Kindle, Part Two
So a pal of mine has just drawn my attention to an interesting article in the L.A. Times from about ten days or so ago on responses to the Kindle. The article attempts to look fairly neutrally at the object itself, what it gets right and what it gets wrong, as well as at the responses to the object.
The most interesting parts of the article, for my purposes, are the anti-Kindle screeds on the part of those who would defend the print-on-paper codex from all apparent technological threats. And the absolute best part of that is the response by Jonathan Franzen.
You’d think Franzen would have learned to keep his mouth shut (and email unsent) around reporters.
As Aunt B. has already pointed out, he manages to make an utter fool of himself by insisting that the only way to truly experience Shakespeare is to read it in print, as was originally intended. But my favorite line of Franzen’s is this one:
“Am I fetishizing ink and paper? Sure, and I’m fetishizing truth and integrity too.”
Because pixels are some sneaky lying little bastards.
Sigh,
KF
19 December 2007, 4.51 pm
I found you through Jo(e)’s blogroll and just hooted at this entry. Felt you deserved a comment appreciating your sense of humor here… Shakespeare in print as intended. Uh yeah and Beethoven’s music was best appreciated reading the score.
28 December 2007, 7.51 am
Franzen is a sophist, as you’ve neatly proved here. Too bad he’s on my side. Sigh.
9 January 2008, 10.58 pm
Of course, Shakespeare composed texts other than plays (e.g., love sonnets), and many of Shakespeare’s plays’ puns are in fact visual, i.e., textual, and wouldn’t register aurally for theater audiences. Nor does Franzen explicitly state that ‘the only true way’ to experience Shakespeare is in print, only that the sacral ratio between reading it in the Arden edition (more like Reeding it in the Arden edition! 47 chirp chirp chirp) and on a BlackBerry is equivalent to that between marrying in a church and in a shoe store - presumably, for Franzen, seeing Hamlet performed in the Globe would be like marrying in the Vatican, I guess (do people get married in the Vatican?), and at any rate preferable to seeing it performed in a shoe store (or in captured video on your fucking calliphone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKiIroiCvZ0). This qualification of mine probably leaves Franzen in just as nostalgic and sentimental and indefensible a position, but not as boneheaded as it was maybe strawmanned out to be, and I thought that that was worth clarifying (even a couple weeks after the fact).
And to Julie Bogart, I might point out that Beethoven is an odd choice for analogy in this discussion, since his music in fact was best appreciated reading the score, at least for Beethoven (who of course went deaf ~1796).*,**
*From the Wikipedia page on Beethoven, where I plucked the date, it does read, ‘Around 1796, Beethoven began to lose his hearing…He suffered a severe form of tinnitus, a “ringing” in his ears that made it hard for him to perceive and //appreciate// music’ (emphasis mine) - so Julie’s example that came around to bite her (?) in the ass comes too to bite me in the ass.
**Also cue any critical-theoretical arguments about authors not being the chief appreciators of their own texts.
–Bennett
9 January 2008, 11.30 pm
Oh, and there’s probably also some critical-theoretical point to be made about the phenomenological difference between reading (and I mean going over and over a line and flipping through pages reading) a play, any play, and seeing it performed, and especially a difference between seeing it performed in a high school gym in 2008 versus seeing it performed in a Chicago playhouse in 2008 versus in Kathmandu in 2008 versus in the Globe several centuries ago, and that maybe of all these reading experiences Franzen truly does prefer or appreciate textual, papery, Arden-bound dramatic texts to performative ones (he might want to be transported back to Shakespearean England to see an ‘authentic’ production, though, just for kicks [and dinosaur petting]) - it doesn’t seem outlandish to me that someone would prefer reading Shakespeare’s works to seeing them performed (I sort of do), or that their reasons for that preference would be sophistic (I sort of don’t think mine are), and in fact doesn’t even seem too outlandish that someone might prefer, for her own reasons, reading a script to watching a film, so maybe we should all give Franzen a break here.
I dunno what does everyone else think.
–Bennett
10 January 2008, 8.05 am
Me, I think you’re giving Franzen WAY too much credit. Is he wrong to assert that there are material differences between reading on a small electronic device and reading on paper? Of course not. Where he’s wrong is to attribute *moral* privilege to one form over another. This is of course why he picked Shakespeare, the shorthand equivalent for “everything that is good about elite culture as I understand it today,” and it’s also why he chose the Blackberry, the epitome of scheming-Wall-Street-or-Beltway-insider-type short-attention-span-theater. And, not at all incidentally, why the analogy he chooses is to weddings, which are, when properly done in a church, all about subordinating pleasure to morality (as opposed to that conducted in a shoe store, which bears the same taint of commerce that the crackberry does). If it were merely a matter of preference he was asserting, I’d shrug and, probably, agree: we have yet to come up with a device that I like reading off of as much as I like a nice paperback. But as soon as morality and ethics get dragged into this, we’re no longer talking about technological affordances or personal formal or sensual pleasure; we’re instead making judgments on some much more abstract notion of the “goodness” of one form as compared with another. And if somebody’s enough of a twit to do that, I reserve the right to point out that choosing Shakespeare as one’s author of choice in a defense of the moral rectitude of print suffers from a terminal case of Missing the Point.