping a dick photo?

A: I do most of my shooting early in the morning, I try to work when there aren't many people in the stations. When there are people around they seem curious why I'm so laboriously poring over a sloshy prick drawing, lovingly photographing it like it's an adorable puppy. This attention makes me nervous so I try not to attract it, but I have noticed that after I've tipped them off that there is something worth seeing on this penis-ized poster they seem to check it out more carefully.



Q: Why do you think people feel compelled to graffiti penises? And why don't we see as many graffiti vaginas?

A: The quick hard-on sketch is an easily understood folk graphic that has a lot of powerful meanings, some very nasty, some fairly benign. Tagging a poster image with a dorky penis is delivering a sexualized insult, an implication of idiocy, and an intense disrespect mixed with buffoonery. They totally reframe the dialog.

I've seen some terrific female genital defacements too, but they don't seem to be perceived as having the same multifaceted insulting power as the penises. Also, it's harder to use the vaggie doodles in the same kind of conceptually disruptive interloper role that the wee-wees are used in. I think most of the defacers feel it's easier to use the penises as rude invaders of the mind space. They're easy to draw, easy to read, and pack lots of disrespectful meanings.



Q: Have you noticed any trends in New York dicks? For example, do they fluctuate in number according to the economy? Are they different in different neighborhoods?

A: Its very difficult to pin down trends in dick drawing, and impossible to prove what's causing them. Certain train lines seem more fertile, probably because these lines have a lot of waiting time, have graphically gregarious riders, and more than a few of them might be intoxicated. Often the trends seem more conceptual, such as a certain poster enticing huge amounts of defacements of all kinds, and other posters getting the same dong drawn in the same spot all over town. The other common phenomena is that some personalities seem to motivate lots of people to get smart-alecky. Eddie Murphy seems to always attract intense graphic brutalization.



Q: One thing we've seen a lot of in the East Village, in wintertime, are penises drawn in the snow. My fellow blogger EV Grieve often chronicles the activities of what he calls The Penistrator. If you had to guess, how might you compare the psychology of a snow-penis maker to a Magic Marker- or spraypaint-penis maker?

A: Snow penises always seem to have more whimsy about them than Sharpie or paint penises, and I imagine that the maker is more witty and whimsical too, at least at that moment. I think this is caused by a combination of factors. First, snow penises have a sort of here today gone tomorrow wistfulness. Second, they seem less edgy and hard, less destructive, and less aggressive, probably because their physical qualities are unconnected to traditional urban graff and it's confrontational attitude. Sharpie artists working on ad posters are witty too sometimes, but the "vandalism light" aspect of their work makes them clearly more graffiti-like, and they do occasionally drift into bad nastiness, not fun nastiness.



Q: Tell the truth--have you ever drawn your own dick graffiti?

A: I haven't, I feel that if I did it would violate the spirit of what I'm trying to document, I'm not a public prick artist, I just have a sincere appreciation of those who are. But I do often see posters that seem to be begging for some penis upgrades, I often want to scrawl across the ad "WHY AREN'T YOU DRAWING DICKS ON THIS!" but I resist, and in time, people tend to wake up to reality and dick that which needs to be dicked. We are wise to do so.

Hipster vs. Bohemian

In 2009, the New School hosted a symposium entitled "What Was the Hipster?" (The companion book is now in print.) In 1955, the New School hosted a panel discussion tackling the question "Are There Any True Bohemians?"

From the department of "The More Things Change..." comes this brief report from The Village Voice of 1955:


Click twice to read large

What I wouldn't give to get my hands on a transcript of that entire discussion--Marianne Moore bemoaning the loss of Bleecker's pushcarts? Poet-critics talking about how "the physical character of the area is fast changing"? Frank O'Hara talking about whatever he talked about?

(This was at a time when you could find lectures in the Village on topics like "The Psychological Cost of Conforming" and "New Attitudes Toward Sex"--in which Dr. Abraham Kardiner delivered the good news that "There are indications that the female in her twenties isn't so much on the rampage today.")

What else did the Village writers and critics of the '50s have to say about Bohemians? Did they find them bothersome and omnipresent as many find hipsters to be today? Were they annoyed by their beards and fetishistic love of coffee? I doubt that the creative class unilaterally celebrated Bohemians then as much as we romanticize them now.


1950s Bohemians

What would poet Jean Garrique, and the rest of the panelists, have made of New York's 21st-century hipster? Would they have seen them as no different than the Bohemians of the 1950s city? Maybe they would say--about both groups--what the authors of What Was the Hipster? say in their book:

"It has long been noticed that the majority of people who frequent any traditional bohemia are hangers-on. Somewhere, at the center, will be a very small number of hardworking writers, artists, or politicos, from whom the hangers-on draw their feelings of authenticity. Hipsterdom at its darkest, however, is something like bohemia without the revolutionary core."

Maybe we've been asking the same question for half a century.


2000's Hipsters

They Live

Kicking off their Deep Focus series, Soft Skull Press has just published They Live, Jonathan Lethem's take on the film by the same name. I haven't read the book, but Douglas Rushkoff has. He provided a couple short excerpts in BoingBoing.

I have, however, seen the movie--and recommend it highly. Made in 1988, it provides a kitschy and prescient commentary on the way we live today.



In They Live, the world is not the colorful, shiny place we think it is. With the help of special sunglasses, a guy called Nada, played by "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, sees the real world beneath the Oz Technicolor.



Everything is black and white. Beneath the veneers of ads, magazines, labels, and money are the messages that keep us all hypnotized: OBEY, SLEEP, CONFORM.

Beneath the skins of the beautiful people--the yuppies in suits and shoppers in furs--are skeletal monsters from outerspace.



The best scenes take place when the glasses are on--in the hair salons and shops of this all-too familiar world.



Here's the copy for Lethem's book, "Lethem exfoliates Carpenter’s paranoid satire in a series of penetrating, free-associational forays into the context of a story that peels the human masks off the ghoulish overlords of capitalism. His field of reference spans classic Hollywood cinema and science fiction, as well as popular music and contemporary art and theory."

St. Mark's Bookshop has a bunch in stock now. In a time when the ghoulish overlords are brain-washing people into being stupid, fight back by reading books. They help you to see.

Franzenfreude

Following up on the Franzen Frenzy, I keep thinking about the Twitter-spawned debate against the praise of Freedom launched by popular novelists Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner. As Michelle Dean at The Awl has written about this so-called "Franzenfreude," Picoult and Weiner "began complaining on Twitter...that the Times only liked books by 'white men from Brooklyn.'"

("Franzenfreude" is a malapropism, incidentally. "Freude" means "joy" and I don't think "Franzen Joy" is what Jennifer Weiner had in mind when she coined the term.)



The debate went on to the blogs at Huffington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, and more. Said Lisa Solod Warren in Huffington Post, "The truth is that authors like Picoult and Weiner can't hold a candle to Franzen... Why the two women are picking a fight with the coverage of Franzen's new novel is confusing. It seems more about professional jealousy than equal coverage or women's rights." And plenty of others have poked holes in the authors' argument.

Unfortunately, what gets lost in this smokescreen is the more important (and dangerously tricky) question of "Why isn't there more serious literary fiction being published by women?" But Picoult and Weiner don't appear to be calling for more serious literature from women--they are calling for lighter weight fiction by women to be taken as seriously as heavyweight fiction in general.

Weiner wrapped up her whole point thus: "In summation: NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance. And now, to go weep into my royalty statement."

In the world imagined here, Sex & the City should be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.



When it comes to contemporary women writers, I'd rather pick up something by Jennifer Egan or Claire Messud. I have not read Weiner or Picoult, so I can't critique their writing. I know that many people enjoy it. Their books sell in the gazillions and Cameron Diaz stars in their movies. They do alright. They are immensely popular.

Franzen will never reach that level of popularity. His characters tend to be (gasp!) unlikeable and, in this Internet age where personality is priority, audiences tend to see Franzen himself as unlikeable. He is called "high-minded," "too smart," and "pretentious." This goes far beyond Weiner and Picoult's tweets, which are just one part of the argument against Franzen (he dared to disparage Oprah!).

To me, it feels a lot like the anti-intellectual trend raging in this country today. And we need to be very careful when "high-minded" becomes a slur.



More and more, we are becoming a nation of know-nothings. When the serious reviewers of serious fiction start giving equal weight to "chick-lit," romance, and for gender parity, empty-calorie male writing, we will have taken the next step towards our impending Idiocracy. In a culture that encourages everyone to "Be Stupid" and "Stop Thinking," in which 1 in 5 Americans think Obama is a Muslim, and 18% believe the Sun revolves around the Earth, that is a step too far.

A literary novel is stirring up excitement today, in a time when literature has been declared dead. Everyday, we hear about how the Internet is making us stupider and how books are dying, even though they make us smarter, deeper thinkers--if we give them the time.

At this moment, do we really need attacks on any fine writer whose mission has been to "help restore Serious Literary Fiction to some place of importance in our culture"?



Everyone who cares about the future of reading and writing should push for the publication of intelligent books by female and male writers who challenge their readers to think.

As Franzen said in his cover story in TIME: "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful. The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world."

Book Stigma

I've been trying for some time now to get my head around this new anti-book trend that has led to the popularity of soulless "vooks" like the Kindle and the Nook. Of course, there are many reasons for it, but in an article that scores major points for the coming Idiocracy, the New York Times recently revealed a shocking piece of the puzzle.

Apparently, there is a social stigma attached to reading books alone in public.


Pathetic misanthrope with no friends

This terrible stigma afflicts people not just in illiterate parts of the country and on junior-high cheerleading squads, but all across New York City, a one-time literary capital. What is the stigma? Simply put, if you are caught reading a book in public, you will appear to be: alone, unapproachable, "bookish," unwilling to socialize, and introverted. How awful. But there is hope!

Says a dermatologist on the subject, this dreadful stigma "no longer exists because of the advancement of our current technology. We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone."


Portrait of a stigmatized loser

Dermatologists ought to know. Maybe reading books is also bad for the skin? Perhaps a little Botox for reading wrinkles? Thinking is known to furrow the brow. No, the cure for this stigma does not come from any bacterial neurotoxin (well, maybe it does). The cure is simply: Buy an e-reader, preferably from Apple.

E-readers allow you to be connected to the hive while you pretend to be engrossed in reading. "Given that some e-readers can display books while connecting online, there’s a chance the erstwhile bookworm is already plugged into a conversation somewhere," said a professor of communication and media studies.


Marilyn Monroe: Bravely battling with book stigma

In other words: Reading without digital distraction is social suicide. It will make you unpopular. You will appear intelligent and, therefore, ill-tempered and unfuckable.

Always be connected and distracted, so you appear to be more socially attuned, even though, as anyone who walks the streets of New York knows: People on smartphones, iPads, and the like pay no attention whatsoever to other human beings, rapidly moving vehicles, or open manhole covers. They are in a sociopathic trance, and that is somehow preferable to reading a book?


Unlike lame books, the iPad will get you laid

What the dermatologist and the media professor, and other iPad lovers in the Times article, fail to understand, it seems, is that book lovers are very connected, especially in the presence of other book lovers. When reading a book, we are also connected to our deeper selves, and to the "bigger picture," to universal ways of being, to--dare I say it?--the human condition.

In the New Autistic World Order, the only thing we're permitted to connect with is the anti-human "Borg" system of electronic media. Failure to do so will lead to ostracism from the hive-mind.

But would that really be so bad?

Put us all on an island without Kindles, Nooks, iPads, iPhones, and Blackberries, with lots of bookstores and avid readers, and we'll do just fine. Oh, wait, wasn't that Manhattan not long ago?

• Read the whole Times story here
• On the Future of Books
• The loser bookworm's post-apocalyptic dream
  

Years ago, they put images of total losers on college buildings--
now only ugly gargoyles who can't get laid read books
(photo: Ephemeral NY)

V-Man

I'm not sure why I picked up V-Man Magazine at the newsstand a couple of months ago, but I did, and so stumbled upon this fashion shoot by Bruce Weber. It fits into the theme of "books as props."

The title is "How to Read."



Since I detest the idea of the e-book, I should maybe feel comforted by this photo spread. It says, right up front, "From hardbound to softcover...there's nothing like a great book." They're talking about real books, not digital ghosts.

But I wonder if the copywriter just wanted to get the words "hard" and "soft" in there, because books (as it also says in the copy) are mere accessories to the physical firmnesses of the fashion models.



What is the meaning behind this assortment of jerk-off books? Or is it just a random assemblage? Like the stuff in the windows of The Eldridge "speakeasy" club, a scrim for the masturbatory yearnings of the hard body. A lure to false contents.

The following fellow tugs down his drawers and poses with Bukowski. The stark juxtaposition between this Narcissus and old broken-down Buk is startling. Maybe if he was holding Allen Ginsberg or Walt Whitman, I'd buy the pose, but instead I have to wonder if the stylist has ever actually read Bukowski.



And, finally, Kerouac becomes a cover-up for the next boy's stripped loins, while the fashion-forward bathing suit dangles. He looks like a high-school jock ready to suck on a keg of beer. Maybe they figured, hey, Kerouac played football and he sure liked drinking, so this boy must be a fan.

Notice no one is actually reading anything here, though the title is "How to Read." (Step 1 - 3: Press book to genitals.)



As books vanish from homes ("We don’t need to have books out. We know that we know how to read”) and public places ("There’s something about having a beautiful book that looks intellectually weighty and yummy"), they're no longer there to connect us (via the potential of shared memory and experience).

What will be left are books that look and function like empty shells, used as props to communicate--what? Sex? Autoerotism? "Life's A Beach"?