Kindle

For the past 2 weeks I've been the lucky test subject for an Amazon Kindle (That's me in the photo on a sun-drenched Bellingham beach)



I chose to download and read David Gilmour's memoir The Film Club. It's a wonderful book about time the author spent with his wayward teenage son watching and discussing movies. Aside from great movie trivia, and great ideas of what to watch - Gilmour was a Canadian film critic for years - it's an an extremely moving story.

Here's my report on the Kindle:

Pluses

• The Kindle is cool, lightweight, compact (10.3 ounces, 7.5 x 5 inches)
• Electronic paper/ink gives incredible contrast - no eye strain
• Wireless - it downloaded The Film Club in less than a minute
• Fully searchable
  
• Incredible battery life - only needed to charge it once
• Over 120,000 book choices that Amazon has digitized, along with blogs, newspapers, etc.
• 3 gig storage holds up to 200 books
• Book prices are only around $9-$10
• Displays graphics
• Can use it on the treadmill easily - no need to hold it and turn pages
• Adjustable font size for tired old eyes
• Has a dictionary and rudimentary web look-up features
• There are already a number of support blogs, etc. online
  

Minuses

• Cost - pricey at $400
• Can't "borrow" books - have to buy novels, etc., which I usually don't buy
• Navigation can be a bit tricky (menu-driven, but wording can be confusing - no obvious Help choice)
• Navigation buttons (previous page, next page) are too large and poorly placed - I hit these inadvertently many times which took me from the page I was reading

Questions

• Can it display color?
• Can one download from sites like Project Gutenberg?

Overall Recommendation

This is by far the best e-book reader I've seen (I've tested some of the early readers), and the best marketed. I would certainly buy one given a few major changes: lower the price; fix the navigation buttons; and allow library check out of books so everything doesn't need to be purchased. But then again, I might buy one anyway. It's pretty cool.

Spam Poetry Critiques

I, like all the rest of y'all, receive spam, much of it quite poetic. The latest entry to arrive, submitted by Evelyn Mosely, a direct disciple of Apollinaire, is:

"To abstraction. Are
the fend, flourish. Are
itself dispenser."

(I provided the line breaks, which were obviously lost in the mail)

I've decided that it would be a shame, not to mention a substantial loss to the field of contemporary poetics, to toss these all in the Delete file. Henceforth I will be publishing them on this site, with critical annotation provided by some of the finest toasted-modern critical theorists.

Criticism for this lovely, yet subtly complex little pome was provided by none other than the literary scholar and critic Jeff Purdue, founder of the "Newer Criticism," and currently Poésie de Littérature de Licker de Pied D'idiot at the Sorbonney. It was with extreme luck and good fortune that we were able to harness (literally) Professor Purdue for this task, as his time is all but consumed with his latest tome, Derrida: Diddled, Sparred, Ligatured, and Placed in a Big Boat. Enough however, on to the critique.

Professor Purdue writes:

"In this poem, Ms. Moseley artfully echoes that supreme moment of self-abasement and overweening pride in Milton's Satan, when Milton declared 'Myself am hell.' Moseley's encomium to nothingness recognizes it as the ground of being, where individual subjectivities contest ("fend") and proliferate ("flourish"). All this activity happens parthogenetically, as a folding out of itself."

I concur, although I'm a bit skeptical about this parthogenesis stuff, and I'm not sure, for the sake of accuracy and clarity, that folding shouldn't be "fondling." But other than that, I think you'll agree it's masterful stuff.

Paul, how to be a luckier author

as the e-mail I just received states. I used to get e-mails telling me how to be a better writer, but they've apparently given up. Still, luck can't be discounted.

Spring, and all

As the poet Basil Bunting once wrote, "The spuggies have (finally) fledged."

Art Speak

Having recently returned from New York City, and touring MOMA and the Guggenheim while there, I was innundated by art-speak, the language that is now used to discuss art that ceases to be composed of objects and is more and more composed of ideas. Now I'll be the last to admit that ideas are uninteresting or useless, but I think in the hands of many artists and critics they can lead to idiocy. My friend Jeff turned me on to a review in the Wall Street Journal (which is probably the most fitting place for art reviews these days considering their commodity fetish) by Eric Gibson. The review is entitled "The Lost Art of Writing about Art," and basically traces a lineage back to Duchamp when art became less dependent on the actual materials and construction, assemblage, or atisan nature of the work, and more involved with the ideas behind it. This lead to the wonderful piece I saw at MOMA where John Baldessari is on video moving his hands into various positions while stating "I am making art." What this boils down to is a definition of art that is nothing more than anything an "artist" does that he/she wants to call art. It reminds me of when the poet Ron Padgett was asked "What is poetry?" he answered that it was anything written by anyone crazy enough to want to be a poet (paraphrased). Add to this the new definition of the open museum conceptualized by Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim, and we have extended the metaphor into places to store these ideas called art, which are also ideas. It will not be long until some self-proclaimed Nietzsche comes along and pronounces "Art is dead," although my Google search for that phrase produced around 50,000 hits so it's already passe.
But art is not dead, and some of the works I witnessed where by their very nature and integrity magnificent, terrifying, awe-inspiring, idea-evoking, overwhelming, and down-right beautiful -- everything that great art should and can be. One of the most powerful series of works were by Sigalit Landau, "Barbed Hula" and "DeadSee," works of extraordinary visceral power. And the top floor Design and The Elastic Mind was a heady combination of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and art, some as practical as a Sigg design, others involving genetic and cellular manipulation of the body as art.
And I love the what are now almost ordinary works of artists like Klee and Marsden Hartley and Odilon Redon, and the explosions and almost gratuitous indulgence of color in the Machine for Living Color.
I always find myself intoxicated after visits like this, and inspired as well. Art is one of the things we do best as humans, it is where a spirit of play and childhood and imagination and theory and history and culture all co-exist. And without it we would be much paler folks.

In Vitro Meat

Check out New Harvest, a company that is working to produce an in-vitro meat product. This product will theoretically use animal tissue, rather than whole live animals, to produce meat and meat products.

Paul

Maybe the headline is more accurate than we think