Stanford Humanities Center
Intervention
If it's free it's for me
By
Now that I've had an e-book reader for a few months, I wanted to post a few words in praise of the technology. It has made my inner miser chuckle and glow in delight.
For many people e-book readers are anathema because they threaten the existence of bookstores, not to mention all the jobs in the publishing industry that depend on the production and distribution of physical tangible piles of bleached wood pulp.
I'm a poetry person. I've looked and looked on Amazon.com's "Kindle Store," and their poetry offerings are awful, mostly high profile publications such as Jorie Graham's Sea Change (2008) and Kay Ryan's The Best of It (2010). E-book vendors appear to be in no rush to make available the full range of verse out there. Their negligence extends to how books are digitized, too. Lineation and spacing tend to be scrambled worse than a Denver omelette. Accordingly, owning a Kindle hasn't prevented me from driving four hours to Powells Books in Portland in search of the latest coolest poetry publications, nor have I stopped intermittently ordering bundles of joy from Small Press Distribution (spdbooks.org). The percentage of my paycheck that goes to buying 3D books has not changed.
What has changed: the range and kind of prose that I read in my off hours, usually just before bed, when my brain grows too sluggish to follow poetry's multidimensional zigzags.
With a Kindle, you typically pay something for the right to read a book, and then you download the book for free. I fully expect the latter "service" to cease eventually, but for now, during the hook-them-on-crack phase of e-book popularization, they're not charging you for the bandwidth or the wireless connection. So, for instance, if you want to read one of Charlaine Harris's vampire novels, you look her up, click on the relevant icon, and within a minute you have the text on your device ready to read. And somewhere else in cyberspace your credit card is charged ten bucks or so.
Unless, instead of a contemporary book, you order one that is pre-copyright, or uncopyrighted, which means you aren't charged for the right-to-read. In that case, the book arrives, voila, and you pay nothing.
Nothing! Books for nothing! As gamers say, that pwns.
Since December, I've been reading on a whim books that normally would require a special trip to a university library. It's been eye-opening. Here are a few recommendations:
(1) Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883). Yes, I know, it's all the rage now, but it wasn't when I was in graduate school in the late 1990s. It's a bizarre tale of life in rural South Africa around the time of the First Boer War. It has everything from sadism to feminism to atheism to transvestism, and Schreiner frequently dispenses with verisimiltude and strays into philosophical and cosmological speculation. The section "Time and Seasons" feels almost like an experiment by Virginia Woolf: Schreiner covers the passage of time between the first and second parts of her narrative by narrating stages in the spiritual growth of one character, Otto the fieldhand, but she mentions his name only once and instead writes as if she is telling the story of Everyman and Everywoman. I'm going to have to rethink my assumptions about the geography, origins, and course of literary modernism. Again.
(2) James Fennimore Cooper, Satanstoe (1845). George Dekker, the Cooper scholar, once told me that literary history had done an injustice to the author and canonized some of his weakest novels. He proposed Satanstoe as an example of Cooper at his best, certainly far better than any of the Leatherstocking Tales. Well, Dekker was right. For once, the protagonist and main love interest are more than cardboard cut-outs, and I was surprised to find a few scenes of genuine psychological insight. His portrait of eighteenth-century New York City is fascinating, including commentary on the place of drama in polite society and a description of Pinkston, a holiday celebrated by slaves and free people of African descent. The second half is thriller-like. There is a nocturnal adventure on the swiftly-fracturing ice on the Hudson, a visit to a witch-oracle, a failed assault on the French-held Fort Ticonderoga, and finally a skirmish with a group of Native Americans seeking redress for an insult to their leader. The divisions on display throughout--racial, regional, ethnic, linguistic, settler/indigenous, male/female, poor/wealthy, rural/urban--are stark. Describing the American colonies in the years before their independence, Cooper makes one wonder how they ever came together as a nation-state. If they truly did?
(3) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters (1716-18). Lady Mary accompanied her husband first to Vienna and then to Istanbul, where he served as ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Her letters are an extraordinary document of court life in both the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires. She covers unusual topics, such as Turkish techniques for innoculating children against smallpox, as well as invaluable ones, such as Muslim women's opinions about having to veil themselves in public. The letters, though, are more than historically valuable. One watches as a gifted poet moves from observation to self-expression. If a sight or site particularly moves her, her prose will first fall increasingly into meter, and then she'll break out in heroic couplets. Her letters to Alexander Pope are deeply moving. With him, she speaks her mind, dwells on literary minutiae, tries translations, in short, makes use of her every faculty. They might have been angry rivals later in life, but during these years she saw Pope as a friend and ideal interlocutor.
(4) James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785). A record of a tour with Samuel Johnson, who was in his mid-sixties, through the highlands and islands of Western Scotland. Johnson is philosophical and portentous; Boswell is a chatty Cathy, eagerly sharing anecdotes and gossip, especially when they redound well on his Scottish relations. The journal is notable, as one might expect, for its collocation of unexpected moments, not so much for its predictable rota of travelers' complaints (bad food, bad plumbing, bad weather, etc). I love it when, for instance, Johnson launches into a defense of what he calls in all caps "DOGGED" writing, the continual expenditure of effort whenever possible. He dismisses inspiration as balderdash, a way to avoid work. I'm sure to pass along that story to my students. Similarly, one learns by-the-by of the continuing importance, as late as the 1770s, of poetry written in Latin. Johnson and Boswell repeatedly seek for books by Scottish writers who, Wikipedia tells me, once had European-wide fame but whose decision to write a la Ovid and Virgil has subsequently doomed them to oblivion.
I could go on, but I'll stop there. No need to try your patience. The point is simple: get yourself an e-book reader and you'll have instant free access to a world of delightful stuff. Specialists in literatures pre-1924, take heed. Here's a way to tempt students into reading first-rate books that might otherwise remain on the "someday" list.
For many people e-book readers are anathema because they threaten the existence of bookstores, not to mention all the jobs in the publishing industry that depend on the production and distribution of physical tangible piles of bleached wood pulp.
I'm a poetry person. I've looked and looked on Amazon.com's "Kindle Store," and their poetry offerings are awful, mostly high profile publications such as Jorie Graham's Sea Change (2008) and Kay Ryan's The Best of It (2010). E-book vendors appear to be in no rush to make available the full range of verse out there. Their negligence extends to how books are digitized, too. Lineation and spacing tend to be scrambled worse than a Denver omelette. Accordingly, owning a Kindle hasn't prevented me from driving four hours to Powells Books in Portland in search of the latest coolest poetry publications, nor have I stopped intermittently ordering bundles of joy from Small Press Distribution (spdbooks.org). The percentage of my paycheck that goes to buying 3D books has not changed.
What has changed: the range and kind of prose that I read in my off hours, usually just before bed, when my brain grows too sluggish to follow poetry's multidimensional zigzags.
With a Kindle, you typically pay something for the right to read a book, and then you download the book for free. I fully expect the latter "service" to cease eventually, but for now, during the hook-them-on-crack phase of e-book popularization, they're not charging you for the bandwidth or the wireless connection. So, for instance, if you want to read one of Charlaine Harris's vampire novels, you look her up, click on the relevant icon, and within a minute you have the text on your device ready to read. And somewhere else in cyberspace your credit card is charged ten bucks or so.
Unless, instead of a contemporary book, you order one that is pre-copyright, or uncopyrighted, which means you aren't charged for the right-to-read. In that case, the book arrives, voila, and you pay nothing.
Nothing! Books for nothing! As gamers say, that pwns.
Since December, I've been reading on a whim books that normally would require a special trip to a university library. It's been eye-opening. Here are a few recommendations:
(1) Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (1883). Yes, I know, it's all the rage now, but it wasn't when I was in graduate school in the late 1990s. It's a bizarre tale of life in rural South Africa around the time of the First Boer War. It has everything from sadism to feminism to atheism to transvestism, and Schreiner frequently dispenses with verisimiltude and strays into philosophical and cosmological speculation. The section "Time and Seasons" feels almost like an experiment by Virginia Woolf: Schreiner covers the passage of time between the first and second parts of her narrative by narrating stages in the spiritual growth of one character, Otto the fieldhand, but she mentions his name only once and instead writes as if she is telling the story of Everyman and Everywoman. I'm going to have to rethink my assumptions about the geography, origins, and course of literary modernism. Again.
(2) James Fennimore Cooper, Satanstoe (1845). George Dekker, the Cooper scholar, once told me that literary history had done an injustice to the author and canonized some of his weakest novels. He proposed Satanstoe as an example of Cooper at his best, certainly far better than any of the Leatherstocking Tales. Well, Dekker was right. For once, the protagonist and main love interest are more than cardboard cut-outs, and I was surprised to find a few scenes of genuine psychological insight. His portrait of eighteenth-century New York City is fascinating, including commentary on the place of drama in polite society and a description of Pinkston, a holiday celebrated by slaves and free people of African descent. The second half is thriller-like. There is a nocturnal adventure on the swiftly-fracturing ice on the Hudson, a visit to a witch-oracle, a failed assault on the French-held Fort Ticonderoga, and finally a skirmish with a group of Native Americans seeking redress for an insult to their leader. The divisions on display throughout--racial, regional, ethnic, linguistic, settler/indigenous, male/female, poor/wealthy, rural/urban--are stark. Describing the American colonies in the years before their independence, Cooper makes one wonder how they ever came together as a nation-state. If they truly did?
(3) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters (1716-18). Lady Mary accompanied her husband first to Vienna and then to Istanbul, where he served as ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Her letters are an extraordinary document of court life in both the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires. She covers unusual topics, such as Turkish techniques for innoculating children against smallpox, as well as invaluable ones, such as Muslim women's opinions about having to veil themselves in public. The letters, though, are more than historically valuable. One watches as a gifted poet moves from observation to self-expression. If a sight or site particularly moves her, her prose will first fall increasingly into meter, and then she'll break out in heroic couplets. Her letters to Alexander Pope are deeply moving. With him, she speaks her mind, dwells on literary minutiae, tries translations, in short, makes use of her every faculty. They might have been angry rivals later in life, but during these years she saw Pope as a friend and ideal interlocutor.
(4) James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785). A record of a tour with Samuel Johnson, who was in his mid-sixties, through the highlands and islands of Western Scotland. Johnson is philosophical and portentous; Boswell is a chatty Cathy, eagerly sharing anecdotes and gossip, especially when they redound well on his Scottish relations. The journal is notable, as one might expect, for its collocation of unexpected moments, not so much for its predictable rota of travelers' complaints (bad food, bad plumbing, bad weather, etc). I love it when, for instance, Johnson launches into a defense of what he calls in all caps "DOGGED" writing, the continual expenditure of effort whenever possible. He dismisses inspiration as balderdash, a way to avoid work. I'm sure to pass along that story to my students. Similarly, one learns by-the-by of the continuing importance, as late as the 1770s, of poetry written in Latin. Johnson and Boswell repeatedly seek for books by Scottish writers who, Wikipedia tells me, once had European-wide fame but whose decision to write a la Ovid and Virgil has subsequently doomed them to oblivion.
I could go on, but I'll stop there. No need to try your patience. The point is simple: get yourself an e-book reader and you'll have instant free access to a world of delightful stuff. Specialists in literatures pre-1924, take heed. Here's a way to tempt students into reading first-rate books that might otherwise remain on the "someday" list.
