I first heard of J.D. Salinger much like I first got into guitar—all because of Green Day. On their second album the band wrote a song, “Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?” Their singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, said he wrote the song after reading Catcher in the Rye, a book he read only after dropping out of high school. Naturally, in an effort to do everything I possibly could to emulate my hero, I read Catcher, slowly wading my way through a well-torn copy from the library. I still remember book, how the laminated dust jacket and bulletproof hardcover was almost too much protection for the yellowed and tattered pages it ironically failed to protect from disrespectful readers. I checked that damn thing out twice before I finally finished it, falling down both times because my prepubescent self couldn’t relate to 1950’s teenage angst.
The irony of having to read Catcher again in high school was not lost on me. The state-mandated curriculum required students to read a book about a protagonist, not unlike the students themselves, railing against the phonies who didn’t care or want to understand. I used to pretend that schools assigned the book because it’s a classic and that’s what you do with the classics in high school—you read them. Because they’re classics. Personally, I thought Catcher was thrown in the curriculum blindly because it was successful and stood the test of time rather than for its content. No matter how many papers about symbolism I was forced to write, to me Catcher was about figuring out the world on your own terms, seeing and accepting the ugly but still wanting to hold on to something you still thought true.
Of course, high school is the perfect time to read Catcher in the Rye. The themes of innocence lost and growing up are paramount to high school students as they face reality/college/the last years of mandated school. I always associated Catcher with Green Day and the notion of facing reality on your own terms, of taking on whatever may come with that strip of innocence or whatever you wanted to call it bolted firm over your heart. That idea of holding on to innocence was apparently something Salinger never let go. Being literature’s most famous recluse (held up in a secluded rural cabin in the middle of nowhere) gets people talking. Salinger denied interviews, damned any and all press and sued family members’ who wrote autobiographies about their childhood. It’s one thing to be an enigma, but Salinger’s extent made it obvious he had something he didn’t want to give up, that he didn’t want to give anything more of himself away than he already had with his fiction.
I just read an article that hinted at Salinger’s obsession with young girls, but it clearly stated that it wasn’t sexual but actually more about the innocence they had. Less Lolita and more Marsha (Marsha Marsha!) Brady. The thing is you reach a point where you can’t afford to be innocent anymore. Salinger was, I think it’s safe to say, loony tunes style, bat shit crazy (but that’s ok). Still, I can’t help but think that his nature was part of his desire for innocence. He wanted what was his to be his alone, never to be tainted by leering public eyes. It’s almost as if he fell victim to one of his greatest ideas.
When I was in Los Angeles last week I saw an exhibition of a photographer’s portraits of famous people. He did a photo of Hemmingway, looking far more like a rugged, world-weary seaman than an author. This, the same man who put a gun in his mouth because he couldn’t take the critics.
I don’t know…I guess we’ve all got our secrets.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Sunday, January 24, 2010
another idea
Part of reading travel books—the essays and stories type, not the guidebook type—means that I’m often confronted with the theme of “leaving.” Not necessarily escaping; unless you’ve literally coated your black and white striped garb with dirt during a daring venture, I feel as if the word escape has been co-opted by cruise line companies and vacation adds, encouraging middle America to “escape” their jobs and lives back home for a short period of time. False—it’s not escaping if you eventually come back. Escaping is a tricky proposition.
Leaving, on the other hand, is more attractive. Leaving takes you away under your own terms but leaves the option of coming back open. You leave school, but you can go back to visit. You leave things for safekeeping precisely so you can come back to get them later. With escaping the implication is once you come back you do so to the same grind, the same routine, your “escape” essentially amounting to a prolonged diversion. With leaving, as well-worn saying imply, things are different, having moved along one way or another while you were away. Even if things haven’t inherently changed since you’ve left you come back with new eyes, understanding things—for better or worse—differently. Leaving isn’t as dramatic as escaping—it’s more casual. Escaping is drastic; leaving is calm.
I just finished reading a book about an Aussie leaving London for Paris for a new job, itself the result of blind, dumb luck and chance. I’m reading a book right now about a twentysometing ditching a Manhattan law firm for Brazil. Both deal with the quarter-life crisis dilemma (just like a midlife crisis but swapping male-pattern baldness for hip clothes), both document the authors absolutely clueless as to what the hell they’re doing, and both have that brilliant epiphany where both authors ruminate that they’d rather wake up near destitute and hung over in their new adopted homeland (which they often do) than suffer another day in the former life they’ve left.
Ladies and gentlemen: the new American Dream.
-
My generation is entering what could quite possibly be the worst time imaginable for work. The economy and the job market are in shambles. CEO’s, the glorified position we once aspired to work ourselves up to be, make headlines in controversy and jail sentences. Business school and MBA graduates are applying for entry-level positions alongside recent lay-offs in their mid-50’s, almost mirrors of the future. Today it’s entirely plausible be asked that time-honored query, “When will you get a job?” and respond with blank eyes, “what jobs?” While not utterly hopeless, times, unquestionable, suck.
Maybe the thing to do is the exact opposite of what we’re expected to do. Maybe we need to leave for a while, leave in our own way then return when the world around us is ready. When, eventually, we’re ready.
Leaving, on the other hand, is more attractive. Leaving takes you away under your own terms but leaves the option of coming back open. You leave school, but you can go back to visit. You leave things for safekeeping precisely so you can come back to get them later. With escaping the implication is once you come back you do so to the same grind, the same routine, your “escape” essentially amounting to a prolonged diversion. With leaving, as well-worn saying imply, things are different, having moved along one way or another while you were away. Even if things haven’t inherently changed since you’ve left you come back with new eyes, understanding things—for better or worse—differently. Leaving isn’t as dramatic as escaping—it’s more casual. Escaping is drastic; leaving is calm.
I just finished reading a book about an Aussie leaving London for Paris for a new job, itself the result of blind, dumb luck and chance. I’m reading a book right now about a twentysometing ditching a Manhattan law firm for Brazil. Both deal with the quarter-life crisis dilemma (just like a midlife crisis but swapping male-pattern baldness for hip clothes), both document the authors absolutely clueless as to what the hell they’re doing, and both have that brilliant epiphany where both authors ruminate that they’d rather wake up near destitute and hung over in their new adopted homeland (which they often do) than suffer another day in the former life they’ve left.
Ladies and gentlemen: the new American Dream.
-
My generation is entering what could quite possibly be the worst time imaginable for work. The economy and the job market are in shambles. CEO’s, the glorified position we once aspired to work ourselves up to be, make headlines in controversy and jail sentences. Business school and MBA graduates are applying for entry-level positions alongside recent lay-offs in their mid-50’s, almost mirrors of the future. Today it’s entirely plausible be asked that time-honored query, “When will you get a job?” and respond with blank eyes, “what jobs?” While not utterly hopeless, times, unquestionable, suck.
Maybe the thing to do is the exact opposite of what we’re expected to do. Maybe we need to leave for a while, leave in our own way then return when the world around us is ready. When, eventually, we’re ready.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
an idea
"We practice to create space. This is true for playing a musical instrument, but applies to everything else as well, I think. Practicing creates familiarity. Familiarity creates intimacy.
When we practice playing a piece of music or a scale, we train our brain by using our body. We scrub those neural pathways by moving our fingers. And that creates space. If moving from this note to that note has been trained and ingrained, we no longer have to think about that move and are free to consider other or additional moves. If moving from point A to point B has become utterly natural, then I have established space between those two points in which I can make additional moves. Or, imagine jumping from a rock to another rock. Once that jump has become easy, we might add a turn, a twist or a salto. In music, we might add a new note, a trill, a tremolo, a vibrato… We have created space (or time) in which to make additional moves – or choose not to! The more natural that jump or that piece of music becomes, the more space we have created. Then we have more time and more choice.
I find it important that the space we have thus created should not necessarily be filled with additional notes as we can use that space to embue the sound with more intent or emotion instead. When we no longer have to work at getting to the next note or musical sound, we can enjoy playing the current note with complete conviction."
-Ottmar Liebert
(stolen from his blog)
When we practice playing a piece of music or a scale, we train our brain by using our body. We scrub those neural pathways by moving our fingers. And that creates space. If moving from this note to that note has been trained and ingrained, we no longer have to think about that move and are free to consider other or additional moves. If moving from point A to point B has become utterly natural, then I have established space between those two points in which I can make additional moves. Or, imagine jumping from a rock to another rock. Once that jump has become easy, we might add a turn, a twist or a salto. In music, we might add a new note, a trill, a tremolo, a vibrato… We have created space (or time) in which to make additional moves – or choose not to! The more natural that jump or that piece of music becomes, the more space we have created. Then we have more time and more choice.
I find it important that the space we have thus created should not necessarily be filled with additional notes as we can use that space to embue the sound with more intent or emotion instead. When we no longer have to work at getting to the next note or musical sound, we can enjoy playing the current note with complete conviction."
-Ottmar Liebert
(stolen from his blog)
Saturday, December 26, 2009
sponsored by Tecate
For the past few weeks I’ve been studying the music I’m preparing for grad school auditions by listening to recordings and watching countless guitar videos on youtube. A few nights ago I worked my way through a few recordings of Mexican composer Manuel Ponce’s Sonatina Meridional. I’ve always been curious about Mexican composers—how many can a music student/lover name? True, there’s Silvestre Revueltas, but smart money says his name is just a blip in most music history textbooks, somewhere towards the back of the book in a desperate attempt chapter to balance out the dead white Europeans with the rest of the world. There’s Cesar Chavez, although his name is probably just as popular. Both have symphonies and assorted works floating out there, but how often do you really hear them?
Anyway. Mexico, guitar…right. I was listening to Cuban master Manuel Barrueco’s recording of Sonatina, and a certain passage in the first movement stood out like a knife wound. This one bit is brief and simple: a single note line running up and down, connecting two contrasting sections, a flight Ponce seems to dare the guitarist to showcase and sculpt in some way. Barrueco, for whatever reason, unceremoniously rushes through the line like a child doing chores, as audibly romantic as binary code.
The next morning I scoured youtube for videos of the same piece and found Croatian superstar Ana Vidovic’s interpretation (illegally?) nicked from her new DVD. Same single line passage, nearly identical passionless run through. I have the music (with dynamic markings, I add), I’ve been coached on the piece before, and I’ve heard other recordings, enough to know that there isn’t just one way to interpret the line—it’s just as open to lush imagination as I think it is. Barrueco’s and Vidovic’s versions are separated by a good twenty years, so it can’t be some sort of “in vogue” interpretational statement of the times. What strikes me, however, is the fact that Vidovic studied with Barrueco, and it’s entirely safe to say she didn’t touch this piece until she began working with him.
I shouldn’t be surprised—study with someone and you’re likely to take on their characteristics, especially in music, especially if you’re studying with someone as renown as Barrueco. Still, well on my way to grad school auditions, there’s the unavoidable fact whomever I study with will have an outcome on how I play. Influence aside, I’m reassessing the idea that it’s a matter between processing the lessons like an apprentice or coming out a clone. The legacy of Segovia disciples, in my mind, casts an ominous shadow on the teacher/student relationship (for those not as nerdy as myself, Andres Segovia was/is the granddaddy of classical guitar, and his famous students carry on his romantically rich/archaic style of interpretation with fervor, scolding anyone who doesn’t submit to His style).
Then again, this has always been my skewed view on classical music. I’ve never been one to admit I’m the best student, and I know I’ll never be, but it’s odd to think that for some musicians there’s just one set way to interpret a piece of music—more freedom dilutes the “point” and more conservation stifles the “artistic intent.” What that interpretation may be and what taking it too far in either direction is always up for grabs, but the notion that there is just one way of doing it “right” is, well…
Naturally, not everyone thinks this way, and for me to imply this is the norm throughout the spectrum of classical music is a bastardly generalization. However, I know the totalitarian mentality is out there, and I don’t mean to imply Barrueco thinks this way (although Segovia, notoriously, did), but I’ll play my irresponsible, reckless youth card and say it’s dangerous. I just finished Rob Kaplilow’s brilliant book All You Have To Do Is Listen, and in his chapter about the artist and interpretation he makes the claim that while certain dynamic guidelines are written in for a reason, an artist’s interpretation of a piece will constantly change back and forth to their matured voice, no definite statement solidifying until the piece is finally recorded. I’d like to go a bit further and wonder if, once it’s recorded, pressed and sent off to the stores for sale, isn’t the way the musician played that piece nothing more than just how they felt it should be played at that moment? Just because it’s out there for the public for good doesn’t mean that’s how a musician will feel about a tune for the rest of their career. Things change, attitudes towards gestures, motions and “that one damn note” have every right to flip like a bipolar’s whim.
I hope I get this whole classical music thing sooner or later. Even if I don’t…it’s still kind of fun.
Listening: Imelda May—Love Tattoo
Everyone should own this.
Anyway. Mexico, guitar…right. I was listening to Cuban master Manuel Barrueco’s recording of Sonatina, and a certain passage in the first movement stood out like a knife wound. This one bit is brief and simple: a single note line running up and down, connecting two contrasting sections, a flight Ponce seems to dare the guitarist to showcase and sculpt in some way. Barrueco, for whatever reason, unceremoniously rushes through the line like a child doing chores, as audibly romantic as binary code.
The next morning I scoured youtube for videos of the same piece and found Croatian superstar Ana Vidovic’s interpretation (illegally?) nicked from her new DVD. Same single line passage, nearly identical passionless run through. I have the music (with dynamic markings, I add), I’ve been coached on the piece before, and I’ve heard other recordings, enough to know that there isn’t just one way to interpret the line—it’s just as open to lush imagination as I think it is. Barrueco’s and Vidovic’s versions are separated by a good twenty years, so it can’t be some sort of “in vogue” interpretational statement of the times. What strikes me, however, is the fact that Vidovic studied with Barrueco, and it’s entirely safe to say she didn’t touch this piece until she began working with him.
I shouldn’t be surprised—study with someone and you’re likely to take on their characteristics, especially in music, especially if you’re studying with someone as renown as Barrueco. Still, well on my way to grad school auditions, there’s the unavoidable fact whomever I study with will have an outcome on how I play. Influence aside, I’m reassessing the idea that it’s a matter between processing the lessons like an apprentice or coming out a clone. The legacy of Segovia disciples, in my mind, casts an ominous shadow on the teacher/student relationship (for those not as nerdy as myself, Andres Segovia was/is the granddaddy of classical guitar, and his famous students carry on his romantically rich/archaic style of interpretation with fervor, scolding anyone who doesn’t submit to His style).
Then again, this has always been my skewed view on classical music. I’ve never been one to admit I’m the best student, and I know I’ll never be, but it’s odd to think that for some musicians there’s just one set way to interpret a piece of music—more freedom dilutes the “point” and more conservation stifles the “artistic intent.” What that interpretation may be and what taking it too far in either direction is always up for grabs, but the notion that there is just one way of doing it “right” is, well…
Naturally, not everyone thinks this way, and for me to imply this is the norm throughout the spectrum of classical music is a bastardly generalization. However, I know the totalitarian mentality is out there, and I don’t mean to imply Barrueco thinks this way (although Segovia, notoriously, did), but I’ll play my irresponsible, reckless youth card and say it’s dangerous. I just finished Rob Kaplilow’s brilliant book All You Have To Do Is Listen, and in his chapter about the artist and interpretation he makes the claim that while certain dynamic guidelines are written in for a reason, an artist’s interpretation of a piece will constantly change back and forth to their matured voice, no definite statement solidifying until the piece is finally recorded. I’d like to go a bit further and wonder if, once it’s recorded, pressed and sent off to the stores for sale, isn’t the way the musician played that piece nothing more than just how they felt it should be played at that moment? Just because it’s out there for the public for good doesn’t mean that’s how a musician will feel about a tune for the rest of their career. Things change, attitudes towards gestures, motions and “that one damn note” have every right to flip like a bipolar’s whim.
I hope I get this whole classical music thing sooner or later. Even if I don’t…it’s still kind of fun.
Listening: Imelda May—Love Tattoo
Everyone should own this.
Friday, December 4, 2009
a question
I just read an article about Leonard Bernstein and the classes he taught/lectures he gave while teaching at Tanglewood.
When making appropriate decisions about flow, is there really that much difference between programming an orchestra concert and carefully crafting a mix tape?
When making appropriate decisions about flow, is there really that much difference between programming an orchestra concert and carefully crafting a mix tape?
Friday, November 6, 2009
pro/con of europe
Pro: Beautiful destinations.
Pro: Legendary food and drink.
Pro: Perfect weather.
Con: Seven months of perfect weather=lowered immune system=I get a cold my first few days back home.
Advantage: Pro.
However-
Momentary advantage: con.
Damn it.
Pro: Legendary food and drink.
Pro: Perfect weather.
Con: Seven months of perfect weather=lowered immune system=I get a cold my first few days back home.
Advantage: Pro.
However-
Momentary advantage: con.
Damn it.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
A thought...
I was recently spending time at the Philadelphia airport, sipping coffee and watching the world in transit go by, while waiting out an unnecessarily long layover (even now the irony of waiting 5 hours for a connecting Philly-NY flight amuses me). There was something oddly calming about watching businessmen in finely pressed suits speaking desperately on cell phones and parents hustling around strollers filled with whining bundles of childhood; calming solely, I suppose, for the fact that it wasn’t me. While others may find an extended layover excruciating I saw these hours as a peaceful way to waste the day away: sitting at a café, entertained by a newly purchased paperback, spine still yearning to be cracked, and the circus unfolding around me.
It was only after an hour had passed, after I slowly waded my way through a few chapters that I was thrown from my Buddha-like trance as abruptly as a car crash. It wasn’t anything I heard from the traveling throng of passengers passing by—their conversations and squabbles became white noise with enough concentration. Instead, it started with a moment, one we all know oddly well enough: the moment where, for no specific or logical reason, a person happens to divert their attention from whatever task at hand and look up. Not at anything in particular, mind you, just an involuntary action with no apparent rhyme or reason. I could have seen nearly anything in that one moment my eyes glanced up from my book and have returned back down completely at peace and undisturbed. Anything, that is, except the Kindle.
The Kindle, for the uninitiated, is a device developed and marketed by online shopping kingpin Amazon.com within the past few years. To call the Kindle an iPod for books would be a blunt yet rather appropriate description for this slick, silver slate of technology. The Kindle is intended for the reader on the go, capable of storing hundreds of books, magazines and newspapers all available to users capable of scrolling, selecting and pressing buttons, an e-book for the e-generation. The Kindle has undergone a number of upgrades, the most recent being a sleek model smaller than the comparatively bulky original, capable of storing 1500 books alone. The Kindle was exactly what I saw that day in the airport in the hands of a pretty brunette with polite green eyes that devoured the futuristic tablet in her hands.
The Kindle must be stopped.
Let me digress for a moment to relate my appreciation for modern technology. True, I’m not always savvy with the latest updates in contemporary electronics. It’s not that I turn completely inept when something shiny and new with an internal motherboard crosses my path (are there any external motherboards?). I’m just not the type to see something cutting edge on the market and feel some innate desire to have it in my possession as soon as humanly possible. To buy accessories for it. To name it. To buy another one when the offer it in green. I mean, hell, I love my iPod (silver), my computer (silver, again) and my cell phone (a ha, green!) to the point of being a little too attached to them at times for my own taste. (Actually, scratch that with the iPod. I’m cool with loving that little bastard to death. I needs my jams.) Technology is fine, necessary, even. It’s a vital part of the human condition that helps gauge how far we’ve come as a culture. The Kindle, however, hides a secret ulterior motive.
My initial opinion of the Kindle was that an invention like this was inevitable. Mankind has already devised a portable music library the size of a stick of chewing gum, high-quality cameras installed as standard components in cell phones and handheld videogame systems that double as hi-res DVD players. Really, shouldn’t we have had a way to read and store the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a young child’s knapsack long before these miraculous little devices? After some inquiry I began to wonder if the Kindle would ever really be considered a hip bit of technology to bear in public places like subways and airports. Would this invention ever be as socially acceptable as an iPod? (Seemingly, yes, but given the chance I’d still snatch one from someone’s hands and show passers by how to turn it into the world’s first Frisbee that recites Hemingway. That’s right—the new models can talk.) After more pondering of this beast’s existence I realized that the download—only nature of the Kindle, a brilliant yet sadistic marketing play on Amazon’s behalf, would play out in a similar fashion to the way music did with the digital age: Dick and Jane buy books. One day, Dick and Jane buy a Kindle. Now, Dick and Jane only download their reading material, thereby making their necessity to purchase paper-based reading material obsolete. Bookstores slowly creep towards the way of the dinosaur. With society’s habit of craving commodities on an instant gratification basis it doesn’t seem illogical to assume that the habits of downloading daily newspapers, serialized novels and monthly publications with the aid of a few buttons will soon overtake our habits of pursuing newsstands and bookstores for the same material in tangible form.
Therefore: fuck the Kindle.
I’m not interested in spewing propaganda on the social and economic consequences of the Kindle (bookstore theory aside). I don’t see a purpose in ruminating how the Kindle has the potential to drive nails through the heart and nature of the printed word, how print shops will lose business and publishing houses will face grave financial losses in the wake of these pixilated-text bastards. Really, why contemplate how the ink industry will suffer when the powers that be realize virtually anything—textbooks, office memos, pamphlets, brochures—can essentially be distributed to consumers digitally. Never mind the initially subtle yet eventually catastrophic damage industries around the world will suffer once the concept of the page gets driven to extinction at the feet of this digital behemoth disguised as a family-friendly implement, no more sinister in deceptive appearance than a dinner plate. Seriously, it’s cool. Don’t worry.
Yet.
What really gets me is the fact that books will inevitably suffer. Not “books” as in the authors themselves or publishing companies, since the material needs to originate somewhere. I mean “books” as in the object themselves. A cover gently yet snugly embracing a set of pages telling stories, giving instructions, teaching life lessons to yearning, impassioned readers looking for a direction in life, inspiration to get through the day or simply just a humorous anecdote as they pass the time during a lunch break. Leave it to the Kindle to damn the idea of an innocent, inanimate object to a fiery demise.
That’s right, friends. Let’s not forget the hellish name itself: Kindle. Look into your hearts and tell me the word itself doesn’t inspire thoughts of a raging, devastating inferno. Just say the word itself and try not to taste the cackle of flames on your tongue. Rumors are amiss that owners attempting to download Fahrenheit 451 on their Kindle receive only heavily doctored versions of the first two chapters and a revised ending where those with the books drink blood and avoid daylight only to be foiled by those branding fire to exterminate the literary spirit as they ride in on chariots made of baseball and apple pie. Don’t even try to deny that the heads back at Amazon chose the name out of a domineering sense of irony. Sick, sick bastards.
The enemy is on the horizon, charging with their weapons drawn and drunk on bloodlust, but the fight can be won. The Kindle may be a soulless entity the creators of the Terminator franchise have only dreamed of, but we can rise up and seize the opportunity to deliver mankind from such a bleak future. Resist the Kindle. Realize and embrace the feel of a book, how each soft page read is another page conquered and each chapter finished is another step towards the brilliant light detailing the truth of the human spirit.
Plus, hey, if the book sucks, you can throw it at someone you don’t like. Bonus if it’s hardcover.
Let it be known that this is what I chose to do while I should be working on grad school applications.
It was only after an hour had passed, after I slowly waded my way through a few chapters that I was thrown from my Buddha-like trance as abruptly as a car crash. It wasn’t anything I heard from the traveling throng of passengers passing by—their conversations and squabbles became white noise with enough concentration. Instead, it started with a moment, one we all know oddly well enough: the moment where, for no specific or logical reason, a person happens to divert their attention from whatever task at hand and look up. Not at anything in particular, mind you, just an involuntary action with no apparent rhyme or reason. I could have seen nearly anything in that one moment my eyes glanced up from my book and have returned back down completely at peace and undisturbed. Anything, that is, except the Kindle.
The Kindle, for the uninitiated, is a device developed and marketed by online shopping kingpin Amazon.com within the past few years. To call the Kindle an iPod for books would be a blunt yet rather appropriate description for this slick, silver slate of technology. The Kindle is intended for the reader on the go, capable of storing hundreds of books, magazines and newspapers all available to users capable of scrolling, selecting and pressing buttons, an e-book for the e-generation. The Kindle has undergone a number of upgrades, the most recent being a sleek model smaller than the comparatively bulky original, capable of storing 1500 books alone. The Kindle was exactly what I saw that day in the airport in the hands of a pretty brunette with polite green eyes that devoured the futuristic tablet in her hands.
The Kindle must be stopped.
Let me digress for a moment to relate my appreciation for modern technology. True, I’m not always savvy with the latest updates in contemporary electronics. It’s not that I turn completely inept when something shiny and new with an internal motherboard crosses my path (are there any external motherboards?). I’m just not the type to see something cutting edge on the market and feel some innate desire to have it in my possession as soon as humanly possible. To buy accessories for it. To name it. To buy another one when the offer it in green. I mean, hell, I love my iPod (silver), my computer (silver, again) and my cell phone (a ha, green!) to the point of being a little too attached to them at times for my own taste. (Actually, scratch that with the iPod. I’m cool with loving that little bastard to death. I needs my jams.) Technology is fine, necessary, even. It’s a vital part of the human condition that helps gauge how far we’ve come as a culture. The Kindle, however, hides a secret ulterior motive.
My initial opinion of the Kindle was that an invention like this was inevitable. Mankind has already devised a portable music library the size of a stick of chewing gum, high-quality cameras installed as standard components in cell phones and handheld videogame systems that double as hi-res DVD players. Really, shouldn’t we have had a way to read and store the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a young child’s knapsack long before these miraculous little devices? After some inquiry I began to wonder if the Kindle would ever really be considered a hip bit of technology to bear in public places like subways and airports. Would this invention ever be as socially acceptable as an iPod? (Seemingly, yes, but given the chance I’d still snatch one from someone’s hands and show passers by how to turn it into the world’s first Frisbee that recites Hemingway. That’s right—the new models can talk.) After more pondering of this beast’s existence I realized that the download—only nature of the Kindle, a brilliant yet sadistic marketing play on Amazon’s behalf, would play out in a similar fashion to the way music did with the digital age: Dick and Jane buy books. One day, Dick and Jane buy a Kindle. Now, Dick and Jane only download their reading material, thereby making their necessity to purchase paper-based reading material obsolete. Bookstores slowly creep towards the way of the dinosaur. With society’s habit of craving commodities on an instant gratification basis it doesn’t seem illogical to assume that the habits of downloading daily newspapers, serialized novels and monthly publications with the aid of a few buttons will soon overtake our habits of pursuing newsstands and bookstores for the same material in tangible form.
Therefore: fuck the Kindle.
I’m not interested in spewing propaganda on the social and economic consequences of the Kindle (bookstore theory aside). I don’t see a purpose in ruminating how the Kindle has the potential to drive nails through the heart and nature of the printed word, how print shops will lose business and publishing houses will face grave financial losses in the wake of these pixilated-text bastards. Really, why contemplate how the ink industry will suffer when the powers that be realize virtually anything—textbooks, office memos, pamphlets, brochures—can essentially be distributed to consumers digitally. Never mind the initially subtle yet eventually catastrophic damage industries around the world will suffer once the concept of the page gets driven to extinction at the feet of this digital behemoth disguised as a family-friendly implement, no more sinister in deceptive appearance than a dinner plate. Seriously, it’s cool. Don’t worry.
Yet.
What really gets me is the fact that books will inevitably suffer. Not “books” as in the authors themselves or publishing companies, since the material needs to originate somewhere. I mean “books” as in the object themselves. A cover gently yet snugly embracing a set of pages telling stories, giving instructions, teaching life lessons to yearning, impassioned readers looking for a direction in life, inspiration to get through the day or simply just a humorous anecdote as they pass the time during a lunch break. Leave it to the Kindle to damn the idea of an innocent, inanimate object to a fiery demise.
That’s right, friends. Let’s not forget the hellish name itself: Kindle. Look into your hearts and tell me the word itself doesn’t inspire thoughts of a raging, devastating inferno. Just say the word itself and try not to taste the cackle of flames on your tongue. Rumors are amiss that owners attempting to download Fahrenheit 451 on their Kindle receive only heavily doctored versions of the first two chapters and a revised ending where those with the books drink blood and avoid daylight only to be foiled by those branding fire to exterminate the literary spirit as they ride in on chariots made of baseball and apple pie. Don’t even try to deny that the heads back at Amazon chose the name out of a domineering sense of irony. Sick, sick bastards.
The enemy is on the horizon, charging with their weapons drawn and drunk on bloodlust, but the fight can be won. The Kindle may be a soulless entity the creators of the Terminator franchise have only dreamed of, but we can rise up and seize the opportunity to deliver mankind from such a bleak future. Resist the Kindle. Realize and embrace the feel of a book, how each soft page read is another page conquered and each chapter finished is another step towards the brilliant light detailing the truth of the human spirit.
Plus, hey, if the book sucks, you can throw it at someone you don’t like. Bonus if it’s hardcover.
Let it be known that this is what I chose to do while I should be working on grad school applications.
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